This semester I have partnered with Dr Marissa Nicosia (Penn State Abington) on an undergraduate research course she runs on Early Modern recipes in collaboration with my colleague Christina Riehman-Murphy as part of the larger Early Modern Recipes Online Collective initiative. In this course, students transcribe recipes from a 17th century recipe book using Dromio (transcribe.folger.edu), learn about Early Modern food culture and history, and develop a lot of hands-on research experience with Marissa, Christina and me. This semester we and our students were focusing on a medicinal and cookery book associated with Anne Western, owned by Folger Shakespeare Library and affectionately called MS v.b.380.
This course has a pretty serious transcription element, where one of the requirements was that each student would transcribe 40 openings using Dromio throughout the semester. Since each student was responsible for submitting a Word file of their transcriptions to Marissa for grading, we then had a substantial (but not complete) coverage of the volume to work with. And it could be easily be loaded into Voyant Tools for some linguistic exploration.
Over the course of the semester, students have also grown increasingly comfortable with the differences between contemporary and early modern recipes with regards to both genre and format, so we wanted to get them to think about the language of recipes more pointedly. The students were already experts in the language and style of the author they were working with. And since the students were so intimately familiar with the work they had already done, it was a little less of a hard sell to get them to think about their work from a more birds-eye view and think about what the language of their recipes looked like in aggregate.