eat!history – eet!verleden

eet!verleden, eat!history in English, was founded in 2012 by me, food historian Manon Henzen. I worked for several national heritage organizations, after having studied history and Middle Eastern studies in the Netherlands. Nowadays I use this experience for my own company, where I combine my passions for history and cooking. I want to inspire people with beautiful and delicious ingredients and recipes that have been lost in time. With my online historical cooking classes, cooking weeks, lectures, recipes and articles I put hem back on the map.

Culinary history

All my cooking classes, projects, writings and recipes are based on historical sources like cooking manuscripts, paintings, frescoes and archaeological finds from Europe and the Arabic world. These sources hide so much inspiration for our modern kitchen and for understanding food culture. I try to serve you this culinary history in an educational, inspiring and exciting way. No effort is spared, if you can see in this picture of a swan and pheasant pie that I recreated with the natural history museum.

Food history

Food history can teach us so much. About flavors and ingredients, about cooking techniques and cookware, about local and seasonal foods, about healthy food and super foods and about how we deal with food. It provides answers to questions that are currently being asked by a wide range of people.

Local and organic products

We believe in a sustainable future and try to contribute to this in every way possible, which is why we use as much local and organic products as we can. We want to show that the present-day culinary traditions mix surprisingly well with the historical ways of cooking. After all, it is not that long ago that it was the standard to exclusively use locally produced, organic products. We try to keep those traditions alive.

I’m always in search for the best ingredients. Therefore we have wonderful suppliers for our cooking classes in the Netherlands. But also during the culinary retreats in Tuscany and Provence we cook with the best ingredients and products possible. It’s so much fun to discover all those delicacies while shopping at the market. It makes live so much better!