Drawing on a wide range of textual, visual and material sources, this project has shown the multifaceted ways in which women were linked to sweet food in early modern Spanish imagery. This study has demonstrated that the links between sweetness and women projected, on the one hand, ideals of femininity, sensuality and domesticity, and on the other, critiques of women’s consumerism and excessive attraction to luxury commodities, reflecting the complex discourses on gender roles, social identities and consumerism in the eighteenth century. Not only were women expected to embody sweetness through their social behaviour and taste, but also through the domestic production of sweets. Furthermore, this study has shown that women of various social backgrounds leveraged the changing legislation as well as their culinary knowledge and social networks to expand their commercial activities in response to the emerging sugar craze in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Barcelona. This project comprised a wealth of underexplored archival material, including court and municipal records, guild documents, family and institutional account books, and recipe collections, among others. The major results of this research project have been published in a peer-reviewed journal article (winner of the 2022 Sophie Coe Prize in Food History). Three additional accepted publications are in preparation. I also presented the research results at 17 international conferences, seminars and workshops. Together with Dr Melissa Calaresu, I organized the international scientific event ‘Beyond Cooking: Global Histories of Food-Making and Gender across the Early Modern World’, which consisted of four online seminars and a two-day conference in Cambridge. An edited volume bringing together the conference results is in preparation for publication. In addition, I disseminated the project to diverse general audiences through public talks, webinars and a blog post. I have been involved in the European Commission’s Science is Wonderful! 2021 as well as the Cambridge Creative Encounters —a public engagement project. The main output of this project was on display at an exhibition as part of the Cambridge Festival 2022.
