Mixology

Without alchemy there would be no mixology. No cocktails, no spirits, no liqueurs, no essences! Dive into the history of alchemy and distillation, with two cocktail recipes.

Jennifer Rampling, a Princeton history professor and author of The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300–1700, explores alchemy in Shakespeare’s England.

Three Taylor Swift-themed cocktails inspired by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century recipes from our collection.

“Lend me your ears”: Harvard English professor Stephanie Burt explores the songs and songwriting of Shakespeare and Taylor Swift.

Learn more about—and how to make!—the four cocktails featured at Folger Institute’s upcoming Mixology event.

An Ayurvedic doctor explores resonances between traditional Indian medicine and an early modern English recipe in the Folger collection that prescribes coriander to “helpe the memorie.”

The Folger Institute has partnered with two DC mixologists to bring you cocktail and mocktail recipes featuring the key memory-enhancing ingredient from Mrs. Baker’s recipe book: coriander.

The Receipt Book of Margaret Baker, compiled in 1675, contains a recipe for a memory-potion called “Confect of Coriander Seed.”

Love-in-idleness, a flower also called pansy or heartsease, plays an important role in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” as Marissa Nicosia explores.

Marissa Nicosia adapts an early modern recipe for heartsease cordial. This purple pansy syrup was used to “clear the heart” – to treat the chest and lungs or to reduce fever – but also for healing heartaches.