Building a Swedish Culinary Heritage Corpus with Transkribus

Swedish recipe manuscripts from the 17th–19th century are windows into language, medicine, and domestic knowledge — and Project Henrika is working to make them readable. This talk shares the honest challenges of the pre-study phase: shifting handwriting conventions across centuries, multiple hands per collection, and never quite enough pages to train a reliable model. A candid reflection on the limits of HTR for fragile, fragmented cultural heritage material.