In the Kitchen, 1550-1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad 9789048552368

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In the Kitchen, 1550–1800

Food Culture, Food History before 1900 The expanding interest that food studies have elicited in the past few decades confirms the importance of a field that is still very much in the making. The history and cultures of food have been the object of wide-ranging methodological approaches: literary, cultural, economic, and material (to name just a few), and continue to elicit contributions from all the major disciplines. The series publishes monographs on the history and culture of food, and hosts contributions from different fields, historiographic approaches, and perspectives. Contributions cover a long chronological period running from the Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century, respecting the distinctive time frames of food history. A similar criterion determines the wide geographic parameters that the series follows. As of the later Middle Ages, food and cuisine traveled with extreme ease not only within the European continent but increasingly to other parts of the world. The purview of this series thus comprises contributions including Europe, the Atlantic world, as well as exchanges with Asia and the Middle East. Series editor: Allen J. Grieco

In the Kitchen, 1550–1800 Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad

Edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Selection from the Frontispiece of Hannah Woolley, The Queen-Like Closet (London, 1684). Courtesy of Archival & Special Collections, University of Guelph. Abrahamson Canadian Cookery Collection, UA s002b13. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 164 6 e-isbn 978 90 4855 236 8 doi 10.5117/9789463721646 nur 685 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2022 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 7 Introduction: In the Kitchen

Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn

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Section 1  Embodied Ecologies 1. Sympoeisis and Early Modern Cooking: Troubling the Boundaries of Human/Nonhuman

29

2. Between Earth and Sky: The Cook as Environmental Mediator in Paradise Lost

45

3. Instinct and the Body of the Early Modern Cook

71

Jennifer Munroe

Madeline Bassnett

Katherine Walker

Section 2  Bread, Cake, and Carp 4. Early Modern Leaven in Bread, Bodies, and Spirit Margaret Simon

91

5. Cake: An Early Modern Chronicle of Trade, Technology, and Exchange 109 Amy L. Tigner

6. The Power of the Pot: Naturalizing Carp Through the Early Modern English Receipt Book Rob Wakeman

131

Section 3  Royalist Cookery 7. How to Make a Bisk: The Restoration Cookbook as National Restorative 151 David B. Goldstein

8. ‘A Little Winter Savory, A Little Time’: Making History in Elizabeth Cromwell’s Kitchen

177

9. A Culinary Embassy: Diplomatic Home Making in Lady Ann Fanshawe’s Booke of Receipts

197

Andy Crow

Melissa Schultheis

Section 4  Around the Hearth 10. Minding the Fire: Human-Fire Coagency in Margaret Cavendish’s Matrimonial Trouble and Seventeenth-Century Recipes 221 Rebecca Laroche

11. ‘Teâgun kuttiemaûnch: What Food Shall I Prepare for You?’: Exchanges in Early New England Kitchens

243

12. ‘A New Source of Happiness to Man’?: Maple Sugaring and Settler Colonialism in the Early Modern Atlantic World

265

Julie A. Fisher

Edith Snook

Index 287

Acknowledgments Many thanks to Andy Crow, David B. Goldstein, Katie Kadue, Marissa Nicosia, and Molly Taylor-Poleskey for being part of the conversations that started this collection. In addition, we would like to thank the team at Amsterdam University Press, with special gratitude to commissioning editor Erika Gaffney for her generous and kind help with the volume’s preparation. Deep appreciation is due to series editor Allen J. Grieco and the anonymous peer reviewer, whose feedback made this volume stronger and more cohesive. Hillary Nunn would like to thank The University of Akron, especially the Department of English, for its financial support of this project; her colleagues Alan Ambrisco, Janet Bean, Yvonne Bruce, Patrick Chura, and Julie Drew for their good advice and even better humour; and especially her fellow Early Modern Recipes Online steering committee members and recipe transcribers, who constantly prove the importance of manuscripts that have been so often overlooked. Madeline Bassnett made the experience of working on this collection not just fulfilling but a pleasure. As always, thanks to Richard Wisneski who gave invaluable support throughout all stages of this volume’s production. Madeline Bassnett would like to thank the many graduate students who have passed through her Early Modern Food from Shakespeare to Milton course at Western University and have helped jumpstart her own thinking about the signif icance of cookery. Hillary Nunn has been a wonderful co-editor, and our Zoom conversations about this volume have been a highlight during these last two years. Many thanks, as well, to the people who have kept me loved and fed: Randall, Hermione, and Penny the cat.



Introduction: In the Kitchen Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn

In the early modern period, the work of preparing food and medicine held a signif icance resonating far beyond the household. Food preparation influenced the public realm when its skills and materials were invoked in political debates, scientific discourse, and diplomatic efforts, where it often served as a means of defining national and individual identity. Familiarity with cooking, as we shall see, mattered in literary works as well, infusing poems and plays with layered meanings derived from the culinary world. As it wove its way into a variety of early modern cultural discourses, cooking and the experiential knowledge it produced offered a sensory language that brought readers of all kinds into its domestic web. The impact of English modes of kitchenwork even expanded across oceans, as food played central and complicated roles in colonization. Yet cooking itself—the activities unfolding within the kitchen as well as the knowledge practices surrounding food preparation—has only recently begun to receive attention from literary scholars and historians. To be sure, not all early modern cooking took place in the defined space of a kitchen. Rustic cottages and smaller city homes might have relied on a central or hearth fire in an all-purpose room, and many steps of food preparation occurred entirely out-of-doors. Yet the work of early modern cookery demanded at the very least a demarcated area where the tasks of chopping, mixing, and heating could be carried out. Defining the kitchen was one of the many goals of the period’s household manuals. Gervase Markham’s English Husbandman (1613), for instance, provides an idealized sketch of a yeoman’s home that envisions the kitchen, buttery, dairy, and larder to occupy an entire wing, mirroring the sites of the dining hall and guest accommodations (and taking up roughly the same amount of floor space).1 His plan makes clear that the kitchen is part of the main house and central to its function, though in a subordinate role that foregrounds 1 Markham, The English Husbandman, sig. A4v.

Bassnett, M. and Hillary M. Nunn (eds.), In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463721646_intro

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it as place of hard labour, refuse, and bloody carcasses. ‘You shall place the vpper or best end of your house, as namely, where your dining Parlor and chiefest roomes are […] to the South, that your buttery, kitching [sic] and other inferiour offices may stand to the North’, he instructs. Yet the placement of these ‘inferiour’ rooms in the cooler north had good logic, since ‘coldnesse bring[s] vnto them a manifold benefit’.2 This not only avoided exposing foods in the larder to higher temperatures while in storage; it also acknowledged the tremendous heat generated during cooking, in the ‘conuenient Ouens, [and] the bruing vessels adioyning’.3 Maison Rustique (1616), translated from Charles Estienne’s French-language manual and augmented by Markham, further acknowledges the problem of heat in the kitchen, advising that ‘The Ouen shall be set without the roome, hauing the mouth in the inner side of the chimney of the said Kitchin’. 4 Apart from worrying about architectural planning and establishing the central role of the fireplace to the work of the kitchen—a role that Rebecca Laroche explores in this collection—these descriptions remain oddly barren, offering little sense of the tools, furnishings, and bustling activities of the cooks, servants, daughters, wives, and widows who entered the kitchen to perform tasks central to its purpose—cooking. It is not surprising, then, that the empty rooms supplied by these malewritten manuals are filled by England’s first female cookery book writer, Hannah Woolley. As the frontispiece to her best-selling recipe book, The Queen-Like Closet; Or, Rich Cabinet (1670), shows, the closet of cookery includes a wide variety of cooking activities and technologies. Divided into five panes, the woodcut invites us to peer in on the work of female servants, giving us a glimpse of what really went on in those enclosed spaces. The top left image shows a woman pouring a flagon of liquid into a steaming cauldron, a roiling hearth fire filling the chimney with smoke. Just below, another woman stops up a distillation vial, a small still to the left of her, heated by a dedicated flame. In the bottom section, two women are at work: one stirs a cauldron hanging over a blazing hearth fire while whole chickens and cuts of beef rotate on spits below. The second is busy baking meat-filled coffins—the hard pastry containers for meats, herbs, and spices, which are too tough to be eaten. Mirrored by the panel above, she reaches into the bake oven with a long peel. A final image, at the top right, shows us a woman stirring a small pot over a chafing dish, steam billowing from its rim. 2 Markham, sig. A4r. 3 Markham, sig. B1r. 4 Estienne, Maison Rustique, 16.

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Yet Woolley’s frontispiece does not tell us the whole story, either. While it populates and activates the kitchen space, revealing the vital and myriad activities of cookery, these images also suggest a firm delineation between the kitchen, the rest of the household, and the world beyond. As Sara Pennell reminds us, however, the kitchen is an outward-looking, permeable space, and should more accurately be considered ‘a domestic zone participating in and embodying some of the most significant socioeconomic, socio-technical and cultural transformations in British culture’.5 In ‘repopulat[ing] the kitchen’, which is too often portrayed as ‘an empty space to be filled with prescribed activities’, Pennell concentrates on the interactions of people, objects, and practices that made this household workplace so vital.6 Whether as dedicated rooms in grand manor houses, work areas in one-room cottages, or outdoor spaces devoted to food preparation, kitchens were a site of industry, urgency, heat, and mess. They influenced not only the domestic space, but larger social, economic, and political worlds as well. It is towards this complex world of kitchen activities, which we group under the broad nomenclature of ‘cooking’, that this collection turns. Devoted to the arts of cooking and medicine, early modern kitchens concentrated on producing, processing, and preserving materials necessary for nourishment and survival; yet they also fed social and economic networks and nurtured a sense of physical, spiritual, and political connection to surrounding lands and their cultures. The essays in this volume concentrate on this expansive view of cooking and aspire to show how the kitchen’s inner workings prove tightly, though often invisibly, interwoven with local, national, and, increasingly, global surroundings. Even as those preparing and serving often go without acknowledgment—and the labourers and enslaved people producing raw materials are routinely rendered invisible—the labour, ideas, and practices of cooking unavoidably intersected with the public world. Cooks depended on sources beyond kitchen walls for raw materials, for instance, incorporating plants from household gardens as well as spices and cures imported from across the seas via London’s always-busy docks. As this collection emphasizes, kitchens are by their nature permeable locations, influenced by the materials they incorporate and transform; the household practices unfolding in their midst correspondingly stretch rhizomatically beyond the home into public and political spheres. 5 Pennell, The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1. 6 Pennell, 11.

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Foodways and Cookery in Current Scholarship Early modern literary scholars and historians have made great strides in establishing food studies as a critical perspective central to understanding the life, culture, and politics of early modern England. Literary explorations have focused most intently on the space of the table and hospitality, eating and digestion, and local and global patterns and politics of exchange.7 Historical examinations, although focusing in particular on diet and agriculture, have ventured further into the kitchen’s work space to explore historical techniques and technologies of cookery.8 Scholars of early modern print and manuscript recipes and recipe culture have likewise drawn us closer to the world of the kitchen and the work of cookery, focusing particularly on gender, domestic knowledge production, and authorship.9 We build on these diverse and intersecting conversations to foreground the work of food preparation—whether imaginative, physical, or spatial—and establish its significance in deepening our understanding of early modern food cultures and practices. Engaging with literary and historical methodologies, including close reading, recipe analysis, and perspectives on gender, class, race, and colonialism, this essay collection breaks substantially new ground. By concentrating on the too-often-hidden practices behind the pleasures of eating, we begin to develop a shared theoretical and practical language for the art of cooking that combines the physical with the intellectual, the local with the global, and the domestic with the political. Especially significant to this volume is the concept of making and its relationship to embodied knowledge. Analyses of making in the early modern period often begin with recipes: documents that describe what happens in the kitchen. Recipes give us a lens into the materiality of this space, with its many dimensions reflected in the range of instructions the recipes provide—for savoury and sweet dishes, medicines and beauty remedies, household and veterinary advice. They encourage doing and discovery and 7 See, for example, Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef; Bassnett, Women, Food Exchange, and Governance; Fitzpatrick, Food in Shakespeare; Goldstein, Eating and Ethics; Goldstein and Tigner, Culinary Shakespeare; Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves; and Shahani, Tasting Difference. 8 Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance; Stobart, Household Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England; and Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England. For discussions of techniques and technologies, see especially Albala, ‘Cooking as Research Methodology’ and Cooking in Europe, 1250–1650; Brears, Cooking and Dining; Day, Cooking in Europe, 1650–1850 and Food History Jottings; and Pennell, Birth of the Kitchen. 9 See, for example, DiMeo and Pennell, Reading and Writing Recipe Books; Field, ‘“Many Hands Hands”’; Kowalchuk, Preserving on Paper; Leong, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge; Pennell, ‘Perfecting Practice?’; and Wall, Recipes for Thought.

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reveal how practice and knowledge go hand in hand.10 Some recipes, such as Woolley’s outrageous ‘To make a Rock in Sweet-Meats’, are fantasies, more literary than practical: a plum cake spiked with biscuits to look like ‘ragged’ stones, decorated with sugar snakes, snails, and worms, and a waterfall contraption using glasses, spouts, and wine.11 But Woolley’s folly is unusual, and many early modern recipes facilitate real-life, active interaction with the ingredients, technologies, and cultures of the kitchen—even for modern-day cooks, as Margaret Simon’s essay shows us. As cooking, an act central to the kitchen, engages us in the ‘manipulation of matter’, it also draws our attention to how it can create and foster relationships.12 Cooking forges human and nonhuman connections, as both Jennifer Munroe and Madeline Bassnett discuss—between maker and eater, servant and mistress, the cook and their environment, ingredients, and tools. As Katherine Walker further demonstrates, cookery is an embodied practice, relying on physical instinct alongside learned skill. When we cook, we find a place within and among the world, bringing together immediate sensory experience, observation, and the accumulation of traditional knowledge in a creatively profound act. The resulting creations, as David B. Goldstein and Andy Crow argue, can resonate politically as well, implicating English domestic practices in the evolution of national identity. Also essential to the purpose of this collection are explorations of how the domestic practice of cookery provided a channel through which everyday English households connected with and impacted the faraway places whose products in turn influenced their kitchen practices. While the majority of our essays focus on the cooking ethics and practices of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, essays by Julie A. Fisher and Edith Snook take us to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial North America to consider how cooking was implicated in settler colonialism even as it could facilitate relationships with Indigenous communities. Yet these sometimes paradoxical and always complex and troubling colonial relations had their roots in very English ideas of self and other, tradition and innovation, nativism and cosmopolitanism. While publications like Gervase Markham’s The English Husbandman (1613) and The English Huswife (bound within the larger volume Countrey Contentments in 1615) attempted to foreground a national 10 For discussions of recipes, making, and knowledge see especially Leong, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge; Smith, ‘In the Workshop of History’ and the Making and Knowing Project’s Secrets of Craft and Nature website; and Wall, Recipes for Thought. 11 Woolley, Queen-Like, 345–49. 12 Smith, ‘In the Workshop of History’, 27.

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identity through diet and domestic practice, recipes (including those in Markham’s manuals) inevitably revealed English cooking’s worldliness, integrating imported ingredients alongside domestic products.13 Kim F. Hall’s groundbreaking essay, ‘Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces: The Gendering of Sugar in the Seventeenth Century’, paved the way for examining the implications of such ‘foreign’ ingredients, focusing especially on the increased consumption of sugar from Caribbean plantations to show how women and the domestic sphere were implicated in a mercantile system increasingly dependent on the labour of enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples.14 Following Hall, scholars have examined further how the arrival of spices from India, chocolate from the Americas, and plantation-raised sugar changed the average household’s perceptions and consumption of imported foods.15 As Gitanjali G. Shahani observes in Tasting Difference: Food, Race, and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Literature, despite the origins of ingredients such as spices and sugar in places unfamiliar to many English people, their common presence in didactic and literary writing helped to create the framework through which English cooks and consumers imagined India and the Caribbean. Shahani argues, ‘It is in the writing about these tastes—in the imaginative literature of the period, in cookbooks, in dietary manuals—that a conception of racial, cultural, and religious difference is articulated’.16 In turning to the practice of cookery, essays by Amy L. Tigner, Rob Wakeman, and Melissa Schultheis further reveal the intricate relationships between otherness, assimilation, and colonialism. As In the Kitchen extends the work of recipe scholars to investigate more deeply the embodied practices and exchanges inherent in the work of cookery—exploring the ways in which cooking technologies, methods, and discourses assimilate new ingredients and practices and inquiring further into cooking’s entanglement with early modern empire building and colonialism—this collection also seeks to expand the very definition of early modern cooking. Luce Giard suggests that the work of cookery is processual, beginning with the imagined meal and the gathering or purchase of ingredients, and proceeding to the work of chopping, mixing, 13 See Wall, Staging Domesticity, for a particularly effective illustration of the way that popular domestic manuals aimed to preserve English national identity by building household skills and reliance on local ingredients. See also Park, ‘Discandying Cleopatra’, for an examination of the role of preservation in integrating the foreign with the domestic. 14 Hall, ‘Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces’. 15 See, for example, Pennell, ‘Recipes and Reception’, and Tigner, ‘Trans-Border Kitchens’. 16 Shahani, Tasting Difference, 2.

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and the application of heat.17 Cooking is an ethos as well as a practice; our interactions with plants and animals, pots and pans, speak to how we understand ourselves and our relationships to the human and nonhuman worlds.18 Our essays take up these processual and ethical perspectives to reimagine how English cooking and its theories and practices reverberate through early modern life. Tracing the ways in which the impact of cooking ripples through culture, our authors show that even as cooking practices may be embedded within the spiritual and physical lives of the household, the impact of these practices extends beyond the kitchen, taking up integral roles in the formation not just of individuals and households but the nation—and world—more broadly.

Embodied Ecologies Cooking is a profoundly physical task. Although today we can distance ourselves from that reality, hiding behind our mixers and microwaves, early modern cooks and kitchen workers had only their own strong bodies to rely on. Recipes can give us a sense of the labour involved, often pinning the work of beating or grinding to a time: one hour or two. At the same time, that physical labour draws attention to cooking as an embodied and relational practice. Drawing on ecocritical approaches, essays in this section illustrate how cookery is not only entangled with the bodies of those doing the cooking, but also reaches beyond the walls of the kitchen to connect with the local environment, as well as the bodies of those who ingest the prepared foods and medicines. Recipe books, with their lists of ingredients and instrumental language, illuminate the sheer number of different items that combine to make a dish and help us imaginatively locate them in the natural world. Warm milk from a cow reminds us of the close, physical interaction early modern people had with food-producing animals, for instance, and alerts us to the physical labour required not only to make food, but also to collect the materials necessary for its production. Literary texts such as Paradise Lost, and dramatic works that bring cooking and dining to life on the stage, allow us further glimpses into the embodied and relational practice of cookery. Jennifer Munroe sets the tone for this deeply relational understanding of cooking. In ‘Sympoeisis and Early Modern Cooking: Troubling the Boundaries 17 Giard, ‘Doing-Cooking’. 18 See also Pollan, Cooked, for discussions of relational ethics.

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of Human/Nonhuman’, she draws attention to cooking’s tentacular reach, showing how it complicates and deconstructs the boundaries between human and nonhuman worlds. Revealing the kitchen as a space of cocreation and collaboration, she examines the connections made between human-ingredient-environment as herbs are gathered and animals are reared for foods and medicines, and the way those ingredients are transformed through cookery, effecting transformation on the bodies ingesting them. In close analyses of two recipe manuscripts, attributed to Constance Hall and Mary Granville and Anne Granville D’Ewes, Munroe shows how cooking ‘exceeds the limits of the human’ (36) as the cook incorporates ingredients and interacts with their tools—pots, knives, utensils—and their materials—metal, earthenware, wood. Further suggesting that early modern recipes recognize the necessity for resilience and contingency, and showing how the ingredients and processes of cookery are not always under human authority, she foregrounds these historical ways of knowing as useful strategies in our own precarious world, where ‘we humans have never really been in control’ (41). Madeline Bassnett’s essay, ‘Between Earth and Sky: The Cook as Environmental Mediator in Paradise Lost’, similarly examines the relations between cooks and their environments. Turning to the vitalist worlds of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Bassnett investigates ‘how cooking relies on, emerges from, and interacts with […] Heaven, Earth, and Hell’ (46). Drawing attention to Milton’s use of cooking terms, particularly ‘concoction’ and ‘fermentation’, she suggests that both Eve and the devils engage in cooking practices that extend from and reflect their respective worlds. As Eve’s Edenic food preparation respectfully relies on and interacts with the concoctive process of ripening and takes part in the similarly concoctive cycle of life, the devils’ pillaging preparation of minerals, which relies on techniques of ‘fire cookery’, creates inedible objects and caters only to death (55). Milton’s characters show us the cook’s unparalleled power to mediate between worlds and tables while also encouraging us to consider our contemporary context, in which cooking and eating likewise have profound ecological consequences. The notion of cookery as an embodied practice is further developed by Katherine Walker in ‘Instinct and the Body of the Early Modern Cook’. Here, Walker examines two cooks: Lickfinger in Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News and Furnace in Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts. Both cooks, she argues, rely on their physical, embodied instincts to pursue their craft, which correspondingly draws attention to the skill and cultural knowledge that underpins their creations. In reading these cooks

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through a Paracelsian emphasis on the relationship between experience and understanding, and the significance of making and generating new knowledge, Walker reveals how playing the cook, whether on stage or off, is a physically engaged process. As Lickf inger foregrounds the kitchen as an epistemological space, and Furnace struggles for recognition of his expertise, both cooks highlight their skill as something uniquely earned and innately experienced. Trained through practice, they understand that their talents extend from their corporeal experience of ingredients and tools, textures and flavours, and the nourishing and medicinal properties of the dishes they serve.

Bread, Cake, and Carp If cooking partakes of these embodied and ecological relationships, then the foods and the ingredients of the kitchen likewise function to open the kitchen and the act of cookery to local and global environments. The essays in this section mingle ecocritical and materialist approaches to highlight cooking as a culturally influenced process, one that reflects not only ingredient availability but also changing ideas of spirituality, geography, and national identity. Considering kitchen practices in this light, the chapters’ authors explore connections between food and the individuals who eat and produce it, hinting at the profound impact kitchenwork has not just on the formation of domestic identities, but public ones as well. These chapters also focus substantial attention on household recipes recorded in domestic manuscripts, underscoring how these largely personal texts offer insight into topics ranging from individual faith to globalization. In doing so, they emphasize that the physical engagement between cooks and ingredients implicates a complex range of worldly relations. Margaret Simon’s ‘Early Modern Leaven in Bread, Bodies, and Spirit’ begins this section by exploring early modern breadmaking’s mingling of spiritual and bodily practice. Simon weaves together an examination of metaphors based upon leavening in early modern religious poetry with accounts of her experiments obtaining and using ale-based leaven in her own breadmaking. ‘While leaven might not easily answer any one theological question’, Simon asserts, its medicinal and culinary uses argue for ‘domestic practice as a method of spiritual knowing which early modern practitioners could express across their culture’s most central spaces—church and home’ (92). Leaven’s medicinal uses, as seen in Mrs. Corlyon’s manuscript compilation, illuminate the substance’s relationship to bodily health, particularly

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purgation, while George Herbert’s and John Donne’s poetry reveals leaven’s relationship to both salvation and corruption, particularly in consideration of original sin. Intertwining these strands of sin and purgation with embodied domestic duties, Simon establishes breadmaking as an ‘unacknowledged epistemological network activated in the kitchen’, which enriches spiritual as well as physical health (105). For Amy L. Tigner, cake offers a similarly rich, if not more decadent, window into early modern life. In her essay ‘Cake: An Early Modern Chronicle of Trade, Technology, and Exchange’, Tigner examines global exploration, colonization, and cultural exchange through in-depth readings of four different recipes for these ever-evolving desserts. Focusing on sugar’s increasing importance to cake recipes throughout the seventeenth century, Tigner’s study of manuscript recipe collections shows how English cakes grew sweeter as sugar became more available. At the same time, she argues, English bakers often adapted European recipes acquired through women’s continental travel and exchange, which required and developed new kitchen technologies. With a focus on recipes from Elinor Fettiplace, the Granville family, Constance Hall, and Ann Fanshawe, Tigner links these developments in cake recipes to new uses of paper and baking hoops in the kitchen, as well as the growing influence of imperialism and travel on English cooking culture. Imports of another sort pervade Rob Wakeman’s ‘The Power of the Pot: Naturalizing Carp Through the Early Modern English Receipt Book’, which examines how early modern cooks and their recipe books responded to the presence of invasive species. Focusing on the carp, imported to stock fishponds at the end of the fifteenth century and then reproducing exponentially in the wild, Wakeman explores methods of domesticating and naturalizing a foreign food through the creative and sophisticated strategies of English cookery. The perception of the carp as a fish in need of special preparation, Wakeman argues, reinforces the notion that what makes species invasive ‘is their lack of integration within local cultural practices’ (143). He surveys more than a dozen early modern cookbooks, in print and in manuscript, to illustrate preparation methods meant to purge the ‘earthy’ matter associated with the fish’s foreign origins in favour of the taste of local ‘sweet’ waters (140). These recipes, Wakeman concludes, offer ‘alternative strategies for living and eating in the Anthropocene: naturalizing newcomers rather than yearning for the unreality of prelapsarian Nature before globalization’ (142). Evoking the ethical thinking of Donna Haraway and Michael Pollan, the essay complicates ideas that some dishes can exemplify national identity while others violate such cultural constructs.

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Royalist Cookery This section builds further on the connection between kitchenwork and national identity, examining how cookbooks connected politically charged notions of nationhood to practices of food preparation during the Commonwealth and Restoration. In particular, these essays consider how royalist authors presented cooking as an extension of their political philosophies, turning to food as a means of communicating reactions to the Civil War’s disruption of English identity. Tracing these political concerns through printed cookbooks, which represented royalist concerns in the public sphere, and through manuscript collections, which represented more personal and familial approaches to political turmoil, these essays show how cooking is both a political discourse and public performance that attempts to restore and redraw relationships within and without the nation. David B. Goldstein’s ‘How to Make a Bisk: The Restoration Cookbook as National Restorative’ turns to the courtly cookbooks of Robert May and William Rabisha to investigate the way in which the bisk, or ‘bisque’, ushered in a new approach to English cuisine. Arguing that this capacious dish encapsulates the ‘grand project of incorporation’ towards which May and Rabisha strive, Goldstein posits the bisk as a symbol of a shared, yet contentious, national—and even international—commensality (151). These bisk recipes, as Goldstein shows, draw on the Erasmian rhetoric of copia to illustrate a ‘reasonable excess’ that contrasts with the puritan forces of the Interregnum: the sheer number of ingredients in the soup outlined in May and Rabisha’s cookbooks exemplify a spirit of inclusion and assimilation that encompasses religious tolerance (164). Even as the bisk represents a new, more hospitable England, however, it also embodies the imperialist impulse to subsume the other, evoking the naturalizing impulse that Wakeman observes in carp cookery. ‘Ultimately’, Goldstein argues, ‘the bisk articulates a doubleedged ethics of culinary and cultural production: liberality, destruction, and wastefulness in the service of hospitality, tolerance, and integration’ (169). In ‘“A Little Winter Savory, A Little Time”: Making History in Elizabeth Cromwell’s Kitchen’, Andy Crow takes on a very different Restoration cookbook, The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth, Commonly Called Joan Cromwel, the Wife of the Late Usurper (1664). This satirical attack on the Commonwealth Protectorate presents the domestic and the national as linked, so much so that ‘the structure and daily practices of a household both arise from and nurture the political outlook and behaviours of its members’ (178). The book’s presentation of the Cromwell family’s food habits, Crow argues, is a means of explaining Oliver Cromwell’s failures in managing the nation. Investigating

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the relationship between the anti-Cromwellian historical narrative of the first portion of The Court & Kitchin and the recipes that follow, Crow shows how the anonymous author treats Elizabeth Cromwell’s management of time in the kitchen as analogous to and causative of the instabilities that faced the Protectorate. As Crow argues, this dual narrative makes the book ‘best understood as a piece of history writing’ that contributes to England’s national healing process after the Restoration (179). The role of cookbooks in creating an English identity is also the focus of Melissa Schultheis’s ‘A Culinary Embassy: Diplomatic Home Making in Lady Ann Fanshawe’s Booke of Receipts’. Schultheis divides Fanshawe’s recipes into two categories—those recorded by her amanuensis Joseph Averie in 1651, and those recorded in the 1660s, during her time in Spain as a diplomat’s wife. Recipes in Averie’s hand, transcribed at the end of the Civil Wars, offer an account of Fanshawe’s efforts to heal and restore her sense of home and belonging in an England where her family is politically marginalized. In contrast, her later periods of residency in Madrid generate recipes that reveal a new excitement about international cuisines and customs, elucidate changing perceptions about the kitchen, and reveal the kitchen’s contribution to ‘the social and domestic stability of a successful diplomat’s family’ (207). Yet Schultheis also demonstrates how Fanshawe’s recipes create the structure for an ongoing practice of culinary diplomacy, as new and unidentified hands record recipes that sustain Fanshawe’s cosmopolitan interests. Through a close analysis of recipes ‘like’ pickled mangoes, this essay offers a valuable look at the kitchen’s role in diplomacy, trade, and globalization.

Around the Hearth The final section brings us to the heart of the kitchen—the hearth fire, establishing it as a place not only important for cookery but also for sociability, contemplation, and the sharing of knowledge. But cooking fires are not always about positive interactions; they also facilitate the advancement of exploitative, and specifically colonial, relations. These essays explore how tending the fire encourages mindfulness and embodied awareness, and illuminate how fires serve as a nexus between Indigenous peoples and English settlers in what is now known as North America. As these essays argue, fire relations, most commonly cultivated in kitchens and through cookery, mediate our understanding of and relations to self and other, the kitchen and the world.

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Rebecca Laroche’s essay, ‘Minding the Fire: Human-Fire Coagency in Margaret Cavendish’s Matrimonial Trouble and Seventeenth-Century Recipes’, examines the language used to describe low fires. These types of fires, whether described as ‘gentle’ or ‘sober’, require attentiveness and care to maintain the right level of heat and ensure that they do not extinguish (225). Laroche argues that such attentiveness signals a kitchen practice of mindfulness and an understanding of fire as something to be worked with rather than simply controlled. Yet terms like ‘gentle’ and ‘sober’, Laroche points out, are also gendered terms, valorizing certain behaviours in women, especially female servants, who are left to tend both fire and pot. Characters in Margaret Cavendish’s two-part play, Matrimoniall Trouble, she suggests, illuminate the relationship between low fires and female interiority at the same time as they assert the importance of mindful human-fire relations. Women’s work is intellectual and physical, in other words, with attentiveness signaling ‘a mind spiritually, not just socially, harnessed and enhanced’ (238). As Laroche indicates, the fire relations Cavendish’s play supports are relations we too should cultivate in an era of climate change, drought, and increasingly frequent wildfires. As Indigenous and Aboriginal practices of fire-management—in which people work together with fire and land—are belatedly validated by settler media, we are reminded of fire’s power as both ally and destroyer, and the importance of cultivating careful relations in an increasingly uncertain world. The hearth f ires of both settler and Indigenous communities in seventeenth-century New England are the focus of Julie A. Fisher’s essay, ‘“Teâgun kuttiemaûnch: What Food Shall I Prepare for You?”: Exchanges in Early New England Kitchens’. Following the settler family of Grace and Thomas Minor, Fisher establishes the couple as important, yet informal translators between settler and Indigenous communities. Noting Grace’s equal participation in translating an Algonquian language, Fisher explores the importance of kitchens and cooking in language acquisition among both settler and Indigenous women and children. These ‘bilinguals’ learnt second languages through providing hospitality and welcoming members of the other community into their homes (247). For the settlers, part of hospitable behaviour included learning how to cook with corn—a skill also born of necessity. Such exchanges of knowledge, both cookery and linguistic, happened most readily in the kitchen, around hearth and cooking fires. However, if hospitality contributed to such exchange, then so did the more brutal reality of colonial practices, as Indigenous people toiled as hired or enslaved labour for settler families. Yet, as Fisher concludes, ‘By attending to English kitchens and the cooking therein as likely places and activities

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that cultivated these exchanges of knowledge, we are reminded that cultural encounters and colonial politics owed as much to hearths and homes as they did to courtrooms and council fires’ (259). Edith Snook’s essay, ‘“A New Source of Happiness to Man”?: Maple Sugaring and Settler Colonialism in the Early Modern Atlantic World’, investigates further the colonial encounters mediated by cooking fires—in this case, the manufacturing of maple sugar. Snook examines in detail the eighteenthcentury recipe, ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar’, published widely—from Philadelphia and New Hampshire, to London, Boston, New York, and Nova Scotia. Tracing, like Fisher, Indigenous-settler relations through the medium of cooking and foodways, Snook highlights not only the ways in which colonial practices obscured Indigenous knowledge, storytelling, and practice concerning the collection of sap and its transformation into sugar; she also draws attention to the ethical differences between cooking and manufacturing. As Snook explains, the ‘Remarks’ originate from abolitionist Quakers looking for an alternative to plantation sugar with its dependence on enslaved labour; yet the ‘Remarks’ also serve to reinforce settler colonialism in the Americas through the capitalist ethos of manufacturing and the appropriation of land for maple plantations. Fire, here, is simply a means to a colonial end, with maple sugar production marked by ‘expansion, profit, and control’ (281). Like Laroche and Fisher, Snook suggests that cooking fires cannot be overlooked as places where relationships can be both formed and deformed. Whether examining activities in the era’s kitchens or exploring the politics of recipe writing, the chapters in this collection advance current scholarly conversations surrounding early modern foodways to focus attention on the act of cooking. The volume owes a great debt to the innovative, often collaborative, online efforts of early modern recipe scholars, whose open access projects have created and extended interest in an often overlooked field. The Recipes Project, for example, has introduced thousands of readers to the history of early modern cooking, and the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC) has been creating crowdsourced transcriptions for the era’s recipe books since 2012.19 EMMR: Early Modern Maritime Recipes, meanwhile, offers a curated, freely-available collection of early recipes from Canada’s Maritime provinces.20 The distinctive quality of learning by experience in the kitchen makes Marissa Nicosia’s Cooking in the Archives blog an 19 Smith et al., The Recipes Project: Food, Art, Science, and Medicine; EMROC: Early Modern Recipes Online Collective. 20 Snook and Bennett, EMMR: Early Modern Maritime Recipes.

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ongoing influence in recipe studies, and the interest that such hands-on activity garners has given rise to such influential public programmes as the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Before ‘Farm to Table’ initiative.21 In fostering collaboration—imaginative, practical, and scholarly—these online projects embody cooking’s ability to bring people together. We hope this collection fosters and furthers these kitchen conversations.

Works Cited Albala, Ken. ‘Cooking as Research Methodology: Experiments in Renaissance Cuisine’. In Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories, edited by Joan Fitzpatrick, 73–88. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Albala, Ken. Cooking in Europe, 1250–1650. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006. Albala, Ken. Eating Right in the Renaissance. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. Appelbaum, Robert. Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food Among the Early Moderns. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Bassnett, Madeline. Women, Food Exchange, and Governance in Early Modern England. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Brears, Peter. Cooking and Dining in Tudor and Early Stuart England. London: Prospect Books, 2015. Day, Ivan. Cooking in Europe, 1650–1850. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009. Day, Ivan. Food History Jottings, 2011. https://foodhistorjottings.blogspot.com. DiMeo, Michelle and Sara Pennell, eds. Reading and Writing Recipe Books, 1550–1800. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2013. EMROC: Early Modern Recipes Online Collective. Hypotheses.org, https://emroc. hypotheses.org. Estienne, Charles. Maison Rustique, Or, The Covntrey Farme […] Reuiewed, Corrected and Augumented […] by Gervase Markham. London, 1616. Field, Catherine. ‘“Many Hands Hands”: Writing the Self in Early Modern Women’s Recipe Books’. In Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England, edited by Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle, 49–63. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Fitzpatrick, Joan. Food in Shakespeare: Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.

21 Nicosia, Cooking in the Archives; Folger Shakespeare Library, Before ‘Farm to Table’.

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Folger Shakespeare Library. Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures. Folger Shakespeare Library, 1996–2022, https://beforefarmtotable. folger.edu. Giard, Luce. ‘Doing-Cooking’. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol. 2: Living and Cooking, by Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, Pierre Mayol, edited by Luce Giard, translated by Timothy J. Tomasik, 149–247. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Goldstein, David B. Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Goldstein, David B. and Amy L. Tigner, eds. Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2016. Hall, Kim F. ‘Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces: The Gendering of Sugar in the Seventeenth Century’. In Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, edited by Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan, 168–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kowalchuk, Kristine, ed. Preserving on Paper: Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen’s Receipt Books. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Leong, Elaine. Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Making and Knowing Project. Secrets of Craft and Nature. Columbia University, https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/. Markham, Gervase. The English Husbandman. London, 1613. Markham, Gervase. The English Huswife. In Country Contentments. London, 1615. Nicosia, Marissa. Cooking in the Archives: Updating Early Modern Recipes (1600–1800) in a Modern Kitchen, 2022, https://rarecooking.com. Park, Jennifer. ‘Discandying Cleopatra: Preserving Cleopatra’s Infinite Variety in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra’. Studies in Philology 113, no. 3 (2016): 595–633. Pennell, Sara. The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600–1850. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Pennell, Sara. ‘Perfecting Practice?: Women, Manuscript Recipes and Knowledge in Early Modern England’. In Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium, edited by Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson, 237–55. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. Pennell, Sara. ‘Recipes and Reception: Tracking “New World” Foodstuffs in Early Modern British Culinary Texts, c. 1650–1750’. Food & History 7, no. 1 (2009): 11–33. Pollan, Michael. Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. New York: Penguin, 2013. Schoenfeldt, Michael C. Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

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Shahani, Gitanjali G. Tasting Difference: Food, Race, and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. Smith, Lisa, Amanda E. Herbert, R.A. Kashanipour, Sarah Peters Kernan, Joshua Schlachet, Laurence Totelin, and Jess Clark, eds. The Recipes Project: Food, Art, Science, and Medicine. Hypotheses.org, https://recipes.hypotheses.org. Smith, Pamela H. ‘In the Workshop of History: Making, Writing, and Meaning’. West 86th 19, no. 1 (2012): 4–31. Snook, Edith and Lyn Bennett. EMMR: Early Modern Maritime Recipes. University of New Brunswick, https://emmr.lib.unb.ca. Stobart, Anne. Household Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Thirsk, Joan. Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions 1500–1760. London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007. Tigner, Amy L. ‘Trans-Border Kitchens: Iberian Recipes in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts’. History of Retailing and Consumption 5, no. 1 (2019): 51–70. Wall, Wendy. Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Wall, Wendy. Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Woolley, Hannah. The Queen-Like Closet; Or, Rich Cabinet. London, 1670.

About the Authors Madeline Bassnett is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University. She is the author of Women, Food Exchange, and Governance in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2016) and project director of the SSHRC-funded open access database Weather Extremes in England’s Little Ice Age 1500-1700. Hillary M. Nunn is Professor of English at The University of Akron. Her research addresses medical knowledge reflected in English seventeenthcentury recipe manuscripts. She is a co-founding member of the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective and author of Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Tragedy in the Early Stuart Era (Ashgate, 2005).

Section 1 Embodied Ecologies

1.

Sympoeisis and Early Modern Cooking: Troubling the Boundaries of Human/Nonhuman Jennifer Munroe

Abstract As a site of food and medicine preparation, the early modern kitchen served as an interface between human and nonhuman, the house and its environs. This chapter considers how cooking illustrates what Donna Haraway calls ‘sympoeisis’ or ‘collectively producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries.’ I argue that work in and out of (and across) the early modern kitchen provides a useful way to rethink what it means to be human and nonhuman, how cooking is an endeavour that particularly blurs the lines between them. Cooking, that is, is an inherently ‘tentacular’ practice (drawing again on Haraway), one that highlights webbed relations between co-agentic things (human and nonhuman alike). Keywords: transcorporeality, sympoesis, recipes, nonhuman, gathering, contingency

As a site of food and medicine preparation, the early modern kitchen served as an interface between the human and nonhuman worlds. But cooking—and its pre-preparation and consumption as well as its restorative qualities—reflects and depends on relationships that defy simple boundaries between self and Other, human and nonhuman. As I will argue, cooking illustrates what Stacy Alaimo terms the ‘trans-corporeal’,1 an enmeshment of multiple entities that is always in flux; or what Donna Haraway calls 1 Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2.

Bassnett, M. and Hillary M. Nunn (eds.), In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463721646_ch01

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‘sympoeisis’, which she defines as ‘collectively producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries’.2 This is not to say that early modern cooking was a romantic enterprise of intimacy with the nonhuman, though. After all, preparing food necessitated bludgeoning, decapitating, and exsanguinating animals, and wading through muck and braving the elements to gather plants. In this chapter, I draw on Alaimo’s and Haraway’s notions to consider how work in—as well as outside and across the boundaries of—the early modern kitchen is inherently sympoeitic, transcorporeal, a site of enmeshment and ‘collectively producing systems’ that forces us to rethink what it means to be human and nonhuman; and, in turn, how this blurring of human-nonhuman also challenges how we understand such a seemingly straightforward notion as ‘cooking’. We might think of cooking as a linear process: the home or professional chef assembles ingredients, follows the a, b, c format of a recipe (especially for us modern cooks, accustomed to such order), then consumes the product and/or serves it to others. But cooking today, as in the early modern period, involves a process of ‘becoming-with’ the Other, involving multiple agents across time and space, becoming neither linear nor teleological but circular and overlapping—from ingredients to thresholds to bodies. An inherently ‘tentacular’ practice (to borrow Haraway’s language for becoming-with), cooking, like eating, highlights webbed relations between co-agentic things, human and nonhuman alike.3 Thus, early modern recipes also defy simple narrative teleology, linking their written presentation to their use in transcorporeal early modern cooking practices. Recent work in food studies has struggled with, among other issues, the ‘interpretability of food’, responding in part to the notion that ‘If there is one sure thing about food, it is that is never just food’.4 Such scholarship has been especially important for calling attention to the ways that cooking and eating are critical to human social relationships. In their ‘Introduction’ to Culinary Shakespeare, David B. Goldstein, Amy L. Tigner, and Wendy Wall qualify the terms ‘culinary’ and ‘commensal’ along these lines, such that ‘the former describ[es] the “what” of eating —ingredients, food, the biology and labor that create them, etc. — and the latter refers to the “how” of eating, including the rituals of the table and interactions among humans

2 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 61. 3 Haraway, 49–55. 4 Shahani, “Introduction’, 1; Eagleton, ‘Edible Ecriture’, n.p.

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and groups’.5 Even as they so usefully qualify these terms, though, their emphasis remains on the human: ‘A cuisine is not just a set of edibles; it is an integral element of [human] social and intellectual life’.6 In this chapter, however, I argue that food (like cooking) is both ‘endlessly interpretable’ and wholly inscrutable at the same time because food, like cooking, involves human practices even as it is not really about the human.7 Or at least it is not only about the human any more than agriculture and animal husbandry are exclusively human practices.8 By looking at early modern recipe books, and ‘cooking’ as a related set of practices, as illustrative of a complex web of relations, I show how human volition and social systems figure as only partial players in this web. What I propose in this chapter, then, is that we think about cooking, eating, and food differently. Reorienting ourselves to cooking as a collaborative set of practices and entities, we thus embrace something akin to Michael Pollan’s proposition that we are human bumblebees, conforming to plants’ desires as much as, or perhaps more than, they to ours.9 The plants and animals named in early modern recipes, and those that remain anonymous or invisible, are hardly simple objects of domestication—in the field, in the garden beds, or on the plate. They are active members of a complex web comprised of an ongoing series of dialectic, co-agentic happenings in and across time and space.

Becoming-With in/and the Kitchen By understanding (early modern) cooking in this way, I build on Pamela Smith’s groundbreaking work on ‘making and knowing’, but I aim to rethink the relationship between the ‘maker’ and ‘object’ as well as who/ what constitutes each of these categories.10 How might such making and knowing be an inherently collaborative—or, tentacular—enterprise that involves equally both human and nonhuman agents? Where Smith is interested in reconstructing artisanal activities that reshape our understanding of ‘words and things’, I wish to put further pressure on how we understand the primacy of the (human) maker-as-agent to consider 5 6 7 8 9 10

Goldstein, Tigner, and Wall, ‘Introduction’, 2. Goldstein, Tigner, and Wall, 3. Shahani, ‘Introduction’, 3. See Cossins, ‘Amazing Animal Farmers’. See Pollan’s excellent full-length treatment of this topic, The Botany of Desire. See Smith, ‘In the Workshop’.

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how nonhumans (plants and animals as well as other nonhuman objects) play an integral role in the back-and-forth of any enterprise, cooking or other. Just as Smith reminds us—following Mark Laird’s work on gardening in the period—that ‘gardens were really a result of collaborative process among designer, gardeners, plants, and the environment’, so too do I propose to expand our sense of cooking to include an array of nonhuman agents fully vested in such collaborations.11 Elaine Leong’s excellent Recipes and Everyday Knowledge begins to reorient recipe books along these lines as it ‘extends our current narratives of early modern knowledge making’ to think about how cooking (and medicine) was a fundamentally collaborative process, involving ‘many hands’—to borrow a phrase from Catherine Field—in the kitchen and, quite literally, on the page.12 As Leong documents, these collaborations spanned generations of women (and men) and included members from multiple ranks of society.13 Not only is recipe book compilation the outcome of these ‘many hands’ that change over time, but recipe books are also themselves dynamic systems, bound perhaps in one sense, but hardly pre-existing bounded units. Moreover, individual recipes, as I have discussed elsewhere, tend to be more circular than linear narratives, with if/then propositions related to ingredients, process, and consumption.14 These books, as material objects, like the processes they reflect, are products-in-flux, elusive more than they are definitive.15 In addition, as cooking and medicinal recipes are frequently interspersed rather than cordoned off from one another, manuscript and print recipe books in the period underscore how early moderns understood cooking and eating as entangled with the ‘making-with’ part of diet and health more broadly.16 As Steven Shapin writes, 11 Smith, 15–16, original emphasis. Laird, Flowering of the Landscape Garden. 12 Leong, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge, 5. See Field, ‘“Many Hands Hands”’ for further discussion of this collaborative work. 13 Leong, especially ‘Introduction’, 1–18. See also Wall’s comprehensive work on recipes in the early modern period, especially Chapter 5, in Recipes for Thought, 208–50. 14 For further discussion about how recipe texts challenge expectations for teleological narrative structure, see Munroe, ‘What Recipes Can Teach Us’. 15 See also Luce Giard in Part 2 of The Practice of Everyday Life, 149–215. Giard discusses some of the entanglements of interest to my argument, though her focus tends to remain on human social intersections related to food and cooking. 16 Scholars have detailed the link between food and nutrition in the early modern period. For an excellent overview of this field, see Fitzpatrick, ‘Reading Early Modern Food’. See also Shapin, ‘“You Are what You Eat”’, and Albala, Food in Early Modern Europe.

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your fundamental emotional and cognitive make-up was at the distal end of a causal chain at whose proximal end was what you ate and drank. So far as dietetic medicine was concerned, the trick was maintaining qualitative and humoral balance (which was health) or, when ill (that is, when the humours and qualities were imbalanced), restoring the body to its normal equilibrium, largely through diet.17

As such, when I discuss recipes in an essay collection on ‘cooking’, I will include those for both food and medicine, since the two were understood in the period as interrelated parts of diet, nutrition, and health. Often using the same ingredients and practices, food and medicine were, as has been well documented, of a piece. For instance, in manuscript recipe books such as the two I discuss at length later in this chapter by Mary Granville and Constance Hall,18 a recipe for plague water—a curative—is followed by a recipe to prevent plague—a nutritional prophylactic.19 Or, in addition to the copious examples of, say, herbs, spices, and plants among recipes for the table as well as materia medica, we find, for instance, aqua mirabilis, an ingredient frequently found in medicinal waters, in a recipe for a fricasee.20 But such examples only begin to document the many more to be found in the manuscript (and print) pages of books and illustrate the familiar adage: ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’. This chapter expands our understanding about the collaborative relationships to include humans and nonhumans as equal co-agents in the enterprise of cooking. Cooking illustrates, even as it is immersed in, a web of interrelations that resists differentiation among bodies (of various sorts) and that challenges the primacy of the human-as-cook or human-aspatient-to-be-cured. In what follows, I consider recipe books, cooking, and eating as they relate to multiple objects, makers, and enterprises involved in early modern English cooking, while also relating to ingredients and their preparation and consumption as well as the various bodies (human and nonhuman) involved in them. To this end, I turn now to the relationship between humans and nonhuman ingredients, which manifests in two key ways: 1) the harvest, cultivation, and use of plants and animals and the environs in which they are located; 17 Shapin, 379. 18 For more information about Granville and Hall, as well as full transcriptions of their books, see Kowalchuk, Preserving on Paper, 61–154, 155–243. 19 See Granville and D’Ewes, Receipt Book, 41/Kowalchuk, 86, referred to from here as ‘Granville’. 20 See Hall, Receipt Book, fol. 10v, referred to from here as ‘Hall’.

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and 2) the transcorporeal mingling that occurs in the process of consuming and digesting these materials, which includes the contingent qualities inherent to recipes and their related set of practices. And so, rather than thinking of the kitchen as a space where making and knowing happens, with discrete actors in the roles of (human) maker and (nonhuman) object, I propose we understand it to be a locus of ‘symbiotic assemblages’, a rich array of human-nonhuman ‘knots of diverse intra-active relatings in dynamic complex systems’.21

Gathering and Indifference Gathering ingredients in early modern England necessitated traversing household thresholds into the environs beyond, whether that meant the kitchen garden, the orchard, or animal enclosures of various sorts near the house—or, for that matter, creek beds, marshes, fields, or other spaces further afield. Plants and animals that originated in uncultivated spaces may have been in part products of human activity—for instance, as a result of deforestation, draining of the fens and other types of water diversion, and more—but the carp captured and stewed alive in the early modern kitchen, for instance, or the fledgling ravens snatched from their nest, cooked until fully dessicated, and mixed with bread crumbs to cure falling sickness, were the product of the more-than-human world as much or more than they were objects of kitchen work.22 What happened in the early modern kitchen—or other sites of cooking and medicine in the period—was the result of a range of activities and agents beyond the human; and agency in this context, as in others, was broadly distributive. It is quite common to find in recipes instructions like this one, in ‘To preserve Apricocks Ripe’, proposing that ‘You must preserve them the same day they are / Gathered’;23 or in another to preserve quinces, ‘take them as soon as they are gathered of the tree or / else they will not gelly’;24 or, with the familiar direction to gather herbs ‘in the heat of the day’.25 Instructions such as these emphasize human activity, indicated by verbs like ‘take’ and ‘gather’, but equally important is the way human labour 21 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 60. 22 For more on carp, see Rob Wakeman’s essay, ‘The Power of the Pot’, in this volume. 23 Hall, fol. 2r/Kowalchuk, Preserving, 160. 24 Hall, fol. 2v/Kowalchuk, 162. 25 Granville, 3–4/Kowalchuk, 69.

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here depends on, even as it may aim to intervene in, seasonality, climatic conditions of sunshine, rain (or drought), and time, all of which must be observed, more than harnessed, by the person doing the gathering. So what happens if/when the housewife gathers said herbs too early or too late in the day, or if she waits too long to harvest quinces from the tree and they have passed their prime, and they won’t ‘gelly’ properly? There is an optimal moment when something is in its prime, but is it possible to know or capture that perfection? Shakespeare’s Sonnet 3 or Sonnet 18, for instance, grapple with just such a question; that perfect moment is fleeting, even illusory, and perhaps more the stuff of poets than kitchen maid or cook. Many recipes, however, express these co-agentic entanglements of humannonhuman ingredients in still more subtle ways. When, in a recipe for an ointment to heal a bruise, it calls for elder flowers ‘dryed by the shadow in the space of 12 howers’, the human may place the flowers in the shadow, but the shadowy air, the ‘shadow’ itself, does the drying—that drying is ‘by’ the shadow. In another recipe, this for a ‘woodstreet Cake’, we find the following instructions:26 Take 4 pound of fine flower A quarter of fine Shuger sifted Cloves mace sinomond & nutmegs as much as you please mingle these alltogeather then take 3 pound of Curans well washed pickt & dryed the night before you are to vse them one pound of reasons of the Sun Stoned & minced very small put the frute to the flower Shuger & Spice mix them well togeather.27

After further mixing the eggs, cream, ale, yeast, and butter, the concoction is warmed ‘over the fier whilst it be indeferent’.28 What does it mean for a mixture to be ‘indeferent’? Or, is ‘it’ here the fire that is ‘indeferent’ and not the mixture? Or both? For raisins to be ‘of the Sun’? These descriptions are, of course, human conveniences of language, but they also illustrate how human interpretation and grammar struggle to name a cooperative process that both involves and yet does not wholly depend on human intervention. Raisins are, of course, ‘of the Sun’ in the sense that a human agent harvested the grapes and placed them in the sun to dry, but the Sun acts to do the drying. Or, that the mixture (or fire) may be noted as ‘indeferent’ may well 26 Granville, 3–4/Kowalchuk, 69. 27 Hall, fol. 20r/Kowalchuk, 183. 28 Hall, fol. 20r/Kowalchuk, 183.

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be a human construct of the transformation taking place in the kitchen, but that moment of indifference captures myriad co-happenings of fire, concocted mixture, human stirring (or not stirring), yeast and ale combining and recombining to culture bacterial life, and more. Such co-happenings involve while they simultaneously elude, or even mark indifference to, human involvement. Even domesticated plants and animals were the product of a confluence of agents and activities. The five-week-old pig called for in a recipe to ‘Colleer a pigge’ might have been raised by the men and women of the house, for example, but it was gestated by and born of an adult female pig and reared on her milk;29 that porcine mother herself inhaled the air and sunshine in the pen where she and the others were kept, socialized with other nonhuman animals, consumed discarded plant material from the house and perhaps foraged for additional food sources, and more. Or, in the many recipes that called for milk ‘still warm’, eggs newly laid, or even dung, freshly evacuated from hen, pig, horse, or cow, we might see how the products of kitchen work are themselves dependent on these animal by/products that have their own history and set of particulars not limited to the implied time and space of a human/nonhuman divide.30 Indeed, once back in said kitchen, the herbs, ravens, pig, and/or carp mingle not only with human hands, but also with mortar and pestle, knife, oven heat, water (fair, gentle, spring, and other), and assorted other plant and animal matter in earthen pot, pewter jug, or butter-saturated sauce.31 That which precedes the gathering, the capture and slaughter, exceeds the limits of the human, as does the product of such seemingly straightforward human activity.

Mingling and Contingency What constitutes the ‘human’ in what is ostensibly ‘human’ activity is in these ways, then, itself the result of a far more complicated set of practices and materials, across and through bodily boundaries, indicative of ‘transcorporeal’ movement. Cooking, and its counterpart, eating, necessarily involve multiple processes of bodily mingling, from the mixing of plant, animal, and other ingredients and the (chemical/physical) reaction that 29 Hall, fol. 42r/Kowalchuk, 216. 30 See, for instance, ‘To make the greene Ointment’ and ‘Oyle of St. John’s worte’ in Granville, 3 and 6/Kowalchuk, 69 and 71, respectively. 31 For an excellent discussion of recipe terminology for waters, see Nunn, ‘Local Waters’.

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makes bread rise, flavours combine, and cream thicken, to the ingestion of food and its journey through the body where blood, acid, bacteria, and more comingle with the ingested material before what is not incorporated is expelled. As Michael Pollan reminds us, what we think of as the ‘human’ is really only 10 percent ‘human’ at all.32 Thus, the notion that ‘you are what you eat’ is neither simple nor straightforward. The many contingencies evident in early modern recipes, those articulated as well as those not, enact these and the other layers of ‘making-with’ that I have described thus far, and it is here that I wish to turn to one recipe in depth from the Granville book, ‘A Receipt to make Meath’, or mead, a fermented honey drink. This recipe, indicative of such layers, begins: Take to six gallons of water, six quarts of honey, or as much honey as will make it strong enough to beare an egge the breadth of three pence aboue water, when the honey is dissolued in the water put your honey and water together into a cleane wooden vessell, over night, and temper it well together, and soe let it stand till the next day that the honey may bee dissolued well, before you set it on the fire, then put it on the fire, in a Kettle or broad panne and boile it well att least an hower, and scum it as long as any scum will rise, then take halfe a handfull of egremony, & as much pellitory of the wall, and wash that cleane, and boile them in itt some halfe an hower more (if the hearbes bee dry it will doe as well as if they were green) then take halfe an ounce of nutmegs, and cynamon, & soe much ginger, bruise the nutmegs and Cynamon but not too small, and slice the ginger thin, and small, then put the spice into a little canvas bag, and put the little cleane pebblestones in the bag to make itt sinke and when the meath is boile enough put the bag of spice in the Kettle, and take it up presently off the fire, for the spice must not boile in it, but scald, then power the meath into a cleane vessell againe, the same you tempered it in, and soe lett it stand, and coole, and let the bag of spice lye still in it, and the next day you may tonne it vp, you must tye a thrid to the bag by which it must hang in the vessell, and not lie in it.33

32 See Pollan, ‘Some of My Best Friends Are Germs’. 33 Granville, 13/Kowalchuk, Preserving, 76–77.

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Here we have a recipe for a large quantity of meath, produced over the span of several days and requiring a series of plant ingredients (both wild and harvested and exotic and imported), spices, honey, water, even pebbles.34 Our motley assortment of players includes, as well, a kettle or pan, wood for fire and the stove on which it smoulders, a wooden vessel, and a canvas bag with thread, those we might be tempted to call ‘inanimate’ objects of kitchen work. In this mixture, however, we find not inert substances but rather those that ‘interanimate’ one another—reminiscent of Donne’s ‘The Extasie’—as they intra-act35 with one with another and make a new substance, the concoction of plant, animal (honey is, of course, in part bee saliva), and mineral beings becoming-with each other.36 That the honey dissolves in the water, depends not simply on the human hands that put it in the container (which also participates in this mixing), or the wooden vessel that holds the mixture overnight, or the fire that contributes to dissolution; rather, the seemingly simple process of dissolving honey in water depends on all these multiple agents at once—and on time and air temperature, both observed as much as mitigated by the cook who sets out to make the meath. Human (or multiple humans, since the duration and labour-intensive quality of this recipe may suggest multiple human ‘makers’), intervention and oversight may appear to determine the outcome of this recipe, but the honey’s dissolution, the meath’s ‘boyle[ing] enough’ but not ‘scald[ing]’, let alone the precise amount of time it takes for all of this to happen, lies beyond solely human control. The recipe concludes by drawing attention to these interanimating contingencies: […] if your vessell you intend to fill bee six gallons, you must take soe much water, and allow the honey for wast in boiling for it will wast soe much if not more, and if the vessell bee not quite full, it matters not much for this kind of drinke, but if it be full it is better, this receipt is as it is usually made. but if you like it not soe strong, you must take five quarts of water to a quart of honey (but I think it was the long keeping that made mine soe strong, if you make it att michaelmas it will not bee ready to drink till lent but the smaller you make it the 34 For key work on the agency and import of nonhuman mineral, including stones, see, for instance, Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman, and Werth, ‘Loving London Stone’. 35 Barad, Meeting the Universe. See also Barad’s podcast on the topic. 36 Donne, ‘The Exstasie’, 130–32.

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sooner it will bee ready for drinke; you must not tonne vp the very dreggs into the vessell.37

As the recipe concludes, we see a series of contingent propositions—‘if… you intend [then] you must […]’ or ‘if the vessell be […]’ or ‘if you like it not so strong […]’—that underscore the contingent qualities that are in fact inherent to all recipes, all such work. Moreover, the phrase ‘I think it was the long keeping that made mine soe strong’ sits in balance with notions of ‘probatum est’, or ‘it is proven’, which suggests reliability, perhaps even certainty. The ‘I think’ here gestures toward concession toward the other, a recognition of factors that one might infer or presume but which lie beyond full apprehension or control. Recipes, their ingredients and processes, are forged of adaptation, and are not always intentional. I propose that it is this very adaptability—the contingent qualities of the cooking and medicinal recipes in these books, the transcorporeal and sympoetic relations they capture—that makes them effective. What early moderns recognized and what our modern sensibilities and our reliance on pharmaceuticals often shun, were these very contingencies. Whether promoting Galenic approaches to food and medicine—the balancing of temperature and moisture in bodies and their humours—or Paracelsian approaches that proposed a more direct through line for bodily balance, these books commonly offered multiple cures for the same or similar ailments and multiple dishes to promote health and to accommodate taste. Even the ‘probatum est’ often cited by scholars as noting a recipe’s special efficacy, its exemplary status within the book or set of cures, did not necessarily mean a recipe worked for everyone. Sympoeisis, as Haraway proposes, and as I argue that recipes illustrate, describes such making-with as not dependent on bundles of time, space, and discrete thing-ness, focusing instead on the ongoing, unfolding qualities of ‘collectively-producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries’.38 Early modern recipes thus often propose multiple recipes for the same ailment, with different dosages for and flexibility related to individual patients. Instructions like those found in the recipe for plague water in the Constance Hall book underscore how these remedies work in such contingent ways: ‘Still it [the prepared concoction] of in a cold still, your first sort being / the strongest you may give to old folks your / midle sort to any and your third to Children / but what ever sort you give mix some of your / Last sort 37 Granville, 13/Kowalchuk, Preserving, 76–77. 38 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 61.

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with it’.39 While anyone who has read the back of, say, a bottle of cough syrup or pain reliever might be familiar with how specific dosage depends on the age or weight of the patient, early modern recipes often do not dictate precise quantities, and they require a certain amount of speculation on the part of the practitioner; they beg a conditional response on the part of the individual human bodies to be cured, the intimate knowledge of those bodies by practitioners who administer it, and the contingent properties of the human-nonhuman mingling of the mixture itself. Such contingent qualities are observable, though in a different way, in such recipes as one for ‘’palsie Water’ in the Granville book, which includes such floral ingredients as sage, rosemary, borage, lavender, and orange flowers, and quantities of exotic and pricey musk, saffron, and ambergris. It instructs, ‘Give 40 Drops to a man; 30 to a woman in Crumbs of Bread & / Sugar Especially against the new, full, & Change of the Moon’. 40 Not only do we find here different dosages for men and women, which was in no way uncommon in early modern England, but more to the point, the efficacy of the cure draws on biodynamic agriculture and medicine, as it is dispensed during particular lunar phases, even as it seemingly evokes the familiar association of women with the Moon.41 That is, this cure will be most effective when coordinated with moments of lunar fluctuation, thereby casting the nonhuman as coagent in the cure itself, much as we find in gardening manuals the numerous examples of how sowing seeds during different phases of the moon improve their germination and growth. As was true in gardening manuals that included such directions for planting, the power in these cures, and the prophylactic efficacy of the cooked food on the early modern table, derived from these very contingencies, the uncontrolled/able and variable qualities that defied human desire or activity. The proof may have been, as they say, in the pudding, but ‘probatum est’ was hardly an indication of a recipe being foolproof and guaranteed to work on everybody who touched or consumed it. To focus on how recipes might have particular validity because they seem to have been or might be in the future proven and repeatable is to ask recipes to conform to notions of the individual that are certainly appropriate for the Cartesian sense of the ‘I’. Instead, we might look for what is not fully articulated by these recipes, 39 Hall, fol. 14r/Kowalchuk, Preserving, 174. 40 Granville, 193/Kowalchuk, 134. 41 The instructions in the recipe are somewhat vague as to whether the reference to administering the medicine in the ‘new, full, & Change of the Moon’ refers strictly to dispensing it to women or whether that direction applies as well to male patients.

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the aspects of these messy assemblages that remain unspoken or invisible; we might foreground the flexibility and adaptability recipes demand, the very qualities of unfolding that emphasize shared agency and co-creative properties.

Coda As I write this piece while in self-isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, like so many others across the globe, I am mindful in a unique sense of the intraconnection, to borrow from Karen Barad—how we are always already enmeshed human/nonhuman amalgamations, in immediate as well as what are otherwise seemingly distant ways. One of the effects of this pandemic has been a new-found sense of precarity, that our human selves might fall to a tiny virus. Our individual and collective experience throughout this pandemic, though, might in fact expose (at least) two fundamental illusions: first, that this precarity is ‘new’, when so many experience it every day and in conditions of great suffering—that suffering was always (and will be) ours to share, even though our ‘normal’ way of life allows us to pretend otherwise; and second, that we humans are anything but an amalgam of bacteria, viruses, and the many organisms, plant, and animal matter on the planet. A virus has laid bare something that has been true all along: we humans have never really been in control. At the same time, this pandemic might serve to give us pause, to reflect on the fact that we have always been linked in a web of human-nonhuman relations, even if our sense of ‘normal’ too often in practice aims to negate that fact. Such self-reflection brings with it the potential to perceive and experience how we might live differently. And so I return to the subject of early modern cooking and the sympoetic. Why might it matter that we reorient ourselves to cooking as a joint human-nonhuman endeavour, one comprised of multiple and entangled co-agents? And why might it matter that the subject of this reorientation is early modern cooking (and eating), as I have discussed here? Early modern recipe books, long before the Slow Food Movement, which has embraced these same tentacular relations by downscaling and digging in the dirt, document (knowingly or not) sympoetic becomings-with that understand self-Other as mutually constitutive, as indistinct. 42 If we want to think differently about how to be human on this planet going forward, we might look to the past in this 42 See Feerick and Nardizzi’s ‘Introduction’ in The Indistinct Human.

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and other respects. If we are to live on this planet in ways that are more sustainable, equitable, and just in the short- and long-term, we must reorient ourselves differently to how we understand ourselves among/as Others, co-produced rather than discrete entities. Beginning with cooking and eating, something we likely do every day (if we are so fortunate), would be a good start.

Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 2010. Albala, Ken. Food in Early Modern Europe. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 2003. Barad, Karen. ‘Meeting the Universe Halfway’. Podcast: https://alwaysalreadypodcast.wordpress.com/2017/07/24/barad/. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Half Way: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Raleigh and Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Cohen, Jeffrey J. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Cossins, Daniel. ‘Amazing Animal Farmers’. BBC, 2 January 2015. http://www. bbc.com/earth/story/20150105-animals-that-grow-their-own-food?ocid=fbert. Donne, John. ‘The Exstasie’. In The Complete Poetry of John Donne, edited by John T. Shawcross, 130–32. New York: Anchor Books, 1967. Eagleton, Terry. ‘Edible Ecriture’. Times Higher Education, October 24, 1997. www. timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/edible-ecriture/104281.article. Feerick, Jean and Vin Nardizzi. ‘Introduction’. In The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, edited by Jean Feerick and Vin Nardizzi, 1–12. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Field, Catherine. ‘“Many Hands Hands”: Writing the Self in Early Modern Recipe Books’. In Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England, edited by Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle, 49–64. Burlington and Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2007. Fitzpatrick, Joan. ‘Reading Early Modern Food: A Review Article’. Literature Compass 8, no. 3 (2011): 118–29. Giard, Luce. ‘Doing-Cooking’. In The Practice of Everyday Life. Vol. 2: Living and Cooking, by Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, edited by Luce Giard, translated by Timothy J. Tomasik, 149–247. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.

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Goldstein, David B., Amy L. Tigner, and Wendy Wall. ‘Introduction’. Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England, edited by David B. Goldstein and Amy L. Tigner, 1–11. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2016. Granville, Mary, and Anne Granville D’Ewes. Receipt Book, c. 1640–1750, Folger MS V.a.430. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Hall, Constance. Receipt Book, 1672, Folger MS V.a.20. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016. Kowalchuk, Kristine. Preserving on Paper: Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen’s Recipe Books. Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Laird, Mark. The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds 1720–1800. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Leong, Elaine. Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Munroe, Jennifer. ‘What Recipes Can Teach Us About Reading’. The Recipes Project, September 24, 2015. https://recipes.hypotheses.org/category/jennifer-munroe/ page/2. Nunn, Hillary M. ‘Local Waters and Notions of Home in Early Modern Recipe Manuscripts’. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20, no. 1 (2020): 59–82. Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. New York: Penguin Random House, 2001. Pollan, Michael. ‘Some of My Best Friends Are Germs’. New York Times Magazine, May 15, 2013. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/magazine/say-hello-to-the100-trillion-bacteria-that-make-up-your-microbiome.html. Shahani, Gitanjali G., ‘Introduction’. In Food and Literature, edited by Gitanjali G. Shahani, 1–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Shakespeare, William. ‘Sonnet 3’. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50644/sonnet-3-look-in-thy-glass-and-tell-the-face-thou-viewest. Shakespeare, William. ‘Sonnet 18’. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45087/sonnet-18-shall-i-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day. Shapin, Steven. ‘“You Are what You Eat”: Historical Changes in Ideas about Food and Identity’. Historical Research 87, no. 237 (2014): 377–92. Smith, Pamela H. ‘In the Workshop of History: Making, Writing, and Meaning’. West 86th 19, no. 1 (2012): 4–31. Wakeman, Rob. ‘The Power of the Pot: Naturalizing Carp Through the Early Modern English Recipe Book’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 131-47. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022.

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Wall, Wendy. Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern Kitchen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Werth, Tiffany Jo. ‘Loving London Stone’. Upstart: A Journal of Renaissance English Studies https://upstart.sites.clemson.edu/Essays/london_stone/london_stone. xhtml.

About the Author Jennifer Munroe is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is co-author of Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory and author of Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature. She is also co-editor of Ecological Approaches to Early Modern Texts and Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity, and co-founding member of the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective.

2.

Between Earth and Sky: The Cook as Environmental Mediator in Paradise Lost Madeline Bassnett1

Abstract To examine the cook’s mediating power, this chapter turns to the vitalist, monist universe of Paradise Lost to explore how cooking relies on, emerges from, and interacts with the poem’s environments of Heaven, Earth, and Hell. Focusing on Eve, who relies on the environmental cookery of ripening to create her dishes, and the fallen angels, who use kitchen techniques to pursue their destructive work of mining, I suggest that both the processes (concoction, fermentation, and adustion) and products of cookery (Eve’s meal, Pandemonium and the cannon) reflect the environmental contexts and associated ethics of their makers. Keywords: concoction, fermentation, fruit, ripening, fire cookery, mining

When we cook, we put our hands amid the produce of the Earth. Vegetables and fruits, nuts and seeds, the bodies of animals: we transform them into dishes, combining flavour and texture, substance and taste; we feed them to others, uniting human and nonhuman within the shared space of the table. As Michael Pollan reminds us, ‘cooking implicates us in a whole web of social and ecological relationships: with plants and animals, with the soil, with farmers, with the microbes both inside and outside our bodies […] cooking connects’.2 While the ways in which cooking and dining connect 1 Many thanks to my co-editor, Hillary Nunn, and to John Leonard and Randall Martin, for their helpful feedback on and insights into this essay. 2 Pollan, Cooked, 18.

Bassnett, M. and Hillary M. Nunn (eds.), In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463721646_ch02

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humans to each other is a popular topic of investigation, cooking’s role as an environmentally relational practice is less so.3 Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous suggestion that ‘culinary operations [are] mediatory activities between heaven and earth, life and death, nature and society’ has compelled more interest in the transformation of nature into culture than it has into the relational nexus between cooking, heaven, and earth. 4 To examine the mediating power of the cook, as one whose work brings them into close relationship with the environment, this essay will take as a case study the monist, vitalist universe of Paradise Lost. In worlds as alive as Milton’s, we can easily investigate how cooking relies on, emerges from, and interacts with the poem’s environments of Heaven, Earth, and Hell. But even as Milton’s is a culturally and historically specific vitalism, his thinking is both relevant to and instructive for our own world, teetering on the edge of climate change catastrophe. In exemplifying Pollan’s relational web and warning of the dangers of its destruction, Paradise Lost illuminates cooking’s past, present, and future significance as a practice central to the ethical mediation and environmental awareness that is crucial for rebalancing our relationship to today’s increasingly terraformed Earth. Milton’s much augmented retelling of the Genesis creation story is underpinned by his particular understanding of what constitutes his imagined worlds. Infused with ‘one first matter’, Milton’s universe, from Heaven to Hell, is made from God’s substance and reflects the vital nature of its creator.5 But God’s matter is organized differently according to its purpose, resulting in environments alternately harsh (Hell, the fallen Earth) and hospitable (Heaven, Eden). Critics have typically read the relationships between these worlds through the lens of digestion: the ‘metabolic’ process that facilitates a purifying ascendance of positive universal energies in Eden and Heaven and a corresponding purgation of ‘evil’ into Hell.6 In this essay, however, I will redirect our attention to the precursor of eating and digestion: cooking. As I will suggest, the residents of Milton’s worlds—in particular, Eve and the fallen angels—do not only embody many of the qualities of their environments, but they also mediate these qualities as they take on the 3 But see Jennifer Munroe’s ‘Sympoeisis and Early Modern Cooking’ in this volume, in which she shows how recipe books illuminate these human/nonhuman culinary and environmental relationships. 4 Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, 65. 5 Milton, Paradise Lost, 5.472. Further citations will be provided parenthetically. 6 Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers, 103. See also Rogers, Matter of Revolution, esp. Chapter 4; Michael Schoenfeldt further develops the digestive metaphor in Bodies and Selves, Chapter 5.

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work of cookery. The meal that Eve makes for the visiting angel Raphael in Book 5, for instance, can be understood as an extension of the garden, as she relies on the environmental cookery of ripening to create her dishes and feed Adam and their guest. In contrast, the fallen angels use kitchen techniques to pursue their destructive work of mining, ‘cooking’ up inedible objects and integrating their fiery environs through their work of boiling and scumming. As these contrasting cooks interact with, and create out of, their respective environments, the products of their cookery—Eve’s meal, and the cannon and the palace dubbed Pandemonium, which emerge from the fallen angels’ cauldrons—further reflect the environments they spring from and signify their relationships with a higher power. If Eve’s cooking participates fully in the concoctive cycle of life that Raphael discusses in Book 5, then the cooking of the fallen angels refuses that involvement, using concoction to halt this cycle, and catering to death through their inedible creations. Ultimately, both types of cooks experience the wide-ranging effects of the Fall, forcing humanity to relearn the art of cooking-as-mediation—a discovery we continue to undertake today, as we seek to restore and nurture our relations with plants, animals, and the Earth.

Concoction and Fermentation Two cooking processes, concoction and fermentation, lie at the heart of Milton’s imagined creation and contribute to the generative vitality of God’s matter. The first, at least in biblical chronology, is fermentation. Milton introduces the term in Book 7, where Raphael narrates the creation story to an enraptured Adam. Recounting the work of the third day, the creation of Earth, the angel describes a watery world uninterrupted by bodies of land. Here, the Earth is simultaneously foetal—an ‘embryon immature involved’ in its own watery ‘womb’—and generative—‘with warm / Prolific humour soft’ning all her globe, / Fermented the Great Mother to conceive / Satiate with genial moisture’ (7. 277, 276, 279–82).7 Although God steps in to manifest the land, Milton gives to the Earth for an instant the independent power of generation. Milton was certainly imagining fermentation as an alchemical power, which ‘swept away the necessity of outside impregnators and created an image of vital matter as self-sufficient, self-moving, impregnable’.8 But 7 See Milton, Paradise Lost, 386 n277: ‘Earth is both the Great Mother about to conceive […] and the foetus enveloped (involved) in protective waters’. Original emphases. 8 Rogers, Matter of Revolution, 119.

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this ‘internally motivated process of fermentation’ is a process we also align with a cooking technique, which highlights the interdependence of creation.9 Fermentation—of cabbage to make sauerkraut, of milk to make cheese, of grapes to make wine—is by necessity dependent on the environment and the work of microorganisms. As a 2017 Economist article elucidates, fermentation ‘connects humans to the invisible processes of life’ and ‘enlists the microbes’ aid, proceeds on their schedules, succeeds or fails according to their needs or rules’. While ‘Ferments made by different people can vary because of the different microbes transferred from their makers’ hands’, this type of cooking is also very much out of the cook’s hands, dependent on the interactions of invisible creatures beyond the cook’s control.10 Pollan describes this as a way of ‘honor[ing] our coevolutionary interdependence’ with things like ‘bacteria and fungi’.11 This model of microbial fermentation paints the picture of a cook who is less of an independent creator and more of a facilitator or partner with the Earth, which enables and extends the cook’s environmental creativity. Even more important to Milton is the concept of concoction, another term that can be related to cookery. Concoction is not the same as fermentation, but in Milton’s world, it too has a generative and connective effect. Central to understanding the full implications of the term is Raphael’s speech in Book 5, where he responds to Adam’s politely anxious query as to whether Eve’s meal is suitable for angelic consumption. Raphael’s response is reassuring. Humans and angels alike, he says, encompass Within them every lower faculty Of sense, whereby they hear, see, smell, touch, taste, Tasting concoct, digest, assimilate, And corporeal to incorporeal turn. (5.410–13)

Raphael’s response to Adam addresses much more than shared human and angelic taste and physiology, and goes on to provide a detailed outline of how Milton’s vitalist world functions. If Adam and Raphael eat ‘with keen dispatch / Of real hunger, and concoctive heat / To transubstantiate’ (5.436–38), then they participate in a cycle followed by the entire universe, 9 Rogers, 118. 10 ‘Universe in a Jar’, 31. 11 Pollan, Cooked, 297. For discussion of another type of fermentation with relevance to questions of corruption and faith, see Margaret Simon’s investigation of bread leaven, ‘Early Modern Leaven in Bread, Bodies, and Spirit’, in this volume.

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transforming ‘one substance into another’, through an internal ‘cooking’ process.12 Just as the fruit feeds the diners, so the elements of ‘one first matter all’ cyclically feed creation (5.472). ‘For know’, Raphael continues, whatever was created, needs To be sustained and fed; of elements The grosser feeds the purer, earth the sea, Earth and the sea feed air, the airs those fires Ethereal, and as lowest first the moon; […] The sun that light imparts to all, receives From all his alimental recompense In humid exhalations. (5. 414–18, 423–25)

The traditionally digestive reading of this concoctive cycle of feeding is supported by early modern usage that conflates the two terms.13 Yet Raphael’s identification of the cycle’s three stages—‘concoct, digest, assimilate’—and the narrator’s earlier foregrounding of the initial ‘concoctive heat’ required to then ‘transubstantiate’ food into nourishment, suggests that concoction is distinct from and a preparatory step towards digestion, and deserves to be considered on its own terms. Early definitions of the word further suggest its kinship with the work associated with cooking, such as baking and boiling; related definitions draw attention to concoction’s role in ripening (fruit) or maturing (minerals).14 Although both digestion and concoction require heat, these definitions that turn our attention to cooking, ripening, and maturing effectively highlight their differences. Foods are cooked and fruits are ripened before we digest them; minerals likewise are, in this framework, used after their maturation. Like fermentation, concoction shares a place within the natural and elemental world.15 Relational and interdependent, it contributes to a creative cycle that sustains and regenerates all life. A useful addition to and context for the elemental enmeshments that Raphael describes is provided by Aristotle’s Meteorology. Still influential 12 ‘transubstantiate, v.’, a. OED Online. 13 See ‘concoct, v.’, II. ‘To digest’, OED Online. 14 ‘concoct, v.’, I.1.a. ‘To prepare by the action of heat, to boil, cook, bake’; 2.a. ‘To bring (metals, minerals, etc.) to their perfect or mature state by heat; to “maturate”’; 3. ‘To ripen or mature’; 3.a. ‘fruits, vegetable juices, gums, etc.’, OED Online. 15 See Marjara’s definition of concoction as ‘a universal process involved in generation and growth in nature [which] presupposed […] that a qualitative change took place in the mixture of the elements’, in Contemplation of Created Things, 230.

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in the early modern period as a reference for understanding weather patterns, climatic disturbances, and ‘exhalations’ through the interactions of elemental earth, air, fire, and water, Meteorology turns in Book 4 to the metaphor of cooking to understand the effects of heat and cold. As Aristotle explains, heat and cold ‘determine, conjoin, and change things of the same kind and things of different kinds, moistening, drying, hardening, and softening them’.16 Concoction, he affirms, is ‘due to heat; its species are ripening, boiling, broiling […] when concoction has taken place we say that a thing has been perfected and has come to be itself’.17 Aristotle’s metaphor reflects not only the way the elements shape the concoctive process but also, in the larger context of Meteorology, the way that weather and environmental conditions contribute to this process. As we will see, the interaction between the cook and their ‘weather-world[s]’, to use Tim Ingold’s term, is important in both pre and postlapsarian contexts.18 For the cook, in Milton’s monistic world view and in the elemental thinking inspired by Aristotle, is physiologically part of the matter and elements that surround them.19 What the cook makes is thus a reflection of their embodied environment that they then extend back into their differently responsive worlds.20

Eve’s Co-Creative Cooking When God asks the angel Raphael to visit Adam and Eve in Book 5, with the instruction that he remind them of the strictures against eating from the Tree of Knowledge, Raphael’s appearance in Eden compels the couple’s hospitality. Adam, as David B. Goldstein observes, ‘administers’ hospitality by acting as host, while Eve ‘implement[s]’ it, quickly switching from preparing dinner à deux to constructing a meal that might impress their divine guest.21 Critics have tended to resist the term ‘cooking’ to describe Eve’s preparation of the meal for Raphael in Book 5, objecting that her work involves assembling and separating raw foods rather than relying on the concoctive, corrupting, and 16 Aristotle, ‘Meteorology’, 608. 17 Aristotle, 609–10. 18 Ingold, Being Alive, 96. 19 On the relationship between the elements and human physiology see Totaro, Meteorology and Physiology, ‘Introduction’, 1–14. 20 For further discussion of embodied cookery, see Katherine Walker’s ‘Instinct and the Body of the Early Modern Cook’ in this volume. 21 Goldstein, Eating and Ethics, 184.

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heat-dependent work of combining that is usually associated with cookery.22 Indeed, Milton does not use the term ‘concoct’ in his description of Eve’s work; instead, she ‘gathers’, ‘heaps’, ‘crushes’, ‘and ‘tempers’ her various fruits (5.343–47). However, Luce Giard’s concept of ‘doing-cooking’ helps us question the critical association of cooking with corruption, as she suggests that we should think of it as a process encompassing the full range of work that goes into making a meal. Cooking, she tells us, is not only about the moment of applying heat; rather, it is a process which includes ‘the pleasure […] of manipulating raw material, of organizing, combining, modifying, and inventing’, as well as ‘the tranquil joy of anticipated hospitality […] the whole body inhabited with the rhythm of working’.23 Many of these terms are readily applicable to Eve’s work. In the ‘tranquil joy’ of anticipating Raphael’s arrival, she connects fully with her materials, making decisions that display her rational knowledge, temperate virtue, and creativity.24 She may not combine ingredients, but she attentively changes the physical structure of her fruits, extracting juice and preparing ‘dulcet creams’, a phrase that implies a technique of softening and blending together the fruit’s meat or pulp. Anticipating Milton’s description of the Earth as the ‘Great Mother’ who softens her body to create the ‘genial moisture’ required for reproduction, Eve externalizes what is also a physiological process of generative fermentation inside her own ‘fruitful womb’ (5.388). While neither juice nor cream actively ferments, the potential for the co-creation inherent in microbial cookery, and its mirroring of Eve’s reproductive capacity, underlies Milton’s description. But Eve also participates in another type of co-creation, relying on the elusive processes of environmental concoction—or ripening—to produce her hospitable meal. As Aristotle advises, “Ripening is a sort of concoction […] of the nutriment in fruit […] the process of ripening is perfect when the seeds in fruit are able to reproduce the fruit in which they are found’.25 This concoctive ripening is alluded to by Raphael, as he focuses the concoctive cycle on ‘The sun that light imparts to all’, and observes the reciprocal ‘alimental recompense / In humid exhalations’ that flows from a grateful Earth (5.423–25). The sun’s role in triggering the concoctive cycle might 22 See in particular, Goldstein, 189–90. Goldstein associates cookery especially with Satan and Sin, as does Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 155–56. 23 Giard, ‘Doing-Cooking’, 153. 24 On Eve’s knowledge, see especially Gulden, ‘Milton’s Eve and Wisdom’; Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity, Chapter 6; Mintz, ‘“On an Empty Stomach”’, 159–67; Speller, ‘“For Knowledge is as Food”’, 7–8; Tigner, ‘Eating with Eve’. 25 Aristotle, ‘Meteorology’, 610.

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account for the frequent references to heat that permeate the scene.26 As Raphael strides towards the couple, we see Adam sheltering to avoid the ‘mounted sun’ which ‘Shot down direct his fervid rays to warm / Earth’s inmost womb, more warmth than Adam needs’ (5.300–02). Adam later refers to the ‘meridian heat’ when he invites Raphael into the protective bower, and Raphael correspondingly welcomes the repose, asking Adam to ‘lead on then where thy bow’r / O’ershades’ (5.369, 375–76). Instead of indicating physical discomfort in a supposedly perfect world, these comments might signal the busy work of concoction that ripens the fruit and prepares it for Eve’s table. It appears as well that Adam and Eve have been given the teaching necessary to understand or judge the condition of ripeness. Eve’s meal in Book 5 could not exist without their earlier and more mediated experience of dining. In Book 4, Adam and Eve rest beside a ‘fountain’ after their ‘sweet gard’ning labour’ and find their ‘wholesome thirst and appetite’ readily answered by the garden itself (4.326, 328, 330). This first meal involves no cookery, preparation, or even conscious selection by the humans. On the contrary, the trees select ripened fruits for Adam and Eve, their ‘compliant boughs’ bending to ‘Yield[ ]’ ‘Nectarine fruits’ to the hungry pair (4.332, 333).27 The dynamic is similar to one between parent and child, with the garden teaching its new inhabitants how to assuage their hunger. The verb ‘fell’, which describes their manner of eating, nicely suggests their position as receivers even as it looks forward to the connection between fruit and the Fall (4.331). In tandem with offering food, the garden encourages the pair to think creatively, as Adam and Eve use the ‘rind’ of their fruit to ‘scoop’ up water to drink (4.335–36). In inviting creativity, the garden also attempts to prepare the couple to make their own decisions, not the least having to do with dinner. But one of the central decision-making lessons involves the judgement of ripeness, which further encourages partnership with the Earth’s concoctive power.28 In accordance with her designated role as preparer of food, Eve appears to have learnt this lesson most fully. As Susannah Mintz observes, Eve corrects Adam’s uninformed directive, delivered as he advises his wife 26 The sun’s heat might also be considered a fermentative influence, as Adam’s earlier observation about the effect of the stars suggests: ‘with kindly heat / Of various influence foment and warm, / Temper or nourish, or in part shed down / Their stellar virtue’ (4.668–71). See ‘foment cherish with heat’, 348 n669. Original emphasis. 27 A similar dynamic exists, for instance, in Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’: ‘The blushing apricot, and woolly peach / Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach’ (43–44). 28 We could also see that partnership in the implicit suggestion that the ‘rinds’ may later be enfolded by the concoctive and fermentative Earth in a perpetuation of the lifecycle.

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of Raphael’s impending arrival: ‘what thy stores contain, bring forth and pour / Abundance’ (5.314–15).29 In return, Eve uses her newly developed knowledge to explain the process of ripening to her husband: […] small store will serve, where store, All seasons, ripe for use hangs on the stalk; Save what by frugal storing firmness gains To nourish, and superfluous moist consumes: But I will haste and from each bough and brake, Each plant and juiciest gourd will pluck such choice To entertain. (5.322–28)

Eve brings to her meal preparation a surprisingly detailed knowledge of solar and passive cookery. Fruits, she says, ripen on the plant, from which she selects the ‘juiciest’ and ‘choice’ fruits for eating. She also alludes to her reliance on comparative and sensory judgement. Her corresponding physical and intellectual interactions with her environment include knowledge of the specific ripening processes peculiar to each plant. She has learned from the trees in Book 4, which bent their boughs, heavy with juicy fruits, and from the fruits themselves, with their inviting scents. She can recognize when the fruit reaches the perfect combination of firmness and succulence. And she knows as well which fruit will ripen on the stalk and which will need storing to turn—in Aristotle’s terminology—its ‘watery’ nature to a more firm or ‘earthy state’.30 As Eve co-operates with, relies on, and even assists the concoctive work of ripening that contributes to the meal for Raphael, she also brings her mediatory practice into her kitchen by turning fruits into food. ‘Even raw or picked from a tree’, Giard asserts, ‘fruit is already a cultured foodstuff, prior to any preparation and by the simple fact that it is regarded as being edible’.31 In judging ripeness, Eve consciously considers the question of edibility; she begins to redefine the fruits in relation to the creative decisions she makes as she arranges and prepares her meal. But Milton’s narrator also resists the implication that Eve fully transforms nature into culture: a term such as ‘heap’, for instance, paradoxically implies a less conscious selection process. When Raphael sits down to dinner and praises ‘these various fruits 29 See Mintz’s discussion of ‘store’ in relation to the different subjectivities expressed by Adam and Eve: ‘“On an Empty Stomach”’, 161–65. 30 Aristotle, ‘Meteorology’, 610. 31 Giard, ‘Doing-Cooking’, 167–68. Original emphases.

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[with which] the trees of God / Have heaped this table’, he implies that Eve is an unthinking conduit, and has contributed nothing of her own to the feast (5.390–91). But the tension between Eve’s own assessment of her work as dependent on her knowledge and judgement, and the suggestions from the narrator and Raphael who dismiss her autonomy and subjectivity, indicates that Eve’s partnering with and mediation of environmental ripening processes is, quite rightly, both conscious and unconscious, because of her embodied connection to the garden. For Eve, a woman whose ‘fruitful womb’ Raphael compares to the bountiful meal in front of him, is enmeshed in the nonhuman world of the garden (5.388).32 As the poem focuses in on Eve preparing food in the couple’s ‘cool bow’r’, we see her framed by the […] mounted sun [which] Shot down direct his fervid rays to warm Earth’s inmost womb, more warmth than Adam needs; And Eve within. (5.300–03)

The structure of these lines establishes Eve as a fertile mother-to-be not simply ‘within’ the bower, but also within the fermentative space of ‘Earth’s inmost womb’. Extending the Earth’s embodied nurture to her cookery, Eve recreates her own nourishing substance in the red juice of the grapes and berries and the sweet milky creams of the kernels. Critics such as John Rogers have observed that the ‘“co-union” of body and spirit’ is a significant consequence of Milton’s monistic creation; Eve shows instead that we should recognize a co-union of body, spirit, and environment.33 For her cooking to occur, she must claim her place at the centre of a network of relationships: with the Earth, with Eden, with the sun and trees and fruit. We can call her a cook because of these relationships—of concoction, of microbial fermentation—that her food preparation and her gendered body depends on and alerts us to. By virtue of her relationship with the Earth, Eve is also closely aligned with the Heavens. It is in her work of cooking that she communes with God directly. Her ‘sequences of gestures’, as Giard describes the repetitive and ritualized movements associated with cooking, are as profound as those that accompany the prayers Adam and Eve offer each morning and evening.34 In 32 On Eve’s close relationship to Eden, see Gulden, ‘A Walk in the Paradise Garden’. 33 Rogers, Matter of Revolution, 106. 34 Giard, ‘Doing-Cooking’, 199.

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preparing a meal to make ‘our angel guest […] confess that here on earth / God hath dispensed his bounties as in Heav’n’, Eve becomes the medium for joining these two worlds while also, in her ‘unsparing’ bounty, solidifying the contract between God and humanity (5.328–30, 344). Indeed, we can see Eve’s cookery reflecting God’s own methods of food preparation. If Eve ‘[h]eaps’ fruit on her ‘board’ in the bower, then Raphael’s observation that ‘the trees of God / Have heaped’ the dining table both overlooks Eve’s agency and reveals her gesture as reflective of God’s natural example (5.344, 343, 390–91). More tellingly, the narrator’s description of the dinner table, where ‘All autumn piled, though spring and autumn here / Danced hand in hand’ (5.394–95), mirrors the verb used by Raphael to describe the celebratory dinner after God introduces the Son to the angelic host: ‘Tables are set, and on a sudden piled / With angels’ food’ (5.632–33).35 Like God, Eve offers a profusion: she has chosen, yet she also allows her guests to choose. In such profusion, Eve proffers a gift that reflects the angels’ joyful dance of prayer that precedes their own meal. By virtue of being the human counterpart to God as master cook, Eve, like God, has the potential to be ‘all-bounteous’, with the hospitable power to mediate between Earth and Heaven, human and angel, God and humanity (5.640).

Fire Cookery in Hell and Heaven The cooking of the fallen angels is, needless to say, very different from Eve’s. Theirs ref ines metals: the gold to make Pandemonium, Satan’s luxurious palace, in Book 1; and the iron and lead to create cannon during the war in Heaven in Book 6. While the ingredients do not traditionally fit the aegis of cooking, the practices do: the devils are fire cookers, boiling and scumming, heating and parching. Pollan calls f ire cookery ‘heroic, masculine, theatrical, boastful, unironic, and faintly […] ridiculous’.36 Although Pollan’s comments refer primarily to open-pit whole-hog barbeque, his description suits the devils well. Pandemonium and the cannon, the theatrical results of this f iery masculine vigour, have all these qualities: the boastful building of Pandemonium, a structure that declares its ‘wealth and luxury’ (1.722); the militaristic and pseudo-heroic cannon whose noise and f ire evoke the bodily excretions of feces and 35 My emphases. 36 Pollan, Cooked, 13. For a very different approach to the topic of fire cookery, see Rebecca Laroche’s ‘Minding the Fire’ in this volume.

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vomit, similar to the eruptions of Hell’s volcanoes; and the devils’ deafness to the narrator’s ironic tone, as he elicits ridicule for their excessive yet empty displays. Like Eve’s cooking, however, theirs emerges from and engages with their environment, which in turn informs their process and their (un)ethical approach. Appropriately, their cooking methods are much closer to those found in early modern kitchens, and look forward to the postlapsarian integration of Earth and Hell. The ‘f ire’, ‘smoke’, and ‘sulphur’ roiling through Hell’s landscape find their reflection in the flames, smoke, ash, and coals of kitchen spaces, where these fiery techniques had dangerous and potentially toxic effects (1.671, 674). As wood became more scarce due to population increase, Little Ice Age climate change, and industrial and naval over-harvesting, seventeenth-century kitchens increasingly adopted the dirty and sometimes deadly fuels of coal and charcoal as a replacement.37 Coal emitted ‘foul sulphurous smoke’, similar to the ‘ever-burning sulphur’ the newly-fallen angels discover in Hell, damaging the respiratory systems of those forced to toil alongside coal-fired ovens and stoves (1.69).38 Charcoal, although derived from wood, was even more deadly, producing invisible fumes that were ‘hot and toxic […] any large concentration would certainly induce drowsiness, unconsciousness and death’.39 Although the devils do not appear to suffer such negative consequences, the upper-world impact of fire cookery signals Hell’s environment as antithetical to life. In this life-denying world, the devils act accordingly. Instead of plucking fruits from trees in a co-creative act of generative transformation, the devils rip apart Hell to pull out another type of fruit: minerals. Although Aristotle suggests that minerals, like fruit, mature through concoction, Milton invites us to see their use by the devils as an invasive assault. Comparing the mineral extraction to the work of men who ‘Ransacked the centre’ and ‘Rifled the bowels’, or the fermentative womb, ‘of their mother Earth’, Milton’s narrator describes the devils creating a ‘spacious wound’ in the hillside through which they extract ‘ribs of gold’ (1.686, 687, 689, 690). The devils actively deconstruct the body of the new land they now inhabit, butchering it as they might a hog, rather than allowing the minerals to mature and surface

37 Brears, Cooking and Dining, 59. 38 Brears, 61. 39 Brears, 66.

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for easy collection. 40 As they prepare the metal for the construction of Pandemonium, they transform from butchers into cooks, labouring over ‘boiling cells’ as if they were kitchen cauldrons: Nigh on the plain in many cells prepared, That underneath had veins of liquid fire Sluiced from the lake, a second multitude With wondrous art founded the massy ore, Severing each kind, and scummed the bullion dross: A third as soon had formed within the ground A various mould, and from the boiling cells By strange conveyance filled each hollow nook. (1.700–07)

Further context for reading this industrious labour as cooking can be found in Book 2 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which similarly negotiates a relationship between mining and cooking. Embodying the virtue of temperance, the Book’s hero, Sir Guyon, first undergoes temptation in the underworld Cave of Mammon, which celebrates greed. As in Paradise Lost, Mammon’s kitchen heats ‘golden metall’ in its ‘fournaces’ rather than food, and the misshapen creatures who serve as menial kitchen staff keep the fires burning with ‘great bellowes’, skim the ‘drosse’ from the cauldrons, and stir them, like stews or pottages, with ‘ladles great’.41 Rescued by Arthur and the Palmer, Guyon undertakes a curative tour of the Castle of Alma, the embodiment of temperance, in Canto 9. Spenser allegorizes the castle as a human body, equating the kitchen to the stomach, where Guyon discovers ‘raunges’ and a ‘mightie fornace, burning whott’. This, too, is kept going by ‘An huge great payre of bellowes’, and the cauldron is circled by a collection of cooks who use their ‘hookes and ladles’ to push and pull the ‘viaundes’ boiling within. Later, they ‘remoue the scum’ that rises to the top of the vessel. Tellingly, Spenser distinguishes concoction from digestion in this depiction, with the former associated with the ‘maister Cooke’ and the latter with the ‘kitchin clerke’. 42 Spenser’s two kitchens reinforce the logic of reading Milton’s mining scenes as also scenes of cooking. In Book 1 of Paradise Lost the work is 40 This maturing process might be seen in Thomas More’s Utopia, where the Utopians ‘gather pearls by the seashore’ and ‘value certain stones such as diamonds and garnets, but they do not go searching for them’, and rather ‘chance upon them’, 76. 41 Spenser, Faerie Queene, 2.7.35–36. Ladles were used in both metallurgical and kitchen cookery; see examples in ‘ladle, n.’, 1.a. OED Online. 42 Spenser, 2.9.29–31.

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similarly led by Mammon, and his pride and greed lie firmly behind Pandemonium’s construction. As the fallen angels render the gold, Milton’s language overlaps with Spenser’s: the ‘boiling cells’ are comparable to Spenser’s gold- or meat-filled cauldrons; we see as well the attendants who scum the pots, removing the ‘bullion dross’—or the ‘boiling dregs’—from the liquid and purifying the concoction within.43 Any contemporary reader would recognize scumming as a necessary labour when boiling meat, which, as Brears explains, ‘threw off a thick, foamy scum, which had to be carefully removed to keep the stock clear’.44 Cookbooks, such as Robert May’s popular The Accomplisht Cook (1660), confirm the pervasiveness of this practice, regularly using the imperative ‘scum’ or ‘scummed’ in recipes for stewing and boiling—an olio podrida or a bisk, for example. 45 Milton uses other terms that seem designed ironically to compare the devils’ work of building with Eve’s work of food preparation in Book 5. As the devils finish constructing the palace, ‘Anon out of the earth a fabric huge / Rose like an exhalation, with the sound / Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet’ (1.710–12). Juxtaposing these terms with those used to describe Eve’s dishes—‘from sweet kernels pressed / She tempers dulcet creams’ (5.346–47)—Milton encourages a reading of Pandemonium as a type of dish, created not by human-nature cooperation with the sun’s concoctive rays, but by rapine and plunder that prevents both the ripening process and fermentative reproduction from taking place.46 To put it another way, Eve’s work relies on and contributes to the concoctive cycle of life that begins with the sun: in feeding humans and angels with ripened fruit, Eve ensures the continuance of human life and allows it to contribute to the concoctive cycle of exhalations. The devils cook, but the only sweetness they produce is inedible, a product ‘like an exhalation’, which is less a breath than it is the passing of wind.47 Indeed, Pandemonium appears to embody the hot and dry elemental mixture that in meteorological terms creates winds, earthquakes, and comets. 48 Disruptive rather than productive, Pandemonium is an end in itself, in opposition to the cyclic rebirthing of Eve’s meal. 43 Milton, Paradise Lost, 306 n704. 44 Brears, Cooking and Dining, 189. 45 May, Accomplisht Cook, 1, 5. For a discussion of the implications of the bisk as a capacious dish of toleration, see David B. Goldstein’s essay ‘How to Make a Bisk’ in this volume. 46 My emphases. 47 In particular see Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers, esp. 206–16; Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, Chapter 5; and Goldstein, ‘Manuring Eden’, 181–83, for associations between the devils, excretion, and excrement. 48 Aristotle, ‘Meteorology’, esp. Books I.4–7 and II.4–9.

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This is not the f irst time that the devils have undertaken miningcooking. As we discover in Book 6, where Raphael recounts the war in Heaven for Adam’s edification, the not-yet-fallen angels dig into Heaven’s fabric for the materials that will allow them to manufacture cannon. This exploration is inspired by Satan, already stripped of the name Lucifer, who posits the ‘materials dark and crude, / Of spiritous and fiery spume’ that ‘grow’ beneath Heaven’s ‘ambrosial’ surface (6.478–79, 477, 475). Alluding once more to the concoctive processes that contribute to the generation of minerals as well as fruit, Satan appears also to reference alchemical theories that imagined ‘minerals […] grow[ing] like seeds in the earth’ which ‘could be ripened and harvested like grain’:49 ‘touched / With Heav’n’s ray, and tempered they shoot forth / So beauteous, op’ning to the ambient light’ (6.479–81). The tempering provided by Heaven’s light also recalls Eve’s ‘temper[ing]’ of ‘dulcet creams’, with both terms evoking the senses of: ‘To prepare by mingling; to make by due mixture or combination; to concoct, compound, compose’; ‘to bring into a good or desirable state of body or health’; and ‘To bring into harmony, attune’.50 Alluding further to moderation, the tempering undertaken by both Eve and Heaven not only brings their work into further alignment, but also suggests the imbalance produced when Satan’s angels intervene, preventing the minerals’ flowering along with the exhalations they would have added to the shared lifecycle. Instead, Satan imagines Heaven’s fertile substructure as ‘pregnant with infernal flame’, a place that generates the materials of war and death and reverses once again the effects of Earth’s fermentative and life-giving womb (6.483). The work of mining necessary to excavate the materials needed to create these cannon tellingly evokes the work of saltpetre men who unearthed, not ‘celestial soil’, but animal and human waste-saturated ground in farmers’ barns and privies, and even churches, in the race to find material to make munitions (6.510).51 The rebel angels’ transformation of these Heavenly materials into products of death—or their misuse of naturally concoctive and compostable materials—might remind us that while the ‘matter of sin and virtue are the same’, ‘human (or angelic) choices’ affect the nature of that matter.52 As Seth Herbst suggests in relation to the ‘infernal music’ created by the fallen angels in Hell, their compositions have a different 49 Smith, Business of Alchemy, 207. 50 ‘temper, v.’, I.4, 5, III.16. OED Online. 51 On saltpetre see Goldstein, ‘Manuring Eden’, 183–88; Martin, Shakespeare and Ecology, 88. 52 McColley, Poetry and Ecology, 49, original emphases.

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‘ontology’ and a ‘different agency’ from that of the angels’.53 Even in Heaven, the angels’ sin is reflected in the way they imagine and alter the materials of their environment to bring ‘missive ruin’ to Heaven’s doorstep (6.519). To make this change, the angels turn again to the practice of cookery, using skills associated with the kitchen to prepare their unwholesome dish: […] in a moment up they turned Wide the celestial soil, and saw beneath Th’ originals of nature in their crude Conception; sulphurous and nitrous foam They found, they mingled, and with subtle art, Concocted and adusted they reduced To blackest grain, and into store conveyed. (6.509–15)

The rebel angels mingle their ingredients, perhaps in the same way that William Rabisha’s recipe for ‘a Jelly as white as Snow’ in The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected (1661) asks its readers to ‘mingle’ a decoction of isinglass with almonds.54 And once again, Milton gives us the terminology of natural balance in order to show the rebels dismantling it. They whisk the ‘originals of Nature’ from their ‘crude Conception’, ensuring they will never reach maturity; they use ‘subtle art’ to undo natural processes; they introduce artificial techniques of concocting and adusting to create ‘blackest’ rather than golden and ripened ‘grain’. Although ‘adusting’ might evoke the alchemical process of reducing ‘ingredients to their purest essence’, this term, too, reminds us of the ideal only to negate it, here being more akin to the OED definition: ‘To burn, to scorch; to desiccate by exposing to strong heat’.55 As Robert Appelbaum further elucidates, ‘adustion’ is ‘a hot corruption, a degeneration […] that heats the body and overcooks the humors comprising it’.56 Adding yet another antithesis to Eve’s co-creative cookery through the term ‘store’, here closer to the hoarding undertaken by greedy landowners in times of famine, Milton positions the devils definitively as mediators and creators of death rather than of life. As Michael Schoenfeldt suggests, it is Hell where the matter of the rebel angels finds its equivalent—a place ‘composed of the excrement of the universe, the material that cannot (or 53 Herbst, ‘Sound as Matter’, 42. Also see Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers, 202: ‘The reactions of the matter of Heaven and Earth are moral and ontological simultaneously; in this they mirror the choices of the poem’s rational creatures’. 54 Rabisha, Whole Body of Cookery, 179. 55 Marjara, Contemplation of Created Things, 246; ‘adust, v.’, 2. OED Online. 56 Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef, 25.

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refuses to) partake of that vast ecology of assimilation and secretion’.57 Their cookery, both practically and linguistically, attempts to halt the cooperative and enmeshed practices embodied by Eve. We might, as well, turn our attention to the infertility of Hell in comparison with Eve, Eden, and Heaven. The devils cook inedible objects and appear to eat nothing except the ashy and food-negating apples of Sodom, which I will discuss in more detail below. In refusing to participate in, and in purposefully counteracting the cycle of life, the rebel angels ensure their own expulsion from this cycle, becoming excretions themselves, driven through a ‘spacious gap […] / Into the wasteful deep’ (6.861–2). But we might also understand them as strangely sterile cooks, disconnected from matter and microbial life, intent on transforming the vital world, as Stephen Fallon argues, into ‘dead, Hobbesian matter’ in an ultimate rebuke to God.58 In contrast, even after Adam and Eve disobediently eat the forbidden fruit and have been expelled from Eden, the human couple can still choose to remain within the lifecycle, a choice dependent in part on their concoctive mediation of and biological enmeshment in their new environments.

Cooking After the Fall Part of the battle for power in a postlapsarian world thus involves a conflict over the environment, or as Milton might say, matter, and raises questions still relevant today. Do we recognize and care for our shared elemental constitutions through the cooking practices of concoction and fermentation? Or do we pursue rapine and plunder, relying on ‘adustive’ cooking to spread death rather than life? The most obvious postlapsarian cook is Sin, who naturally chooses the latter option, ‘imagin[ing] nature as an extended appetizer, and humanity as the main course, carefully seasoned by the products of its own transgressive consumption’.59 Preparing an unending meal for her insatiable son, Death, Sin invites him to feed ‘first’ ‘on these herbs, and fruits and flow’rs’; ‘next’ on ‘each beast […] and fish, and fowl’; and finally on humanity: ‘Till I in man residing through the race, / His thoughts, his looks, words, actions all infect, / And season him thy last and sweetest prey’ (10.603–04, 607–09). Schoenfeldt suggests that Sin’s ‘menu is as carefully 57 Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 144. 58 Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers, 212. 59 Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 155. See also Goldstein, Eating and Ethics, ‘With Sin at the stove, all earth becomes a cooking pot’, 190.

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planned as that delightful mixture of tastes which Eve had prepared for Adam and Raphael’, but as Milton is careful to tell us, Eve’s meal is imbued with the virtue of rational choice, whereas Sin’s is a parodic shadow of Eve’s generous hospitality.60 Her apparently orderly ‘first’ and ‘next’ and ‘Till’ are negated by her more honest response to the undefined gluttony of Death, who wishes only to ‘stuff this maw, this vast unhidebound corpse’ (10.601). Sin accordingly opens the doors to his disorderly dining: ‘whatever thing / The scythe of Time mows down, devour unspared’ (10.605–06). Sin’s only real contribution to this cooking pot is to ‘season’ humanity, a ‘concoctive action that renders human bodies fit for consumption’.61 But her unselective, uncaring, and minimal cooking practices only illustrate one more dead end; she offers even less mediation than the devils, who employ physical labour and imagination to create new objects, however infernal. Sin, on the other hand, creates nothing; she is less a cook than a disease who ‘infect[s]’ God’s creation through adustion. A similar example of adustive cookery appears in the postlapsarian Hell, although interestingly, the ‘cook’ behind the apples of Sodom is God himself. After Satan victoriously recounts his successful temptation of Eve to his compatriots waiting for him in Pandemonium, the f iends discover themselves transforming into serpents, writhing out of the palace into ‘A grove […] laden with fair fruit like that / Which grew in Paradise’ (10.548, 550–51). Driven to eat the fruit by ‘scalding thirst and hunger f ierce’, not unlike the ‘eternal famine’ experienced by Death (10.556, 597), the serpents […] thinking to allay Their appetite with gust, instead of fruit Chewed bitter ashes, which th’ offended taste With spattering noise rejected: oft they assayed, Hunger and thirst constraining, drugged as oft, With hatefullest disrelish writhed their jaws With soot and cinders filled; so oft they fell Into the same illusion. (10.564–71)

In supplying this overcooked, charred fruit to the devils, God makes sure they understand their outcast position. Unworthy of participating in the lifecycle of concoction and exhalation, the devils are forced to ingest the 60 Schoenfeldt, 155. 61 Goldstein, Eating and Ethics, 190.

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bad, unnourishing matter they themselves have created through their obsession with death. As the creatures of Hell find themselves—willingly or not—further entrenched in mediating death rather than life, Eve also subtly begins to alter her mediatory role, first by separating herself from Adam in the garden, and second, and more substantially, by eating the forbidden fruit. While the fruit itself partakes in the same concoctive processes of ripening as the rest of the garden, Eve’s interaction with it effectively undercuts her position as a mediator between Heaven and Earth. Like the devils, she denies her relationship with Heaven by focusing on the mundane world and transferring divinity to the fruit itself (9.776). As Eve unwittingly chooses to be an Earthly being rather than one at the crux of both Heaven and Earth, she inflicts the first ‘wound’ (9.782). The ‘signs of woe’ Nature expresses in this moment are multiplied after Adam also eats: ‘Sky loured, and muttering thunder, some sad drops / Wept’ (9.783, 1002–03). Not only do these meteorological signs prefigure God’s providential anger, they also anticipate the climatological changes to come. The easy ripening familiar to Eve in Eden is about to end: neither she nor the Earth will continue to experience the ‘genial’ fermentation of the womb or the profuse fertility of a garden whose expressions of flowering and fruiting ‘Danced hand in hand’ with the sun’s faithful light (7.282, 5.395). Instead, both Adam and Eve face a world of unpredictable fertility and the failure of fruition: Eve will birth children ‘In sorrow’, a term that might well include the grief of losing infants to miscarriage, childbirth, disease, famine, or war (10.195). Adam’s ‘sorrow’ is the struggle to grow food in soil marred by inedible ‘Thorns […] and thistles’ (10.201, 203). Unwelcoming, dependent on the newly unpredictable weather, and subject to barrenness and destruction, the Earth and its fruits struggle to participate in the concoctive cycle while having to rely on now unreliable human stewardship to maintain the vestiges of that cycle. As Milton looks forward in the last two books of Paradise Lost to the biblical postlapsarian world, he provides us with glimpses of the cook’s future role. Perhaps the first indication that the fallen humans can potentially regain an aspect of their mediating purpose comes at the beginning of Book 11, when the Son joyfully describes Adam and Eve’s contrition as ‘first fruits’, recognizing their repentant prayer as equivalent to the generous exhalations of Eden’s plant and animal life (11.22). They may have inadvertently chosen to mix Earth with the substance of Hell, but they remain attached to Heaven. To encourage the fallen humans to communicate with God through contrition and prayer and thereby begin to reunite Earth and Heaven, the archangel Michael provides Adam with visions and instructions about the

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importance of temperance and reliance on ‘Due nourishment, not gluttonous delight’ (11.533). Focusing more on what is ingested than on how nourishment is prepared, this advice seems especially designed to make up for Eve’s ‘inabstinance’ in eating the forbidden fruit (11.476). The unspoken allusion, however, is to the cook’s importance as a gatekeeper, as one who prevents ‘intemperance more / In meats and drinks’ through the careful selection of ingredients so helpfully modelled in Book 5 by Eve (11.472–73). Indeed, the postlapsarian cook must consciously choose to inhabit and cultivate the role of mediator in order to restore the community to the connected web of ecological relationships so naturally experienced in Eden. Two especially instructive moments in these final books return more directly to cooking. The first concerns the story of Cain and Abel—the unlucky sons of Adam and Eve who compete for God’s recognition through sacrificing the fruits of their labours. Cain, his brother’s jealous murderer, offers ‘from his tillage […] / First fruits, the green ear, and the yellow sheaf, / Unculled, as came to hand’ (11.434–36). Abel, whose offering God approves, […] came with the firstlings of his flock Choicest and best; then sacrificing, laid The inwards and their fat, with incense strewed, On the cleft wood, and all due rites performed. His off’ring soon propitious fire from heav’n Consumed with nimble glance, and grateful steam. (11.437–42)

Michael’s description once again highlights the importance of selection: Cain’s ‘Unculled’ grain, ‘picked at random’ rather than carefully selected, is a first sign of its inadequacy.62 As Giard outlines, and as Eve shows us, ethical cooking relies on conscious choice, good judgement, and generosity. Cain’s off-hand gathering of what appears to be unripe—still green—grain answers none of these requirements; nor does it demonstrate the co-creativity that reveals attentiveness to natural cycles. Although not adustive in nature, this offering is also not concoctive, contending rather than partnering with the ripening process. Abel, however, consciously selects which ripe young lambs he will offer and takes care to prepare them for God’s approval, ritually sacrificing them and separating the flesh from the ‘inwards and their fat’, presumably allowing his mother to prepare the flesh so that they might share this meal with God. Unlike Eve in Eden, Abel adds wood to facilitate the burning of his offering, but the logic of that becomes clear as 62 Milton, Paradise Lost, 438 n436.

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the heavenly fire creates steam: an exhalation explicitly designed to feed the divinity from the now mutable Earth. A similar praise for concoctive cooking practices occurs at the beginning of Book 12, in which a ‘second source of men’ (12.13), descended from Noah, provide a new beginning for humanity: Labouring the soil, and reaping plenteous crop, Corn wine and oil; and from the herd or flock, Oft sacrificing bullock, lamb, or kid, With large wine-offerings poured, and sacred feast, Shall spend their days in joy unblamed. (12.18–22)

This sacrificial meal emerges fully from its environment. Although the fruits of the Earth here are grapes, olives, grain, and domesticated farm animals rather than the bounteous fruits of Eden, the exchange of labour and productivity suggests that these humans, however fallen, understand their interdependence with the land. While we do not see them crushing the grapes into wine, pressing the olives into oil, grinding the grain into flour, or even preparing the altar to sacrifice the ‘bullock, lamb, or kid’, we have already witnessed Eve’s and Abel’s choices and ritualized labours. Reinvigorating the fermentative energies of the Earth through ‘wineofferings’, reconnecting with the heavens through the steam of sacrifice, sharing feasts that will extend the concoctive cycle through the thankful breaths of the living, this is cooking that acknowledges its relationship to an interconnected world. How might Milton’s attention to concoction, fermentation, and adustion resonate outside the bounds of Paradise Lost, and especially within today’s secular and industrialized West? Milton’s guidelines for good cooking— thoughtful selection of ingredients, attentive preparation, minimal waste, awareness of environmental impacts, moderation, and pleasing taste—are strikingly similar to contemporary advice. Pollan’s appeal to ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants’, is a resonant example, counselling us to reject processed food in favour of fresh, local ingredients, to cultivate a garden, and eat homecooked meals.63 Pollan’s investigation of cookery further evokes the cook’s reliance on the elements and pays particular attention to fermentation: air-based sourdough and what he identifies as the earth-based creation of wine, beer, cabbage, and cheese. ‘It is the earth’, Pollan writes, in a manner reminiscent of Milton’s fermentative vision, ‘that breeds and 63 Pollan, In Defence of Food, 1 and ff.

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shadows every fermentation’.64 Writers like Giard and John Cochran—who offers an object oriented investigation of cookery—promote the embodied attentiveness that govern Eve’s choices, arguing for a practice ‘rooted in the fabric of relationships to others and to one’s self’ and thinking in what we might call a concoctive and vitalist way about food as ‘an object in itself with capacities and tendencies undiscovered’.65 Cochran’s ensuing critique of molecular gastronomy as a prime example of an industrialized, and perhaps adustive, technique interested in aesthetics rather than nourishment is startlingly similar at times to Milton’s own perspective on the fallen angels’ impressive but non-edible creations.66 Doing-cooking, these writers seem to confirm, contributes significantly to how we understand, relate to, and mediate the environment, plants and animals, our own bodies, and each other. While Milton’s monist vitalism and his imagined biblical worlds are very different from ours, we, too, share the postlapsarian troubles of disease, war, famine, climatic change, and extreme weather. As we seek to reclaim a ‘vitalist politics’ that resists capitalist extractivism and recognizes human enmeshment with more-than-human worlds, we might also turn to historical narratives of vitalism—such as those found in Paradise Lost—to assist us in the struggle to reimagine environmental and nourishing relations in a time of combined climate and pandemic crises.67

Works Cited ‘adust, v.’, 2. OED Online. December 2020. Oxford University Press. Appelbaum, Robert. Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food Among the Early Moderns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Aristotle. ‘Meteorology’. In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 1, edited by Jonathan Barnes, translated by E.W. Webster, 555–625. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Brears, Peter. Cooking and Dining in Tudor and Early Stuart England. London: Prospect Books, 2015. Cochran, John. ‘Object Oriented Cookery’. Collapse 7 (July 2011): 299–329. ‘concoct, v.’. OED Online. December 2020. Oxford University Press. 64 Pollan, Cooked, 294. 65 Giard, ‘Doing-Cooking’, 157; Cochran, ‘Object Oriented Cookery’, 301, original emphases. 66 Cochran, 305–17. 67 On calling for a vitalist politics see Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse, 235 and Chapter 18.

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Fallon, Stephen M. Milton Among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991. Giard, Luce. ‘Doing-Cooking’. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol. 2: Living and Cooking, by Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, Pierre Mayol, edited by Luce Giard, translated by Timothy J. Tomasik, 149–247. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Ghosh, Amitav. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Goldstein, David B. Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Goldstein, David B. ‘How to Make a Bisk: The Restoration Cookbook as National Restorative’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 151-75. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Goldstein, David B. ‘Manuring Eden: Biological Conversions in Paradise Lost’. In Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science, edited by Hillary Eklund, 171–93. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2017. Gulden, Ann Torday. ‘Milton’s Eve and Wisdom: The “Dinner-Party” Scene in Paradise Lost’. Milton Quarterly 32, no. 4 (1998): 137–43. Gulden, Ann Torday. ‘A Walk in the Paradise Garden: Eve’s Influence in the “Triptych” of Speeches, Paradise Lost 4.610–88’. In Renaissance Ecology: Imagining Eden in Milton’s England, edited by Ken Hiltner, 45–62. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2008. Herbst, Seth. ‘Sound as Matter: Milton, Music and Monism’. In Milton, Materialism, and Embodiment: One First Matter All, edited by Kevin J. Donovan and Thomas Festa, 37–55. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2017. Ingold, Tim. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Jonson, Ben. ‘To Penshurst’. In Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, edited by George Parfitt, 95–98. London and New York: Penguin, 1996. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ‘ladle, n.’. OED Online. December 2020. Oxford University Press. Laroche, Rebecca. ‘Minding the Fire: Human-Fire Coagency in Margaret Cavendish’s Matrimonial Trouble and Seventeenth-Century Recipes’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 221-42. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology: I. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

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Marjara, Harinder Singh. Contemplation of Created Things: Science in Paradise Lost. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Martin, Randall. Shakespeare and Ecology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. May, Robert. The Accomplisht Cook, or the Art and Mystery of Cookery. London, 1660. McColley, Diane Kelsey. Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell. Aldershot and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2007. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by John Leonard. London and New York: Penguin, 2000. Mintz, Susannah B. ‘“On an Empty Stomach”: Milton’s Food Imagery and Disordered Eating’. In Reassembling Truth: Twenty-First-Century Milton, edited by Charles W. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt, 145–72. Selinsgrove and London: Susquehanna and Associated University Presses, 2003. More, Thomas. Utopia. Edited by William P. Weaver, translated by G.C. Richards. Peterborough: Broadview, 2010. Munroe, Jennifer. ‘Sympoeisis and Early Modern Cooking: Troubling the Boundaries of Human/Nonhuman’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 29-44. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Pollan, Michael. Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. New York: Penguin, 2013. Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2008. Rabisha, William. The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected. London, 1661. Rogers, John. The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996. Schoenfeldt, Michael C. Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Simon, Margaret. ‘Early Modern Leaven in Bread, Bodies, and Spirit’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 91-108. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Smith, Pamela H. The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Speller, Emily E. ‘“For Knowledge is as Food”: Digesting Gluttony and Temperance in Paradise Lost’. Early English Studies 2 (2009): 1–28. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Rev. 2nd Edition. Edited by A.C. Hamilton with Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2001, 2007. ‘temper, v.’. OED Online. December 2020. Oxford University Press. Tigner, Amy L. ‘Eating with Eve’. Milton Quarterly 44, no. 4 (2010): 239–53.

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Totaro, Rebecca. Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture: Earthquakes, Human Identity, and Textual Representation. New York and London: Routledge, 2018. ‘transubstantiate, v.’. OED Online. December 2020. Oxford University Press. ‘Universe in a Jar’. The Economist December 23, 2017, 30–31. Walker, Katherine. ‘Instinct and the Body of the Early Modern Cook’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 71-88. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022.

About the Author Madeline Bassnett is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University. She is the author of Women, Food Exchange, and Governance in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2016) and project director of the SSHRC-funded open access database Weather Extremes in England’s Little Ice Age 1500-1700.

3.

Instinct and the Body of the Early Modern Cook Katherine Walker

Abstract Of the many ingredients required in the early modern kitchen, instinct was one of the more elusive but key elements in preparing food and medicine. Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News and Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts both feature unruly cooks who use their instincts in the kitchen. Even as they point emphatically to their bodies, these cooks also comment explicitly on how they make knowledge through their art. Turning first to Paracelsus’ alternative interpretations of embodied knowledge, this essay charts how debates about instinct feature in seventeenth-century printed recipe collections and in Jonson and Massinger’s plays. As this chapter shows, instinct was an important conceptual tool that intersected with the period’s natural philosophy. Keywords: instinct, cooking, drama, printed recipe books, Paracelsus, natural philosophy

On the early modern stage, cooks are fleshy and temperamental. Mimicking the sensory impressions of the kitchen—including the odours of sweat, fat, or frying—these seventeenth-century makers have something of a Falstaffian zest for the banquets they prepare for others. They point to the creativity inherent in the art of cookery and also imply that the cook’s body plays an important role in the processes of creating new, consumable fancies. Ben Jonson’s Lickfinger in The Staple of News (performed 1625) and Philip Massinger’s Furnace in A New Way to Pay Old Debts (performed c. 1625 or

Bassnett, M. and Hillary M. Nunn (eds.), In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463721646_ch03

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1626) repeatedly call attention to their bodies.1 Lickfinger, with his allusive name, points to the symbiotic relationship between the cook’s senses and the perfection of his craft. Likewise, Furnace is just as fiery as the materials with which he works. In contrast to our own post-Cartesian perspective of the physical self as distinct from the mind,2 the early moderns understood their bodies as embedded within an animate environment, shaped by the Galenic humours, and never self-contained.3 As this essay will show, the concept of bodily instinct, particularly the instinct of the cook, illustrates another aspect of early modern understandings of the body. In turning to instinct, the cooks discussed here are able to harness their bodily resources and felicitous skills in the kitchen to transmit their fancies to the dishes they create. What I describe in this essay is a type of physical exchange that is transacted through the cook’s instinctive body—which is evident in the fancy that appears in the foodstuffs they prepare—and manifests within the bodies of those the cooks serve. Using the familiar pathway of consumption, the early modern stage takes up the idea that the cook’s instinct and fancy have a significant impact on those who consume their creations. In the few cases in which representations of professional cooks tread the playing-boards in early modern England, they declare the importance of their bodies and, at the same time, their art, not unlike actors on the professional stage. They demand that audiences take seriously the science of cooking, and they do so through claiming unique, embodied methods for developing the most efficacious, and therefore most pleasing, foodstuffs for those they serve. Both Lickfinger and Furnace observe carefully the bodies of others as well, showing in their diagnoses of humoral conditions that their cookery depends upon a vast array of knowledge for modifying food to suit or balance individual complexions and behaviours. As I argue in this essay, the cooks in Jonson’s and Massinger’s plays echo a larger scientific concern in the period, namely, the role of instinct in observation and in making new knowledge. Lickfinger and Furnace work to establish the legitimacy of cookery even as they acknowledge that their practices require qualities beyond procedure. Those qualities, I show, include the exceptional fancies 1 Boehrer captures neatly Jonson’s obsession with cookery and the alimentary in The Fury of Men’s Gullets. 2 See in particular Damasio, Descartes’ Error. 3 The scholarship on bodies in the early modern period is vast. This essay relies on work on early modern humoralism alongside scholarship in the history of science. See Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine; Park, Secrets of Women; Traub, ed., Shakespeare and Embodiment; Paster, Humoring the Body; and Paster, Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson, Reading the Early Modern Passions.

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of the cook made visible in their inventions, which in turn reveals what we can understand as the instinct needed in the kitchen. In what follows, I turn first to Paracelsus’s concept of instinct in the creation of knowledge, alongside a discussion of the confluence of instinct and knowledge in recipe books, before examining Jonson’s The Staple of News and Lickfinger’s arguments regarding his art. I conclude with a reading of Furnace in Massinger’s A New Way that shows how the cook’s body features significantly in the act of cooking. While Furnace is perhaps less instinctual than Lickfinger, he relies upon his status in the household to assert his body’s role in making not only foodstuffs, but also new knowledge of how to temper and treat other bodies. If Lickfinger works to elevate the art of cookery to a science, then Furnace enacts the types of knowledge Lickfinger outlines. The outcome suggests that, while often unstated, the body of the cook is essential to an early modern understanding of the art of cookery: this body is instinctive and works to transmit the cook’s fancies to their material creations.

Instinct and Fancy The two terms, instinct and fancy, merit consideration and highlight the interlacing of corporeality and cookery on the early modern stage. Instinct precedes and therefore empowers the expression of the cook’s fancy. For the early moderns, instinct was a term that described a body’s intimations, the way a body speaks to oneself. Turning to neoclassical literary theory, for example, we find George Puttenham providing a diversity of sources for the poet’s inspiration, including ‘diuine instinct’, ‘excellencie of nature and complexion’, ‘great subtiltie of the spirits & wit’, or ‘much experience and observation of the world’. 4 The expanse of possible sources for poetic knowledge and instinct are striking because they leave open the opportunity that at any time one or more of these forces of craft are active within the body of the literary maker. On the early modern stage, as in many natural philosophical forms of inquiry in the period, the very openness of potential causes was not necessarily a shortcoming, but rather an occasion to think through how the body might be used as a type of dowsing rod in gauging the forces alive within the self. The same applies to the cooks on the early modern stage, and Lickfinger and Furnace both delight in how their bodies are active players in the 4 Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, C1r.

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performance of provision; these cooks are also keenly aware that bodily instinct is a form of making knowledge. For the early moderns, instinct was an immensely important component in contemporary knowledge-making, despite its malleable characteristics. Girolamo Ruscelli’s book of secrets, for example, locates the desire for new knowledge in instinct, in which humans are ‘by a certaine instinct of natural inclination […] desirous to know things not before knowen’.5 In the late seventeenth century, Israel Hiebner likewise avers that knowledge of the virtues of herbs derives from instinct, for even unlearned individuals are able to cull the most beneficial plants for healing ‘by Natural Instinct, notwithstanding they have read no Books’.6 Lickfinger and Furnace are uncannily similar to a figure in the Renaissance who avouched the value of experiential knowledge and decried contemporary reliance on textual authority. Emphasis on the body of the preparer is evident in the work of Theophrastus von Helheim, known as Paracelsus.7 Paracelsus gives forceful articulation to a growing disaffection with contemporary medicine and the transmission of knowledge, and elevates the role of experience, like that garnered from Furnace and Lickfinger’s years in the kitchen. The physician and alchemist Paracelsus insists on the experiential knowledge held in all social classes, stressing [A] Physitian ought not to rest only in that bare knowledge which their Schools teach, but to learn of old Women, Egyptians, and such-like persons; for they have greater experience in such things, than all Academians.8

Paracelsus advocates for turning to these unlikely figures for a truer type of understanding, one that would extend in England to many professional and artisan classes, including the cook. Disdaining elitism, Paracelsus attempts to raise the marginalized to the rank of active participants in new knowledge, which might extend to the cook’s instinct and fancy. In this same text, Paracelsus develops the conceit further, linking experiential knowledge to instinctual, processual knowing. I quote the passage at length because of how significant such a frame for grasping early modern cooks and their bodily knowledge is:

5 Ruscelli, The Secretes, A3v. 6 Hiebner, Mysterium Sigillorum, 49. 7 See Moran, Distilling Knowledge, 67–98. 8 Paracelsus, Of the Supreme Mysteries of Nature, 88.

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But if you further enquire, out of what Author or Writer I read of these virtues, or where I learned such experience; I answer you Sophisters and Contemners of the Gifts of God, that very Nature her self demonstrated before your eyes, doth far excel all the Authors and Writers of the world. I pray tell me which of your Authors or Writers taught the Bear, when his sight is dimmed by reason of the abundance and superfluity of his blood, to go to a stall of Bees, which by their stinging him, pierce his skin, and cause an effusion of the superfluous blood? […] Did you teach this knowledge to them? or do not they teach you? The same might I speak of infinite other Animals, that know naturally the Cure of their own Diseases. What! Have the Bruit-beasts taught the Medicinal Art? If you say, It’s a Natural instinct, and that Nature teacheth them, so say I too. If Nature hath infused so much reason into Bruit-beasts, how much more should men learn thereby, who are made according to the Image of God, the Creator of all things; and are indued with reason from God, to consider and contemplate such things?9

For Paracelsus, experience and intuition are forefront, even divine, and he gleans his ability to discover ‘virtues’ through ‘very Nature her self’ and the animal kingdom. For the early moderns, ‘virtue’ entailed the innate qualities of organic and inorganic materials—their ability to heal or effect change, for instance. Beasts, endowed with instinct but not reason, are able to access more intuitively and perceptively the inherent qualities of the materials they need to heal and thrive. If humans, possessed with reason, would only observe the many remedies and perceptual knowledge exhibited by all of nature, they could elevate their practices to those arts—as we will shortly see—that Furnace will praise in Massinger’s play. For Paracelsus, instinct is the initial route, the prompting and impetus, that then enables a more sensory experience. Both the cooks are followers of Paracelsus, even if they do not explicitly acknowledge their indebtedness to the alchemist. They figure the processes of preparing meals as involving experience and instinct, and they importantly embody the dizzying range of knowledge that Paracelsus attempted to capture in his advocacy for learning from ‘old Women, Egyptians, and such-like persons’. And yet, in feeling and imparting their instinctive knowledge, Lickfinger and Furnace, marginalized figures in their respective plots, do something on the stage that print can only approximate. That is, these figures onstage advance a type of felt knowledge that slows down the 9

Paracelsus, 98.

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narrative; they dwell on the body and its knowledge before a momentous event erupts. They dilate the process of instinct so that it can be staged, something impossible to do in the discursive context of vernacular science (and something that must be inferred from the printed play texts we have inherited). Instinct and the body’s powers of knowing enabled new knowledge, and this knowledge could prepare one to handle materia medica or the various ingredients in foodstuffs. Those responsible for preparing food were versed in, even if not explicitly cognizant of, the experimental processes of bodies as sites for testing and gauging the efficacy of various receipts. They had to, in very real and significant ways, understand their own selves and knowledge in order to create viands that would maintain the health and flourishing of the household members. Such responsibility should not be taken lightly. Furnace and Lickfinger both express pride in their roles as regulators of the very heartbeat of the households, and their humorous interjections on the status of their art point to how their bodies are very much a part of the ecology of health and knowledge within the play. As messy and inexact as instinct might be, the cooks are versed in a Paracelsian reevaluation of knowledge and the disparate sources from which it might arise.

Embodied Cookery Instinct was the initial prompting for new knowledge. In early modern recipe books, qualities like instinct and fancy are praised as necessary to the cook responsible for providing the table with foodstuffs or the household members with medicinal remedies.10 Hannah Woolley, for example, advocates that ‘they [cooks] ought also to have a very good Fancy: such an one, whether Man or Woman, deserves the title of a fit Cook’.11 For Woolley, to be ‘fit’ as a cook requires that one cultivate a felicitous creativity and maximize the intuitions that strike the cook as efficacious for the particular individuals consuming prepared foods. This ability is not the province of a particular gender. Moreover, Woolley and other early modern authors’ understanding of fancy is much more embodied than our modern definitions admit: 10 Many scholars have pointed out the overlap in medical and culinary receipts in the early modern period. In particular, see Leong, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge. 11 Woolley, The Queen-like Closet, 371. On moments of thinking and judgement in Woolley, see Lupton, ‘Thinking with Things’.

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fancy in the seventeenth century was part of the faculty of psychology and suggested an inclination for making.12 In Woolley’s recipe for ‘a very fine Bisket’, for example, the cook must use wit and body in a multistep process of preparing, making, and creating: Take half a Pound of searced Sugar, the Yolks of six Eggs, a little searced Spice and Seeds, and a little Ambergreece or Musk, your Eggs must be very hard, then put all these into a Mortar, and beat them to a Paste with a little Gum Dragon steeped in Rosewater all night, then mould it up with fine Sugar; and make it into pretty Fancies, and dry them in a warm Oven.13

The discerning hand of the cook must carefully searce, or sift, the sugar, separate out the yolks, and physically mash these ingredients together in a mortar. Finally, the fancy of the cook designs the shapes that are crafted with the cook’s assiduous hands that will, in turn, excite the fancies of others. Together, these acts point to the shared labour of body and mind, with the cook’s innate fancies determining the success of the biscuit. The body of the maker ultimately is responsible for shaping both the inner and outer qualities of the food. Enmeshed in that process is the cook’s own instinct. That act of making, as scholars such as Pamela Smith have shown, highlights the constitutive role of the body in producing new knowledge.14 Cooking, for Jonson and Massinger’s cooks, is a product of instinct and the acknowledgement of the role that corporeality plays in producing materials for consumption. On the early modern stage, those preparing food embody their art, and therefore elide distinctions between maker and prepared dish in order to intimate that the epistemology of the cook arises from—is enfolded with—the corporeal self. Ultimately, a cook’s instinct works to distinguish the artful preparation of food from the mere mechanical supply of the basic materials for sustenance.15 But to early modern thinkers, instinct must be cultivated, and that cultivation takes place within the laboratory of the kitchen for both Lickfinger and Furnace. The cook’s fancy plays a constituent role in determining the quality of the finished product, as M. Marnettè’s recipe for ‘The Fifteenth and last manner of stirring of Eggs’ allows: the cook may top off the eggs ‘with all kind of sauces you can imagine,

12 ‘fancy, n. and adj.’, OED Online. 13 Woolley, The Queen-like Closet, 150–51. 14 Smith, The Body of the Artisan, 8. 15 For a full discussion of knowledge and recipes, see Wall, Recipes for Thought.

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or do affect’.16 Their desires affect outcomes, for example, in Woolley’s the ‘Green Paste of Pippins’: ‘coddle them tender, then peel them, and put them into a fresh warm Water, and cover them close, till they are as green as you desire’.17 Here we witness instinct flirting provocatively with creative improvisation. Intervening in the period’s debates on the designations of what forms of inquiry constitute legitimate practice, Jonson’s and Massinger’s comedies provide a space for enfolding cookery into these discourses, with the important caveat that recipes are not simply replicable and require us to seriously consider the cultivated instinct brought to them by the maker.

The Staple of News, Knowledge, and Instinct Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News is a familiar prodigal son narrative, with Pennyboy Junior brought to repentance for his spendthrift generosity. At the centre of the play is the New Staple, a place for gathering and selling fake news, where a cast of figures (called Emissaries) flock to hear, relate, and reproduce the latest gossip. In competition with the avaricious Pennyboy Senior, his uncle, Pennyboy Junior seeks to win the hand of Lady Pecunia, while his father, presumed dead, is disguised as a beggar accompanying Junior. This odd satire on contemporary journalism exhibits a confluence of Jonsonian delight in the idiosyncrasies of London urbanity and the more traditional tale of a son reconciled with his father through the defeat of various greedy figures, including the lawyer Picklock.18 Among the many humorous figures who flock around the New Staple and Pennyboy Junior is the cook Lickfinger, who serves food to almost everyone in the play. Lickfinger’s long disquisitions on his artistry derive from Jonson’s satire of Inigo Jones: Lickfinger represents the ridiculous pretensions of someone who crafts with their hands.19 Having agreed beforehand to purchase the leftover foodstuffs of Pennyboy Senior, Lickf inger arrives late to their meeting, which occasions such insults as ‘unctuous rascal’ and ‘vessel of

16 Marnettè, The Perfect Cook, 312. 17 Woolley, The Queen-like Closet, 61. 18 The confluence I am citing here is also a source of consternation for critics; Shargel argues, however, that ‘[i]f The Staple is Jonson’s most contradictory play, it is also his most democratic, its ideas of genre, tradition, and the integrity of authorship as multifarious as the crowd’. See Shargel, ‘A Stewed Comedy’, 48. 19 The debate between the cook (Jones) and the poet (Jonson) is even more underscored in Jonson’s Neptune’s Triumph for the Return of Albion.

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kitchen stuff’ (2.2.68; 69).20 And yet Lickfinger is no silent object of abuse. Rather, the cook trenchantly observes the vices of Pennyboy Senior and is able to cleverly turn Pennyboy Senior’s complaints on their head to reflect on the miserliness of his interlocutor. The contrast between the pinched, miserly Pennyboy Senior and the generous corporeality of Lickfinger on the stage would have been even more evident to early modern audiences witnessing these bodies before them. In this invitation to judge between the two, Lickfinger’s actions and words invite us to see him as a percipient figure, one whose body is a central part not only of his characterization, but also his practice. The cook himself readily acknowledges and emphasizes his corporeality. Lickfinger figures himself as a kitchen implement, ingredient, and dish, thus running through the entire act of culinary creation in his fanciful, fast-moving image of labour. Having run onstage in response to Pennyboy Senior’s summons, Lickfinger complains, I have lost two stone Of suet i’the service posting hither. You might have followed me like a watering pot, And seen the knots I made along the street. My face dropped like the skimmer in a fritter pan, And my whole body is yet, to say the truth, A roasted pound of butter with grated bread in’t! (2.3.13–19)

Invoking a highly fleshly image of his body dropping pounds of sweat and fat as he hurries to his summons, Lickfinger demands that those onstage and in the audience acknowledge his corporeality. Lickfinger’s similes turn upon the relationship he has with the space and materials of his profession; he appears to relish the wit he possesses in providing analogies between his body and the kitchen. These analogies will continue throughout the play, but besides providing moments of humour, they also speak to Lickfinger’s need to be an emphatic presence onstage, to demand recognition of his body in the role it plays within the kitchen. Throughout the comedy, even though we never see Lickfinger in the kitchen, he never leaves his environment entirely behind. In linguistically carrying the kitchen with him, Lickfinger also expresses how his professional role enables him to enfold fancy and instinct into his practice. In our first introduction to the cook, he hints at his instinctive ability to ‘read’ others’ bodies and thereby to provide the most palliative 20 Jonson, The Staple of News, cited parenthetically throughout.

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meals for their constitutions. Thus Lickfinger establishes that he possesses better insight into his patron’s bodily needs than the ludic figure of Doctor Almanac in the play. In many ways, Lickfinger’s attention to his own body informs his close scrutiny of others’. As he avers, Pennyboy Senior requires ‘Nothing but a young hare in white broth. / I know his diet better than the doctor’ (2.4.33–34). Within this assertion is the joke that Pennyboy Senior really wishes to consume the young heir/hare Pennyboy Junior. The jest thus not only is a moment of Lickfinger’s claim for instinctive knowledge, but also displays his canny observation of the vices of those he serves. From these early intimations of Lickfinger’s instinct and observational abilities, audiences gather that the cook is both clever and an imposing bodily presence. He points to this corporeality not to detract from his wit, but rather to highlight the entwining of body and mind in his larger practice. His interests and boasts range among an impressive—and ridiculous—collection of topics, but at every step Lickfinger has the last word. If Jonson is slyly alluding to the pretensions of Inigo Jones in his representation of his cook, Lickfinger nonetheless escapes such simplistic correspondences. Instead, Lickfinger exceeds the bounds of his supposed roles by drawing on a wide array of methods for gaining and transmitting knowledge. As Lickfinger argues, he is particularly well situated because of his disposition and his penchant for fancies to classify such arts as poetry, architecture, and alchemy under the umbrella of the cook, his body, and his kitchen. Lickfinger asserts boldly the different natural philosophical discourses in which he is versed. Responding to Madrigal’s challenge on the origins of poetry—either from drinking or from food—Lickfinger upholds that the kitchen is the source of all useful knowledge: Seducèd poet, I do say to thee, A boiler, range, and dresser were the fountains Of all the knowledge in the universe, And they’re the kitchens, where the master cook – Thou dost not know the man, nor canst thou know him, Till thou hast served some years in that deep school That’s both the nurse and mother of the arts, And hear’st him read, interpret, and demonstrate! (4.2.11–18)21

Interestingly, Lickfinger claims that he and others of his art are unknowable except through sharing their experience specifically within the kitchen. 21 These lines appear verbatim in Jonson’s earlier Neptune’s Triumph, 48–55.

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They possess a type of understanding that can only be transmitted via observation, through a manual apprenticeship based not on texts, but rather on the physical labours of the trade. Following his encomium of the architectural and military skills the cook wields, he turns to astrology and alchemy: [The cook] knows The influence of the stars upon his meats, And all their seasons, tempers, qualities, And, so to fit his relishes and sauces, He has Nature in a pot ’bove all the chemists Or airy brethren of the Rosy Cross. He is an architect, an engineer, A soldier, a physician, a philosopher, A general mathematician. (29–37)

Lickfinger’s protest that his elevated knowledge derives from his craft, which he considers a science, relies on experience. One must, Lickfinger claims, have ‘served some years in that deep school’, presumably combining both manual labour and experimentation, before one obtains his or her special province of knowing (34). Importantly, Lickfinger’s expertise extends to many categories of knowledge—medicine, astrology, and mathematics, among others. Lickfinger thus broadens the category of viable empirical knowledge to include cookery, and thereby enters into conversation with Paracelsus’s elevation of different forms of inquiry in the period’s larger corpus of bodily knowledge. That knowledge, for Lickfinger, derives first from the kitchen itself, and it is grounded in the cook’s body. There are, for both Paracelsus and Lickfinger, abundant creative possibilities so long as one first acknowledges, and celebrates, how those possibilities for transformation and improvisation originate in the body of the maker, a body that harbours the qualities of instinct that enable the transmission of fancy. Others in the play echo Lickf inger’s encomium of his art, as Doctor Almanac and Madrigal, two members of the play’s so-called Society of Jeerers, report. When asked about Lickfinger, Doctor Almanac exclaims, Who? The glory o’the kitchen, that [i.e., Lickfinger] holds cookery A trade from Adam, quotes his broths and salads, And swears he’s [Adam is] not dead yet, but translated In some immortal crust, the paste of almonds? (3.3.15–19)

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In Doctor Almanac’s fantastic figuration, Lickfinger’s philosophy holds that the first man is continually ‘translated’ or immortalized in the crusts (or perhaps the coffin) that the cook devises. But in this comical reportage, the sea-captain Shunfield attributes even the philosopher’s stone to Lickfinger’s claims for cookery’s antiquity. As Shunfield adds, ‘He’ll draw the magisterium from a minced pie, / And prefer jellies to your juleps, doctor’ (3.3.26–27). Lickfinger, in the estimation of the jeerers, attributes the entire scope of human knowledge to an origin within the kitchen. Such a claim undercuts the pretensions of contemporary knowledge, particularly the ‘news’ that the Staple Office vends. The jeerers conclude that Lickfinger has no equal in his art, even if he ‘holds some paradoxes’, or is unorthodox in his elevation of the practice of cookery (3.3.41).

A New Way to Pay Old Debts and Performative Cookery The cooks who appear in early modern plays demand that audiences dwell on their knowledge and corporeality. Lickfinger’s presence calls for recognition of the many discourses into which cookery intervenes, since the cook is also ‘an architect, an engineer, / A soldier, a physician, a philosopher, / A general mathematician’ (4.2.35–37). And Lickfinger’s very name suggests humorously his intimate connection to the meals he makes, with his body coming into contact through the finger in the pot, testing and evaluating his meals before they arrive at the table. Furnace too has an occupational surname. In Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts, we see that this boast of art is even more intimately tied to Furnace’s frenetic and yet powerful theatrical presence on the stage through his roles as cook and intermediary. Furnace as a cook is intimately bound up in the narrative of using one’s talents to exhibit one’s inner value. The play revolves around the household of the widowed Lady Allworth, who is accosted by various suitors. Lady Allworth’s stepson, Tom Allworth, serves as a page to Lord Lovell. We learn that Tom and Frank Wellborn have both been subject to financial hardships because of the greedy Sir Giles Overreach. Overreach is also one of Lady Allworth’s suitors and, in a further ploy to obtain money and status, intends to marry his daughter Margaret to Lord Lovell. Together Lady Allworth, Lord Lovell, Tom Wellborn, and others help to foil Overreach’s plots, and the play concludes with the marriages between Lady Allworth and Lord Lovell and Tom and Margaret. Furnace becomes the intermediary in Wellborn’s elaborate plot to overturn Overreach and regain his former status. He is the one responsible for conveying the

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significance of Wellborn’s supposed elevation by providing the belly-cheer featured at Lady Allworth’s home, and helping Wellborn pose (facetiously) as the intended husband to Lady Allworth. Lady Allworth’s home is a busy one, with the outspoken Order, Amble, Watchall, and the cook Furnace managing the practical and social affairs of the household. The play opens with two other figures responsible for nourishing the body, the inn-keep Tapwell and his wife Froth, who evict the prodigal Wellborn from their tavern. And yet Wellborn makes the case that it is one’s ‘virtue’ over one’s external wealth that is the true marker of worth (1.3.187).22 This is the philosophy that all of the figures in the household will come to share. Furnace thus plays a central role in bringing about the comedic ending to the play; significantly he is able to do so through his ready movement among different spaces within and outside of the household. As an intermediary for others and as one in charge of the cheer offered at the Lady’s home, Furnace can traverse the divergent spaces of the community, and in doing so demands that we take seriously his instincts and his skills. When we first meet Furnace, he insists that he is angry at all times, regardless of whether he is serving a meal or not. As he avers to his fellow servants, ‘’Twit me with the authority of the kitchen! / At all hours, and all places, I’ll be angry’ (1.2.22–23). But Furnace’s real ire is directed towards the woman he serves, for Lady Allworth, in mourning for her husband, eats simple fare, which means Furnace cannot properly display his talents: I was entertained by her to please her palate, And, till she forswore eating, I performed it. Now, since our master, noble Allworth died, Though I crack my brains to find out tempting sauces, When I am three parts roasted, And the fourth part parboiled, to prepare her viands, She keeps her chamber, dines with a panada, Or water-gruel, my sweat never thought on. (1.2.41–48)

Sounding much like Lickfinger in his own transformation into the materials and processes of the kitchen, Furnace puts his talents, his sciences, and his body in the service of Lady Allworth’s suitors, for she commands him to prepare an ample table even though she herself does not partake of his 22 All references, cited parenthetically throughout, to A New Way are from The Selected Plays of Philip Massinger.

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elaborate confections. His body, taxed in ‘perform[ing]’ his art, is misdirected towards those individuals that he does not love or serve. Instead, his main complaint is that his bodily labours and knowledge are ignored, ‘my sweat never thought on’ (1.2.60). He complains that despite the fact that his ‘art is seen in the dining-room’, it is only by those like Justice Greedy, who do not admire, but merely enjoy, quickly devouring his prepared viands (1.2.62). In this sense, Greedy undervalues the qualities of instinct and fancy evidenced in Furnace’s creation and delivery of his foodstuffs. Unlike Greedy and the others who rush to consume Furnace’s food, however, Furnace himself demands that they slow down and acknowledge his art. Like Lickfinger, he delivers long panegyrics on his art that pause the action in the household and draw attention to his embodied labour. Through a performance of his instinctive body, Furnace is careful to outline the role his body plays in creating fancies to be shared as new knowledge. We witness this dilated exploration of the cook’s instincts when Furnace describes a cordial for Tom Allworth. Furnace reveals the alchemical element of his concoctions. His lines seem to recall a form of Paracelsian healing, but also hint at the physical shortcomings that he reads in others—he knows, that is, how to diagnose Tom Allworth’s hunger and personalize the meal accordingly. He offers the young Allworth a cordial that is dependent upon his knowledge of various ingredients and their distinct qualities: Here, drink it off; the ingredients are cordial, And this the true elixir; it hath boiled Since midnight for you. ’Tis the quintessence Of five cocks of the game, ten dozen of sparrows, Knuckles of veal, potato-roots and marrow, Coral and ambergris: were you two years older, And I had a wife, or gamesome mistress, I durst trust you with neither. (2.2.42–49)

Furnace’s careful explication of the many steps and ingredients required for his cordial is nonetheless dizzying. We are asked to imagine Furnace up late at night, contriving this recipe of excess to produce the cordial that will enliven his young master Allworth. Furnace is swept up in his creations and creativity, and we are asked to imagine Furnace offstage expending his physical and mental resources in acts of careful experimentation within his kitchen. In this space, Furnace’s cookery is his sole physical outlet, the site for his exercise of body, mind, and instinct.

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Echoing Lickfinger’s assertion that cookery is the ‘nurse and mother’ of all the sciences, Furnace continually demands that we recognize his unique knowledge, those skills that are exhibited to the audience through his body rather than materialized in banquet form on the stage itself since no meal is staged. Furnace moves frenetically among kitchen and entryway, always a part of the crowd at Lady Allworth’s threshold, attempting to remind everyone that the attraction to Lady Allworth’s home resides not simply or even primarily in her status as a desirable widow, but rather in the goods and arts that he creates for her board. In a ploy to alter Overreach’s opinion on Wellborn’s prospects, Wellborn and Lady Allworth collude to pose as if they were about to be married. Throughout this elaborate ruse, Wellborn presides over the table at Lady Allworth’s home, tricking Overreach’s lackey Marrall into believing that Wellborn’s fortunes have changed because of the treatment he receives from Lady Allworth. At this point Furnace bursts in, complaining that they dally too long in pleasantries: ‘Will you still be babbling / Till your meat freeze on the table? the old trick still: / My art ne’er thought on!’ (2.2.219–21). Assertively, Furnace reminds them and us of this art, his careful skill and bodily knowing expressed through the luxuries and staples that he prepares with his own hands. Although Furnace is sometimes excessive in his boasts, his claim to knowledge is borne out by the fact that so many individuals flock to Lady Allworth’s not merely to gain access to the widow, but to taste his culinary creations. Although Greedy gobbles down his creations without reflection, others praise Furnace’s skills in the kitchen. To Wellborn and Marrall, for example, Furnace asks ‘What kind of sauces best affect your palate / That I may use my utmost skill to please it’ (2.2.47–48). This skill, beyond the social and economic gains of the Allworth home, are the true fancies of the play. We have to imaginatively supply the actual meals Furnace provides to the household. But we can glean that Furnace is willing both to improvise and use his knowledge of the current seasons and his countryside to craft suitable dishes for the many bodies encroaching upon Lady Allworth’s table. And yet for all his art, Furnace’s abilities transcend those merely aesthetic ornaments that adorn Sir Giles Overreach’s table. As Overreach demands in preparation for a meal to impress Lord Lovell, ‘let my dressers crack with the weight / Of curious viands’ (3.2.1–2). Overreach’s mistake is in allowing the gluttonous but naïve Justice Greedy to oversee his kitchen. Unlike Furnace’s ideal of cookery, in which he evokes a higher science of consumption and fancy, Greedy clearly thinks only of the momentary pleasure of eating. As he boasts,

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[I’ll] give the best directions. Now am I, In mine own conceit, a monarch; at the least, Arch-president of the boiled, the roast, the baked; For which I will eat often, and give thanks When my belly’s braced up like a drum and that’s pure justice. (3.2.33–37)

Such interventions into the site of artisanal crafting are disruptive, and we learn, though do not witness, that Overreach’s unnamed cook is infuriated by the irruption of one uninitiated into his art within the kitchen. Greedy returns from offstage to complain The cook, sir, is self-willed, and will not learn From my experience: there’s a fawn brought in, sir, And, for my life, I cannot make him roast it With a Norfolk dumpling in the belly of it; And, sir, we wise men know, without the dumpling ’Tis not worth three-pence. (3.2.103–08)

Greedy’s bravado in highlighting his ‘experience’ and his status as one of the ‘wise men’ is clearly satirical. The unnamed cook and Furnace’s own knowledge of the kitchen undercuts Greedy’s facetious claims to knowledge. To an unusual degree, Massinger’s play dwells on the knowledge that figures like Greedy will never obtain, however versed they are in the language of the kitchen. Instead, they lack the innate instinct and training to understand the proper ordering and presentation of food, and, by extension, to grasp the skills requisite to participate productively in the making of new knowledge within the household. Greedy, dismayed that Overreach’s cook has ‘found / A new device for sauce’ (3.2.152–53), cannot comprehend that he is not part of the strictly enforced bounds of knowledge and skill prescribed by the several cooks in the play. Ultimately the marriage plot excises Furnace from the play, just as the instincts inherent in his body and his meals are forgotten in favour of the complications of undoing Overreach. Nonetheless, Furnace’s future presence is promised in the forthcoming marriage celebrations of young Allworth and Overreach’s daughter Margaret, for which he will undoubtedly prepare the wedding feast. We might imagine that Furnace will provide similar cordials to those he offered Allworth at the beginning of the play. Just as in early modern recipe collections the body of the cook is rarely visible but hinted at through generic and rhetorical cues, so too is Furnace’s body—its labours, its virtues, and its knowledge—removed from our

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direct access by the end of the narrative. Nonetheless, as I have argued, we have to give Furnace credit for his insight. However boisterous and ludic Furnace might be, his body possesses the instinctive knowledge to comment trenchantly on the hollowness of mere consumption. Instead, Furnace applies a theory of instinct to his cookery, and in doing so celebrates the role of the body in making and sharing not only virtues and fancies, but also new knowledge.

Conclusion In seeking to uncover the mysterious body of the early modern cook, I have extrapolated from the notions of qualities or inclinations in the works of Paracelsus. The enigmatic physician, while not a cook himself, delineated a sensibility that reassessed experiential knowledge and valued the inner workings of the body and its knowledge. Such knowledge is transmitted to the stage in the figure of Jonson’s Lickfinger and Massinger’s Furnace, who are remarkable for the degree to which they assert their bodily presence and knowledge onstage. They both point to the skills that they possess, hinting that their knowledge is not simply mechanical or processual. Rather, this form of understanding involves something beyond following a recipe, and entails a careful look at how one’s instincts serve one well when serving others.

Works Cited Boehrer, Bruce. The Fury of Men’s Gullets: Ben Jonson and the Digestive Canal. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1994. ‘fancy, n. and adj.’. OED Online. March 2021. Oxford University Press. Hiebner, Israel. Mysterium Sigillorum, Herbarum & Lapidum Containing a Compleat Cure of all Sicknesses and Diseases of Mind and Body. London, 1698. Jonson, Ben. Neptune’s Triumph for the Return of Albion. Edited by Martin Butler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Jonson, Ben. The Staple of News. Edited by Joseph Lowenstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Leong, Elaine. Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

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Lupton, Julia Reinhard. ‘Thinking with Things: Hannah Woolley to Hannah Arendt’. postmedieval 3, no. 1 (2012): 63–79. Marnettè, Mounsieur. The Perfect Cook. London, 1656. Massinger, Philip. A New Way to Pay Old Debts. In The Selected Plays of Philip Massinger: The Duke of Milan, The Roman Actor, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, the City Madam, edited by Colin Gibson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. 183–280. Moran, Bruce T. Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Paracelsus. Of the Supreme Mysteries of Nature. London, 1655. Park, Katharine. Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation and the Origins of Human Dissection. New York: Zone Books, 2010. Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Paster, Gail Kern, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds. Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. London, 1589. Ruscelli, Girolamo. The Secretes of the Reuerende Maister Alexis of Piemount. London, 1558. Shargel, Raphael. ‘A Stewed Comedy: Chaos and Authority in The Staple of News’. Ben Jonson Journal 12, no. 1 (2005): 45–72. Siraisi, Nancy E. Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Smith, Pamela. The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Traub, Valerie, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Wall, Wendy. Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Woolley, Hannah, The Queen-like Closet; or, Rich Cabinet. London, 1670.

About the Author Katherine Walker is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Her current book project, Instinct, Knowledge and Science in Early Modern Culture, situates embodied ways of knowing in sixteenthand seventeenth-century culture. Her work appears in Studies in Philology, Preternature, and English Literary History.

Section 2 Bread, Cake, and Carp

4. Early Modern Leaven in Bread, Bodies, and Spirit Margaret Simon1

Abstract This essay investigates how different leavening agents were used in early modern English devotional, culinary, and medicinal contexts. Baking bread leavened through various means in the modern kitchen offers insight into the historical processes that made leaven and its physical effects so telling for medical practitioners, home cooks, and devotional writers of the time. In discovering a complex and contradictory history of leaven in early modern life, this essay argues that the baker and believer must rely on their own physical and faithful experiences to employ the right leaven the right way for bread or belief. The domestic practice of using leaven becomes a method of spiritual knowing which early modern practitioners could express across their culture’s most central spaces. Keywords: bread, John Donne, George Herbert, leaven, yeast, culinary history

This is the skill, and doubtlesse the Holy Scripture intends thus much, when it condescends to the naming of a plough, a hatchet, a bushell, leaven, boyes piping and dancing; shewing that things of ordinary use are not only to serve in the way of drudgery, but to be washed, and cleansed, and serve for lights even of Heavenly Truths.2

1 I would like to thank Robert Dunn and Erin McKenney of North Carolina State University’s Applied Ecology programme for their review of this article and their assistance in articulating the scientific details of sourdough and yeast. Any remaining errors are my own. I would also like to thank Aminah Al-Attas Bradford for her review of this article and for assisting me in articulating the relationship between the material, even microbial, presence of bread in the home and in Christian texts. 2 Herbert, A Priest to the Temple, Or, The Country Parson, 87.

Bassnett, M. and Hillary M. Nunn (eds.), In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463721646_ch04

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In this section of The Country Parson, George Herbert advises parsons to help parishioners access complex Christian concepts by illustrating the ‘thing by something else, which he knows, making what hee knows to serve him in that which he knows not’.3 Following these connections between elements of daily life and their abstracted cultural significance is a way of indexing religious terminology and metaphor to pragmatic, embodied human experiences and concerns. While Herbert’s end goal is to reinforce ‘Heavenly Truths’, what he provides is a comprehensive and interdependent list of early modern skills: sowing, building, reaping, cooking, and celebrating. Even in this brief passage, Herbert connects the practical, physical acts of daily survival with the practice and acquisition of abstract spiritual knowledge. While ‘leaven’ fits neatly into Herbert’s agricultural object narrative, where the process of attaining physical sustenance is paralleled with gaining spiritual food, leaven’s uses and symbolism push beyond the kitchen to medical knowledge, spiritual understanding, and questions of English identity. Given how fundamental bread is to English culture, as food staple, medicinal ingredient, religious symbol, and class marker, it is not surprising that the language of bread-making permeates English writing, both in recording its material practices and as an item of ‘ordinary use’ ripe for employment in metaphor. This essay explores the realms of knowledge to which the properties and practice of making and using leaven contribute: manuscript recipe collections, printed medical texts, the kitchen, the sickbed, devotional poetry, sermons, and the Bible. While leaven might not easily answer any one theological question, its qualities and diversity, its ability to act paradoxically, both in fomenting growth and purging wounds, evidencing sin and manifesting faith, argues for domestic practice as a method of spiritual knowing which early modern practitioners could express across their culture’s most central spaces—church and home.

Making Bread Rise in Early Modern England Bread history in England is complex, and baking traditions, bread types, and leavening practices do not sort easily by guild, social status, or time period.4 Even the exact proportion of bread made and baked at home in the 3 Herbert, 79. 4 Whiter wheat breads were long associated with more wealthy households, and scholars delimited white bread baking to certain guilds. More recent research suggests that both the white and tourte guilds baked many different kinds of breads. Purkiss, ‘Crammed with Distressful

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sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, versus bread baked by a baker’s guild, is not entirely clear.5 Gervase Markham advises the housewife to ‘look into her Bakehouse, and to the baking of all sorts of bread, either for Masters, Servants, or Hinds, and to ordering and compounding of the meale for each several use’, unequivocally suggesting home baking.6 But Markham’s text, as Diane Purkiss has discussed, is instructing rather than describing and he leaves ‘out almost everything we would like to know’.7 Enclosure and other challenges made home baking difficult during the early part of the seventeenth century, particularly for poorer families. Markham’s instructions may have aimed more at an idealized household than at the reality of English foodways.8 Views of who baked bread and where during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are mixed. Purkiss suggests a move away from female-dominated home baking to male-dominated commercial production; home baking then resumes for unknown reasons in the mid-seventeenth century.9 And male-run bread guilds and the governing assize of bread were at work in England since the thirteenth century. On the other hand, Peter Brears emphasizes the continuity of home baking in a few forms: the lady of the house, if wealthy enough, oversaw a team of workers who managed the grain refining, storage, and bread baking. In most ‘gentry, yeoman, and peasant homes bread-making remained a decidedly female occupation’.10 The uncertainties around bread production in this period extend to the terminology for leavening agents. In general, the ‘leaven’ used to raise bread in commercial or home baking frequently denotes a sourdough process, but it could also just be used to refer to the bread’s raising agent, whether Bread’, 20. Likewise, the terminology for bread types could overlap, as Sarah Peters Kernan notes in suggesting that paindemain and simnel breads were likely the same thing. ‘From the Bakehouse to the Courthouse’, 150. 5 Information on bread baking in England in the fourteenth and f ifteenth centuries has been more thoroughly researched. For example, we know that in Oxford and Southampton women made up 15 percent and 4 percent of professional bakers respectively. Kernan, ‘From the Bakehouse to the Courthouse’, 145. Amy L. Tigner’s ‘Cake: An Early Modern Chronicle’ in this volume brings attention to some of the regulations that might govern the seasonal production of bread products. 6 Markham, Countrey Contentments, 230. 7 Purkiss, ‘Crammed with Distressful Bread’, 21. 8 During this period, ‘the enclosure of forests and wood commons made it impossible for poor families to collect the twigs needed to fire a bread oven’. Southern farmers stopped providing food to their workers, meaning they had to ‘rely on the forces of commerce for their sustenance’, Purkiss, 22. 9 Purkiss, 22. 10 Brears, Cooking and Dining, 120.

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a sourdough starter, made from water and grain, or a barm, which is the froth that forms on the top of beer which was used to raise bread.11 While we can make generalizations that, for example, a sourdough leaven was more common in French baking, while the English generally used yeasted bacteria derived from brewing (barm) to raise their doughs, some English breads, like at least one version of cheat bread, were raised in the continental style.12 That English bakers ‘favoured yeast over sourdough leavening systems’ suggests a preference not just for a process but also for a milder, less-sour bread.13 Noting the national preference, John Parkinson reports that ‘the Yeast of Ale serveth our white Bakers of London in stead of Leaven to cause their bread to rise as Leven doth which else would be sad and heavie unfit to bee eaten’.14 This quotation also raises a dilemma for anyone researching early modern leaven: at times, as here, ‘leaven’ is specifically a sourdough process, while in some cases barm, which also raises bread, is lumped into the category of ‘leaven’. While the type of flour, raising agent, and baking determined categories of bread, one universal requirement for good bread was, as the quotation above suggests, a rise proper to its type. While the focus on leavening adequate to the bread type is clear, much of the description is not. Thomas Cogan, one of the period’s health authorities, is particularly confusing on the subject of raised breads. He writes that ‘all kinde of bread made without leauen is unwholsome’. He then goes on to describe manchet bread in positive terms, though ‘having no leaven’. It is ‘made of fine flowre of Wheat’ and ‘no bread is lighter than manchet’.15 This could mean that it is raised in some way that doesn’t fit into Cogan’s definition of leaven or it may refer to the lighter colour of the loaf made of sifted wheat. He then goes on to suggest that ‘bread much leavened is heavie of digestion’.16 Here he could mean bread that is over-risen, then falls again, becoming dense. Andrew Boorde, a physician, similarly contends that Breade made of fyne flower without leuyn is slowe of dygestyon, but it doth nourysshe moche yf it be truely ordered and well baken, whan the 11 ‘barm, n.1’, OED Online. 12 Brears, Cooking and Dining, 128–29. Tigner’s essay in this volume includes a recipe that demonstrates the use of barm in other baked goods, like cakes, which had to be yeasted or raised by eggs in an era prior to chemical leavening. 13 Rubel, Bread: A Global History, 96. 14 Parkinson, Theatrum Botanicum, 1134. 15 Cogan, Haven of Helth, 26. 16 Cogan, 26.

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breade is leuened it is soone dygested as some olde Aucthours sayth, but these dayes is proued the contrary by ye stomacke of men, for leuyn is heuy and ponderous.17

At the same time, he says ‘Soden bread’ like ‘symnels […] is not laudable’.18 ‘Soden’ here likely refers to a wetter batter. While simnel cakes are light, as with fruit cakes, they are still full of fruit and sack.19 Both moisture and the time of leavening are elements of judgment for raised breads. While these varying reports on the digestibility and desirability of leaven are confusing, the takeaway is that leavening has experiential strictures and requires careful practice—too much or too little can be unwholesome, resulting in excessive density or over-rising. Thomas Elyot, a diplomat and amateur medical authority, writing before Cogan, suggests as much. While he agrees that unleavened bread ‘nourisheth much’ while leavened bread ‘digesteth sooner’, he also advocates a balance in bread. Bread ‘sufficiently leauened, well moulded, and moderatly baked, is the most holesome to euery age’.20

Experiments in the Kitchen What were the material conditions and actions necessary to achieving a well-raised, well-formed, and well-baked loaf? To consider this as not just a historical question, but as a continuing practical challenge, I stepped into my own kitchen. One question I’d been pondering in starting this essay was the extent to which notions of proper bread accorded with more specifically English baking practices.21 Was bread leavened with the more common English barm substantively different than that raised by the more continental sourdough process? How might their flavours differ and would this be relevant to the use of leaven in medicinal contexts? While attempting to recreate early modern recipes in a contemporary kitchen with modern ingredients is more adaptation than close translation, I 17 Boorde, A Dyetary of Helth, F3v. 18 Boorde, F4v. 19 Nicosia, ‘To Make a Simnel’, discusses the simnel cake as a ‘light fruit cake’ in her introduction to a modernized recipe from Penn MS 785. 20 Elyot, The Castell of Health, 25. 21 Julie A. Fisher’s ‘Teâgun kuttiemaûnch: What Food Shall I Prepare for You?’ in this volume notes the English cultural preference for wheat and how colonial settlers had to learn to incorporate maize as they experimented with grain cultivation.

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was able to learn quite a few things about the process and results of different forms of leavening relevant to leaven’s representation in various areas of early modern practical knowledge. I am lucky enough to work on a campus that has a Brewery Science programme. I could, like the modern equivalent of an early modern housewife, walk from my office in the English Department at North Carolina State University to the NC State Brewing Lab, part of our Food, Bioprocessing, and Nutrition Sciences department, and be sent away with a large, bubbling jar of brewing yeast, a form of barm.22 While an early modern brewer’s barm used by bakers would have contained multiple strains of yeast and bacteria, the isolated commercial species of yeast that causes dough to rise today is the same—S. cerevisiae.23 The beer ferment, or barm, for this recipe was re-activated yeast (S. cerevisiae – Nottingham strain), which was harvested from a batch of Red Ale that was made from an all barley-malt recipe. The mix was very thin, brown, and foamy. The liquid yeast and barley-malt mixture was collected in a mason jar and after my walk across campus the released carbon dioxide had bent the interior lid of the jar! The basic thing I gained here, aside from a near-explosive device, was a raising agent that was very active and had some of the flavours of the malt and barley in which it developed. In both contemporary brewing and commercial baking, S. cerevisiae is the exclusive yeast used (with varying strains) which allows for consistent fermentation and flavour. This isolation is not possible in the less controlled environment of a wild sourdough, where multiple types of yeast might alight on the starter from the air, along with various bacteria, offering a range of flavours. While sourdough flavours are enhanced by this variety, recipes that prevent beer from souring suggest that barm also could take on additional, in some cases, detrimental bacteria.24 I used Gervase Markham’s proportions for bread, though I did not follow his technique for kneading with the feet: opening the flower hollow in the midst, put into it of the best Ale-barme the quantity of three pints to a bushell of meale, with som salt to season it with: then put in your liquor reasonable warme and kneade it very well together with both 22 I especially thank Dr. John D. Shepherd for allowing me to take some of his brewer’s yeast and for answering quite a few scientifically naive emails on the subject. 23 Brewers and bakers can vary the strain, but it is S. cerevisiae that causes bread to rise and beer to ferment without spoilage. In the case of sourdoughs, while S. cerevisiae is generally present, the yeast S. exiguus is one that likes the acidic environment, so S. exiguus may play a more active role in raising these doughs. Reinhardt, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, 66. 24 See, for example, ‘To Keepe Beere from Sowreing’, Medical Miscellany, c. 1634, 249r.

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your hands and through the brake, or for want thereof, fold it in a cloth, and with your feete tread it a good space together, then letting it lie an howre or thereabouts to swell take it foorth and mold it into manchets, round, and flat, scotch about the wast to giue it leaue to rise, and prick it with your knife in the top, and so put it into the Ouen, and bake it with a gentle heate.25

Adjusted for one loaf, I added a mere 2¼ teaspoons brewer’s dregs to three cups of grain and about 1½ cups of water. Given scholarly suspicion about the practicality and veracity of Markham’s text, I was skeptical that this ratio would work. My first dough was all wheat, made from unbleached strong, or bread, flour, which has a higher protein content and is a somewhat close, though not perfect, equivalent to early modern flours (which probably still had more bran than our well-sifted white flours). I was expecting a very slow rise, if it rose at all, based on the small amount of yeast. For comparison, if I make a sourdough with my own wild yeast starter, I use about a cup of starter to the same proportion of flour; most regular bread recipes take one to three teaspoons of dried yeast, which is more concentrated. The bread indeed took a very long time to rise, contrary to Markham’s account. This could be, again, that his recipe is not based on baking experience, or it is possible that the liquid or air temperature during the mixing and raising process were lower, slowing the rise. The first rise took about 12–15 hours on a rather cool day, a length of time that offers some context for leaven’s biblical symbolism discussed below. The second rise was shorter—two to three hours. I went about my bread baking in the way I usually do, and in the way I imagine many early modern women did—while working, supervising children, and managing a few other household duties. My goal was not to be extremely scientific, but to see how the process and pace of breadmaking with barm might shape the ideas of raising agents we see circulating in literary, culinary, and medical contexts. It was significant to me that the rise with brewer’s yeast was just as slow as a sourdough rise; for comparison, dough raised with modern dry yeast takes about one-and-a-half to two hours. Often, modern bakers will make a sponge or pre-ferment using a small amount of commercial yeast, water, and flour to develop a sour flavour and a slow-rising agent that is somewhere between a sourdough and dough raised with commercial dried yeast. The resulting 25 Markham, Countrey Contentments, 231, adds to the confusion on manchet’s rising process, which Cogan implies is via a sourdough process in Haven of Helth, 25. Markham here seems to distinguish manchet by its shape, which is one definition. See ‘manchet, n.’, OED Online.

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bread is more flavourful than an immediately yeast-raised dough but not as strong as a sourdough.26 The brewery-yeast-raised bread rose well, with large holes, and was somewhat less moist than a traditional sourdough, in addition to lacking any fermented flavour. It was striking to me that, despite this slow rise, the resulting bread from brewer’s yeast was not particularly flavourful nor was it noticeably sour. It was even milder than the breads I’ve made with pre-ferments. This is due to a lack of lactic acid bacteria and the single strain of yeast. When I replicated the process with another traditional English mix—half strong flour, half rye flour—I expected a slower rise due to rye’s heaviness. Instead, the rise was similar to the first batch but the resulting bread was somewhat, though not remarkably, denser, likely because rye does not develop gluten well. It also had a slightly more sour flavor and was noticeably more moist. Sourdough starters, whose fermentation process includes not just yeast but many other bacteria, produce a lot of water and alcohol and the breads they yield are, in my experience, more moist than a standard yeast-raised loaf.27 In this experiment, the dough raised and baked from the barm (imitating the early moderns, I didn’t take a temperature, but the colour was good and the crumb was set), was less moist than a similarly baked sourdough loaf, and considerably less moist than the loaf baked with rye and brewer’s barm, which was actually somewhat sticky. Rye’s stickiness, sourdough’s moisture and acidity, and barm-raised dough’s mildness and relative dryness might speak to why each ingredient had the supposed efficacy it did.

Medicinal Leaven Given the focus of humoral medicine on balancing the humours via purgation and ingestion, it is not surprising that the line between food and medicine in this period is particularly blurry. Elyot and Cogan both list foods useful for bringing the body into humoral balance and manuscript recipe books are replete with remedies made from common foods, bread and leaven among them. In early modern curatives and culinary recipes, it is not always possible to distinguish leaven in recipes as sourdough or as the leavening agent in beer then mixed with flour, but sourness or ‘sharpness’ is often a feature

26 The yeast strain could account for some of this difference, in addition to the alcohols and bacteria that develop in a sourdough starter. 27 McGee, On Food and Cooking, 538.

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of medicinal leaven, suggesting a leaven of sourdough. Leaven’s moistness is another feature frequently suggested as efficacious in medicinal recipes. If moistness and sourness affect the perceived drawing properties of medicinal leaven, this would be increased in the more flavourful and tackier rye. This may be why the herbalist John Gerard prescribed wheat leaven for drawing out ‘swellings, bunches, tumors, and felons, being mixed with salt’ but goes on to suggest that ‘Bread, or the leaven of Rie, as the Belgian Physicians affirme vpon their practise, doth more forcibly digest, draw, ripen, and break all Apostumes, Botches, and Byles, than the leuen of wheat’.28 In both cases, Gerard seems to be speaking of leaven as a sourdough starter, not just a dough raised from brewer’s yeast, which would make sense given the credit he gives to physicians from the continent. The English household seems equally invested in continental and English modes of leaven and bread production, depending on availability and the particular application. As the above examples suggest, leaven is associated with the power to draw or purge. Unsurprisingly, this belief derives from ancient medical authorities: Galen saith, Wheate is in the first degree of heate, but neither drieth nor moisteneth evidently, yet Pliny saith it drieth. To eate the cornes of greene Wheate, saith Dioscorides, is hurtfull to the stomacke and breedeth wormes: a plaister made of leavened bread doth more digest, than that which is made of the Wheate it selfe, by reason of the leaven and salt therein, for leaven hath a power to draw and digest that which is farre off.29

Mrs. Corlyon’s seventeenth-century recipe collection contains a recipe for a topical purgative such as this, to treat migraine or to ‘stay the humors from falling into the eyes’. Shredded daisy roots and large earthworms are mashed together with an apple-sized ball of ‘sharp leaven’.30 This is part of a multi-stage treatment, the first of which involves the leaven, and which is made into a sort of plaster to be laid over the forehead. The distinction of ‘sharp leaven’, or leaven that has less water and is thus more sour and 28 Gerard, The Herball, 67–68. 29 Parkinson, Theatrum Botanicum, 1122–23. 30 Mrs. Corlyon, A booke of such medicines, 2. Both the Wellcome Collection and the Folger Shakespeare Library have manuscript copies of recipe books associated with Mrs. Corlyon. This article references the Folger copy, V.a.388.

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astringent, suggests a belief that pungency is related to efficacy. Curatives involving leaven are prevalent in both manuscript and print sources. Using variant spellings, I got 35 hits for ‘leaven’ in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s LUNA database, which includes transcriptions of a fraction of its manuscript receipt books. All recipes that reference leaven in particular are designed to assist with some sort of drawing or drying. Mrs. Corlyon includes five recipes involving leaven. The breadth of her recipes is indicative of other uses for leaven. In many cases, ‘leaven’ appears in Corlyon’s text when the recipe wants a sour bread, a ‘sharpe leaven’ or ‘ripe levenned bread that is sharpe of the leaven’ or ‘strong of the leaven’.31 In some cases, sourdough leaven itself, unbaked, is an ingredient for topical application, as for the migraine above. Thomas Sheppey’s collection claims that leaven of rye applied to the skin ‘ripens impostumes’. It also breaks ‘boyls and other swellings’ and ‘draws out thorns and splinters’ and the ‘Leaven of wheat meal drawes out slivers, splints, & / thorns, espeically in the soles of the feet’.32 And ‘a peese of wheate leauen’ is part of a recipe for ‘a pinn & webb in the eye’.33 Rebeckah Winche’s recipe for ‘Elder Berry Water’, advised for colic, calls for ‘as much leaven as the bignes of a penny loaf’.34 In many cases, leavened bread is specified, as in a recipe from the anonymous Folger V.a.562 where ‘leaven bread of wheate’ is an ingredient for a poultice for a bruise in the eye.35 In a slight shift from purging to halting purgation, Folger V.b.400 prescribes ‘a pound of white leaven’ as part of a paste to ‘comfort the stomack and stay the Bloody Flux’. And ‘soure leaven’ is called for in a recipe from the same collection ‘To stay any casting’.36 The perceived drawing and suppressing properties of leaven likely come from its sourness and, in the case calling for leavened bread, its ability to raise or change flour; any English allegiance to the milder barm-raised doughs is foregone for the efficacy of a sour leaven. Along with a force like heat, leaven would have been one of few visually transformative culinary and medicinal substances common to the early modern home, making it a potent thing ‘of ordinary use’ in both practical and figurative contexts.37

31 Mrs. Corlyon, 21, 28. 32 Sheppey, A Book of Choice Receipts, 152–53, 157. 33 Receipt Book, c. 1700, 72–73. 34 Winche, Receipt Book of Rebeckah Winche, 37. 35 Cookery and Medicinal Recipes, 69. 36 Receipt Book, c. 1690, 51, 234. 37 Herbert, A Priest to the Temple, Or, The Country Parson, 87.

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Devotional Leaven For all breads made in this period, purity, and the ability to ascertain purity, were essential: ‘Faulty bread was a social and ideological as well as a pragmatic threat; bread was so laden with social and supernatural significance that its deformation was menacing’.38 Given the strong associations of food, medicine, and moral probity in this period, it is not surprising that proper bread, and therefore proper leaven, was crucial to both physical and spiritual well-being. The most profound link between early modern English culture and the spiritual significance of leaven comes through the Bible. The leaven metaphors in the Bible, and calls for unleavened bread, likely assume a sourdough process. Thus the leaven is indistinguishable from the bread dough itself and may also be generational, if a lump of dough is passed from one bake to the next. Taken together, the devotional representations of leaven, like its use in early modern culture, are diverse and in some cases contradictory. Leaven is not a stable material, performing differently depending on the grains from which it is made or to which it is added, the temperature at which it is stored and used, the yeasts and bacteria that populate it, the time it is left to develop, and even the systems and spaces of knowledge that give its use context. In the kitchen, its gases raise bread.39 In the sickroom, its alcohols draw corruption. Leaven’s power to corrupt or create functions as a potent metaphorical resource in the biblical text, claiming a power that transfers into domestic culinary and medicinal realms, while the efficacy of a sour leaven might also reinforce its religious power, whether scriptural or liturgical. The religious and domestic uses of leaven are reciprocal. In the Old Testament, eating unleavened bread speaks to the plight of the Israelites, who had no time to let their bread rise, and is practiced by Jews during Passover and certain Christians during Communion. So begins a long association of unleavened bread with holiness alongside occasional calls for leavened bread as sacrif ice. 40 In the New Testament, Matthew 38 Purkiss, ‘Crammed with Distressful Bread’, 21. This view is also biblically oriented in that the broader role of bread as a symbol in the Gospel of Matthew is to distinguish good teaching from bad—to eat the wrong bread is to be instructed as a heretic: ‘The bread and the [leaven] do not signify bread or anything to satisfy human hunger, but they signify the ultimate life-giving source God provides, the teaching of Jesus and the ideology of Matthew’s community’, Lee, The Breaking of Bread, 149. 39 See Madeline Bassnett’s discussion of fermentation, time, and the cook’s lack of control in ‘Between Earth and Sky’ in this volume. 40 Leviticus 7:13, 23:17, KJV.

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13:33 speaks about the patience needed to wait for the kingdom of heaven this way: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened’. A bit later, in 16:6, Matthew reports, ‘Then Jesus said unto them, Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees’. Leaven is part of a parable about the gradual power of God’s grace to change believers (a spiritual version of the proper extent of leavening required of bread). It subtly and invisibly expands to raise believers closer to God. Leaven can also be an invisible force corrupting this kingdom, spreading unseen. 41 Leaven from wild yeast or old dough has the positive and negative tendency to infiltrate unseen, to change what it enters, and, by implication in the case of negative hypocrisy, to sour it as well—all features that make leaven captured from unseen wild yeast, or old dough, eff icacious as a purgative of corruption. The baker and believer alike must rely on their own physical and faithful experience to employ the right leaven in the right way, to discern curative qualities from corrupting, be it for bread or belief. Bread baking thus becomes a sort of physical practice for care of the soul. Many devotional writers in the seventeenth century used the diversity of leaven’s properties and uses to help navigate complex and even controversial religious views. John Donne, for example, makes clear that the biblical requirements for proper leaven often run counter to the human, physical experience of the ingredient, complicating the physical metaphor. ‘Devotion XXII’ refers to leaven specifically twice, but the whole devotion is motivated by the figures of farming, cooking, and eating. The world ‘cooks’ humanity, setting the sin: ‘The whole world is a pile of fagots, vpon which we are laid, and (as though there were no other) we are the bellowes’.42 People are transformed by the world into sin and human nature contributes to this process. Donne, whose speakers so often take a demanding or argumentative position towards God, a disposition central to the structure of the Devotions, expostulates that the cleansing God commands in 1 Corinthians 5:6–7 is not possible. This verse demands: ‘Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is 41 This is the def inition Ramie Targoff uses when she discusses Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions as ‘patristic leaven’, adopting Coleridge’s phrase to explore moments in Donne’s sermon when he activates anti-Jewish ideas he likely doesn’t believe in just to serve his Protestant agenda, ‘Patristic Leaven’, 76. Lee notes that leaven, in Matthew 16:6, is read as ‘symbolizing a corrupting influence’ and this corruption grows through false teaching, The Breaking of Bread, 149. 42 Donne, Devotions, 582.

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sacrificed for us’. The Geneva Bible explicates the notion of purging leaven in this verse as purifying, similar to purging the leaven of hypocrisy. 43 Leaven in this case denotes age and corruption—like the leaven that took hours to change flour in my kitchen experiments, its metaphorical corruption also develops over time. So to purge it is to return to an untainted state, to become renewed and new in Christ. Despite his own reliance in this Devotion on an extended metaphor (the soul as a farm, or land, to be tended, sometimes through harsh methods), he can’t abide the impractical, metaphorical nature of Christ’s request: Wilt thou bid me to separate the leuen that a lump of Dowe hath receiued, or the salt, that the water hath contracted, from the sea? […] when thou biddest purge out the leaven, dost thou mean not only the sowrenesse of mine own ill contracted customes, but the innate tincture of sin imprinted by Nature? How shall I do that which thou requirest, and not falsifie that which though hast said, that sin is gone over all?44

Donne suggests that humanity cannot, even through the rituals of the Bible, become a ‘new lump’. Leaven to bread, like salt to the sea, is intrinsic. In taking this stance, Donne makes the practical matter of sour leaven a claim for sinfulness, resisting the Gospel’s contention that it is possible for humans to be purged of the sin they both inherit and continue to commit. For Donne, leaven is a metonym for humanity’s innate sinfulness and continuing capacity to sin, a fault that can only be solved by death, the ultimate physical corruption. By insisting on leaven’s intrinsic nature, Donne claims the intransigence of his own sin. Bread is already implicated in a postlapsarian world as Adam and Eve must get their food from the ground. 45 Donne extends this connection by suggesting that, even with God’s directive, this cannot be otherwise. And so humanity, fed by the corrupted bread of the world, can no more be purged of sin than dough can be of leaven. Donne’s refusal to fully participate in biblical metaphorical thinking introduces a materiality to the leaven he invokes, reminding us that figurative language takes liberties with matter. 43 See gloss h: ‘As euerie man particularly is pure, so the whole in general may be pure’, in The Bible and Holy Scriptures Conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testament, sig. 71r. 44 Donne, Devotions, 582, 587. 45 Matvejević and Valentino, ‘Levantine Legends and Histories of Bread’, 549. The claim derives from Genesis 3:19: ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’.

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While Donne takes leaven’s embeddedness within bread itself as a material image that captures humanity’s ‘proofed’ sin, Herbert, in using the ordinary matter of leaven in his poetry, emphasizes the Gospel claim for leaven as a way to figure God’s unseen and transformative power in humanity. In ‘The H. Communion’ he writes: Before that sinne turn’d flesh to stone, And all our lump to leaven; A fervent sigh might well have blown Our innocent earth to heaven. (29–32)46

In Herbert’s poem, sin is leaven, taking up one strand of this biblical metaphor also held by Donne. Sin, in fact, is not just leaven, it is the wrong leaven. Taking matter even more at its representational word than Donne does, Herbert understands that just as the housewife must choose or cultivate the right leaven, so too must the believer: For so thou should’st without me still have been, Leaving within me sinne: But by the way of nourishment and strength Thou creep’st into my breast; Making thy way my rest, And thy small quantities my length; Which spread their forces into every part, Meeting sinnes force and art. (5–12)

Here Christ becomes leaven, intensifying Matthew’s claim that Jesus’s leaven is his teaching and continuing the paradoxical symbolism of leaven in scripture and devotional poetry. Christ is ‘unleavened’ by sin, equated by his sign on earth as the unleavened host. In eating the host, however, believers allow Christ to work within, like leaven; Christ redeems or recapitulates material leaven’s corrupting properties to positive effect. The host itself transforms its material properties to change the communicant, not turning into Christ’s body, but mixing with the body, as leaven with dough, spreading to ‘every part’ and matching ‘sinnes force’ with, by implication, its own (this process is similarly suggested by the example in Matthew 13). Christ’s unleavened host illogically leavens the believer properly. The poem ends not with bread, but with wine: 46 Herbert, The Temple, 43–44.

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For sure when Adam did not know To sinne, or sinne to smother; He might to heav’n from Paradise go, As from one room t’another. Thou hast restor’d us to this ease By this thy heav’nly bloud; Which I can go to, when I please, And leave th’earth to their food. (33–40)

Adam, prior to the Fall, is inexperienced in both sinning and resisting sinning; thus he does not know how to encounter sin’s ‘leaven’. ‘Smothering’, in the context of the poem, connects the bodily growth of sin-as-leaven with the breathing body itself, which must be smothered, the leaven washed away with Christ’s blood. The poem’s ending offers a different allusion to leaven, one made of wine and the sacred host. This new right leaven revives the communicant, a spiritual leaven powered by the ‘raising’ agent of grace. Herbert’s poem brings together the two scriptural ideas about leaven, as something that can be metaphorically purged or literally consumed through Communion. In either case, leaven is the ingredient on which the speaker’s changed nature depends. By keeping both of these processes in play—purging and consuming—Herbert relocates the transformative aspects of the sacrament to the material grace of leaven and away from problematic ideas about trans or consubstantiation. Leaven, already a diversely useful domestic material employed to redeem the body from infection, is a logical thing ‘of ordinary use’ for Herbert to employ in this way. If, as Robert Whalen claims, aspects of this poem ‘suggest the need for a physical explanation of sacramental grace’, leaven, as both a direct metaphor for sin and an implied material for conveying grace, acts as explanatory matter. 47 The cross-currents of salvation, corruption, and purgation that exist in the figurative and medicinal descriptions of leaven hint at an unacknowledged epistemological network activated in the kitchen. Donne uses practical knowledge to scrutinize the Bible’s impossible offer (purging the leaven from a dough). Herbert believes Christ’s salvation leavens the soul without needing to be transformationally manifested in bread and wine. I am not suggesting that the pragmatics of bread baking are directly made figurative in the works of Donne and Herbert, but rather that we can read the influence and details of pragmatic encounters with the physical world in their exploration of Christian faith, and that leaven plays an unrecognized and provocative 47 Whalen, ‘Sacramental Puritanism’, 1288.

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part in these encounters. The spiritual process of discerning right leaven for the care of the soul is reflected in period concerns over right leaven as part of care for the body, bringing together metaphor and matter in a way that is as vexingly intermingled as leaven is with dough.

Works Cited ‘barm, n.1’. OED Online. December 2020. Oxford University Press. Bassnett, Madeline. ‘Between Earth and Sky: The Cook as Environmental Mediator in Paradise Lost.’ In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 45-69. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. The Bible and Holy Scriptures Conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testament. Geneva, 1561. Boorde, Andrew. Hereafter Foloweth a Compendyous Regyment Or a Dyetary of Helth. London, 1542. Brears, Peter. Cooking and Dining in Tudor and Early Stuart England. London: Prospect Books, 2015. Cogan, Thomas. The Haven of Health. London, 1636. Corlyon, Mrs. A Booke of Divers Medecines, Broothes, Salues, Waters, Syroppes, and Oyntementes, of which many or the most part have been experienced and tryed by the speciall practize of Mrs. Corlyon, 1606, Wellcome MS 213. Wellcome Collection, London, UK. Corlyon, Mrs. A Booke of Such Medicines as have been Approved by the Special Practize of Mrs. Corlyon, 1660, Folger MS V.a.388. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Cookery and Medicinal Recipes, seventeenth century, Folger MS V.a.562. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Donne, John. Devotions vpon Emergent Occasions. London, 1624. Elyot, Thomas, Sir. The Castell of Health, Corrected, and in some Places Augmented by the First Author Thereof, Sir Thomas Elyot Knight. London, 1595. Fisher, Julie A. ‘“Teâgun kuttiemaûnch: What Food Shall I Prepare for You?”: Exchanges in Early New England Kitchens’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 243-63. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Gerard, John. The Herball Or Generall Historie of Plantes. London, 1597. Herbert, George. A Priest to the Temple, Or, the Country Parson His Character, and Rule of Holy Life. London, 1652. Herbert, George. The Temple Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations. Cambridge, 1633.

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Kernan, Sarah Peters. ‘From the Bakehouse to the Courthouse: Bakers, Baking, and the Assize of Bread in Late Medieval England’. Food and History, 12, no. 2 (2014): 139–78. Lee, Minkyu. The Breaking of Bread and the Breaking of Boundaries: A Study of the Metaphor of Bread in the Gospel of Matthew. New York: Peter Lang, 2015. LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection. https://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet. ‘manchet, n.’. OED Online. September 2020. Oxford University Press. Markham, Gervase. Countrey Contentments, Or the English Husvvife Containing the Inward and Outward Vertues which Ought to be in a Compleate Woman. London, 1623. Matvejević, Predrag and Russell Scott Valentino. ‘Levantine Legends and Histories of Bread’. The Massachusetts Review 55, no. 4 (2014): 547–53. McGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. New York: Scribner, 2004. Medical Miscellany, c. 1634, Folger MS E.a.5. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Nicosia, Marissa. ‘To Make a Simnel’. Cooking the Archives. March 21, 2016. https:// rarecooking.com/2016/03/21/to-make-a-simnel/. Parkinson, John. Theatrum Botanicum: The Theater of Plants. Or, an Herball of a Large Extent. London, 1640. Purkiss, Diane. ‘Crammed with Distressful Bread? Bakers and the Poor in Early Modern England’. In Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories, edited by Joan Fitzpatrick, 17–28. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Receipt Book, c. 1690, Folger MS V.b.400. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Receipt Book, c. 1700, Folger MS E.a.4. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Reinhardt, Peter. The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press 2001. Rubel, William. Bread: A Global History. London: Reaktion Books, 2011. Sheppey, Thomas. A Book of Choice Receipts Collected from Several Famous Authors, 1675, Folger MS V.a.452. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Targoff, Ramie. ‘Patristic Leaven, or Reading Donne with Coleridge’. Donne Journal 34 (2015): 59–78. Tigner, Amy L. ‘Cake: An Early Modern Chronicle of Trade, Technology, and Exchange’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 109-29. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Whalen, Robert. ‘George Herbert’s Sacramental Puritanism’. Renaissance Quarterly 54, no.4 (2001): 1273–1307. Winche, Rebeckah. Receipt Book of Rebeckah Winche, c. 1666, Folger MS V.b.366. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC.

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Margare t Simon

About the Author Margaret Simon is Associate Professor in the English Department at North Carolina State University. Her most recent publication is a co-edited volume of essays entitled Forming Sleep: Representing Lost Consciousness in the English Renaissance. She serves on the steering committee of the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective.

5.

Cake: An Early Modern Chronicle of Trade, Technology, and Exchange Amy L. Tigner 1

Abstract To consider cake as a field of study or even as a case study seems a bit of a sweet indulgence, given that cake is hardly fundamental to the quotidian needs of good nutrition or a good meal. Rather, as Sir Toby indicates to the puritanical Malvolio, cake is (like ale), something that is part of revelry and celebration—a luxury. Yet, if we consider its history from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries (and beyond), cake provides a narrative of Europe’s engagement with global exploration, colonization, and trade; the development of chemistry and technology; and the illusive networks and communities of recipe exchange. Thus, to study cake is to study culture, with its political, economic, technological, and artistic complexities. Keywords: history of cake, historic recipes, colonialism and food, sugar and slavery

In Twelfth Night (1601), Sir Toby Belch proclaims to Malvolio, ‘Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’ (2.3.103–4).2 To the puritanical Malvolio, ‘cake’ is (like ‘ale’) something that is part of revelry and celebration, that represents pleasure and therefore should be shunned. Malvolio’s parsimony reflects the puritan elements of society interested in curbing the pleasure of cake. In the decade prior to

1 I would like to thank the editors, Hillary Nunn and Madeline Bassnett, along with Jennifer Munroe, Peter Parolin, and Judith M. Tigner for their careful and astute suggestions and comments on the article. All errors remain mine. 2 All Shakespeare references are taken from Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, and parenthetically cited.

Bassnett, M. and Hillary M. Nunn (eds.), In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463721646_ch05

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Shakespeare’s play, the Lord Clerk of the Markets issued a decree vastly constraining the sale of cakes: That no Bakers, or other Person or Persons, shall at any time, or times hereafter, make, utter or sell by Retail, within or without their Houses, unto any the Queen’s Subjects, any Spice Cakes, Buns, Bisket, or other Spice Bread, (being Bread out of Size, and not by Law allowed) except it be at Burials, or upon the Friday before Easter, or at Christmas.3

The outlawing of cake, with the exception of funerals, Good Friday, and Christmas, represented a culturally imposed frugality associated with sectarian eagerness to control human gustatory desire. However, this decree was also part of a whole series of official assizes that controlled the price, quality, and quantity of food sold in the markets, in an effort to balance demand with supply.4 England in the 1590s suffered a series of food shortages, due to the particularly cold weather that prevented good harvests; indeed, Brian Fagan writes that the ‘1590s were the coldest decade in the sixteenth century’.5 Therefore, local governments attempted to control the consumption of many foodstuffs made from grains and most particularly those they considered luxurious, i.e. cake. Of course, such edicts could not in fact control what households baked at home, especially in the countryside, where the London laws had no jurisdiction. If in Twelfth Night we read the Countess Olivia’s grand country house to be an English estate (even as the play is set in Illyria) and Sir Toby as a kind of profligate country squire, then Malvolio comes to represent city restraints that at once try to control consumption and pleasure but in fact are ineffectual. With the slight improvement in weather and the effective agricultural reforms of the seventeenth century, the popularity of cake could not be contained by puritanical limitations or official decrees; indeed, the introduction of global importations and the corresponding economics meant that cake could and would be more readily produced and consumed. Studying four seventeenth-century cake recipes from manuscripts as case studies, this essay argues that cake enables us to see how technological advancements, economics, and politics are driven by and reflect quotidian kitchen culture. In the past, historians and literary scholars have not paid a great deal of attention to kitchens and recipes, as they are primarily 3 Strype, Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, 338. 4 Walford, ‘Early Laws’, 70. 5 Fagan, The Little Ice Age, 94.

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the domains of women. However, as we are discovering, and as this essay collection shows, the kitchen was the foremost place of importance in the home and a surprisingly significant place for the nation. Among its many aspects, the kitchen generated household economy, which in turn drove national politics and international trade. As Gitanjali G. Shahani makes plain, imported ingredients desired in English kitchens ‘account for a vast majority of overseas voyages, newly discovered trade routes, and joint-stock companies that were formed throughout the early modern period’.6 With the importation and use of these new culinary products, the kitchen and the food it produced changed, which in turn spurred the inventions of new processes and implements. As luxury foods that often require imported spices and sugar, cakes and their changing recipes provide a window into what was occurring in English kitchens in the seventeenth century. The first cake recipe I discuss, from the Elinor Fettiplace family recipe manuscript (dated 1604), opens a portal into seventeenth-century countryhouse life, relaying information about the social structures inherent in food culture and rural estate agricultural practices. The second cake recipe is found in the Granville family manuscript (c.1640–c.1750)—‘To Make a seed cake Mrs Tauerners way’—and reveals a development in cake chemistry and attendant kitchen technology, along with illustrating the communal networks inherent in recipes. Constance Hall’s recipe for a ‘Woodhouse Cake’ (c. 1672) further demonstrates novel uses for paper to accommodate the rising cake batter.7 The final recipe, for the Portuguese cake Paõ de ló​, appears alongside others from the Iberian peninsula in Mrs. Ann Fanshawe’s multi-generational recipe manuscript (1651–1707).8 As her husband was an English ambassador, Fanshawe and her family lived abroad for several years during the mid-seventeenth century, thus enabling Ann to collect recipes for foreign foods. This cake recipe, calling for a large quantity of sugar, exposes cake’s dependence on imperialism, slavery, and trade, highlighting the class and racial divide between eaters of cake and the slaves of sugar production. Following the history of cake and gustatory desire thus provides a narrative of England’s burgeoning engagement with global exploration, colonization, and commerce; the development of chemistry and technology; and the elusive networks and communities of recipe exchange. 6 Shahani, Tasting Difference, 6. 7 Jennifer Munroe, in her essay ‘Sympoeisis and Early Modern Cooking’ in this volume, also discusses recipes from the Granville and Hall manuscripts. See 29-44. 8 Spurling, Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book, 137; Granville, Cookery and Medicinal Recipes of the Granville Family, 124; Hall, The Cookbook of Constance Hall, fol. 20v; and Fanshawe, Mrs. Fanshawe’s Book of Receipts, 326.

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Twelfth Night Cake: Of Households, Local Production, and Eastern Spice To the early modern English audience, Sir Toby’s ‘cakes’ would have recalled a whole host of culinary memories and desires, like eating the small spice cakes (really more like sweet or hot cross buns) that were prohibited in the London edict. Or, given that Shakespeare’s play title references the Twelfth Night holiday, what might have come to mind is the traditional Twelfth Night cake, which was eaten in both France and England at Epiphany. Due to their association with the Magi, the cakes, also known as King Cakes, would bring thoughts of holiday eating games, in which the person who found the bean baked into the cake would become king for the day and whoever found the pea would be queen. Though this tradition seems tied to Christianity, it was first part of the Roman winter solstice celebrations of Saturnalia, from which many Christmas traditions derive.9 It was only later that Christian celebrations in the Middle Ages associated this cake tradition with the festival of Epiphany, or Twelfth Night. By the time of Shakespeare’s audience, the Twelfth Night cakes would have meant flour cakes sweetened primarily with fruit. Thematically, the tradition of the cake making a ‘king for the day’ or a ‘Lord of Misrule’ certainly resonates with Shakespeare’s play and Sir Toby in particular. Deciphering a quintessential early modern Twelfth Night cake, such as the one that appears in the Elinor Fettiplace family recipe manuscript, allows us to see the relationship between food culture and the country-house estate: Take a peck of flower, and fower pound of currance, one ounce of Cinamon, half an ounce of ginger, two nutmegs, of cloves and mace two peniworth, of butter one pound, mingle your spice and flower & fruit together, but as much barme as will make it light, then take good Ale, & put your butter in it, saving a little, which you must put in the milk, & let the milk boyle with the butter, then make a posset with it, & temper the Cakes with the posset drink, & curd & all together, & put some sugar in & so bake it.10

According to Hilary Spurling, Fettiplace’s cake recipe would have been served at festival time given its enormous size and amount of sweet ingredients. Like many recipe manuscript compilers, Fettiplace grew up in and then married into a landed family. Born into the Poole family of Sapperton in 9 Larousse Gastronomique, 1110. 10 Spurling, Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book, 137.

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Gloucestershire, she married Richard Fettiplace, heir to heavily mortgaged estates in Berkshire.11 Common to many early modern cake recipes from manuscripts produced by the gentry, the Fettiplace recipe makes a huge quantity, since a peck is a quarter of a bushel, or 12½ pounds, of flour, reminding us that this cake would surely not have been approved by the London market decree that limited the size of baked goods. The amount of cake, however, also indicates class, as only an aristocratic estate with its extended family, guests, retainers, servants, foster children and hangers-on would have required, and been able to afford, such ingredients. Serving such gargantuan quantity of cake would have constituted a show of wealth to all the guests who appeared for the Twelfth Night celebration. Discussing the generosity of English tables, Fynes Moryson observed that they ‘are not furnished with many dishes all for one mans diet, but severally for many mens apetite, and not onely prepared for the family, but for strangers and reliefe of the poor’.12 Indeed, the food account books from the Sidney estate at Penshurst, famously memorialized in Ben Jonson’s poem ‘To Penshurst’, gives details of food provided for Lord Leicester’s table, the children’s table, the side table, maids and the hall.13 Thus, a great number of people were served on any given day, although the quantity, variety, and quality of the food at each of the tables would have varied depending on the eater’s status, starting at the top with the Lord’s table and moving down according to social standing, with the very last of the food given at the door as alms for the poor. The vast number of people at these tables also suggests the amount of largely invisible labour required to run the household and estate, including the labour necessary in the kitchens. Writing about the Willoughby family and estate in the sixteenth century, Mark Dawson considers that ‘all evidence suggests’ that food distribution ‘was based on a strict hierarchy’. Sugar, dried fruit, and spices would have been the favoured food of the gentlemen and gentlewomen, and those at the lower tables, the numerous servants and retainers, would likely have only tasted sweetmeats such as a Twelfth Night Cake during the holiday season.14 Several of the ingredients in the cake illustrate what would have been typically produced at a country house estate. Since England had long been a dairy country, it is not surprising that a pound of butter is the recipe’s source 11 Spurling, ix. 12 Moryson, An Itinerary, 4.173. 13 De Lisle Mss U1475 A27/6, 1623. 14 For a clear description of the hierarchy of the tables in an estate, see Dawson, Plenti and Grase, 235–37.

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of fat. The butter would likely have been perishable sweet butter, as the English typically did not begin to preserve butter with salt until somewhat later in the seventeenth century. In the recipe, the cake is leavened with barm, the yeasty froth that rises to the top of the ale fermentation, and it requires the creation of an ale posset drink, milk curdled with ale, to ‘temper’ the dry ingredients.15 The leavening ingredients, then, are localized English ingredients: ale rather than beer, as ale, brewed locally and often at home by women, was the traditional drink of the English.16 What we are seeing in the recipe is that the ingredients likely were produced at the Fettiplace estate in Oxfordshire. Even though Dutch-style salted butter was available at the marketplace and beer was readily available at breweries and ale houses, women and their servants in country-house estates, the bakers of the cake, likely used their own sweet butter and their own home-brewed ale, with its particular mix of signature spices, both local and imported. According to the chronicler William Harrison, these spices might have included orris (the root of the iris), bayberries, or long pepper (imported from India).17 Beyond the ingredients of the estate, the cake is also flavoured with expensive spices (ginger, nutmeg, clove, and mace) that would have been shipped from the East and had been typical of English food since the Middle Ages, thus revealing how domestic practices relied on but also fed global markets. After the turn of the seventeenth century, prices of spices that had been exorbitant were slowly decreasing as the English and the Dutch were breaking into the Portuguese trading monopoly with the creation of the Dutch and English East India Trading Companies.18 Currants, which had been an imported dried fruit from Corinth in the fifteenth century, were a popular ingredient in cakes.19 The Fettiplace recipe requires four pounds of currants, which would make the cake quite heavy. Fettiplace would have purchased a great deal of currants for the Christmas holiday, much 15 For more about barm, see Margaret Simon’s essay, ‘Early Modern Leaven’, in this collection. 16 Beer, which was stabilized by the bitter plant hops in the fermentation process, was a Dutch innovation that allowed for long distance travel, as beer could last much longer. Early on, the English resisted the more bitter taste of beer. Indeed, use of hops was outlawed in England until 1556. The English nonetheless slowly adopted the practice of adding hops, thus making beer, a product that could last longer. Beer also required less malt than ale; thus, beer was more economical and could sell for a cheaper rate. Beer-making would become a larger-scale business run by primarily men rather than women. See Parolin, ‘The Poor Creature Small Beer’, 28–29. 17 Harrison, Description of England, 138. 18 Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, 316. 19 Gerard’s early edition of his Herball (1597) does not mention currants, but the later 1633 edition has a section on currants, as does John Parkinson’s 1629 herbal. See Gerard, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes, 1593; Parkinson, Paradisus in Sole, 558.

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like Perdita in The Winter’s Tale directs the clown to buy three pounds of currants (along with sugar and rice), so that she might make a large dessert to serve at the spring sheep-shearing festival (4.3.36–37). Joan Thirsk notes that the Shuttleworths, a gentry family who lived in Lancashire, bought their currants from London in large amounts—eighteen pounds at a time.20 The Fettiplaces might have done likewise, given the four pounds of currants in this recipe. As the currants would provide most of the sweetness, the small amount of sugar added at the very end is more a final spice to top up the cake’s flavour rather than a staple ingredient. This usage of sugar in the recipe is consistent with the fact that sugar was a luxury item at the beginning of the seventeenth century. As C. Anne Wilson has figured, the English in 1600 imported one pound of sugar per capita, though in fact the majority of common people would not have consumed sugar at all. Although the price fluctuated, the cost of one pound of sugar was as high as thirty-two pence in 1600, when daily wages were roughly one shilling (twelve pence) for the Elizabethan craftsman.21 From a humoral perspective, sweetness, which was hot and moist, was believed to be extremely nutritious; thus, as Ken Albala notes, ‘Sugar, understandably, was a prime candidate for the miracle food category’.22 However, this imported ‘miracle food’, sugar, went almost exclusively to the wealthy merchant and upper classes—those who could afford to make such extravagant and large quantities of cake and other sweetmeats for a holiday celebration, even as the amount of sugar in this recipe would be less than what would be found in cake recipes later in the century, when the availability of sugar to the English became significantly increased, as I will discuss below.

Seed Cake: Of Community, Hoops, and Paper What we will see in the next cake recipe is a development of ingredients, techniques, and attendant kitchen technology necessary for the changing chemistry of cake batter in the Granville family recipe manuscript. The manuscript belonged to at least four generations of women—though many men, both in the family and among family acquaintances, also contributed numerous recipes, from ink to chocolate, as we know from their attributions. 20 Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, 49. 21 Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain, 199. The figure of 32 pence comes from Hersh and Voth, ‘ ‘Sweet Diversity’, 6. 22 Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance, 66.

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The family itself is notable, given that members of two generations of the family, Sir Martin Westcomb and his son, served as the English consuls at Cadiz from 1665–1687, and the manuscript contains a thirty-page section of recipes collected during that period. This manuscript is also remarkable for the number of named recipe contributors (over thirty) from captains to midwives, doctors to neighbours, and soldiers to housewives, anchoring the family in a vast and complicated network of culinary and medicinal knowledge that moved from person to person and from one country to another. Some of the contributors are known to history, such as ‘my lord marshall howard’ (likely Charles Howard, 1628–1685), while others leave only a trace of themselves, a name on the recipe, such as Mrs. Taverner, who contributed a seed cake recipe to the collection. Although this recipe is undated, it is likely a mid-seventeenth-century recipe, as it uses eggs (along with yeast) and has quite a quantity of sugar in the candied carraway seeds that provide the sweetness. To Make a seed cake Mrs Tauerners way To a pound of flower you must take a pound of butter, you must drye your flower very well, then rub your butter into it, then take six spoonfulls of the best alle yest and Twelue egges takeing away 6 whites beat all this very well together with your hand adding as much cream blood warm as will weet it, when it is well beaten alltogether you must couer it with a clean cloath and lett it stand by the fire to risse about half an hower then take a pound of sugar carroways and strew them in with your hand mixing them well together then put it into a hoop with paper vnder it which with the hoop must be buttered that the cake stick not then tye the paper closse vp to the hoop that the cake run not out at the e[g]dges, it must stand in the ouen about an hower, the ouen must be pritty quick and you must haue a care of scorching it.23

Mrs. Taverner’s seed cake exhibits how cake recipes were changing: following the trail of ingredients and processes, we can see how various cultural factors made the changes possible. In particular, the use and amount of ‘sugar carroways’, or comfits, to sweeten the cake show the progression of cakes using a local source of sweetness derived from fruit to seeds coated 23 Granville, Cookery and Medicinal Recipes, 124.

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with imported sugar. The increase of eggs as a leavening agent demonstrates the trend toward lighter and fluffier cakes, which were also more labour intensive. The eggy and liquid cake batters in turn required the use of a container, thus causing the development of cake hoops. Comfits have a long and storied history that chronicles the increased use of sugar both for medicinal and culinary purposes. Producing comfits involved a laborious process of repeatedly coating seeds, nuts, or spices with layers of sugar syrup. One of the oldest forms of sugar confectionary, comfits likely ‘had their origin in the Middle East in the early medieval period. Developed by Arab apothecaries as medicines for indigestion, they were introduced into Europe by Genoese and Venetian sugar traders’, according to food historian Ivan Day. 24 They were certainly available at apothecary shops in Antwerp by the sixteenth century, as Rembert Dodoens describes in A Newe Herball (1578): ‘The Apothecaries of this Countrie do vse to preserue and comfit the roote of Eringium, to be giuen to the aged, and olde people, and others that are consumed or withered, to nourishe and restore them againe’.25 Though Dodoens describes eringo root (Eryngium maritimum, sometimes called sea holly) comfits, the most popular comfits in England were those made with caraway seeds, which would have been consumed after a large meal or banquet with a glass of warm spiced wine to aid in digestion. What had begun as a carminative physic soon became decorative on various sweets, such as marchpane (marzipan), or trifle (a cooked cream dessert) and whigs (small sweet buns with herbs and spices). Comfits also begin to appear in recipes for cakes, such as this one from Mrs. Taverner, to provide both flavour and sweetness. Indeed, comfits contain quite a bit of sugar, as Sir Hugh Plat makes clear in his Delights for Ladies (1608): ‘halfe a pounde of Annis seeds, with two pound of sugar wil make fine small comfits’.26 If we use Plat’s recipe as a measurement, four-fifths, or 80 percent, of a typical small comfit would be sugar, so that the one pound of ‘sugar carroways’ in Mrs. Taverner’s recipe would have contained almost thirteen ounces of sugar. As evidence of what was already occurring in kitchens, Plat’s recipe also teaches cooks how to make comfits, thus demonstrating that households might have been as likely to produce their own comfits as they were to buy them at an apothecary shop. What we are seeing, then, is the development of household culinary skills in sugar works previously obtained in 24 Day, ‘Sugar Plums and Comfits’, n.p. 25 Dodoens, A Newe Herball, 529. 26 Plat, Delights for Ladies, Book II, recipe 54, sigs. F36v–42r.

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specialized professional apothecary shops or made by professional chefs. The publication of early cookbooks, such as Plat’s, which is highly reliant on sugar cookery, demonstrates that household cooks were already increasing their repertoire of sweet recipes in the early seventeenth century. Plat acknowledges that he gets his recipes from various friends, neighbours, and acquaintances throughout the city of London. 27 His popular book, however, would in turn teach many of them how to make comf its and other sweet foods. Thus, in both Plat’s book and in the Granville recipe, we are witnessing the increase of seventeenth-century households’ use and consumption of sugar, reflecting sugar’s growing availability and attendant price drop throughout the century. Another culinary evolution that appears in this recipe, the cake hoop, is necessitated by the more liquid character of the batter caused by the addition of eggs. The recipe calls for twelve eggs—six whole eggs and six yolks—along with ale yeast for the leavening. Likely, the increase in the number of eggs has to do with an ‘enlivened’ interest in the raising of poultry and eggs beginning in the late sixteenth century, brought on by the publication of new poultry manuals, as Joan Thirsk argues.28 Thus what we see are the beginnings of an industrialized egg production, which was reliant on networks of female poulterers, who made sure that large numbers of eggs could be supplied to wealthy estate houses. Significantly, to keep production ongoing, these poulterers developed special hen diets, such as toast dipped in ale and boiled barley, during the winter months when hens typically slow their laying.29 In December 1598, the Shuttleworths of Lancashire bought 124 eggs, and Lord Leicester’s household required 250 eggs in 1570, likely to make the many cakes for the Christmas feasts.30 Mrs. Taverner’s cake recipe thus evidences a transition from yeasty sweet bread to lighter cakes, made by the addition of several whipped eggs.31 A cake, such as the Fettiplace one, made with yeast and flour, has enough structure simply to be shaped and placed in the oven, sometimes on paper. Earlier cake recipes typically do not specify on what surface, only how long, the cakes should ‘stand’ in the oven. However, a cake that contains twelve eggs will lack structure and therefore needs some kind of container. Though 27 Harkness, The Jewel House, 212. 28 Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, 251. 29 Thirsk, 253. 30 Thirsk, 252–53. 31 It is not until the nineteenth century, however, that baking powder was invented by the British chemist Alfred Bird, who developed the product for his wife who was allergic to yeast. Panko, ‘The Great Uprising’, paragraph 8.

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a baking vessel seems like an obvious solution to a modern reader, we have to remember that England did not have a tradition of baking cakes or pies in pans. Rather, most baking of runny foodstuff, such as stews, occurred in flour and water-paste pie-crust vessels, known as coffins. To contain the more liquid eggy cake batter, the English began to use a hoop, adapting its earlier usage for marchpane. In The Treasurie of Commodious Conceits and Hidden Secrets (1573), John Partridge advises in his recipe, ‘To make a Marchpane’, to use a ‘hoop of a greene hasell wand of the thiknes of halfe an inch on the inner syde smothe’ to cut out a round shape from the marzipan dough, like one would use a cookie cutter.32 Then the cut marchpane would be set on paper to bake in the oven. The use of the hoop morphs from an implement to cut to one that would hold. The first printed recipe that calls for a kind of hoop for cake is in Gervase Markham’s The English Huswife (1615). As Markham is really more of a collector and editor of recipes than a cook himself, we can imagine that he is recording a practice and equipment used by English housewives. The recipe ‘To make Bisket bread’ calls for eight eggs and four yolks, along with flour, sugar, and aniseed, and then directs the cook to rub butter in ‘your Bisket panes’ or, if the cook wants thin cakes, to bake them in ‘fruit dishes’.33 Both the ‘Bisket panes’ and the ‘fruit dishes’ show the beginnings of using containers for the making of cakes. The transition to using hoops in larger cakes appears in print recipes mid-century, such as in Hannah Woolley’s The Cook’s Guide (1664) and Kenelm Digby’s The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Opened (1669), though these books are likely describing what had been in practice for a while in household kitchens.34 Generally speaking, cake hoops would have been constructed of wood, such as the one from the marchpane recipe, and later of tin, though both seem to have been in use throughout the seventeenth century. Mrs. Taverner’s cake recipe also demonstrates household use of varying types of paper and gestures towards other paper innovations in the period. Paper is a significant part of the cake-making process, as the hoops would have been placed on paper, sometimes buttered, and paper would also build up the sides of the hoop, thus making sure the cake would not fall out of the sides. Some hoops were constructed solely of paper: Constance Hall’s manuscript calls for an extraordinary paper hoop, or as she says ‘coffin’, 32 Partridge, The Treasurie of Commodious Conceits, sigs. B4r, B4v, B5r. 33 Markham, The English Huswife, 72. 34 Woolley, The Cook’s Guide, 90; Digby, The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie, 259, 263.

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that is sewn together in her ‘To make A woodstreet Cake’. The directions specify that: a sheet of browne and white paper that which goeth round about the Cake must be duble white of A yarde & half long & halfe quarter & naile depe when you have sewn your papers to geather in A round forme to the botome So high as you intend the Cake Shall Come then With a Spone put your Kake into this Coffin & Soe into the oven and their let it Stand 3 quarters of an hower.35

Though not as enormous as the Fettiplace cake, this recipe—calling for four pounds of flour, three pounds of currants, a pound of butter, twelve eggs, a pint of ale and a pint of cream—would have made a substantially large cake. So, it is not surprising that the specified paper hoop, or coffin, is made from a yard and a half of paper, making approximately a 64-inch diameter. The depth of the hoop is about six and a quarter inches, as it is made from half of a quarter yard, or four inches, and a nail, an antiquated measurement for two and a quarter inches. The recipe directs the baker to use two different types of paper, brown and white, with the white being doubled (or perhaps it was a double thick white paper) to form the ring of the hoop, and one assumes the brown would serve for the bottom. The recipe shows household consumption of various types of paper for different purposes. As Elaine Leong notes, ‘Contemporary household account books reveal that many stocked their cupboards with several kinds of paper at the same time’.36 Most common was the cheaper brown paper, or what Leong calls ‘the workhouse of the family’s paper within the house’, which also would have been used to wrap objects and medicines and even became part of the medicinal recipe, as plasters applied directly to the skin.37 Baking needs figure prominently for the use of brown paper, if we can surmise from Joyce Jeffrey’s household account book, which notes that the household bought ‘a quier of browne paper to putt under pies’.38 What we see in the Hall and Granville cake recipes is a quotidian use of paper and hoops, hand-crafted specif ically to deal with the changing chemistry of cake batter. The fact that we know the provenance of the 35 Hall, The Cookbook of Constance Hall, fol. 20v. 36 Leong, ‘Papering the Household’, 35. 37 Leong, 35. 38 Spicksley, The Business and Household Accounts, 156. Also quoted in Leong, 37.

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Granville recipe (Mrs. Taverner) also means that we can understand how new ideas in cake chemistry and attendant technologies might have spread throughout communities of friends, neighbours, and acquaintances, as they gave and received recipes, a word that itself derives from the Latin recipere, to receive.

Paõ de ló: Of Travel, Sugar, and Slavery As we look to another recipe, in Mrs. Fanshawes Book of Receipts of Physickes, Salues, Waters, Cordials, Preserves, and Cookery, we see more changes in cake recipes: the craft, the ingredients and the resources—of nature and humans—that it took to make these tastes of luxury. And, as we have been witnessing, cake recipes unveil much about the tremendous economic, political, and social changes that were occurring throughout the century. Like many family recipe books, Ann, Lady Fanshawe’s was a multi-generational project collected and approved primarily by Ann, but also including recipes contributed by Ann’s mother Margaret and her daughter Katherine. Written in several different hands, the manuscript is primarily produced by the amanuensis Joseph Averie, who leaves a note at the beginning of the book, that it was ‘written by me, Joseph Averie’.39 Many of the recipes, however, do have the initials ‘Afan’, which approve the recipe, or at times the recipes are amended or written in Ann’s less legible scrawl. The book is particularly fascinating because Ann Fanshawe, as wife of the royalist and later English ambassador Richard Fanshawe, travelled and lived in several European countries beginning in 1648 in Ireland and France and then in the 1660s in Portugal and Spain. 40 While abroad, Fanshawe collected a series of recipes that she added to her manuscript, particularly from the Iberian Peninsula. From a memoir that she wrote for her children that covered the same period, we know that her husband had been sent to the court at Lisbon in 1662 to negotiate the intended marriage between Catherine of Braganza and Charles II. Thus, we can roughly date when she might have received the recipe for the Portuguese cake Paõ de ló, which appears in her manuscript first in English and then, in a different hand, in Portuguese (both are rendered as Paõ de lo, with no accent mark on the final o). The Portuguese hand is the same that appears on the following page that contains another Iberian 39 Fanshawe, Mrs. Fanshawes Book of Receipts, fol. 3r. 40 For more about Ann Fanshawe and how her recipes relate to diplomacy, see Melissa Schultheis’s essay ‘A Culinary Embassy’ in this volume.

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recipe: ‘To Adabado Porke’, which is written in English. 41 We can imagine, though never really know, that the contributor of the recipe, an Iberian acquaintance or friend, wrote the original recipe in Fanshawe’s manuscript. Unlike many of the other recipes recorded in the book that provide the provenance, such as ‘My Lady Levinthorp’s receipt to make Crème cheese’ or ‘Mrs. Fanshaw of Jenkins her receipt to make a sack possit’, the Paõ de ló remains anonymous. 42 Nevertheless, the recipe speaks about the culture from which it came and the culture to which it was imported. Hence, from this recipe, we can envision how culinary ideas and technologies cross international borders. A Receipt how to make Paõ de lo First they take twenty eggs and of them they break ten in a basin neither very great nor little, of the which they putt their whites of the other ten, only their yolks and with a great spoon they beate them, then putt in a pound of sugar well weighed and beate it by little and little for the space of an houre or 5 quarters and when they are well beaten, they putt in a spoonfull of water and beat it a little more, then a pound of flower dispersed and well mixed. This beinge done putt it in a basin which is called de fartes that is not very large, yet somewhat deep and puttinge under it a little paper carrie it to the oven putt it in presently and when it is baked take away the paper before it be cold. 43

The first striking difference between this Paõ de ló recipe, essentially for a sponge cake, and the Fettiplace and the Granville cakes is its complete lack of barm, yeast, and ale, relying solely on eggs for the leavening. 44 The consistency of this cake, then, is much lighter, less like bread, and more like what we now consider cake. As I have discussed above, we can see the movement towards eggs and away from yeast in cakes. Whereas most early recipes use almost only yeast-based leavening (like Fettiplace’s cake), later recipes will call for both yeast and eggs (like the Granvilles’), and then finally recipes appear, like 41 Fanshawe, Mrs. Fanshawes Book of Receipts, 328. 42 Fanshawe, 320. 43 Fanshawe, 326. 44 I write elsewhere about this recipe and its complex history in Tigner, ‘Trans-Border Kitchens’, 9–12. Bassnett also mentions this recipe in ‘A Language Not One’s Own’, 20.

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this one, that exclusively use eggs. However, it must be noted that the earlier style yeast-based cakes do not in fact disappear, and even still we find them, as fruitcakes, for example. Although the Granville cake calls for twelve eggs, this cake calls for an even more remarkable number of eggs: twenty! We should consider that this tremendous number of eggs might have to do with the difference in the typical size of eggs, which likely would have been considerably smaller than modern industrial eggs. However, this recipe uses ten whole eggs and only the yolks of the other ten, thus creating an even richer and more lemon-coloured batter. The addition of eggs generally in a cake recipe means that the egg protein produces a more tender crumb, the fat from the yolks enriches the batter, and the action of whisking eggs traps air that aids in the cake’s rising. 45 This eggy cake required a considerable amount of kitchen labour, as the baker (or bakers) needed to whisk the eggs by hand for an hour or more to create the honeycomb effect of air bubbles required for the sponge. The Paõ de ló recipe also reveals human ingenuity and the developing kitchen techne needed to adapt to the chemistry of the recipe. Whereas the English solution to a liquid eggy cake batter was to use a hoop, the Portuguese had a long tradition of ceramics that entered the Iberian Peninsula with the invasion of the Moors in the eighth century. 46 So, it is not surprising that the Portuguese Paõ de ló recipe in Fanshawe’s manuscript calls for a ‘basin which is called de fartes that is not very large, yet somewhat deep’. What this vessel is exactly is unclear; yet, ‘de fartes’ translates as ‘of abundance’ and one can imagine that it was a narrow and tall clay pot. Certainly, modern day Paõ de ló cakes are often baked in clay vessels lined with paper. Fanshawe’s recipe similarly mentions ‘puttinge under it a little paper’, which makes it sound like one should put paper under the pot itself, but it is more likely it means that the paper should line it. Extrapolating from the traditional practice of paper being used as a lining that continues above the vessel to prevent the cake from running off the top and down the sides (as in the Granville and Hall cakes), it makes more sense that this is what the recipe prescribes. The result, however, would be a rather tall cake that would puff up during the baking and then later subside. For the English this use of a ‘basin’ would have been rather innovative and perhaps influenced later baking in England, with the use of more specialized baking vessels in the eighteenth century. Perhaps one of the more revealing aspects of this cake recipe is the increase in the amount of sugar in the cake: one pound, which marks the 45 Levene, Cake: A Slice of History, 6–7. 46 Martins, ‘Azulejos: The Visual Art of Portugal’.

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general tendency of cake recipes across the seventeenth century to include more and more sugar. The sweetness of the Fettiplace cake comes from the four pounds of dried currants; sugar functions only as a spice. The Granville cake uses large amounts of caraway comfits; the sugar would sweeten but also enhance the taste of the caraways. But what we are seeing in Fanshawe’s Paõ de ló is a growing taste for sugar as a dominant flavouring device on its own. Generally speaking, Fanshawe’s Portuguese cake recipe is in line with the broad trend of increased sugar usage in the diet, at least for the middle and upper classes. It is not surprising that an Iberian recipe would have had more sugar, as the Portuguese and Spanish had established sugar operations in islands off the west African coast (São Tomé by the Portuguese, and the Canaries by the Spanish), from the fifteenth century. Later, from the 1580s, these countries began to establish a sugar industry in the Atlantic islands, using enslaved labour on the plantations. Thus, sugar was more readily available and cheaper on the Iberian Peninsula than it was in England at the turn of the seventeenth century. 47 However, the sugar picture in England changed as the century progressed, and sugar became more easily attainable at a cheaper price. The increase in sugar in English cake recipes was a direct result of the decrease in sugar prices in the mid-seventeenth century, which by 1650 dropped to fifteen English pence, less than half of what it was in 1600. 48 Part of the price drop in sugar may have also been due to the political situation in England during the Interregnum. After the puritan Parliamentary government executed Charles I, they also instituted parsimonious measures throughout the country, including the banning of Christmas celebrations and festive sweetmeats. 49 With the restoration of the monarch and the return of the royalist aristocracy, the consumption of sugar would have increased. Further, British-owned sugar plantations meant that the commodity was more available and cheaper to the home country. By 1663, three years after the Restoration, sugar consumption expanded to about two pounds per capita per year, four pounds per capita in 1690, then to twenty-three pounds per capita in 1790.50 A latecomer to imperial pursuits generally, England’s entrance into the colonial sugar business began in 1627 when they claimed the island of Barbados after Captain John Powell had landed there in 1625. However, it took until 1655 (the same year the English claimed Jamaica) for Barbadian 47 Mintz, The Power of Sweetness, 30–31. 48 Hersh and Voth, ‘Sweet Diversity’, 6. 49 Levene, Cake: A Slice of History, 47. 50 Hersh and Voth, ‘Sweet Diversity’, 7.

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sugar to enter the English domestic market.51 When English planters first arrived in Barbados they primarily planted tobacco and cotton, but beginning in the 1640s through to the 1660s they increasingly replaced these two crops exclusively with sugar. And whereas earlier planters primarily used indentured European labour, once they switched to sugar, they also shifted to enslaved African labour.52 The cheaper and more abundant sugar came with greater and greater cost to enslaved Africans: in 1655, 20,000 slaves worked in the Barbadian sugar plantation and by 1694 that number had risen to 46,602.53 As the eminent sugar anthropologist Sidney Mintz writes, ‘Since it [sugar] was linked for at least five centuries to the pain and suffering of millions of human beings, I have long thought of sugar’s sweet thread as red in color—the color of blood’.54 What appears through a post-colonial lens is not simply the pound of sugar in a cake recipe but what that pound of sugar costs in terms of human suffering. As Kim F. Hall has famously argued, with the practice of sugar-cookery, women and their kitchen practices increasingly entered into the imperial market, thus becoming complicit in the slave trade.55 This Paõ de ló recipe, and so many other cake recipes, show us not only the outcome of and the impetus for colonial systems, but also how the economics of both cake and slavery are circularly related. The social class prosperous enough to eat cake was the same class that profited from investments in the slave trade, a relationship that would last until the nineteenth century. The decreasing cost of sugar also meant that the upper classes would make even more money from the lower classes who were consuming sugar in tea and cakes. Thus, expanding demand for sugar meant the escalation of suffering by enslaved Africans in sugar plantations.

Of Reading Recipes Seventeenth-century manuscript cake recipes provide a glimpse of the quotidian household kitchen and its connections with global trade and empire, the invention of technologies, and the exchange of knowledge. Cake tells a complicated story of the bright side of human ingenuity and communal 51 Mintz, The Power of Sweetness, 38. 52 Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 59. 53 Dunn, 87. 54 Mintz, ‘Foreword’, vii. 55 Hall, ‘Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces’. For more about colonialism and sugar, as it relates to maple sugar, see Edith Snook’s essay “‘A New Source of Happiness to Man’”, in this volume.

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networks, but also of the dark side of sugar. We see how the chemistry of a new cake with eggs would require novel technologies with hoops and paper. We can understand how a cake in Portugal would travel to England but also around the globe. After all, Ann Fanshawe’s Paõ de ló is the same sponge cake that is still made in Japan as ‘katsura’ or castella cake (Spanish cake), which the Portuguese brought to the Japanese in the sixteenth century. More locally, we can surmise that Mrs. Taverner once shared her seed cake recipe with her friend or neighbour, Mary Granville, who in turn shared it with other friends or neighbours. And since cake is about desire and celebration, we might return to the beginning of this essay and Sir Toby’s argument that no amount of censure will stop the consumption of cake, as the desire for sweetness is primal. Nonetheless, desire for festivity and eating costs a great deal in resources, both non-human and human alike. The increasingly extravagant number of eggs in the cakes, for example, expended labour from chickens, their poulterers, and the cooks who spent hours whipping them to satisfy the enjoyment of the privileged eaters. More profoundly, from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, the baking and eating of cake, like the butterfly effect, had an atrocious effect on the lives of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans who toiled and died for sweetness. Reading recipes enables us to understand far more than the direct culinary outcomes and their attendant cooking practices. We see in recipes the extremes to which humans will go to feed their particular hungers. As well, in recipes we can see narratives of vast foodways and the larger historical ramifications of what and how people have eaten.

Works Cited Albala, Ken. Eating Right in the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Bassnett, Madeline. ‘A Language Not One’s Own: Translational Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen’s Iberian Recipes’. Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 9, no.1 (2019): 1–27. Dawson, Mark. Plenti and Grase: Food and Drink in a Sixteenth Century Household. Blackawton: Prospect Books, 2009. Day, Ivan. ‘Sugar Plums and Comfits’. https://www.historicfood.com/Comfits.htm. De Lisle Mss U1475 A27/6, 1623. Kent History and Library Centre, Kent, UK. Digby, Kenelm. The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Opened. London, 1669. Dodoens, Rembert. A Newe Herball. London, 1578.

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Dunn, Richard. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1972. Fagan, Brian. The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300–1850. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Fanshawe, Ann. Mrs. Fanshawes Book of Receipts of Physickes, Salues, Waters, Cordialls, Preserues and Cookery, 1651–1707, MS 7113. Wellcome Library, London, UK. Gerard, John. The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes. London, 1633. Granville, Mary. Cookery and Medicinal Recipes of the Granville Family, 1640–1750, Folger MS V.a.430. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Hall, Constance. The Cookbook of Constance Hall, 1672, Folger MS V.a.20. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Hall, Kim F. ‘Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces: The Gendering of Sugar in the Seventeenth Century’. In Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, edited by Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan, 168–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Harkness, Deborah E. The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. Harrison, William. The Description of England. Edited by Georges Edelen. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968. Hersh, Jonathan, and Hans-Joachim Voth. ‘Sweet Diversity: Colonial Goods and the Welfare Gains from Global Trade after 1492’, Working Paper, Chapman University. https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article =1205&context=economics_articles. Larousse Gastronomique: The World’s Greatest Culinary Encyclopedia. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2009. Leong, Elaine. ‘Papering the Household: Paper, Recipes, and Everyday Technologies in Early Modern England’. In Working with Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge, edited by Carla Bittel, Elaine Leong, and Christine von Obertzen, 32–45. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. Levene, Alysa. Cake: A Slice of History. New York and London: Pegasus Books, 2016. Markham, Gervase. The English Huswife. London, 1615. Martins, Kim. ‘Azulejos: The Visual Art of Portugal’. https://www.ancient.eu/ article/1452/azulejos-the-visual-art-of-portugal/. Mintz, Sidney W. ‘Foreword’. In The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, edited by Darra Goldstein, vii-xiii. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Mintz, Sidney W. The Power of Sweetness and the Sweetness of Power. Amsterdam: Van Loghum Slaterus, 1988. Moryson, Fynes. An Itinerary…Containing His Ten Yeeres Travell…to 1617. 4 vols. Glasgow: James Maclehose & Sons, 1907–1908.

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Munroe, Jennifer. ‘Sympoeisis and Early Modern Cooking: Troubling the Boundaries of Human/Nonhuman’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 29-44. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Panko, Ben. ‘The Great Uprising: How a Powder Revolutionized Baking’. Smithsonian Magazine (June 20, 2017). https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ great-uprising-how-powder-revolutionized-baking-180963772/. Parkinson, John. Paradisus in Sole, Paradisus Terrestris. London, 1629. Parolin, Peter. ‘“The Poor Creature Small Beer”: Princely Autonomy and Subjection in 2 Henry IV’. In Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England, edited by David B. Goldstein and Amy L. Tigner, 21–40. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2016. Partridge, John. The Treasurie of Commodious Conceits, & Hidden Secrets. London, 1573. Plat, Hugh. Delights for Ladies. London, 1608. Schultheis, Melissa. ‘A Culinary Embassy: Diplomatic Home Making in Lady Ann Fanshawe’s Booke of Receipts’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 197-217. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Shahani, Gitanjali G. Tasting Difference: Food, Race, and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York: Norton, 1997. Simon, Margaret. ‘Early Modern Leaven in Bread, Bodies, and Spirit’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 91-108. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Snook, Edith. ‘“A New Source of Happiness to Man”? Maple Sugaring and Settler Colonialism in the Early Modern Atlantic World’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 265-86. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Spicksley, Judith M. The Business and Household Accounts of Joyce Jeffreys, Spinster of Hereford, 1638-1648. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Spurling, Hilary, ed. Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book: Elizabethan Country House Cooking. London: Viking, 1986. Strype, John, ed. Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster. London, 1720. hriOnline, 2007. https://www.dhi.ac.uk/strype/index.jsp Thirsk, Joan. Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions 1500–1760. London and New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2006.

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Tigner, Amy L. ‘Trans-Border Kitchens: Iberian Recipes in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts’. History of Retailing and Consumption 5, no. 1 (2019): 51–70. Walford, Cornelius. ‘Early Laws and Customs in Great Britain Regarding Food’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 8 (1880): 70–162. Wilson, C. Anne. Food and Drink in Britain: From the Stone Age to the 19th Century. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1991. Woolley, Hannah. The Cook’s Guide. London, 1664.

About the Author Amy L. Tigner is Professor of English at the University of Texas, Arlington and Editor-in-Chief of Early Modern Studies Journal. She has co-written Literature and Food Studies (Routledge, 2018), co-edited Culinary Shakespeare (Duquesne UP, 2017), and written Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles II (Ashgate, 2012).

6. The Power of the Pot: Naturalizing Carp Through the Early Modern English Receipt Book Rob Wakeman1

Abstract How did early modern cooks and their recipe books respond to the introduction of invasive species? The introduction of the common carp to England provides an illuminating example. At the end of the fifteenth century, manors and monasteries began to stock ponds in England with imported carp, but they quickly colonized English river systems. Their tolerance for mucky waters helped them thrive in England, but less-thanpristine environments affected the taste of their flesh and resulted in divided culinary opinion. This essay examines strategies for dressing carp that proliferated through the seventeenth century as cooks sought to transform this stranger fish into a naturalized British dish. Keywords: cookery, carp, fish, angling, invasive species, naturalization

Near the outset of her literary history of early modern angling texts, Myra E. Wright asks, ‘Is there such a thing as an English fish?’2 On landscapes and waterways that have been so extensively managed and domesticated throughout history, what does it mean to draw a distinction between English fish and ‘naturalized’ fish? Although the last ice age left species of freshwater fish isolated in fragmented pockets of Europe for much of recorded human history, fish are wont to flow without regard for national borders. Perhaps no 1 For their invaluable assistance tracking down, transcribing, and researching many of the recipes in this essay, I owe many thanks to Annalise Hansen and Victoria Kuhr, research assistants in Mount Saint Mary College’s Summer Undergraduate Research Experience programme. 2 Wright, The Poetics of Angling, 10–13.

Bassnett, M. and Hillary M. Nunn (eds.), In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463721646_ch06

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European species demonstrates this better than the common carp (Cyprinus carpio). Ecologically, they are eager colonizers, gamely adaptable to new habitats. Culturally, carp are perceived disparately in different waters. A prized pond fish here, a dangerous invader there; unfit for the kitchen according to some, a culinary delicacy for others. Frequently reviled in North America as a muddy-tasting bottom-feeder, carp are immensely popular in other countries. In fact, carp are now the most farmed fish in the world.3 Common carp are no more indigenous to the British Isles than they are to North America, but they elicit very different responses depending on the continent. Ask a white person in North America what they think of carp and you’re likely to hear phrases like ‘trash fish’ or, especially, with the introduction of Asian carp to North American rivers, ‘invasive species’. 4 As the American ecologist David L.G. Noakes puts it, ‘We are familiar with the common carp as being much too common. To many it is a pest, a far too successful immigrant, an intruder, a destroyer of habitat, perhaps the ultimate coarse fish. Recreational anglers would attempt to catch it only out of desperation, and would consider it beneath their dignity to keep any they caught’.5 Carp prosper where other fish do not, readily settling in less-than-pristine low-oxygen, muddy, and even toxic and bacteria-ridden anthropogenic environments. Although this means that they generally do not compete directly with indigenous fish species when they are introduced to a river, they do create feedback loops by rooting up food from the riverbeds and increasing turbidity.6 They are the feral hogs of the water, snouting their 3 Balon, ‘The Common Carp’, 3. 4 ‘Asian carp’ is an imprecise umbrella term that refers to several different species of introduced carp, most often silver carp. On the relationship between the rhetoric of invasive species and anti-immigrant sentiment see Cardozo and Subramaniam, ‘Assembling Asian/American Naturecultures’ and Coates, Animal Perceptions. 5 Noakes, ‘Carp – Reviled and Revered’, [ii]. See also Simberloff’s account, in ‘Integrity, Stability, and Beauty’, of Aldo Leopold’s antipathy to the common carp and the effect they have on muddying fishing holes: ‘Perhaps simple aesthetic distaste explains Leopold’s animus toward carp, or perhaps it is partly that they are foreign’, 498. For a different view, see Johnson’s admission that even though, as an angler, ‘choosing the ignoble carp over trout seems a travesty’, angling for invasive species is a strategy for ‘embracing the future’ in the Anthropocene. Johnson, ‘Fly-Fishing for Carp’, 182. 6 Richard C. Hoffmann documents similar effects of carp on medieval riverine environments in ‘Economic Development and Aquatic Ecosystems’, 664. On the carp’s fitness for the increasingly polluted anthropogenic ecosystems of early modern England, see Brayton, ‘Shakespeare’s Fishponds’, 28–31. Brayton documents carp’s powerful association with the odiferous fishponds near the Globe theatre. London’s carp farming operations were situated among the theatres and brothels, stewing in an environment that linked appetite, corruption, and pollution in the cultural imagination.

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way through stream bottoms and mucking up ecologically sensitive habitats. In this essay, I follow Noakes in asking, ‘So how can, and do, we [as North Americans] reconcile this love-hate relationship with the strange European (and Asian) immigrant? And how are we to reconcile this ethnocentric view of a species that is one of the most widespread, and most important, aquaculture species in the world?’7 The answer, I propose, can be found in the kitchen. By considering the introduction and naturalization of invasive carp in the dietary and angling culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, we can relearn strategies for coming to terms with new species that disrupt and threaten local ecosystems.

Introducing a Stranger to Early Modern England The irony of the invasive species rhetoric surrounding the common carp is that, in both the British Isles and in North America, their introduction came as a result of what Karen Cardozo and Banu Subramaniam call an ‘invited invasion’.8 The situations were similar: in both the late- nineteenth-century United States and mid-fifteenth-century England, carp were imported and stocked to bolster the market as native populations of wild fish declined.9 The precise origins of carp in England are shadowy, but they were probably brought over from the continent in barrels or tubs by a savvy pisciculturist. They were first introduced no later than 1462, when the Duke of Norfolk stocked his fishponds in East Anglia with them.10 Carp recipes cannot be found in the earliest English language cookery texts, which date to the fourteenth century, but a recipe for a fish stew in Harleian MS 279 (c. 1430) suggests that a cook can ‘take Trowtys, Rochys, Perchys, other Carpys, other alle these y-fere, an make hem clene, & aftere roste hem on a Grydelle’.11 7 Noakes, ‘Carp – Reviled and Revered’, [ii]. 8 Cardozo and Subramaniam, ‘Assembling Asian/American Naturecultures’, 5–6. 9 The ‘emerging crisis in freshwater fish supply’ that began in the High Middle Ages resulted from a number of factors, including overfishing, damming of rivers, and wetland reclamation. For an overview, see Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea, 24–27. To ensure a regular supply in the late medieval and early modern periods, pondfish were regularly transported overland by wagon to new ponds. Currie describes the delivery of five hundred carp by wagon to Titchfield in 1537, ‘The Early History of the Carp’, 103. In his Tour Thro’the Whole Island of Great Britain, Defoe details an elaborate transportation network which brought live fish from the Fenlands to London, a distance of 150 kilometres, 151–52. 10 See Hoffmann, ‘Environmental Change’, 68; Bond, ‘Monastic Fisheries’, 93–94. Phipson catalogues many of the early references to carp in The Animal-Lore of Shakespeare’s Time, 360–61. 11 Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books, 21.

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Carp only appears as secondary ingredient or a supplement to much more readily available fish. It evidently took a few generations for carp to spread throughout the country, but eventually they escaped the confines of fishpond operations to colonize rivers and streams. This spread corresponds with carp’s inclusion in English fishing manuals, beginning with the Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1496. The Treatyse, and its account of carp in England, has a convoluted history. It is often attributed to Dame Juliana Berners because de Worde appended it to the hunting and hawking guide known as The Boke of St Albans, which he had first printed in 1486 and credited to Berners. However, there is no evidence that the fishing manual and the hunting and hawking manuals were written by the same author. Instead, it appears that de Worde brought together two different sources in order to present a more complete sporting guide.12 Moreover, de Worde, or someone else, made many additions to the mid-fifteenth-century manuscript source for the Treatyse, Beinecke Library MS 171, which makes no mention of carp.13 In the 1496 version, however, the Treatyse describes carp as a deyntous fysshe: but there ben but fewe in Englonde. And therfore I wryte the lasse of hym. He is an euyll fysshe to take. For he is soo stronge enarmyd in the mouthe that there maye noo weke harnays holde hym. And as touchynge his baytes I haue but lytll knowledge of it And me were loth to wrtye more than I knowe & haue prouyd But well I wote that the redde worme & the menow ben good baytys for hym at all tymes as I haue herde saye of persones credyble & also founde wryten in bokes of credence.14

New editions of the Treatyse published in the early sixteenth century solidified carp’s reputation as a latecomer to England. Following de Worde’s claim of carp’s rarity in England, subsequent early modern writers would suppose that the fish were first introduced to England during the early Tudor period. 12 For an account of doubting the existence of Berners, much less her association with the Treatyse, see Wright, The Poetics of Angling, 25. McDonald offers the most complete account of the ‘Legend of Dame Juliana’ in the fourth chapter of The Origins of Angling, 67–102. See also Hands, ‘Juliana Berners and The Boke of St. Albans’. 13 All citations from the Treatyse and Beinecke Library MS 171 come from McDonald’s The Origins of Angling. McDonald’s edition includes modernized text, diplomatic transcription, and facsimiles of both de Worde’s 1496 edition and the c.1450 manuscript, along with detailed comparisons of the manuscript and earliest print edition. 14 McDonald, 214.

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All available evidence suggests that carp remained uncommon in the British Isles until the late sixteenth century. A century after the Treatyse, Leonard Mascall’s A Booke of Fishing with Hooke and Line (1590) is still hesitant when it comes to recommending bait for the aspiring angler because carp hath not long beene in this realme. The first bringer of them into England (as I haue béene credibly enformed) was maister Mascoll of Plumsted in Sussex, who also brought first the planting of the Pippin in England: but now many places are replenished with Carpes, both in poundes and riuers, and because not knowing well his chéefe baites in each moneth, I will write the lesse of him, he is a straunge fish in the water, and very straunge to byte.15

By ‘straunge to byte’, Mascall means that the carp is a picky eater, avoiding the traditional baits of the English angler; this echoes the author of the Treatyse who claimed ‘lytyll knowledge’ of their ‘baytes’. Rather than take the worm, the carp prefers nosing through muddy bottoms looking for crustaceans and insects. Autochthon and alien have different tastes which, it would seem, leads to a mutual distrust that continues to bear out in later fishing manuals: James Chetham, in The Angler’s Vade Mecum (1681), says carp ‘are so wary, fearful and subtil, therefore stiled the Fresh Water Fox’.16 The precise date and manner of the introduction of carp to England is less interesting to me than the persistent early modern understanding of carp as an alien—a ‘stranger’ species that provokes different attitudes than native fish. In 1653’s The Compleat Angler, Izaak Walton calls the carp the ‘Queen of Rivers’ and ‘a stately, good, and a very subtle fish’, but also singles it out as a fish that was not at first bred, nor hath been long in England, but is now naturalized […] [D]oubtless, there was a time, about a hundred or a few more years ago, when there were no Carps in England, as may seem to be affirmed by Sir Richard Baker, in whose Chronicle you may f ind these verses: ‘Hops and Turkeys, Carps and Beer, / Came into England all in a year’.17

15 Mascall, A Booke of Fishing, 7–8. Mascall wrongly credits Master Mascall of Plumsted, Sussex (no relation) with the introduction of carp to England. 16 Chetham, The Angler’s Vade Mecum, 87. 17 Walton, The Compleat Angler, 153. Walton follows the error of Richard Baker’s A Chronicle of the Kings of England, 66. As Frederick Eberhardt Zeuner succinctly puts it, in A History of Domestic Animals, ‘The rhyme that “Turkey, carps, hops, pickerel and beer, / came into England

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Walton yokes carp to an increase in global commerce and immigration. By applying it to nonnative species, Walton also innovates a new usage of ‘naturalized’, a word first imported from French in the Tudor period to describe the investment of rights and privileges on foreign-born residents.18 The success of carp’s colonization of England is due to their hardiness according to Walton. Comparing them to native species such as brown trout, Walton concludes that the carp ‘lives longest out of his own proper element: and therefore the report of the Carp’s being brought out of a foreign country into this nation is the more probable’.19 The expansion of carp farming in England was probably motivated by multiple factors. Prior to the twelfth century, the common carp was only farmed in the Danube and Balkan basins along the Black Sea where they were also found in the wild. Climate change during the Medieval Warming Period may have played a role in the spread of carp from southeastern Europe, as wild f ish and f ish that escaped deteriorating ponds spread northward and westward. They were surely aided in this migration by humans who were building extensive f ish farming operations across central Europe.20 Economic development, urbanization, damming, and overfishing in the high medieval period put significant pressure on fish that migrate between river and sea, leading to the development and spread of intensive fishpond operations for abbeys, palaces, and elite households that wished to create a more reliable supply.21 Long established stocks of pike, tench, and bream—the closest cousin to the common carp in Western Europe—were already being farmed in England, but by the beginning of the seventeenth century carp outpaced them all as the most favoured fish among pisciculturists such as Jan Dubravius (1563), John Taverner (1600), and Gervase Markham (1613). Upon discovering their prodigious spawning capability, their rapid growth rate, their resilience to disease, and their all in one year”, by which year is meant 1514, is nonsense throughout. The turkey arrived later, and the other items earlier’, 480–81. 18 ‘naturalize, v.’ OED Online. As far as I can tell, Walton is the first person in English to refer to an introduced species as ‘naturalized’. The OED’s first citation of this usage, ‘Of a plant or animal: to become established so that it lives wild in a place where it is not native’, dates from the nineteenth century. 19 Walton, The Compleat Angler, 153. 20 For thorough accounts of the spread of carp during the Late Middle Ages, see Hoffmann, ‘Environmental Change’, 71–75; Hoffmann, ‘Economic Development and Aquatic Ecosystems’, 668; Balon, ‘The Common Carp’, 13–15; Fagan, Fish on Friday, 138. 21 Currie, ‘The Early History of the Carp’, 97. Hoffmann argues that easier access to the sea in England and Italy staved off demand for carp in those countries until the fifteenth century in ‘Environmental Change’, 75.

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tolerance of subpar environmental conditions and overland transport, the English quickly incorporated carp into their diet.22 According to Brian Fagan, ‘Prolific, fast growing, and abundant, the carp was an ideal farm fish despite its sometimes muddy-flavored flesh’.23 Carp were perfectly suited for expanding fishponds, but flooding and poor maintenance of ponds led to their introduction to English river systems. Rows of fishponds created large areas of warm, stagnant, nutrient-rich water, and when these ponds fell into disrepair they polluted local streams. As Fagan describes, failing fishponds across western Europe had ‘dire environmental and social consequences’: ‘Thousands of domesticated carp escaped from captivity and proliferated in lakes and streams. The now feral newcomers disrupted native fish populations that were already under stress from overfishing, accelerating changes in local habitats’.24 In his account of carp in the American West, Philip David Johnson II writes, ‘There is no freshwater fish stronger and more resilient to human management than carp, but without the aid of humans, without the gargantuan fish-stocking project of the late-nineteenth century, carp could not have spread so effectively across North America’.25 As Jennifer Munroe argues elsewhere in this volume, pace Haraway, foodstuffs are the product of intra-action among humans and nonhuman environments.26 Early modern carp in England prospered due to similar assistance from humans. More than any other freshwater fish in Europe or North America, carp—like pigeons, rats, and raccoons—have continually used human activities to their ecological advantage.

Cooking, Taste, and Naturalization Radiating out from its manmade habitats into the local waterways, the common carp is a hybrid creature along the axes of domestic/foreign and wild/farmed. As a fish that is routinely marked in angling and husbandry literature as ‘lately naturalized’ to English waterways, carp present an interesting case for the history of early modern English cookery. While other animal species introduced to England in this period, such as the Canada goose, persist in being recognized as invasive pests today, the common carp 22 Hoffmann, ‘Environmental Change’, 72. Bream, for comparison, grow half as quickly as the common carp. Currie, ‘The Early History of the Carp’, 103–5. 23 Fagan, Fish on Friday, 134. 24 Fagan, 139. 25 Johnson, ‘Fly-Fishing for Carp’, 195. 26 Munroe, ‘Sympoeisis’, 30-31.

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became integrated into the English diet as a ‘naturalized’ species. Recipe books played a key role here, converting a fish regularly called ‘strange’ in angling manuals into a favourite dish for domestic consumption. However, this change did not come easily. Despite their popularity in pisciculture, carp divided opinion at the early modern table. In his chapter on the qualities of meats in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton declares, ‘Carp is a fish of which I knowe not well what to determine’, citing some authorities who find the flesh of carp ‘muddy’ or ‘slimy watery meat’ and others who deem it ‘excellent wholsome meat’. ‘But’, Burton continues, ‘this controuersie is easily decided in my iudgement by Bruerinus’, who says, ‘The difference ariseth from the difference and site and nature of pooles, sometimes muddy, sometimes sweet, they are in tast as the place is from whence they be taken’.27 Burton’s preference for ‘sweet’ ponds reminds us that the pisciculturist is always preparing carp for the table, cultivating flavours through the very water in which they live. A nineteenth-century fishing manual, however, offers another explanation for flavour variation: according to Charles Snart, carp is thought to be ‘one of the principal dishes at genteel tables’, and yet, ‘it is universally believed that the encomium bestowed upon them by epicures, is more owing to the richness of the sauce and the mode of cooking them, than to any superior flavour of their own’.28 A seventeenth-century piscatorial dialogue, Northern Memoirs, by Richard Franck, agrees with Snart on the the ability of cookery to disguise the fish’s origins: The Carp’s no Courtier, nor a Country Guest; Yet answers both, all often as he’s drest. He loves the silent Deeps, its Ponds and Pools, A Dish for States-men, or a Mess for Fools.29

The explanation for carp’s incorporation into the early modern English diet thus likely lies in a combination of these factors—it is through a collaboration between pisciculture and cookery that the carp became naturalized. The mutual dependence of angling and cookery is displayed in Walton’s Compleat Angler. Walton’s affable and peaceable anglers are often said to 27 Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 90. The exception to this culinary ambiguity seems to be the ‘tongue’ of the carp which is universally described as a ‘choice and costly meat’, as Walton puts it in The Compleat Angler, 156–57. 28 Snart, Practical Observations on Angling, 38–39. 29 Franck, Northern Memoirs, 266.

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‘know how to use nature, to live in intimacy and harmony with its terms, to honor the reciprocity between use and needs in a way that sharply contrasts with landholding and urban power’.30 This claim of harmonious living is on view when Walton’s Piscator references a fish in Aelian’s Book of Living Creatures: the ‘Adonis’ or ‘Darling of the Sea’ is ‘so called because it is a loving and innocent fish, a fish that hurts nothing that hath life, and is at peace with all the numerous inhabitants of that vast watery element: and truly I think most Anglers are so disposed to most of mankind’.31 Piscator goes on to declare, ‘I am not of a cruel nature,—I love to kill nothing but fish’, a dizzying moment of exceptionalism that should remind the contemporary reader of the exemption of fish from protections such as the Animal Welfare Act and the Humane Slaughter Act.32 As Wright points out, Walton delimits gender roles with ‘clear expectations as to who catches and who cooks’. But in this, Walton departs from his sources: ‘In Thomas Barker’s Art of Angling, a text to which Piscator sometimes refers, braggery about riverside success is matched with claims of culinary prowess’.33 While it is imperative that the angler must provide fish that are fresh, and therefore local, it is still incumbent upon the cook to transform fish and make them fit for English appetites. There is no escaping the imbrication of angling, cookery, and violence. Even if Walton abhors killing, ‘animal slaughter and abuse was a recurring aspect of material practice’.34 Michelle DiMeo and Rebecca Laroche, Patricia Fumerton, David B. Goldstein, and Wendy Wall have all shown how the violent business of food preparation was frequently outsourced to housewives and servants.35 As DiMeo and Laroche put it, when reading early modern recipes that describe methods of slaughter, ‘we cringe, imagining a little scene of horrors’.36 Carp are no exception; violent methods of slaughter purge the flesh of its muddy flavour. Importantly, the violence of early modern recipes for carp differs from those for bream and other pondfish to a significant degree. While certainly it would not be uncommon to gut or boil any fish alive, it is noteworthy that these instructions 30 Zwicker, Lines of Authority, 72–73. 31 Walton, The Compleat Angler, 33. 32 Walton, 52. On f ish slaughter, see Goldfarb, ‘The Right Way to Kill a Fish’; United States Department of Agriculture, ‘Animal Welfare Act’; United States Department of Agriculture, ‘Humane Handling’. 33 Wright, The Poetics of Angling, 144. 34 DiMeo and Laroche, ‘On Elizabeth Isham’s “Oil of Swallows”’, 93. 35 Fumerton, ‘A New New Historicism’; Goldstein, ‘Woolley’s Mouse’; Wall, Recipes for Thought. 36 DiMeo and Laroche, ‘On Elizabeth Isham’s “Oil of Swallows”’, 96.

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show up with much greater frequency in carp recipes. Moreover, carp recipes that recommend scaling and salting the fish while alive stand out in comparison to other pondfish. The carp’s reputation as a dirty fish that needs to be cleaned of impurities persists to the present day. The website Reel Game advises, There is one secret to getting a carp to taste as it should. ALWAYS put a carp straight on ice or in a mix of ice and water as fast as possible after a catch. This will limit the blood flow into the rib meat, the meat we want, and preserve the flavor. Carp do have a bloodline which should not be a portion of the meat we intend to cook. Doing so can introduce that bitter flavor of mud. A second rule to getting a carp to taste as it should is to make sure you take it from the cleanest water possible. Because carp rely so much on vegetation for food, they are susceptible to pollution. This will reflect in their meat quality.37

According to modern day anglers, failure to prepare the carp properly will result in an unctuous dish that reflects its filthy origins. To wit: Big River Magazine ran an article in 1993 titled ‘Carp – Queen of Rivers or Pig with Fins?’38 Perhaps this is why the cookbook of Lettis Vesey (c. 1725) instructs the cook to kill the fish like a hog: ‘Stick your Carpes as you do a Pigg Saive all the Blood you Can seale and Take out the Refage’.39 The seventeenth century popularized several violent methods for preparing carp, emphasizing strategies that would preserve the taste of local ‘sweet’ waters while removing foreign earthy matter from the body. By cleansing the fish of mud and cooking the blood in a precise manner, the cook seeks to naturalize the flavour of the fish. Anne Carr’s (1674) recipe for dressing a carp, attributed to Lady Anne Waller, calls for scaling ‘him whils’t he is alive, and Cut him AThwart the taile upon the side to make the blood come out save the blood and put it and the liver into your pan’. 40 The Cookbook of Constance Hall (1672) instructs the cook to ‘Take a Live Carpe Gut and scale it give it a cut in the neck Lett it bleed well’, or else ‘Take a Carpe Alive scower him well with salt then scale him or not as you thinke f itt then open him power into his belley A little vinegar and rub him within with 37 ‘Are Carp Good to Eat?’, n. p. 38 Eyden, ‘Carp – Queen of the Rivers or Pig with Fins?’ 39 Vesey, Cookery Book, fol. 133r. 40 Carr, Choyce Receits, fol. 28r.

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salt which will make him bleed freely’. 41 An even more surgical approach is recommended for both carp and pike in Folger MS V.a.19; according to this anonymous seventeenth-century manuscript, one should ‘Take a liue Carpe; slit a hole in belly and take out onely his gaule [gall bladder] then boile him’. 42 Elizabeth Fowler’s (1684) recipe for baked carp ‘to be eaten hott’ charges the cook to take ‘a carp & [s]call it aliue & scrap of the slime draw it and take away the gall & guts scoch it and season it with nutmeg peper & salt slitly’. 43 Ann Smith (1698) calls for ‘Carpes quick Lett them bleed & save itt scale them’, or for ‘Carpes a Live open the Bellies & take out all thatt is in them the milt or spawn you must Reserve to boyle with them’. 44 Lady Anne Morton (1693) says that the ‘best way to stew carps’ is to ‘Stabb them in the taile and let them bleed in halfe a spoonful of elder vinegar keeping the blood and uinegar stird to keep it from gelleying’. An accompanying recipe for sauce says to ‘let your carps be put into the kettle aliue with more boyling water then will couer them, keep them boyling till anough’. 45 The use of carp blood in the sauce stands out as unusual among freshwater fish recipes from the period.46 Contemporary chefs prize pig and cow’s blood ‘for both pleasure and efficiency. It’s a superb thickener, provided it hasn’t been frozen and congealed’. 47 But the quality of blood will also reflect the quality of the animal’s diet. Reincorporating carp blood into a wine sauce adds rich flavour, as long as it doesn’t reincorporate impurities. It seems that the use of carp blood was a way of showing off the quality of an estate’s fishponds. It also helps to explain why the fish must be as fresh as possible. If the carp’s blood will not do because it is not fresh, the cook must find an alternative. According to the recipe book of Bridget Lane (1732), ‘if they [carp] are dead before you haue them kill a Chicken and keep the blood’. 48 Prominent printed cookeries contain similar instructions for preparing carp: kill and clean them at the last possible second before they go into the pot. The Compleat Cook (1694), a collaboration between several cooks identified only by their initials, contains twenty-two pages of fish recipes, 41 Hall, Cookbook, fols. 16r, 15r. 42 Cookbook, 8. 43 Fowler, Cookbook, fol. 17v. 44 Smith, Cookbook, fols. 19r, 66r. 45 Morton, The Ladey Mortons Booke, fol. 8. 46 Although cooking with blood is most associated with carp in both print and manuscript receipt books, occasional recipes recommend similar preparations for bream. 47 Bilow, ‘Why Chefs are (Finally) Cooking with Blood’, n. p. 48 Lane, Cookery, fol. 67r.

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but only the carp dishes call specifically for a living fish, which suggests that while freshness is an important factor for all fish it is virtually essential for carp. 49 In other books, one may find recipes for preparing living flounder, pike, and, of course, lobster, but such stipulations are much more common with carp. Joseph Cooper’s The Art of Cookery Refin’d (1654), calls for a carp that is brought to the kitchen and scaled alive.50 The method for boiling ‘Carps an honourable way’ in William Rabisha’s The Whole Body of Cookery (1661) requires ‘two live carp, or as many as you intend to boyl’; the cook must then ‘knock them on the head, open them in the bellies and draw them clean’.51 Hannah Woolley’s Accomplish’d Ladies Delight (1686) recommends the same method for gutting carp as Rabisha.52 What is most significant in these print and manuscript recipes is not necessarily the degree of violence—after all, many animals are subjected to extraordinary brutality in early modern cookery—but their emphasis on transforming carp from a muddy-tasting fish to something rich and savoury. Rather than toss the blood aside, it is combined with wine—usually claret—and warm spices, and cooked. In these recipes we see how ‘the early modern kitchen was about material transformation: of raw into cooked, of the bloody into the beautiful, ingredients into dishes, transformation and transmutations’.53 While American ecologists worry about a ‘growing army’ of invasive species such as Asian carp ‘overrunning’ the United States and threatening the country’s ‘biological heritage’, these seventeenth-century recipes offer alternative strategies for living and eating in the Anthropocene: naturalizing newcomers rather than yearning for the unreality of prelapsarian Nature before globalization.54 An environmentalism centred solely on the preservation of the autochthon is unsustainable given the pace of climate change. Instead of clinging to the ‘national fantasy’ of utopian purity, we must adopt more resilient ecological practices and models of ecological citizenship.55 49 The Compleat Cook, 1, 52–53. 50 Cooper, The Art of Cookery Refin’d, 28–29, 111–13. 51 Rabisha, The Whole Body of Cookery, 190. 52 Woolley, The Accomplish’d Ladies Delight, 142–43. 53 Pennell, The Birth of the English Kitchen, 81. 54 The ecologists Don Schmitz and Daniel Simberloff are thus quoted in Coates, Animal Perceptions, 2–3. 55 I am drawing on Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy, 4–5. See also Mentz’s critique of the environmentalist nostalgia for ‘an orderly past or once-sustainable golden age’ which ‘falsif[ies] lived historical experience’ in ‘After Sustainability’, 588.

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The ecologist’s definition of invasive species—a nonnative species that prospers and spreads beyond human care and control—too kindly exempts humans from the same charges levied against the Chinese mitten crab, zebra mussel, Burmese python, kudzu, and Asian carp. I am reminded of an article about ‘locavore hunter’ Jackson Landers who was hired to cull invasive Canada geese because they ate too many grapes at a Virginian winery. It was the geese who were deemed invasive and not the cabernet sauvignon grapes nor their cultivators despite the much more pronounced impact of the latter on North American ecosystems.56 Few anglers in England now remember that carp were not always native to its ponds and rivers. Although they are still popular sport, carp were supplanted in culinary popularity as fresh oceanfish such as cod, haddock, and tuna became more widely available thanks to refrigeration and the railroads. The naturalization of carp in early modern England demonstrates that with increased globalization the distinctions between autochthon and alien grow blurrier. Today, pisciculturists in England seek to renovate the culinary reputation of carp by simultaneously promoting them as a sustainable alternative to overfished imports such as cod and haddock, a delicacy favored by immigrants from eastern Europe, and as a quintessential British dish.57 Now, it seems, there is no such thing as an English fish, nor an American fish, nor an Asian fish; all ecosystems are now what Donna Haraway calls ‘naturecultures’.58 Within a natureculture, what makes a species ‘invasive’ from an anthropocentric point of view—say, geese on a Virginia winery or in New York City airspace—is their lack of integration within local cultural practices.59 Naturalizing the carp in England could not be accomplished solely through the idyllic pastoralism of Walton’s primrose banks; it required the cook to get her hands dirty, gutting and cleaning fresh fish, reincorporating blood and milt in a stew, and simmering over a low fire. Through what Michael Pollan calls the ‘symbolic power of the pot—to gather together, to harmonize’—recipe books turned the common carp from stranger to favoured dish.60 56 Carlson, ‘New York Solves its Canada Goose Problem’. On the relationship between settler colonialism and emergent foodways, see also Edith Snook, ‘“A New Source of Happiness to Man”’, and Julie A. Fisher, ‘Teâgun kuttiemaûnch: What Food Shall I Prepare for You?’, in this volume. 57 Morris, ‘The New Face of Fish Suppers?’ 58 Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 3, original emphasis. 59 Cardozo and Subramaniam note that kudzu is seen as invasive in North America, because, ‘Unlike in Japan, where kudzu is used for food and medicinal purposes, kudzu has never been assimilated into U.S. cultural practices’. See ‘Assembling Asian/American Naturecultures’, 10–11. 60 Pollan, Cooked, 158.

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Works Cited ‘Are Carp Good to Eat?’ Reel Game. https://reelgame.com/are-carp-good-to-eat/. Baker, Richard. A Chronicle of the Kings of England. London, 1643. Balon, Eugene. ‘The Common Carp, Cyprinus carpio: Its Wild Origin, Domestication in Aquaculture, and Selection as Colored Nishikigoi’. Guelph Ichthyology Reviews 3 (1995): 1–55. Berlant, Lauren. The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Bilow, Rochelle. ‘Why Chefs are (Finally) Cooking with Blood’. Bon Appétit, February 12, 2015. http://bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/trends-news/article/ restaurants-chefs-blood. Bond, C.J. ‘Monastic Fisheries’. In Medieval Fish, Fisheries, and Fishponds in England, edited by Michael Aston, 67–112. London: BAR British Series, 1988. Brayton, Dan. ‘Shakespeare’s Fishponds: Matter, Metaphor, and Market’. In The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Animals, edited by Karen Raber and Holly Dugan, 21–33. New York: Routledge, 2021. Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Oxford, 1621. Cardozo, Karen and Banu Subramaniam. ‘Assembling Asian/American Naturecultures: Orientalism and Invited Invasions’. Journal of Asian American Studies 16, no. 1 (2013): 1–23. Carlson, Kathryn Blaze. ‘New York Solves its Canada Goose Problem by Feeding Them to Pennsylvania’s Poor’. National Post, June 18, 2011. https://nationalpost. com/news/new-york-solves-its-canada-goose-problem-by-feeding-them-topennsylvanias-poor. Carr, Anne. Choyce Receits Collected out of the Book of Receits, of the Lady Vere Wilkinson, 1674, Folger MS V.a.612. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Chetham, James. The Angler’s Vade Mecum. London, 1681. Coates, Peter. Animal Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. The Compleat Cook, or the Whole Art of Cookery…. By T.P, J.P., R.C., N.B., And Several Other Approved Cooks. London, 1694. Cookbook, seventeenth century, Folger MS V.a.19. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Cooper, Joseph. The Art of Cookery Refin’d and Augmented. London, 1654. Currie, Christopher K. ‘The Early History of the Carp and Its Economic Significance in England’. The Agricultural History Review 39, no. 2 (1991): 97–107. Defoe, Daniel. A Tour Thro’the Whole Island of Great Britain. Vol. 2, London, 1725. DiMeo, Michelle and Rebecca Laroche. ‘On Elizabeth Isham’s “Oil of Swallows”: Animal Slaughter and Early Modern Women’s Medical Recipes’. In Ecofeminist

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Approaches to Early Modernity, edited by Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche, 87–104. New York: Palgrave, 2011. Eyden, Pamela. ‘Carp – Queen of the Rivers or Pig with Fins?’ Big River Magazine, November 1993. https://www.bigrivermagazine.com/br.story.a.html. Fagan, Brian. Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World. New York: Basic Books, 2006. Fisher, Julie A. ‘“Teâgun kuttiemaûnch: What Food Shall I Prepare for You?”: Exchanges in Early New England Kitchens’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 243-63. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Fowler, Elizabeth. Cookbook of Elizabeth Fowler, 1684, Folger MS V.a.468. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Franck, Richard. Northern Memoirs. London, 1694. Fumerton, Patricia. ‘A New New Historicism’. In Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, edited by Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt, 1–17. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Goldfarb, Ben. ‘The Right Way to Kill a Fish’. The Atlantic, March 26, 2019. https:// www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/commercial-fishing-humanefish-pain/585688/. Goldstein, David B. ‘Woolley’s Mouse: Early Modern Recipe Books and Uses of Nature’. In Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity, edited by Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche, 105–27. New York: Palgrave, 2011. Hall, Constance. Cookbook of Constance Hall, 1672, Folger MS V.a.20. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Hands, Rachel. ‘Juliana Berners and The Boke of St. Albans’. The Review of English Studies 18, no. 72 (1967): 373–86. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Hoffmann, Richard C. ‘Economic Development and Aquatic Ecosystems in Medieval Europe’. The American Historical Review 101, no. 3 (1996): 631–69. Hoffmann, Richard C. ‘Environmental Change and the Culture of Common Carp in Medieval Europe’. Guelph Ichthyology Reviews 3 (1995): 57–85. Johnson, Philip David II. ‘Fly-Fishing for Carp as a Deeper Aesthetics’. In Trash Animals: How We Live with Nature’s Filthy, Feral, Invasive, and Unwanted Species, edited by Kelsi Nagy and Philip David Johnson II, 182–98. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Lane, Bridget. Cookery and Medical Remedy Book, 1732, William Andrews Clark MS 2015.002. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles. Mascall, Leonard. A Booke of Fishing with Hooke & Line. London, 1590.

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Vesey, Lettis. Cookery Book of Lettis Vesey, c. 1725, Folger MS W.b.456. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Wall, Wendy. Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Walton, Izaak and Charles Cotton. The Compleat Angler, or, The Contemplative Man’s Recreation. New York: Modern Library, 2004. Woolley, Hannah. The Accomplish’d Ladies Delight. London, 1686. Wright, Myra E. The Poetics of Angling in Early Modern England. New York: Routledge, 2019. Zeuner, Frederick Eberhardt. A History of Domesticated Animals. London: Hutchinson, 1963. Zwicker, Steven N. Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.

About the Author Rob Wakeman is Assistant Professor of English at Mount Saint Mary College where he directs first-year composition and teaches early British literatures. His work appears in Exemplaria, Arthuriana, and several edited collections.

Section 3 Royalist Cookery

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How to Make a Bisk: The Restoration Cookbook as National Restorative David B. Goldstein1

Abstract Scholars credit Robert May and William Rabisha with a central role in the development of seventeenth-century English courtly cuisine. Focusing on a recipe common to both of them—the ‘bisque’ or ‘bisk’—I argue that in the hands of these authors, this ‘grand boyled meat’ ushered in a new approach to English cuisine. Working within the framework of Restoration hospitality, Rabisha and May attempt to transform society by harmonizing foreign influences in order to expand the culinary, religious, and political boundaries of Englishness. The bisk symbolizes a table at which all England shares in a national commensality, even as aspects of that commensality remain fiercely debated. Keywords: tolerance, hospitality, Restoration, assimilation, courtly cookery, commensality

‘How to Make a Bisk’ opens the seventh chapter, ‘Which teacheth to make all manner of hot boyled meats of flesh’, of William Rabisha’s The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected (1661). The bisk forms the meat of my argument here in two senses: first, because in the hands of Rabisha and his contemporary, Robert May, this ‘grand boyled meat’ ushered in a new approach to English cuisine. Second, the bisk encapsulates the grand project of incorporation for which these authors strive. Working in the first years of the Restoration, Rabisha and May attempted to transform English society by means of 1 The list of people and institutions whose support has been invaluable to the development of this essay and ideas is long and humbling. Thanks in particular to Andy Crow, Katie Kadue, Marissa Nicosia, and Molly Taylor-Poleskey—as well as the editors of this present volume, Madeline Bassnett and Hillary Nunn, for the conversations, ideas, and encouragements.

Bassnett, M. and Hillary M. Nunn (eds.), In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463721646_ch07

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two principles, both abstracted from the experiential practice of cookery, especially recipes such as the bisk: hospitality and assimilation. These principles overlap and often work in tandem, but sometimes also operate in productive tension with each other, contrasting two subtly different views—contained paradoxically, as I will show, within the same recipes and cookbooks—of how to address foreign influences upon English society. I trace the development of this project along culinary, religious, and political lines, showing that both Rabisha and May employ this approach to cookery and cookery writing in the interest of inculcating a culinary tolerance that transcends, in limited but nevertheless important ways, religious, national, and social divisions inherited from the Interregnum, and which builds upon the analogy of how the physical body itself encounters, plays host to, and absorbs the foreign organisms that form its food. Scholars credit May and Rabisha with a central role in the development of seventeenth-century English cuisine, giving special emphasis to May as the primum mobile of a new kind of cookery book in England, which Stephen Mennell calls ‘the “courtly” genre’.2 These books, influenced by an influx of translations of new French cookbooks as well as by new developments in Spanish and Italian cuisine, produced a sort of cookery writing that differed both in source and audience from its predecessors and from contemporaries such as Hannah Woolley and other writers of middle-class-oriented cookery. Marked by the use of expensive ingredients, elaborate preparations, and increased reliance on sauces, the courtly genre, though it ultimately gave ground to the simpler style known (and since derided) as the ‘plain fare’ of English cooking, fit well with the new ostentatiousness of Charles II’s court.3 If conspicuous consumption was à la mode in the 1660s, here was the cooking best suited to it. Of the two, May is the better known figure. His book, The Accomplisht Cook, or the Art and Mystery of Cookery, was published in 1660, and reprinted five times by 1685, after which it was not issued again until 2000. The book is often considered to be the ‘domestic prototype of the modern cookery book’—the first, that is, to arrange recipes in sections accompanied by illustrative woodcuts while eliminating medical receipts. 4 Its 1,300 recipes provide ‘the most comprehensive panorama of cookery in upper-class 2 Mennell, All Manners of Food, 89; Lehmann, British Housewife, Part 1. 3 Pullar, Consuming Passions, 129–32. 4 Davidson, ‘Foreword’, in May, Accomplisht, 10. This facsimile of the 1685 text contains an invaluable introduction to the cookbook by Marcus Bell. All references to the Accomplisht Cook are taken from this edition.

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English households of its time’.5 May’s influence continues to be felt in attenuated fashion among food writers: Elizabeth David, the avatar of twentieth-century British cuisine, called The Accomplisht Cook ‘a most beautiful piece of cookery literature’,6 and May’s recipes continue to appear in contemporary anthologies of food writing.7 William Rabisha’s The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected appeared in the year following The Accomplisht Cook and has usually been considered a lesser version of May’s work (though it was popular enough to go through three more editions, the last in 1682).8 Rabisha’s subordinate status may or may not be justified from a culinary perspective, but from a writerly one, Rabisha—whose name also appears as the author of a 1649 religious tract entitled Adam Unvailed—is distinctive and fascinating, and is the focus of my argument here.9 May’s and Rabisha’s books, along with The Queen’s Closet Opened and many other recipe books and manuals of the 1650s and 1660s, are decidedly royalist.10 As Madeline Bassnett has argued, royalist cookbooks of the 1650s ‘were particularly careful to unite the shared appreciation of ingestion, hospitality, and the aesthetic pleasures of the table with civility and the good governance of the national household—by the Stuart monarchy’.11 By the 1660s, however, the monarchy had been restored, and the work of these manuals turned to modifying the habits of both government and polity in less dramatic ways.12 In what follows I consider the ways in which May’s and Rabisha’s cookbooks make a subtle but, I argue, unmistakable contribution to discussions about inclusion and tolerance in Restoration England.13 In making this suggestion, I make a distinction between toleration—the historical term for the acceptance 5 Davidson, 10. 6 Qtd. in Davidson, 9. 7 See, e.g., Kurlansky, Choice Cuts, 184–85. 8 A facsimile edition of the 1682 edition of The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected was published, again by Prospect Books, in 2003. I, however, use the original 1661 edition, which is available via Early English Books Online in full text and is generally identical to the 1682 edition. 9 On the tract, see Goldstein, ‘Recipes for Authorship’, 144–52. 10 Appelbaum, Aguecheek, 282; Bassnett, ‘Restoring’; Knoppers, ‘Opening’; Mennell, All Manners of Food, 89–93. 11 Bassnett, 3. 12 See Andy Crow’s essay in this volume, ‘“A Little Winter Savory, A Little Time”’, for an analysis of how another recipe book published in the early days of the Restoration, The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth Cromwell, participates in the process of establishing a new order while reordering past temporalities. 13 See also Melissa Schultheis’s essay in this volume, ‘A Culinary Embassy’, which makes a somewhat cognate claim for a ‘cosmopolitan kitchen practice’ (209) in another royalist writer, Ann, Lady Fanshawe.

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of opposing religious viewpoints in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England—and tolerance, which I take broadly to refer to an open-minded response to various kinds of difference.14 In relation to the former, scholars have noted that May’s book displays affinities with Catholic culinary and religious practice, as I discuss below; therefore it seems reasonable to place their books in the context of the toleration for Catholics that Charles II urged throughout his reign, often in the face of stiff parliamentary opposition.15 It is important to remember that, in Alexandra Walsham’s words, ‘Early modern toleration was […] not an ideal or a virtue. […] it was something one conceded grudgingly, reluctantly, against one’s better judgement, and with a considerable degree of moral discomfort’.16 It was not equivalent to religious liberty, or even openness to change, but rather, as Herbert Butterfield puts it, ‘a last resort for those who often still hated one another, but found it impossible to go on fighting any more’.17 My interest in the following pages, however, mainly concerns the latter—the broader realm of tolerance. I argue that both writers, and especially Rabisha, employ copia—the rhetorical technique most closely associated with Erasmus and the sixteenth-century Ciceronian debates—as both a rhetorical and a culinary strategy to urge a broader, more syncretic understanding not just of late-seventeenth-century English cookery, but of the English polity more generally.18 This integrationist approach to cuisine oscillates between two poles: on the one hand, a kind of national hospitality that opens the nation to foreign influences without endangering the host’s integrity, and on the other, an assimilationist tendency that converts foreign influences and ingredients into English ones. While these ways of addressing the foreign other differ and may appear contrastive, they often appear alongside each other in the second half of the seventeenth century, and ultimately share a common goal. In her examination of seventeenth-century translators’ prefaces, for example, Marie-Alice Belle argues, ‘While translation certainly provided a sure means by which to integrate (or… “domesticate”) foreign texts within a nascent literary canon, fashioning translated texts as guests allowed for subtle positioning on the part of translators, even as they sought to introduce their foreign-born productions

14 On toleration debates in the English Restoration, see especially Coffey, Persecution; Walsham, Charitable Hatred; Goldie, ‘Theory’. 15 Walsham, 266. 16 Walsham, ‘Cultures’, 115–16. 17 Butterfield, ‘Toleration in Early Modern Times’, 573. 18 Erasmus, De Copia/De Ratione Studii; Erasmus, Ciceronianus/Notes/Indexes; Cave, Cornucopian Text.

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to English patrons and readerships’.19 For Bassnett, ‘while recipes can and do indicate the desire to assimilate, appropriate, and colonize, they also can inscribe early modern Englishwomen and men as engaging with a fluidly multicultural world and expressing an active and respectful curiosity about things strange’.20 The notion of hospitality itself encapsulates this problematic: as Emile Benveniste has famously shown, the term encapsulates both generosity and risk, both vulnerability and the urge to control.21 To host someone is to welcome them into the host’s domain, but that welcome brings forces that may transform that very domain. May and Rabisha’s approach mixes a desire for hospitality with a sort of rearguard concern to assimilate and manage. The language of digestion and integration that they continually employ thus allows them to engage in Bassnett’s ‘curiosity about things strange’ while maintaining English hegemony over the continental culinary practice within its bounds. The hoped-for result, I will argue, is an expansion of the boundaries of English identity through a hospitable encounter with the foreign. While this may seem like a vision of incompatibles, it is in fact true to the paradox that lies at the etymological heart of hospitality. As Tracy McNulty argues, ‘When we put together these two roots—hostis and potis—we find that the institution of hospitality implies the union of two somewhat contradictory notions: a social or legal relationship defined by reciprocity and exchange, and despotic power, mastery, and personal identity’.22 At the intersection of exchange and identity lies Restoration cookery. The very title of Rabisha’s cookbook implies a tolerant and integrationist approach to his subject: The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected, Taught, and Fully Manifested, Methodically, Artificially, and According to the Best Tradition of the English, French, Italian, Dutch, &c. or, A Sympathy of All Varieties in Natural Compounds in that Mysterie. The title activates a relationship between the instruction of a recipe and the material reality of a body—to be ‘taught’ is to be ‘fully manifested’ in the physical world. Further, the book assimilates into that body of English cookery the national cuisines that have formed it, cuisines that are conspicuously both Catholic (French and Italian) and Protestant (Dutch). The use of these three specific nationalities subtly suggests tolerationist stances toward Catholics and Dissenters, both of whom were fiercely at issue in the context of 1660s Anglicanism.23 The 19 Belle, ‘Domestication’, 210–11. 20 Bassnett, ‘Language’, 4. See also Coldiron, Printers. 21 Benveniste, Indo-European, 71–83. 22 McNulty, The Hostess, xi. 23 Grell, ‘Introduction’, 7–8.

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almost mystical last phrase, which connects Rabisha to the tradition of books of secrets out of which the recipe genre had largely emerged, emphasizes the synthetic quality of the relationships the cookbook establishes. The ‘sympathy’ of ‘natural compounds’ denotes a happy fusion of disparate elements, an incorporation of widely dispersed material and rhetorical ingredients into a newly composite whole. The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected aims to break down (‘dissect’) cookery, and to uncover its sources (‘fully manifested […] according to the best tradition’), only to unite it again in a new harmony. It is the rhetorical trope of digestio, the gathering of many sources into a seamless whole, applied to the realm of cookery.24 Rabisha establishes a reciprocal relationship between digestive rhetoric and a digestive style of cooking. He and May share a commitment to the integration of these elements, and use that integration to demonstrate on all levels of their cookbooks the process by which continental cuisine and continental forms of writing can contribute to a newly restored English identity.

Continental Insinuations Neither May nor Rabisha makes any secret of a close affinity with French, and more generally with continental, cuisine. May spent five years of his apprenticeship in France, while Rabisha served ‘as Master Cook […] before and since the wars began, both in this my Native Countrey, and with Embassadors and other Nobles in certain forraign patts [sic]’, and claims to have been ‘absent in the country’ when the book was being prepared for the printer.25 Yet May belittles the French ‘Insinuations’ that have bewitcht some of the Gallants of our Nation with Epigram Dishes, smoakt rather than drest, so strangely to captivate the Gusto, their Mushroom’d Experiences for Sauce rather than Diet, for the generality howsoever called A-la-mode, not worthy of being taken notice on.26

This burst of apparent xenophobia criticizes the adoption of French style without the true absorption of French substance. ‘Epigram dishes’, a fad mentioned (but neither condemned nor identified with France) as early 24 On digestio see Jeanneret, Feast, 136; Cave, Cornucopian Text, 45; Goldstein, ‘Recipes for Authorship’, 8–9. 25 Rabisha, Whole Body, A3r, A5v. 26 May, Accomplisht, A4r.

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as George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589), were dishes made of marzipan or sugar paste with witty little poems printed on them.27 The epitome of courtly frivolity, they also provided a convenient symbol of the word made food, the literal consumption of text. The distinction between sauce and diet is likewise complex: sauce suggests mere dressing, while diet connotes the reasons behind one’s eating practices. Yet the transformation of sauces was not just a cosmetic change, but one of the major innovations of seventeenth-century French cooking. The first notable courtly French cookbook to be translated into English, La Varenne’s Le Cuisinier François (1651, published in 1653 in London as The French Cook), was the first cookbook in either France or England to rely upon the use of flour to thicken sauces.28 Although La Varenne constituted May’s single most significant source, both May and Rabisha rejected the flour liaison, preferring instead to thicken their sauces using older techniques such as butter emulsions and beaten egg yolks. Thus to take French sauce over French diet is to do the opposite of what May’s cookbook endeavours, both literally and figuratively. May suggests in this attack on French ‘A-la-mode’ that it is not French influence per se but the informed understanding of it—how or what one assimilates—that makes the difference between good and bad influences. John Town’s dedicatory poem to May’s book explains the right way of going about this absorption of foreign and manifold influences: He is so universal, he’l not miss, The Pudding, nor Bolonian Sausages. Italian, Spaniard, French, he all out-goes, Refines their Kickshaws, and their Olio’s.29

‘Kickshaws’, a corruption of the French quelque chose, means a fancy dish, usually and contemptuously of French provenance, and by extension any frivolous ‘something’. The olio was a great soup of Iberian origin, closely related to the French bisk,30 which during the mid-seventeenth century came to stand metaphorically for ‘any mixture of heterogeneous things or elements; a hodgepodge, farrago, medley’.31 Pudding and ‘Bolonian 27 Puttenham, Arte, 72. 28 Marcoux, ‘Thickening’; see also Wilson, ‘The French Connection: Part 2’, 13–14. 29 May, Accomplisht, B1v. 30 Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain, 101. 31 The term ‘hodgepodge’ itself referred to a dish much like a bisk, likely descended from the term ‘hotchpotch’. Both terms acquired the broad derogatory meaning of any jumble of disparate elements. See ‘hodge-podge, n.’, OED Online.

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Sausages’ are foods of mainland Europe, and thus May is being lauded for including and welcoming them in his sweeping gesture of culinary hospitality. But kickshaws and olios require a more focused intervention, since the hospitality extended to them must contend with a fear of continental, and specifically Catholic, encroachment. The poet walks a fine line between the vulnerability of hospitable welcome and the protective stance of assimilation. To ‘out-go’ and ‘refine’ continental Catholic cooks is to supersede them by transforming them into good trustworthy English fare. But the poem declines to erase the book’s continental and Catholic influences and origins. The paradoxical interaction between hospitality and assimilation is here made clear: in order to welcome the culinary other, May’s first task is to neutralize the apparent risk that the other presents to the self. The mastery of the host—the maintenance of a singular and protected identity—becomes the rhetorical prerequisite for the act of welcoming. Is this doubled politics of cultural encounter to be interpreted negatively, as ultimately protectionist or xenophobic, or positively, as an act of curiosity and vulnerability? I would suggest that May and Rabisha’s rhetorical and culinary artistry makes possible a ‘both/and’ approach, in which hospitality and assimilation each make the other possible, both as rhetoric and as cookery.

The Copious Bisk Rabisha’s recipe ‘How to Make a Bisk’ begins with a similar meta-recipe, an instruction for how a good Englishman should go about ingesting foreign matter: There is a grand boyled meat, called a Bisk, & it is much mended by the English, of what was practised by the French, according to their Original, because an English man never thinks a thing well, nor rich enough, but usually doth augment according to reason, and disalloweth of unnatural compositions.32

The threats of mere frippery and ornament on one hand, and the fear of hodgepodge on the other, describe precisely the ‘unnatural compositions’ that threaten to damage or corrupt the English diet, and through it the

32 Rabisha, Whole Body, 58.

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English soul.33 These threats were interchangeably rhetorical and culinary. Puttenham decried the use of soriasmus, or ‘the mingle mangle’, which is the importation of ‘some Italian word, or French, or Spanish, or Dutch, or Scottish, not for the nonce or for any purpose (which were in part excusable) but ignorantly and affectedly’.34 Sir Thomas Mayerne, Queen Henrietta Maria’s physician, wrote in a white heat of double entendre, ‘I am no fit Cooke to dresse an Epistle, and to set it forth in the Kickshaw Language, which these Chameleon Times love to feed on’.35 May and Rabisha respond to the bisk not by simply embracing or rejecting it, but by welcoming it into English cookery while reserving the right to modify the terms of its admission. Rather than simply modifying a dish to please local palates, these authors employ a conscious and paradoxical rhetorical strategy that strives to achieve a balance between the foreign and the domestic. Frenchness lives in an English context, according to English rules, while resisting the effacement of its continental character. The dry wit of Rabisha’s observation that ‘an English man never thinks a thing well, nor rich enough’ masks a serious point which emerges in the next clause. To ‘disallow of unnatural compositions’ is to imagine the possibility of unified or harmonized compounds, although the unification takes place according to English specifications. Yet embedded in these terms is another paradox: the richness that Rabisha’s Englishman desires seems at odds with the golden mean suggested by ‘reason’ and ‘natural compounds’. To ‘augment according to reason’ is a noble goal, both in the sciences (which build on earlier experiments) and in the humanities (e.g. Milton’s augmentation of scripture with myth in Paradise Lost). But if French food needs mending, how does richness mend it without slipping into decadence? The English palate was frequently attacked for its addiction to pleasure and variety: Fynes Moryson, in his 1617 Itinerary, complains that ‘in such plenty and variety of meates [to furnish English tables], everie man cannot use moderation’.36 In 1630, Sir William Vaughan dourly urged his readers to apprehend the difference betwixt a Table furnished with a variety of meates, whose nature in digestion are contrary the one to th’other, and betwixt that simple Cheere, which contented our Saviour here on Earth 33 Distrust of foreign food also appears frequently in English dietaries of the period; see Albala, Eating Right, esp. 227–31. 34 Puttenham, Arte, 259. 35 Qtd. in Hunter, ‘Cookery Books’, 31. 36 Qtd. in Scodel, Excess, 88; see also Albala, Eating Right, 111–12.

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with his Disciples. By the former spring all our sickness. By this latter of Sobriety we stint Concupiscence.37

How do May and Rabisha create rhetorical and culinary spaces for variety that tend toward harmony rather than conflict? A rhetorical mode already existed to counterpose the critique of France associated with the plain style of English puritanism, which could ‘augment according to reason’ by loading every rift with ore in the service of ‘natural compounds’: Erasmus’s theory of copia. ‘Nature above all delights in variety’, and the copious style achieves this natural variety through ‘richness’ of expression and subject matter.38 Hand in hand with floridity went the ready acceptance of foreign words and influences in the copious style. Erasmus not only admitted foreign importations into Latin, he welcomed them, ascribing to such borrowings ‘a charm of their own when introduced in the appropriate place’. His primary examples of words transferred ‘from barbarian nations to the Greeks, and from the Greeks to us’ are terms for exotic spices: ‘sinapi, piper, and zinziber [mustard, pepper, ginger]’.39 For Erasmus, foreign words and foreign foods participate in the same phenomenon of incorporation, and are to be integrated into language rather than walled out. It is in Erasmus, not in the xenophobia of Tudor-Stuart rhetorical theory, that we find a suitable linguistic model for May and Rabisha’s hospitable yet digestive stance. The enthusiasm of the French Renaissance for the copious style, and for digestio as a useful trope for originality, issue into Rabisha and May’s texts along with French cooking. The new richness these books proclaim—and their integrated, digestive approach to achieving it—are all of a piece and develop by embracing continental models. While the rhetoric of both cookbooks exhibits elements of the plain style popular during the Restoration, it also exhibits copious flourishes—May’s use of synonyms and parallelism in his attack on French fashions, for example, is in keeping with the guidelines for writing in De Copia. But it is in the recipes themselves that copious discourse blossoms, both verbally and visually. Many of their recipes call for vast alimentary amalgamations with similarities to the great combinatory edifices of medieval cuisine.40 May’s ‘grand Sallet of divers Compounds’, for example, calls for capon or other roast meat (May mentions several), herbs and lettuce, and no fewer than fourteen garnishes, accompanied by the 37 Vaughan, The Newlanders Cure, 10. 38 Erasmus, De Copia/De Ratione Studii, 302, 198. 39 Erasmus, 314–15. 40 Wilson, ‘The French Connection: Part 1’, 14.

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open-ended comment ‘and the like, more or less, as occasion serves’.41 After giving a modification for fish days, he offers ten more ‘grand sallets’, all variations on the same concept, with different combinations of ingredients. His ‘extraordinary Pie, or a Bride Pie of several Compounds, being several distinct Pies on one bottom’ is a digestio of pie-making, with an enormous variety of ingredients going into ‘three fashions proportionably answering one the other’. 42 The Bride Pie is delectably illustrated, its concentric sixpetalled forms rising to a height of five crusts. Illustrations of pies fill the sections on baking, with two full foldouts devoted to an overwhelming array of shapes—copia translated into the visual world. In order to understand more fully how these authors teach a kind of national hospitality—a new English commensality for a new, more global age—let us return to Rabisha’s bisk recipe. First, what, exactly, is a bisk? The French ‘bisque’ did not achieve its modern meaning, as a rich, puréed shellfish soup, until after the mid-eighteenth century. Previously the term denoted not a purée at all, but a ‘simple presentation of boiled poultry or game, sometimes served with a garnish of cocks’ combs and kidneys’.43 Le Cuisinier François begins with a recipe for a pheasant bisque that calls for pheasant, a bouquet garni, bread, cockscombs, veal sweetbreads, mushrooms, ‘mutton juice’, and pistachios to be simmered together in a strong broth and garnished with lemon. 44 It is a substantial and restorative soup, but hardly an extravagant one. In English hands, as Rabisha’s bisk shows, the dish underwent a metamorphosis, becoming an extremely elaborate and expensive soup composed of meat, poultry, or fish of several different varieties, and often married with fruits, vegetables, and spices. England borrowed the dish in the mid-1700s, and Rabisha and May were the first to give it a prominent place in printed cookbooks. May offers ‘To make a Bisk divers ways’ as the second recipe of his book—the first is an ‘olio podrida’, a Spanish version of the same dish.45 May gives recipes for several more bisks, including an extraordinarily rich fish bisk similar to bouillabaisse, as well as a ‘Bisk of Eggs’, which involves layers of bread and cheese cooked in bouillon, topped with poached eggs and parsley—a concoction that appears unrelated to the soup beloved today of French restaurants and Maine shanties. 46 Rabisha begins the section of 41 May, Accomplisht, 150. 42 May, 235. 43 Montagné, Larousse Gastronomique, 148, original emphasis. 44 La Varenne, The French Cook, 4. 45 May, Accomplisht, 1–6. 46 May, 304–05, 436–37.

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his book on making ‘all manner of hot boyled meats of Flesh’ with the bisk quoted below, and goes on to give several recipes for bisk and ‘olue’ (another spelling for olio) as well as a recipe for ‘A hot baked meat of compounds’ or a ‘bastard Bisk Pye’, further stretching the meaning of this already elastic term. 47 Since the length of the bisk recipe is part of its point, I quote it here in full: The best way for dressing the said dish, now in use, and allowed, is, That you take all the choicest wild-fowl, and tame-fowl, of the smaller sort; the biggest that is to be made use of, is a Capon or Pullet, to be forced; Put the said fowl (that you make choice of) a boyling, with a piece of good Bacon, belonging to the rib; then having your forced meat in balls, about the bigness of an egg, but longer, rouled up in the yolks of eggs (as is shewn in the Book of Forced meats) put twenty of the said Balls in the aforesaid Fowl; you may wrap up some of the same Balls in the Caul of Veal after the same bigness and length; then charge a second Pipkin with Lamb-stones, sweet-breads, Lambs tongues larded on both sides; these must first be all fryed brown, only scorcht, not thorow, before they are put into the Pipkin: put to them blanched Cocks-combs and sliced pallets: let them simber up in strong Broth, and a little white-wine: add two or three whole Onions, a little large Mace and Nutmeg: then charge your third Pipkin, with bottoms of Artichokes cut in quarters, and the Marrow of four or five bones: let them boyl with strong Broth; then having all your Fowl drawn, and trussed, whether peeping Chickens, squab Pigeons, or in season, Plovers, Partridge, Ruffs, Knots, Godweaths, Quails, Larks, or any other; your proportion in these being trussed, parboyled, and made ready, boyl them up according to their time of boyling, either in water and salt, or strong Broth; let all these ingredients be ready together: then having your great Charger, with a soop and light bread in sippets, then dish up your Capon (or great Fowl) in the middle of your dish, and place your worser Fowl round about, and your next sort towards the brim of the dish, and your best and smallest sort on the top of all; your forced meat between the Fowl round the dish; and your Lamb-stones and sweet-breads in every vacant place; then slit your Lambs-tongues in halves, and put them in the most necessary place, with the larded side upwards; so put your Pallets and Cocks-combs between and about the whole, as also your Artichokes and Marrow about the top of the boyled meats; then take your Bisk Broth, being boyling hot, adding half a pint of Clarret gravie thereto, 47 Rabisha, Whole Body, 174–75; see also e.g., 117, 128, 131, and 191–94.

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pour it all over your boyled meat; you may garnish your boyled meat with fryed Bacon, fryed Potatoes, fryed Oysters, and all over with sliced Lemmon; then strow it over with one handful of Pistatious [pistachio] Kernels; you may make this Bisk lesser, or bigger, as you please. 48

The origin of the bisk, in the French soup of pheasant or another bird, forms Rabisha’s starting point: ‘take all the choicest wild-fowl’. But in keeping with the process of welcoming foreign influence by Englishing it, Rabisha departs almost immediately from French precursors such as La Varenne, whose ‘Bisque of Young Pigeons’ is basically a one-fowl dish. Rabisha multiplies the possibilities like a good Erasmian, giving a range of sizes rather than a precise kind or amount. The recipe further dilates to accommodate meat of several varieties—bacon, beef, lamb, and veal, including a range of organ meats. Seared separately or prepared as meatballs, eventually all these parts combine in one of three pipkins, or pots, whose ingredients overlap: fowl with bacon and meatballs; organ meats (including cockscombs) and onions; and a third which compounds elements of the first two—vegetables, marrow, and fowl. Timed to finish simultaneously, the ingredients of all three pots are brought together again, this time in a great, towering hierarchy. Tolerance is never easy; balancing competing interests and needs is as challenging for the chef as for the diplomat. The bisk broth, presumably a combination of all three pipkins, is enriched and poured over all, producing a further melding of flavours. The French source cycles back into the dish in the form of its garnish of lemon and pistachios, both of which are mentioned in La Varenne’s bisk of pheasants. Rabisha’s bisk accomplishes in microcosm what his cookbook sets out to do in macrocosm: it separates ingredients (first in their itemization, second in their division into three pipkins), only to teach the art of their combination (first in pots, then as broth, then as a single extravagant presentation). The bisk further performs ‘a sympathy of all varieties in natural compounds’, bringing a set of far-flung ingredients into a sympathetic relation with one another through an accumulative process. The bisk operates on a model of inclusive incorporation, not of effacement. It draws several sources into relationship, shaping them subtly while yet refusing to eliminate the genealogy of those sources. Instead, Rabisha’s bisk performs a kind of culinary copia: the ingredients are multiplied and fragmented, to paraphrase Terence Cave, in the service of a second union. 49 It does so not only on the level of 48 Rabisha, 58–59. 49 Cave, Cornucopian Text, xi.

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cuisine, but also on the level of rhetoric. It is always a dangerous game to make generalizations about an author’s personal style based on the rhetoric of his or her recipes, because so many of those recipes are borrowed, with minimal if any alterations, from other authors. Rabisha’s bisk, however, which I have not found elsewhere, exhibits a copious, peristaltic style that permeates his writing (including his only other attributed work, Adam Unvailed),50 in which ingredients and cooking techniques resonate with the language in which they are enunciated.

Reasonable Excess The copious approach to cooking of May and Rabisha contains within it a complex ethics. On the one hand, it is an ethics of toleration and inclusion, as we have been discussing. But on the other hand, as with all forms of ethics, this one contains a dark side—as indeed does cooking itself, which destroys in order to create and kills in order to nourish. May and Rabisha are attuned to the fact of the thorn within the rose. They locate a latent violence within the very hospitality they celebrate, and justify that violence using royalist tropes familiar to any reader of Hobbes, or Charles I, or indeed of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. In order to examine this more dangerous aspect of royalist cookery’s copious ethics, we can turn to the most famous passage in either book: May’s paean to those Golden Days wherein were practised the Triumphs and Trophies of Cookery; then was Hospitality esteemed, Neighbourhood preserved, the Poor cherished, and God honoured; then was Religion less talkt on, and more practised; then was Atheism and Schism less in fashion: then did men strive to be good, rather then to seem so.51

The first recipe in May’s cookbook describes one of these ‘Triumphs and Trophies’, an elaborate banquet involving pastry castles, ships, and bleeding stags; live frogs and birds; and eggshells filled with sugar water that court ladies are meant to throw at each other. Likewise, Rabisha ends The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected with a bill of fare from a massive feast concocted during the reign of Edward IV, first published by Matthew Parker in the

50 See n. 9. 51 May, Accomplisht, A6v.

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late sixteenth century.52 The menu includes ‘6000 Dishes of Jelly’, ‘1000 muttons’, ‘400 peacocks’, and similar profligacies. ‘I have done it the rather’, Rabisha explains of his inclusion, ‘that thou maist see what liberality and hospitality there was in antient times amongst our Progenitors. […] Thus hoping to see liberality flourish amongst us once more, as in old time’.53 The cookbooks of both May and Rabisha spring from an intense nostalgia for royal extravagance, and from an understanding of the Civil War as having severed England, perhaps irreparably, from this lost paradise of excess, wealth, and hospitality. The liberality devoutly to be wished by May and Rabisha is in keeping with much of the rhetoric that emerges in other genres of this period. Joshua Scodel, for example, finds in Restoration georgic ‘only a vestigial interest in combating excess’, although the genre is marked in prior years by a commitment to moderation.54 Further, when Rabisha identifies the monarch positively with profligate entertainment, he converses with a long tradition of envisioning hospitality as a form of both power and protection. ‘Riches joyned with Liberality, is Power’, wrote Thomas Hobbes in 1651, ‘because it procureth friends, and servants’.55 In a period when ‘domestic beneficence and good entertainment was often a matter of public concern’ and ‘one of the foundations of the moral economy’, liberality played a vital role in any conception of power relations.56 May’s stirring ode to times gone by had been a topos for at least a hundred years—the English always seemed to think that the golden age of hospitality lay in the past.57 But this sentiment takes on added resonance in a cookbook, especially one published at the beginning of the Restoration. By conjuring that world within the book, May and Rabisha construct a new iteration of hospitality through commercial print. Hospitality is no longer trusted to emerge through the local ethics of community and chivalry. Instead, May and Rabisha propose to reconstitute it commercially. One learns hospitality not through tradition, but by reading the cookbooks that decry its loss. What the authors celebrate is a complete value system based on the apparent oxymoron of commercial hospitality: in this case, a hospitality inextricable from the recipe book trade. In actuality, such hospitality has existed since 52 Heal, Hospitality, 271. 53 Rabisha, Whole Body, 291–93. 54 Scodel, Excess, 140. 55 Hobbes, Leviathan, I.x.41. 56 Heal, Hospitality, 2. 57 Heal, 93.

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commerce has existed, through the examples of inns and taverns.58 May and Rabisha embrace this marriage of economy and hospitality, while referring that relationship back to a mythical anti-capitalist feudalism. The traditions of great house and hall were meant to address all levels of country society—from the aristocracy, to the lesser gentry and professionals invited to share their table, to the servants who made that table groan with food, to the poor who were fed on its leftovers. Whether this consistently happened in practice, its ideal was firmly established in the English imagination. May’s passage is so famous because it captures an ideal of eating as the spectacular performance of waste in the service of a convivial commonwealth, an elite celebration that somehow conveys its magnificence to the rest of its subjects. Its visual translation may be found in the grand illustration of James II’s coronation dinner, which features an uncountable number of dishes arranged for the gastronomic delectation of the court, while above in the gallery, the commoners sit and feast with their eyes.59 While May and Rabisha envision commensality as an essentially peaceable act, one that binds the nation through bonds of amity and social obligation, they do so paradoxically through recipes as well as results that combine violence (May’s bloody stag and staged sea battles, Rabisha’s thousands of butchered flesh and fowl) with entertainment (May’s intimately raucous gathering of Elizabethan nobility, Rabisha’s vast feast that ministers to thousands of guests). In fact, May’s famous scene ends with an evocation of ideal chivalry that glorifies actual violence even as he replaces it with the banquet’s fake violence: ‘These were formerly the delights of the Nobility, before good House-keeping had left England, and the Sword really acted that which was only counterfeited in such honest and laudable Exercises as these’.60 In the wake of civil war, this nostalgia for noble violence, rather than the sordid kind out of which the nation has recently limped, lands awkwardly. May and Rabisha’s dreams of war properly conducted suggest a theory of noblesse oblige in which cookery and confectionery control violence by translating it into playful theatrics—a control that had, by definition, disappeared during the Interregnum. This perhaps surprising connection between hospitality and savagery brings us back to the etymological links between hospitality, receipt, and violence—the fine line between host and hostile, 58 See, e.g., Hailwood, Alehouses; Kümin, Drinking; Smyth, A Pleasing Sinne. 59 Sandford, History, Plate 24. 60 May, Accomplisht, A7r.

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guest and enemy, receiving and seizing.61 For Rabisha and May, cookery and the hospitality that extends from it operates as a Hobbesian safety valve whose function is to protect culture from its own savage impulses. The transmutation of human violence into theatrical metaphor by means of the kitchen is an important, though paradoxical, step toward tolerance conceived of through eating. England in 1660 had recently witnessed what Georges Bataille would describe as a catastrophic expenditure of resources. Although he calls it luxury or excess, Bataille is the great modern theorist of hospitality as the transmutation of violence. In his theory of general economy outlined in The Accursed Share and earlier essays, Bataille argues that ‘it is not necessity but its contrary, “luxury”, that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems’.62 His theory provides an account of the world in which liberality, or ‘expenditure’ in Bataille’s terms, forms the impetus for the general economy of living matter, as well as for more narrowly conceived economies of human scale. When an economic system ‘can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth’, writes Bataille, ‘it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically’.63 Catastrophic expenditures include war and human sacrifice. ‘If we do not have the force to destroy the surplus energy ourselves’, writes Bataille, ‘it cannot be used, and, like an unbroken animal that cannot be trained, it is this energy that destroys us; it is we who pay the price of the inevitable explosion’.64 War is the expenditure of excess uncontrolled by societal mechanisms. When the kitchen is the stage, this excess is consumed as food, but as a profligate form of food, as in May’s banquet or Rabisha’s piles of dead birds. As Wendy Wall reminds us, the early modern kitchen was every bit a metaphorical war zone, ‘a slaughterhouse strewn liberally with blood and carcasses’. The kitchen’s textual emissaries—household guides and recipe books—‘construct the decorum of violence’, while describing how excess energy can be made socially useful through cooking’.65 Bataille’s theory allows us to read the efflorescence of nonviolent liberality, or what I shall paradoxically call ‘reasonable excess’, in the years following the Restoration as both a reaction to and an extension of the war. English society 61 On the linguistic connections between host, guest, and enemy, see Benveniste, Indo-European, 71–83. On the etymology of ‘receipt’ see Goldstein, Eating, 135. 62 Bataille, Accursed, 1:12, original emphasis. 63 Bataille, 1:21. 64 Bataille, 1:24. 65 Wall, Staging, 3–4.

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replaced the uncontrolled catastrophic expenditures of the war with other kinds of expenditure that, at least on the surface, seemed to reduce physical violence.66 Liberality offered the possibility of an impressive efflux of money and materials with the hope that these spent resources would be absorbed back into the general economy in other ways: through entertainment and leisure, the reinforcement of power structures, and increased consumption of goods. These were useful expenditures in the sense that certain individuals and classes—courtiers and merchants, for instance—benefitted from them, but as a general phenomenon they were frivolous, and this was the point. May and Rabisha, through their evocations of a lost era in which nobility managed the expenditure of excess resources by means of liberality and hospitality, and through their professed hatred of the war, reject catastrophic expenditure in favour of the glorious kind. Rabisha explicitly links the Interregnum with the rise of a nefarious, even devilish wastefulness. In language that echoes Menenius’ gastronomic defense of absolutism in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus,67 Rabisha writes: I was further encouraged to this work, by seeing that happy and blessed restauration of our long-exiled Royal Luminaries, and the hopes of the benevolent Influence of Liberality and Hospitality, which is in part the Life of Arts and Sciences. […] As for food and rayment, they pay for, by which all men live; for all that they have comes to the Purse, Pocket, Back and Belly of all men yearly; they are like a great Wheel that moves the next; and so they move one the other, that none stands idle; the removing of which, is the destruction of the whole, which we have lately found by woful experience, occasioned by Solomons fools, even men to whom God hath given riches, so that they want nothing for their soul of all that they can desire, yet God giveth them not the power to eat thereof, but a stranger eateth it, but this hath been their vanity, and their evil disease; notwithstanding they had as good pretences as Judas, who said, Wherefore serves this waste, it might have been sold for much money and given to the poor.68

The failure of the monarchic system entails ‘the destruction of the whole’ through the misuse of extra resources: the men in control have riches and 66 The role of such liberality in other, more hidden and sometimes slower forms of violence, such as racism, classism, colonialism, and environmental degradation, deserves more careful analysis than I can give it here. 67 Gerhardt, ‘Feeding’. 68 Rabisha, Whole Body, A3v.

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nourishment, but ‘have not the power to eat thereof’, squandering those riches even though their intentions seem honest. For a stranger to eat of a wealthy man’s produce would seem to be the hospitable ideal, but Rabisha’s point here is that in the absence of the bonds and structures of hospitality, the transfer of food from host to stranger becomes unmotivated, unstable, and dangerous. The hospes (guest) becomes the hostis (alien or enemy). The comparison to Judas directs us to his complaint about the ‘ointment of spikenard’ Mary Magdalene applies to the feet of Jesus (John 12:5).69 Rabisha interprets Christ’s famous and troubling response, ‘For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always’, as a defense of liberality. If the king acts as the embodiment of ‘food and rayment’, of ‘the Purse, Pocket, Back and Belly of all men yearly’, then the dispersal of food serves hospitality, channeling excess in nonviolent ways. May and Rabisha reinterpret cooking as a site not of puritan frugality, but of a reasonable excess that makes possible the vulnerability inherent in hospitality and tolerance. If the French bisque was a restorative, the English bisk became a true restoration, a f itting emblem for the epoch in which it developed.70 A dish both innovative and medieval, recalling both the great Tudor and Plantagenet feasts for which May and Rabisha longed and the new cuisines of France and Spain, the bisk encapsulates the nostalgic originality of May and Rabisha’s projects, transforming French and Spanish (and perhaps even Dutch!) precursors into a new form that nevertheless would not seem out of place in the imagined context of the old English court feast. Ultimately, the bisk articulates a double-edged ethics of culinary and cultural production: liberality, destruction, and wastefulness in the service of hospitality, tolerance, and integration. To cook in such a deliberately overfull way is to stage that process at the level of the body itself, the ultimate site of absorption of disparate and wasteful elements. Cooking transmutes violence into bodily integrity. The cookery book further shapes that process, offering a rhetoric suitable for the construction of a national identity that accepts violence as a constituent aspect of it, just as it forms a constituent aspect of cooking, eating, and the growth of the individual body. And likewise, just as the physical body acts as a host to food that the body then digests, becoming 69 All biblical quotations refer to the King James edition. 70 Interestingly, the royalist Compleat Cook (1658) is cautious about such exalted compounds. A recipe for ‘A Spanish Olio’ occasions the outburst: ‘I am utterly against those confused Olios, into which men put almost all kinds of meats and Roots, and especially against putting of Oyle, for it corrupts the Broth, in stead of adding goodnesse to it’. W.M. goes on to insist that the broth should be drunk rather than eaten with a spoon, and that neither mace, rosemary, nor thyme should touch the olio. Compleat, 93.

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vulnerable to other organisms while simultaneously integrating them into the host, the cookery book acknowledges and hosts foreign influences and foreign dishes, opening up to while attempting to digest and control the culinary other in the service of an expanded and enriched body politic.

Digesting Coexistence Book XII of The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected ‘Treats how to boyl or stew fish to be eaten hot with Compositions’.71 It consists of a variety of seafood dishes, including a bisk and an ‘olue’, both of which fall into the category of the grand, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink recipes we have already examined. In fact, the number of fish recipes in the book is substantial, even excessive, compared to other English books of the period. One reason for this copia may be found in a passing instruction in the last recipe in the section, ‘To stew a dish of Breams’. The dish calls for gravy, presumably made from meat, to be added to the stewing liquid. ‘But’, Rabisha cautions, ‘if there be Roman Catholicks, or others, whose conscience scruples to eat of flesh on fasting dayes, you may stew it up after another manner’, in which salad oil substitutes for the gravy.72 Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook shows a similar predilection for fish dishes; so many, in fact, as to elicit comment from Marcus Bell, his most recent editor. Bell and his co-editor Tom Jaine show that virtually all of the aristocrats for whom May cooked were Catholic royalists. Absent conclusive evidence of May’s own religious leanings, his (and his father’s) association with prominent Roman Catholic families suggests that May was a co-religionist. But Bell accurately resists the conclusion that The Accomplisht Cook is properly a Catholic cookbook: It could be advanced that he does have a chapter on egg cookery, largely derived from La Varenne, and several sections on fish cookery, as well as a section ‘Pottages for Fish-Days’. Yet the full-blooded division of the year into fast days, meat days and Lent is not followed through as it would have been in France or Italy. He may have been Catholic, but he was also English.73 71 Rabisha, Whole Body, 125. 72 Rabisha, 134. 73 Bell, ‘Introduction’, 20. The conclusion that May, though possibly Catholic, was not overtly challenging the status quo, is borne out by the fact that—to judge by the booklist appended

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Catholicism haunts many of Rabisha and May’s positions. First, any book that announces its French, Italian, and Spanish influences, as both Rabisha and May’s cookbooks do, is obviously flirting with imputations of Catholic influence. Second, the cultivation of liberality I have identified in these works relates symbolically to English views of Papistry. Catholic ritual was viewed axiomatically as excessive, opulent and wasteful—the unreasonable excess to which Rabisha’s reasonable excess is counterposed. Third, Catholicism was closely associated with royalism and specifically with the circle of Queen Henrietta Maria. Fourth, the copious rhetorical style was developed by Catholic humanists, and was often opposed to the puritan ‘plain style’. Do all of these connections to Catholicism radiating out from both May and Rabisha mean that their cookbooks are Catholic after all? I do not think so; rather, the authors engage the sensibility of Catholicism with the goal of transcending it. This elasticity forms the basis for these authors’ project of tolerance. The Accomplisht Cook and The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected, I have suggested, use culinary copia as a rhetorical model for coexistence, implying a vision of an England based, at least contingently, not only upon religious toleration but upon a broader vision of tolerant inclusion. These cookbooks are English, but they are English in a cosmopolitan sense. May and Rabisha’s England is a nation founded upon the harmonization of apparently disparate entities, just as their bisks, olios, compounds of meats, and grand sallets, and ultimately their cookbooks themselves, draw from a wide range of ingredients and sources to produce an original and national cuisine. The model of copia, of reasonable excess, provides the ground for a new conception of English nationalism, an open-ended model of hospitality and liberality by which a rejuvenated noble and monarchical class fuels an approach to English culture and cuisine at once nostalgic and innovative. When Rabisha, in his theological tract of the Civil War era, has his narrator aver that he ‘thinks him to be a murtherer that should endevour to make all mankind to eat one sort of meat’, he suggests what May’s Lenten fast day dishes also imply.74 One sort of food, one sort of cooking, one closed national body, one faith: none befit a restored England. The new royalist cookery envisions an England strong and flexible enough to play host to a table crowded with foreign guests. to the Accomplisht Cook—May’s publisher, Nathan Brook, seems to have favoured the middle ground of religious dispute, publishing attacks on both Catholicism and nonconformist sects such as the Anabaptists, Quakers, and Scottish Presbyterians. 74 Rabisha, Adam Unvailed, 90.

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Works Cited Albala, Ken. Eating Right in the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Appelbaum, Robert. Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food among the Early Moderns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Bassnett, Madeline. ‘A Language Not One’s Own: Translational Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen’s Iberian Recipes’. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19, no. 1 (2019): 1–27. Bassnett, Madeline. ‘Restoring the Royal Household: Royalist Politics and the Commonwealth Recipe Book’. Early English Studies 2 (2009): 1–32. Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Translated by Robert Hurley. Vol. 1. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Bell, Marcus. ‘Introduction’. In The Accomplisht Cook, or the Art and Mystery of Cookery, edited by Marcus Bell and Tom Jaine, 10–20. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2000. Belle, Marie-Alice. ‘“Domestication” Revisited: Hospitality and the Foreign in Early Modern English Translation Discourse’. In Early Modern Hospitality, edited by David B. Goldstein and Marco Piana, 207–43. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2021. Benveniste, Emile. Indo-European Language and Society. Translated by Elizabeth Palmer. London: Faber and Faber, 1973. Butterfield, Herbert. ‘Toleration in Early Modern Times’. Journal of the History of Ideas 38, no. 4 (1977): 573–84. Cave, Terence C. The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. Coffey, John. Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689. Studies in Modern History. Harlow, England: Longman, 2000. Coldiron, A. E. B. Printers without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Crow, Andy. ‘“A Little Winter Savory, A Little Time”: Making History in Elizabeth Cromwell’s Kitchen’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 177-95. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Davidson, Alan. ‘Foreword’. In The Accomplisht Cook, or the Art and Mystery of Cookery, edited by Marcus Bell and Tom Jaine, 7–9. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2000. Erasmus, Desiderius. Ciceronianus/Notes/Indexes. Edited by A.H.T. Levi. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978. Erasmus, Desiderius. De Copia/De Ratione Studii. Edited by Craig Ringwalt Thompson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978.

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Gerhardt, Ernst. ‘Feeding on the Body Politic: Consumption, Hunger, and Taste in Coriolanus’. In Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England, edited by David B. Goldstein and Amy L. Tigner, 97–111. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2016. Goldie, Mark. ‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’. In From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, edited by Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke, 331–68. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Goldstein, David B. Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Goldstein, David B. ‘Recipes for Authorship: Indigestion and the Making of Originality in Early Modern England’. Diss., Stanford University, 2005. Grell, Ole Peter. ‘Introduction’. In From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, edited by Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke, 1–16. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Hailwood, Mark. Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2016. Heal, Felicity. Hospitality in Early Modern England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, or, The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common Wealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil. London, 1651. ‘hodge-podge, n.’ OED Online. March 2021. Oxford University Press. Hunter, Lynette. ‘Cookery Books: A Cabinet of Rare Devices and Conceits’. Petits Propos Culinaires 5 (1980): 19–34. Jeanneret, Michel. A Feast of Words: Banquet and Table Talk in the Renaissance. Translated by Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. ‘Opening the Queen’s Closet: Henrietta Maria, Elizabeth Cromwell, and the Politics of Cookery’. Renaissance Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2007): 464–99. Kümin, Beat A. Drinking Matters: Public Houses and Social Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Kurlansky, Mark. Choice Cuts. New York: Ballantine Books, 2002. La Varenne, François Pierre. The French Cook. London, 1653. Lehmann, Gilly. The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Blackawton, England: Prospect Books, 2003. M., W. The Compleat Cook. London, 1658. Marcoux, P. ‘The Thickening Plot: Notable Liaisons between French and English Cookbooks, 1600–1660’. Petits Propos Culinaires 60 (1998): 8–20. May, Robert. The Accomplisht Cook, or the Art and Mystery of Cookery. 1685. Facsmile edited by Marcus Bell and Tom Jaine. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2000.

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McNulty, Tracy. The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Mennell, Stephen. All Manners of Food. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Montagné, Prosper. Larousse Gastronomique. New York: Crown, 1961. Pullar, Philippa. Consuming Passions: A History of English Food and Appetite. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1970. Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. 1589. Facsimile. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1970. Rabisha, William. Adam Unvailed, and Seen with Open Face: Or, Israel’s Right Way from Egypt to Canaan, Lately Discovered. London, 1649. Rabisha, William. The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected, Taught, and Fully Manifested, Methodically, Artificially, and According to the Best Tradition of the English, French, Italian, Dutch, &c. London, 1661. Rabisha, William. The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected, Taught, and Fully Manifested, Methodically, Artificially, and According to the Best Tradition of the English, French, Italian, Dutch, &c. 1682. Facsimile. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2003. Sandford, Francis. The History of the Coronation of the Most High, Most Mighty, and Most Excellent Monarch, James II. London, 1687. Schultheis, Melissa. ‘A Culinary Embassy: Diplomatic Home Making in Lady Ann Fanshawe’s Booke of Receipts’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 197-217. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Scodel, Joshua. Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Smyth, Adam, ed. A Pleasing Sinne. Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2004. Vaughan, William. The Newlanders Cure. London, 1630. Wall, Wendy. Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Walsham, Alexandra. Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Walsham, Alexandra. ‘Cultures of Coexistence in Early Modern England: History, Literature and Religious Toleration’. The Seventeenth Century 28, no. 2 (2013): 115–37. Wilson, C. Anne. Food and Drink in Britain: From the Stone Age to the 19th Century. Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1973. Wilson, C. Anne. ‘The French Connection: Part 1’. Petits Propos Culinaires 2 (1979): 10–17. Wilson, C. Anne. ‘The French Connection: Part 2’. Petits Propos Culinaires 4 (1980): 8–20.

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About the Author David B. Goldstein is Associate Professor of English and coordinator of the Creative Writing programme at York University in Toronto. His first monograph, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England, shared the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award. He has also co-edited three essay collections on Shakespeare, food, and early modern hospitality.

8. ‘A Little Winter Savory, A Little Time’: Making History in Elizabeth Cromwell’s Kitchen Andy Crow1

Abstract This article examines a puzzling question surrounding the 1664 recipe book, The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth, an anonymous collection purporting to explain the Cromwells’ unfitness to govern by examining their favorite recipes. Scholars have viewed the text as satirizing Elizabeth as stingy in household management and low-class in taste. Yet why would an author opposed to the Cromwells offer the reader a work that invited them to recreate the Cromwellian dining experience for themselves? I argue that the collection draws on the early modern association of the kitchen with the manipulation of time, guiding readers to learn through creating its recipes how to avoid future temporal ruptures of the sort that its author viewed the Protectorate to be. Keywords: women’s writing, food history, recipe books, Cromwell, historiography, early modern literature

How to make a Rare Dutch Pudding. Take a pound and a half of Fresh Beef, all lean, take a pound and a quarter of Beef Suet, sliced both very small, then take a half penny stale Loaf and grate it, a handful of Sage, and a little Winter Savory, a little Time, shred these very small; take four Eggs, half a pint of Cream, a few Cloves, 1 I am grateful to David Goldstein, Katie Kadue, Marissa Nicosia, and Molly Taylor-Poleskey, as well as Madeline Bassnett and Hillary Nunn, for our conversations, which illuminated for me the diverse ways in which early modern kitchens shaped the narrativization of history.

Bassnett, M. and Hillary M. Nunn (eds.), In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463721646_ch08

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Nutmegs, Mace and Pepper finely beaten, mingle them altogether very well, with a little Salt, roll it all up together in a green Colwort Leafe, and then tye it up hard in a Linnen Cloth, garnish your Dish with grated bread, and serve it up with Mustard in Sawcers. (47)2

The above recipe for a ‘Rare Dutch Pudding’ invites the reader to recreate a moment in history. The recipe opens the 1664 collection, The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth, Commonly Called Joan Cromwel the Wife of the Late Usurper, the work of an anonymous royalist compiler. Its detailed instructions make Cromwellian England tangible by encouraging early modern readers to put themselves into the bodies of Elizabeth, Oliver, and their household at the table and in the kitchen.3 Whether actually preparing this pudding, or simply imagining the cooking process, smells, and tastes that go into this meal, readers are connected by this recipe to the recent past. Yet returning to this historical moment was an ambivalent experience for the compiler and the text’s imagined royalist audience. It took them back to a time in which they were politically, socially, and economically marginalized, and brought them into the intimate lives of those perceived as the villains driving this marginalization: the Cromwells. The long introduction to the collection and editorial comments throughout the recipes record the Cromwells’ vices, made vivid through the compiler’s disparaging depiction of their daily diet. In presenting the Cromwells in this manner, the compiler views the domestic and the civic as intertwined: the structure and daily practices of a household both arise from and nurture the political outlook and behaviours of its members. Examining the Cromwells’ food habits is a means of concretizing explanatory arguments about their failures in managing the Commonwealth. Restoration-era readers are invited to perceive the basis of these arguments firsthand, coming to apprehend the Cromwells’ political character through recreating their diet and perceiving what it reveals about their shortcomings. Scholars almost universally have classed The Court & Kitchin as a satirical piece of royalist propaganda.4 This description, however, fails to account for 2 This and all subsequent quotations from this text are noted parenthetically and are taken from The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth, Commonly Called Joan Cromwel (1664). 3 The compiler of The Court & Kitchin, who gathered the recipes and composed the long introduction that opens the text, is unknown. The collection is often attributed to Thomas Milbourne, its printer. Knoppers, in Politicizing Domesticity, speculates that the collection may have been completed c. 1659–1660, though not printed until 1664. 4 See, for example, Gillespie, ‘Elizabeth Cromwell’s Kitchen Court’, 9; Knoppers, ‘Opening the Queen’s Closet’, 1; Wall, Recipes for Thought, 34. Jenner, ‘The Roasting of the Rump’, provides

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the complex relationship the text facilitates between its audience and the family the recipes purportedly satirize. By instructing early modern readers in how to prepare these dishes, the text enables them to internalize the very substances from which it claims the Cromwells’ allegedly destructive practices arose. Furthermore, in recreating these meals, readers willingly return to Cromwellian England and spend time there, in the Protector’s own home. That royalists should want to leave this era behind was a matter written into law. In 1660, Parliament had passed the ‘Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity, and Oblivion’ ordering that the Commonwealth era be erased from public memory. What, then, is The Court & Kitchin doing in making this period sensorially present? How does the collection ask readers to organize their relationship to the past by preparing Elizabeth’s pudding recipe, or any of the other dishes in this collection? I argue that The Court & Kitchin is best understood as a piece of history writing, undertaken at a moment in which understanding the Commonwealth and its impact was as urgent as the demand to forget it. Matthew Neufeld notes that, despite the mandate to consign the Commonwealth to oblivion, ‘personal memories of what were referred to as the “late broken times” were lodged firmly within most people’s minds’ and thus ‘the early Restoration regime and its supporters in Parliament [worked] to shape a useable public memory of the recent past’, turning to the history genre to do so.5 Histories were a necessary tool for maintaining the new government, but these histories had to manoeuver around the contradictory demand to forget the past on the one hand, and to enable people to recover from it in a politically expedient way on the other. The Court & Kitchin approaches these demands innovatively through its recipe book form. Recipes were associated with the manipulation of time, as kitchen work preserved both foodstuffs and, in a book like this, those who consumed them. The collection takes advantage of this association to construct a usable history for its readers, giving them access to the past in the safe, controlled environment of their own kitchens. Furthermore, The Court & Kitchin uses the thematic link between recipes and temporality to delineate a model of how to relate to time in a way that might be able to prevent ruptures of the kind the country had just passed through. The collection presents its recipes in a manner that proposes that the Cromwells’ downfall arose relevant context for the kinds of gendered, food-related royalist propaganda of the Restoration era. The Court & Kitchin deploys some of the typical insults found in this propaganda but, as I argue in this chapter, the recipe collection does not take the form of satire or propaganda. 5 Neufeld, The Civil Wars, 17–18.

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from their disordered relationship to time: a disorder emblematized by their relationship to food. The ingredients and steps that go into the ‘Rare Dutch Pudding’ exemplify this portrayal of the Cromwells’ vexed relationship to time. The pudding combines the ‘Fresh’ with the ‘stale’, bringing the out-of-date into contact with the new. It incorporates ‘Winter Savory’, the name of which emphasizes the passing of time with the seasons. The recipe also points to Elizabeth Cromwell’s alleged fixation on thriftiness: its directions to grate ingredients and slice and shred them ‘very small’ take added preparation time—the cook’s labour—to make the components of this pudding (essentially a meatloaf) stretch further, skimping with an eye to future times of need. In a pun recurring throughout the collection that highlights how the text solicits reflections on the past, the recipe asks the reader to put ‘a little Time’ into the meal.6 As readers examine England’s recent political history by bringing it into touch with their present through following this recipe, they experience the Cromwellian kitchen as a space of temporal derangement, characterized by the effort to make the expired, unseasonable, or insufficient outlast its time. As I will demonstrate, the aims of The Court & Kitchin as a history are twofold: first, even as it transports readers back to Commonwealth England, it frames Elizabeth’s recipes as part of a bygone era. As Neufield notes, what limited public remembrance of the Commonwealth was permitted to circulate rested on a ‘construction of historical discontinuity […] splitting up the past into a very bad “before”, followed mercifully and thankfully by a wholly good “after”’.7 The Court & Kitchin addresses the potentially problematic nature of its reviving of the ‘bad before’ by making it everaccessible yet ever-ephemeral. The recipes enable the reader to know and study the period from which they arise by preparing the Cromwells’ dishes, but reassert the brevity of the Cromwells’ time in power by containing it in the form of foodstuffs to be consumed. The preface says that Elizabeth should count herself lucky that, despite the ‘Butchery’ her husband oversaw, this text focuses only on her ‘Cookery’, raising ‘no other Monument of it then in Paste’ and leaving ‘the records of his Crimes […] only damn’d to an Oven’ (sigs. A7r–A7v). The text’s assertion of the transitory character of 6 The word time (including variants such as sometimes, dinnertime, etc.), in the sense of a temporal period, appears thirty-seven times in the collection. Time appears another ten times in the text to refer to the herb thyme. Frequently, these two definitions of the word are used in close succession, and the text begins and ends by framing itself as commenting on ‘the Times’, all of which suggests that the reader is intended to think about the two words as associated. 7 Neufeld, The Civil Wars, 207–8.

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Cromwellian England is dramatized each time the food-monuments the reader creates are devoured. Second, The Court & Kitchin lays out an argument about the Cromwells’ doomed relationship to time that asks readers to consider how they orient themselves in relation to their own past, present, and future. The compiler says that Elizabeth’s rise from merchant’s daughter to wife of the head of state threw off her sense of time, as ‘the former Extremities of her Necessitious and indigent Condition, upon the bettering thereof […] raised in her such a quick sense of the misery of want, that she became most industrially provident, and resolvedly sparing and cautious for the future’ ([2], mislabelled 8). Starting from a place of lack and then suddenly able to access more resources than she needed, the text claims, was such a massive and rapid shift in the expected narrative order of Elizabeth’s life that she fell out of touch with the present. She was left both dwelling in the past—afraid of returning to her former state, and thus letting it dominate her present—and simultaneously fixated on the future, trying to protect herself against possible lean times to come. These anxieties led her to become excessively sparing in her use of kitchen resources, forcing her husband to instead ‘Surfe[t]’ himself on ‘biting and eating cares and ambitious thoughts’ (sig. B2v). The failure to fill his empty stomach turned into an insatiable desire for power. Like Shakespeare’s Cassius, with the ‘lean and hungry look’ that signifies his political ambitions, Oliver experienced an emptiness that, the text posits, made him out of step with the present and, like his wife, fixated on desired future satisfactions.8 The Court & Kitchin makes a case to its readers to learn from these missteps and stay in the present, urging them to trust that the state of the nation and their place in it will be sufficient to sustain them. In the supposed presence of peacetime abundance there is no need to question the restored monarchy. However, the collection is unable fully to resolve the fact that the past continues to influence the present, including in the pages of the recipe book itself. It is haunted by images of the temporally out-of-joint Elizabeth, depicted as a living ghost preventing the Protectorate from being completely put to rest. Comparing her to Lambert Simnel, a challenger to the throne of Henry VII who was put to work in the ‘Kings Kitchin’ following his defeat, the text manages Elizabeth’s lingering presence by likewise keeping her in the kitchen, ‘let[ting] this once mighty Lady, do Drudgery to the Publique’ (sig. A8r). This recipe collection ultimately is a kind of compromise, a partial containment of a set of values and practices whose influence royalists 8 Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1.2.194.

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must continue to contend with even as they claim to be able to achieve a restored England, seamlessly connected to the bygone court of Charles I and unmarred by the disruption of the intervening decade. Royalist readers making these recipes or incorporating them into their own recipe books similarly occupy this state of compromise.

History and Temporality in the Kitchen The Court & Kitchin appears to fit into the dominant models that have been developed for making sense of early modern cookery’s philosophies of time, yet it demands us to adjust these models to account for this publication’s strangeness. Wendy Wall in particular has persuasively delineated how recipe books figure culinary preservation and seasoning as a means of resisting time’s forward march.9 Cooking was perceived as a kind of engineering of time, slowing down the decay of foodstuffs, and renewing the bodies of those eating what was prepared. A meal also could bring people into a specif ic moment in history. Wall, Madeline Bassnett, and David Goldstein (in his contribution to this volume), have shown that many of the recipe books that were published in Republican England and following its collapse—such as W.M.’s The Queens Closet Opened (1655), Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook (1660), and William Rabisha’s The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected (1661)—sought to facilitate the Restoration by recreating pre-Commonwealth tastes, economic norms, and modes of sociality.10 The Court & Kitchin can be seen as part of this body of literature, in that it likewise views a governing household’s food culture as sign and source of its character, which is actively reinforced with each paradigmatic instance of food preparation and dining. Like other royalist recipe books, too, The Court & Kitchin looks back with disdain on the Cromwells’ eating habits and the ethos they thereby embody. Yet, unlike other royalist recipe books, this collection neither nostalgically describes pre-Commonwealth cooking nor provides readers with an 9 Wall, Recipes for Thought, esp. Chapter 4, 167–208. On recipes as a form of life-writing, see Pennell and DiMeo, ‘Introduction’, 11, and Catherine Field, ‘“Many Hands Hands”’. Knoppers argues that the seventeenth-century recipe book, The Queens Closet Opened, claiming to reveal Henrietta Maria’s cookery, attempts to make her practices and the relational networks ‘pas[s] from hand to hand, and generation to generation’, cutting across temporal distance. Knoppers, ‘Opening the Queen’s Closet’, 491. 10 Wall, Recipes for Thought, 36–38; Bassnett, ‘Restoring the Royal Household’; Goldstein, ‘How to Make a Bisk’.

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idealized model of dining after which to fashion their own practices. Rather, The Court & Kitchin teaches readers to cook like a woman it describes as ‘an hundred times fitter for a Barn then a Palace’, guilty of ‘sordid frugality and thrifty baseness’ that gave rise to a literally hungry household and a metaphorically hungry, unsustainably ambitious Protectorate (sig. B3r). Scholars have tried to make sense of how to square the instructions the collection provides—how to run a kitchen like Elizabeth Cromwell—with its supposed status as a satire. For instance, Katharine Gillespie reads the text’s depiction of Elizabeth’s kitchen as a critique of mercantilism. The compiler claims that Elizabeth accepted and then resold bribes at a profit, and Gillespie shows how this practice is portrayed as a kind of ‘regurgitati[on]’ and ‘consumptive auto-cannibalism’ of resources that should be digested into favours that would nourish the court.11 Laura Lunger Knoppers reads The Court & Kitchin alongside W.M.’s The Queens Closet Opened, the latter of which sought to rehabilitate Henrietta Maria’s image against widespread xenophobia by depicting her as a wholesome and refined English housewife.12 Unlike The Queens Closet Opened, Knoppers argues, The Court & Kitchin contains few medicinal or confectionary recipes, and rather is dominated by rustic dishes like the pudding described above.13 Juxtaposing the two texts, Knoppers suggests, allows us to perceive how many of the recipes included in the Cromwell recipe book ‘reiterate the upstart, lower-class qualities of the Cromwells’—though, Knoppers qualifies, the clever and energetic thriftiness associated with Elizabeth in this text also implicitly critiques Charles II for his failure to manage the country’s resources adequately.14 However, viewing The Court & Kitchin as a satire leaves us with the question of why most of its pages are devoted to giving the reader real recipes that they can prepare. I am currently working with a group of colleagues to prepare a digital edition of the Cromwell recipe book—soon to be accessible 11 Gillespie, ‘Elizabeth Cromwell’s Kitchen Court’, paragraph 30. 12 Knoppers, ‘Opening the Queen’s Closet’, 464. 13 Knoppers writes that the Cromwell text ‘contains neither medicinal recipes (the most prestigious of the genre) nor confectionary ones’, 487. While such dishes do not dominate the Cromwell collection, it does contain two medicinal recipes, for ‘A Cordial strengthning Broth’ (113-[115]), as well as several for tarts, cakes, and preserves (131–35). Knoppers’s distinction is further complicated by the fact that, as Knoppers notes in her description of The Queens Closet Opened, the collection does not feature aristocratic and costly fare, but rather ‘accessible dishes’ including ‘confectionary and preserves, boiled, baked, and roasted beef, pork, mutton, and chicken, a variety of game birds and fish, pies, puddings, tarts, and creams, pickled and stewed vegetables’, a list that is not very divergent from what is found in The Court & Kitchin, 475. 14 Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity, 127. Knoppers’s f ifth chapter discusses criticisms of Charles II’s resource management, 132–36.

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at https://sites.bc.edu/court-and-kitchen. One of our most striking findings has been that many of the recipes in the collection are either taken from other royalist-leaning recipe books or were reprinted in them. We have found numerous recipes from The Court & Kitchin printed word-for-word in May’s Accomplisht Cook, Rabisha’s The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected, and two other popular recipe books (dubiously attributed to Hannah Woolley), The Gentlewomans Companion (1673) and The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight (1675).15 These findings are consistent with Knoppers’s observation that several of the recipes in The Court & Kitchin are strikingly similar to those found in The Queens Closet Opened, despite the ostensible differences in how the two texts are framed.16 When the digital edition of The Court & Kitchin is complete, it promises to further change the way we conceptualize this text. Revealing the networks in which its recipes travelled allows us to get a sense of how recipes circulate within a subculture or move across partisan and socioeconomic lines. While Knoppers suggests that the fact that ‘none of the recipes are attributed’ in the Cromwell text ‘underscor[es] [Elizabeth’s] lack of social connections’, it appears that this work was connected to the most popular recipe collections in the period. Although we don’t know whether the later texts borrowed directly from The Court & Kitchin, nor whether The Court & Kitchin borrowed from May and Rabisha—they may share unknown common sources—the Cromwell collection is certainly a nexus point through which the dishes featured in royalist-oriented recipe books crossed. Given that such a preponderance of the recipes cross political lines, we have to reconsider what this text is doing for its royalist audience as they try to recover from the recent past and bring on a desired future. If we approach The Court & Kitchin as a history, however, its invitation to the reader to pore over the documents of the Cromwells’ kitchen starts to make sense, as does the propensity of those documents to decouple from the partisan narrative under which the compiler assembles them. Frances Dolan has argued that early modern history writing (and the work of scholars of 15 The Dutch pudding recipe in the epigraph to this chapter, for example, also appears, nearly word-for-word, in Woolley’s 1675 The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight. I am working with Emma Atwood, Mary Crane, Deanna Danforth, Laura Sterrett, and Margaret Summerfield on a digital edition of The Court & Kitchin, one of the major contributions of which is revealing the surprising pathways these recipes travelled. The fact that many appear in royalist-leaning recipe books suggests that the perception that these dishes exemplify rustic, republican bad taste cannot wholly account for what is found in The Court & Kitchin. On the complications that the transmission of recipes introduces into our notions of authorship, see DiMeo, ‘Authorship and Medical Networks’. For a discussion of the making of this edition, see Danforth, ‘Creating and Teaching’ (conference paper). 16 Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity, 129–31.

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that history today) consists in constructing narratives by moving evidence into useful arrangements, which can just as easily be ordered into different relationships in support of alternative arguments.17 The partisan flexibility of The Court & Kitchin’s recipes, transforming from icons of Cromwellian mismanagement to parts of royalist subcultures in the collections that include these recipes, is a function of their status not as satires but rather as pieces of historical evidence. Like other forms of evidence, they remain susceptible to being taken apart and rearranged. These are not joke recipes: they are not inherently ridiculous, anti-Cromwellian, déclassé, or damning. They only acquire these connotations when presented under the framework through which the compiler asks the reader to think about them. In terms of this framework and the relationship it creates between readers and the text, The Court & Kitchin participates in significant new trends in history writing in the period. The genre had moved away from recounting timeless exempla directed at elite readers and towards a systematized presentation of documentary evidence for the general reader to examine firsthand.18 Daniel Woolf observes that, in the Restoration, making sense of history became experimental and experiential, and open to the public.19 Historical documents were collected and printed to allow anyone who could purchase and read a book (or get someone else to do one or both of these things for them) to weigh in on the facts and significance of a given moment in time.20 History moved ‘out of the library and the closet and into the marketplace, the dining room, and the garden’, and turned its attention from

17 Frances E. Dolan, True Relations, esp. 223–24. 18 On the shift from history as exempla to history told ‘as it really was’ through systematic investigation of evidence, see Broadway, ‘No Historie So Meete’, 4–5 and Grafton, What Was History, 31; on the opening up of history to the general reader, see Kewes, ‘History and its Uses’, 18–19, Waddell, ‘Writing History from Below’, and Wood, The Memory of the People. 19 Woolf, ‘From Hystories to the Historical’, 38. The validity of written documents in supporting historical claims evolved during the medieval period, as Clanchy argues in From Memory to Written Record. This shift paved the way for the type of historiography we see evolving in the Restoration, in that examining written evidence became a way of verifying historical claims, and in that the perspective of the author of a given history may clash with the evidence of the documents that author has compiled: see Fisher, Scribal Authorship. However, whereas—as Jahner et al. discuss in their introduction to Medieval Historical Writing and as Camp investigates with regard to hagiography in Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives—these medieval precedents employed overtly fictional genre forms and thus openly framed their histories as arguments, the shift Woolf observes in Restoration historiography moves away from authoritative compilers making a case for a particular take on the past and instead towards opening up documentary evidence for general readers to assess firsthand. 20 Woolf, 44.

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kings to things.21 This change in function and audience provoked formal evolutions: histories were told through the form of annotated almanacs, calendars, newspapers, life writing, and more.22 As a recipe book, The Court & Kitchin represents another example of these experimentations in the kinds of genres through which history could be explored. Its concerns are not so much to lampoon as to instruct. While still focusing on affairs of state, the collection approaches them through kitchen stuff, a familiar part of daily life for readers from across class positions.23 The text invites this array of readers to understand history and evaluate their relationship to the past through bringing its substances back into being temporarily and examining them firsthand.24 The reader who follows Elizabeth’s method ‘To bake a Pig’, for example, re-attempts ‘an experiment practised by Her at Huntingdon Brewhouse’, and is asked to make sense of her choices by following what the text calls her ‘singular […] way of dressing a Pig’. By going through the motions of covering a recently butchered pig in clay, ‘like a Curassier, or one of Cromwels Iron-sides [i.e., armored cavalrymen]’, before putting it below the furnace for baking, the reader replays conflicts with parliamentarian troops and comes out literally on top, burying and eventually eating the figurative soldier-carcass (129). Whereas a strict satire would distance the reader from its object of ridicule, as a history, The Court & Kitchin’s aim is to bring the reader into an intimate encounter with the past—though guided by the frames the historian lays onto the documentary evidence. The Court & Kitchin foregrounds the kitchen as the place where political history was made—where the characters of leaders are formed, and where its events could be represented and examined in a kind of abstract or dumb show, as in the preparation of Elizabeth’s baked pig. In positioning the kitchen as a centre for producing and comprehending history, the text makes household staff and the decidedly non-aristocratic, rustic Cromwell 21 Woolf, 43–44. 22 Smyth, ‘Almanacs, Annotators, and Life-Writing’; Woolf, 26 and 40. 23 This reading accords with Wall’s claim that, over the course of the early modern period, ‘recipes moved away from a concern with social mobility to consolidate a national community that ideally could fuse socially differentiated audiences’, Recipes for Thought, 16–17. In a similar vein, Knoppers suggests that The Queens Closet Opened inadvertently closes distancing socioeconomic hierarchies by allowing readers to reproduce Henrietta Maria’s court in their own homes, ‘Opening the Queen’s Closet’, 495. 24 This idea of history as something understood via experiential, individualized experimentation complements Spiller’s characterization of recipe books’ place in the rise of ‘how experience-based definitions of knowledge […] implicitly expanded participation in the creation of knowledge to anyone who could read’, ‘Introduction’, x.

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family drivers of political history. Among the few named people in this text are the steward and cook who worked for the Cromwells—‘one Mr. Maidstone [hired] to be Steward of his House, and one Mr. Starkey to be his Master Cook’—and the text treats their appointments as especially significant events (24).25 Even as The Court & Kitchin advances royalist views, it acknowledges and addresses a cross-class community, which it enjoins to assist in the work of putting the past in its place.

A ‘Monument […] in Paste’: Temporal Instability in the Cromwellian Kitchen The Court & Kitchin sets out to argue for the inevitability of the Cromwells’ fall by allowing the reader to experience day-to-day life in the Cromwell household and perceive firsthand the shaky foundations on which it rested. Many of the recipes include comments that vividly lay out the family’s typical menus. The instructions for ‘Marrow Puddings’ note that Elizabeth ‘usually had [them] to her Breakfast’ (56). A recipe for strained barley broth is described as ‘a Mess frequently prepared for Oliver’, and a recipe for hog’s liver pudding is marked as the Cromwells’ daughter ‘Madame Frances her Delicacy’ ([115]-16). These recipes allow the reader to put themselves into the temporal and material matrix in which the Cromwells existed. For instance, readers can get a sense of the household’s daily schedule and priorities by picturing Elizabeth’s marrow puddings: a concoction of blanched, ground Jordan almonds, rosewater, sugar, nutmeg, cream, and ambergris ‘boyl[ed] […] gently’ with marrow bones into a kind of jelly (56). This sweet, aromatic dish includes ambergris, a luxury ingredient produced by the intestines of sperm whales that was often used in perfume-making. Labelling this as Elizabeth’s favourite breakfast presents her starting each day with dainty and flimsy, rather than fortifying, fare. Oliver’s preferred dish of strained barley broth, boiled with mace, clove, raisins, and currants and seasoned with white wine, rosewater, butter, sugar, and two beaten egg yolks, likewise depicts his body as constituted of watery, insubstantial meals. Moreover, the recipes for the dishes that are highlighted as the Cromwells’ favourites highlight a finickiness of timing. Just as cooks must carefully 25 John Maidstone, a former sequestration commissioner, served as Cromwell’s steward and cofferer; see Barclay, ‘The Lord Protector and his Court’, 206–7. Philip Starkey was Cromwell’s master cook; Latham and Matthews, eds., The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 403n.

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ensure that Elizabeth’s breakfast pudding remains at a gentle boil, they must keep a constant eye on Oliver’s barley broth, boiling it six separate times and watching on each occasion for the right moment to strain out certain ingredients and add others. Frances’s hog’s liver pudding is especially fussy; the cook is instructed that ‘the boyling must be sober, if the wind rise in [the dish], you must be ready to prick them, or else they will flie and burst in pieces’. Though heartier than her parents’ near-liquid diet, Frances’s preferred meal is a batter of flour, eggs, and ‘more grated bread then Liver’, spiced and sweetened with currants and rosewater to make a filling ‘no thicker then fritter batter’ which was then stuffed into hog intestine casings for boiling ([115]-16).26 Referring to this as Frances’s ‘Delicacy’ highlights the fragility of this dish during the cooking process. Taken together, these recipes depict the Cromwell household as insubstantial and inclined to come apart at any moment. Their kitchen staff are preoccupied with preventing the dissolution of dishes that can be read as metonyms of the Cromwells themselves. Their favourite foods sit uncomfortably in the environments in which they are prepared and make excessive demands on the cooks’ time, requiring constant attention and adjustment. Representing these fussy meals as the Cromwells’ most-demanded foods represents them in turn as inept household managers, misusing the cooks’ time and skills and wastefully consuming expensive ingredients that fail to satisfy the appetite. The compiler orients these recipes to suggest that the Cromwells’ inefficient home economics both reflected and perpetuated their likewise inefficient management of the country. The Court & Kitchin also figures the unsustainability of the Cromwells’ governance in its depiction of the family’s mealtimes. The Cromwells’ table, like their food, is portrayed as something that sucks up time and demands an ornate show, but provides little substance. ‘About Noon time’, the compiler explains, ‘a man might hear a huge clattering of Dishes, and noise of Servitors, in rank and File marching to his Table’, an excessive daily performance that nonetheless leaves the table ‘neither sumptuous nor extraordinarily furnished’. The text asks readers to picture this scene as they consider how Cromwellian England fits into their sense of history. This noisy march to a spare table is described as an ‘imitation of Paulus Ameilius in his answer to the Grecians, after his Triumph and Conquest [over] Perseus, the last Macedon King’ (30). Unlike the general of the Roman Republic that Oliver wants to equate himself 26 Thanks to Marissa Nicosia for sharing her early modern sausage-making expertise in helping me make sense of this recipe. Nicosia also points out that ‘there’s definitely a fart joke here with the “wind”’. Nicosia, email exchange with author, February 25, 2020.

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with—Lucius Aemilius Paulus Macedonius, bringing plundered goods home to his country from his victories in battle—Oliver failed to feed his country.27 The text responds to the English republicans’ portrayals of their government as carrying on the legacy of Republican Rome by insisting that these two historical moments are not analogous, and that the emptiness of Cromwellian England prevented it from matching the greatness of Rome. Likewise, in describing the Cromwells’ daily distribution of ‘Broth […] Scraps and Relique of dinner’ to the poor, the text labels these gestures of care for the country as ‘lame, decrepit, and starved precepts’ that ‘like impotent suspended Meteors, hoysed [i.e., raised] half Region high, fell distinctly at last upon himself and Family’ (43-44). Comparing rulers to meteors was a common trope in the period: the conceit suggests that their deeds are of such historic significance that they become recorded in the stars, part of history at a cosmic scale. Often, as in this instance, meteors are portents of an ill-fated future. The Cromwells’ failure to fill bellies causes their period of governance to fail to register in this history, a stalled meteor that never reaches the heavens. The food culture of their time in power is portrayed in a way that signifies that their era was a momentary anomaly and that the course of time has again righted itself, restoring order and leaving only records of puddings and broth as remaining traces of the Cromwells’ interruption of the historical narrative. This insistence on narrative order in the unfolding of history emerges in the case the text makes for living in the present. In an attitude congruous with royalist ideologies, such as Cavalier carpe diem verse, The Court & Kitchin criticizes the Cromwells for being out of touch with their present, a flaw it suggests was both rooted in and perpetuated by their relationship to food. Elizabeth’s experience with lacking adequate fare in the past, the text claims, led her ‘to prefer the certainty of her own care and diligence to the extemporary, fond and easie delusions of Deus providebit’ ([2], mislabelled 8). Elizabeth’s self-reliance, unwilling to trust that ‘God will provide’ and approaching resource management with careful oversight, might seem to be a desirable quality in a governing household. The text explains that her ‘Aspect and Consideration of the future’ made her a person of ‘prudence and sagacity’, taking ‘a prophetical prospect of the Times’ ([2]-3). This characterization of Elizabeth resonates with an ideal put forward in a long tradition of English recipe books guiding readers in how to feed themselves thriftily, 27 Thank you to Emma Atwood and Mary Crane, who are editing the introduction to The Court & Kitchin for our digital edition, for letting me run this interpretation by them and confirming that it was consistent with their reading of the passage. Atwood and Crane, email exchange with author, February 24, 2020.

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from Hugh Plat’s Sundrie New and Artificiall Remedies Against Famine (1595) to Thomas Tryon’s The Way to Save Wealth: Shewing How a Man May Live Plentifully for Two-Pence a Day (1695?).28 However, in The Court & Kitchin, Elizabeth’s approach to the reduction of consumption is not matched by a reduction in appetite. Even as her cupboards hold ‘not a joynt of Meat for which the Cook was not called to give an account’, accounts which she personally oversaw, the text claims that her efforts to deny the pull of her appetites only made them stronger (35). The compiler writes that Elizabeth ‘would look as religiously upon a March pane, Preserve, or Comfit, as a despairing lover upon his Mistresses Lips’ (8–9). Her unsatisfied hunger creates self-perpetuating cycles of acquisitiveness driven by an unaddressed feeling of lack. ‘Every one of [the Cromwells’] mischievous and Matchiavilian consultations and projects’, the text asserts, ‘were ushered in continually by a Fast’ (9). Hunger fuels their ‘deep designes and practices upon the King and Kingdome’ which, their stomachs still remaining unsatisfied, only leads to a desire for more. This refusal, motivated by ambition, to respond to the daily need to fill empty stomachs throws their household’s sense of time into disarray. Fasts ‘came so thick upon the neck of one another, that [Elizabeth’s] Domesticks had almost forgot dinner time; upstart Piety, like the modern Frugality, bating a Meal, and as that had limited the diet to Noon, this changed it and inverted it to night’ (9–10). The mealtimes that would normally give the day its structure are stripped away, leaving the household disoriented and blending daytime with night. The Court & Kitchin thus characterizes the Cromwells as a force of temporal disruption, whose ‘upstart’ behavior disordered the country, but also created the unstable conditions that inevitably brought about their ruin. The text depicts Elizabeth’s fixation on the past and future, and the fatedness of her downfall, by figuring her as a ghost haunting Whitehall, even during her time in power. The compiler describes how, ‘like a Spirit she came only to haunt, not to enjoy any part of [the palace]’ (24). Anxiously unable to serve the needs of her own and her household’s hungry bellies, she only finds ‘Content and Satisfaction […] in repining & vexing her self at the cost and Charge, the maintenance of that beggerly Court did every day put her to’ (24). Like a ghost, Elizabeth is unable to truly exist in the present because of her constant fear of imminent loss. This leaves her in part always dwelling in the future, and at the same time, in the past, as her former insecurity and ruptured life-narrative is what keeps her in this frame of mind. 28 Thirsk discusses the growth of attention in the mid-seventeenth century to the need to consume thriftily, in Food in Early Modern England, 97–126.

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The internal vacancy to which Elizabeth’s fear of consuming leads her, which leaves her more spirit than body, also manifests in her as a horror of empty space. The text describes her having the palace retrofitted with ‘many small partitions up and down, aswel above Stairs, as in the Cellars and Kitchins’ because of her terror of ‘vastness and silentness’, which made her picture the corresponding vastness of the ‘Desolation her Husband had caused’ (26). She is terrified to be left alone, imagining these rooms, which she and her husband have failed to supply with the bountiful goods that should nourish the state, instead occupied by ‘dreadful apparitions’ of those her husband overthrew, ‘whose incensed Ghosts wandred up and down’ (26–27). Both haunted and haunting, Elizabeth emblematizes how the Cromwells’ desire to secure a future by neglecting the present produced a vacancy that allowed the past to encroach upon them and repair the historical narrative they had disrupted by creating conditions that would allow the monarchy to reassume its place.

‘This Essay and quelque chose’: Restoration Historiography as Collaborative Practice Even as The Court & Kitchin attempts to portray the Cromwells’ time in power as insubstantial and transient, it is preoccupied by its lingering material traces. The collection invites the reader to participate in performing the ideological work of contending with these influences. Elizabeth Spiller notes that early modern recipe books evolved out of the medieval genre of the ‘book of secrets’, collections that instructed readers in magic, alchemy, and other arts that would enable them to transform the material world, revealing how ‘both doing and knowing something, could transform nature, and, in doing so, create knowledge’.29 As a recipe book rooted in this tradition, The Court & Kitchin asks the reader to participate materially in shaping the present. As a history, the collection recruits the reader to performatively confront the past and put it to work for the present by controlling and consuming its remnants. In keeping with the Restoration-era trend towards treating history as something to be examined f irsthand by ordinary people, The Court & Kitchin frames its intention to allow ‘the Reader [to] better perceive, and be perhaps advantaged’ by confronting the still-extant evidence indicating who the Cromwells were (45). Though the text represents her as ghostly, its 29 Spiller, ‘Introduction’, xv.

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Elizabeth lives on still, as do those who were impacted by her. Recounting the story of a woman who attempted to sell some ‘Green Pease’ to Elizabeth, only to take them back on hearing the insultingly low price she offered to pay for them, the text notes that the would-be seller ‘is yet alive to justifie the truth of this Relation’ (36-37). Whitehall Palace, too, bears the marks of their presence: the text laments how the Cromwells ‘left it in a worse condition then when [they] found it, as is publique in several Treatises’ (29). These ongoing effects make the work of restoration an urgent, present need: ‘how can the desperate depressed estate of many thousand loyal Subjects, who are irrecoverably lost and past all means […] buoy up themselves or Families?’ (sig. A4v). The Court & Kitchin figures kitchen work as just such a means of restitution, describing itself as an ‘Essay and quelque chose to help [the reader’s] Digestion’ ([151], mislabelled 133). In calling itself a ‘quelque chose’—a term for a small, elegant French dish—the text frames its effects as a kind of dietary therapy. In consuming the collection by working through the recipes it presents, readers are able to digest the past, both literally and metaphorically, remaking it for their own purposes, putting it into the service of maintaining their bodies, and transforming it as it passes through their systems. When recipes included in The Court & Kitchin appear in The Gentlewomans Companion or The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight without any apparatus associating them with the Cromwells or commenting on the political effects of consuming them, the logical end of this appropriation is complete. In the absence of The Court & Kitchin’s framework, the historical loose ends that the Cromwells represent are erased and neutralized. Indeed, the very processes that went into making the book itself are figured as part of the healing process. As the compiler warns, ‘nothing but the lees of gall, and the most biting sharpest Ink will ere be able to cure or stop this Protectorian Evil’ (sig. A5v). The batches of ink that were fixed up to put these recipes into print are the first step in the work they ask the reader to continue. As the digital edition of The Court & Kitchin traces out how the recipes ascribed to Elizabeth Cromwell circulated widely in royalist cookery books, we will be able to see how this method of attempting to make the Restoration a reality happened on the ground: in the everyday terrain of the early modern kitchen.

Works Cited Barclay, Andrew. ‘The Lord Protector and his Court’. In Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives, edited by Patrick Little, 195–215. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

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Bassnett, Madeline. ‘Restoring the Royal Household: Royalist Politics and the Commonwealth Recipe Book’. Early English Studies 2 (2009): 1–32. Broadway, Jan. ‘No Historie So Meete’: Gentry Culture and the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Camp, Cynthia Turner. Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives as History Writing in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015. Clanchy, Michael. From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307. 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2013. The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth, Commonly Called Joan Cromwel the Wife of the Late Usurper. London, 1664. The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth Commonly Called Joan Cromwel the Wife of the Late Usurper. Edited by Deanna Danforth, Emma Atwood, Mary Crane, Andy Crow, Laura Sterrett, and Margaret Summerfield. Boston College. https://sites. bc.edu/court-and-kitchen. Danforth, Deanna Malvesti. ‘Creating and Teaching the New Digital Edition of The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth’. Paper presented at the Renaissance Society of America Conference, Virtual conference, April 14, 2021. DiMeo, Michelle. ‘Authorship and Medical Networks: Reading Attributions in Early Modern Manuscript Recipe Books’. In Reading and Writing Recipe Books 1550–1800, edited by Michelle DiMeo and Sara Pennell, 25–46. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2013. Dolan, Frances E. True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in SeventeenthCentury England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Field, Catherine. ‘“Many Hands Hands”: Writing the Self in Early Modern Women’s Recipe Books’. In Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England, edited by Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle, 49–64. London: Routledge, 2007. Fisher, Matthew. Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012. Gillespie, Katharine. ‘Elizabeth Cromwell’s Kitchen Court: Republicanism and the Consort’. Genders 33 (2001): paragraphs 1–34. https://www.colorado.edu/ gendersarchive1998-2013/2001/01/10/elizabeth-cromwells-kitchen-courtrepublicanism-and-consort. Goldstein, David B. ‘How to Make a Bisk: The Restoration Cookbook as National Restorative’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 151-75. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Grafton, Anthony. What Was History? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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Jahner, Jennifer, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth M. Tyler. ‘Introduction’. In Medieval Historical Writing, edited by Jahner et al., 1–16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Jenner, Mark S. R., ‘The Roasting of the Rump: Scatology and the Body Politic in Restoration England’. Past and Present 177 (2002): 84–120. Kewes, Paulina. ‘History and its Uses’. In The Uses of History in Early Modern England, edited by Paulina Kewes, 1–30. San Marino: Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 2006. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. ‘Opening the Queen’s Closet: Henrietta Maria, Elizabeth Cromwell, and the Politics of Cookery’. Renaissance Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2007): 464–99. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Latham, Robert and William Matthews, eds. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol. X. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983. M., W. The Queens Closet Opened. London, 1655. May, Robert. The Accomplisht Cook. London, 1660. Neufeld, Matthew. The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembrance in Late Stuart England. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2013. Pennell, Sara and Michelle DiMeo. ‘Introduction’. In Reading and Writing Recipe Books 1550–1800, edited by Michelle DiMeo and Sara Pennell, 1–22. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Plat, Hugh. Sundrie New and Artificiall Remedies Against Famine. London, 1595. Rabisha, William. The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected. London, 1661. Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar. In The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al., 1685–1750. New York: Norton, 2016. Smyth, Adam. ‘Almanacs, Annotators, and Life-Writing in Early Modern England’. English Literary Renaissance 30, no. 2 (2008): 200–44. Spiller, Elizabeth. ‘Introduction’. In Seventeenth-Century Recipe Books: Cooking, Physic and Chirurgery in the Works of Elizabeth Talbot Grey and Aletheia Talbot Howard, edited by Elizabeth Spiller, ix–li. Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. Thirsk, Joan. Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions 1500–1760. London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006. Tryon, Thomas. The Way to Save Wealth: Shewing How a Man May Live Plentifully for Two-Pence a Day. London, 1695?. Waddell, Brodie. ‘Writing History from Below: Chronicling and Record-Keeping in Early Modern England’. History Workshop Journal 85 (2018): 239–64. Wall, Wendy. Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

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Wood, Andy. The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Woolley, Hannah. The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery. London, 1675. Woolley, Hannah. The Gentlewomans Companion. London, 1673. Woolf, Daniel R. ‘From Hystories to the Historical: Five Transitions in Thinking about the Past, 1500–1700’. Huntington Library Quarterly 69, no. 1–2 (2005): 33–70.

About the Author Andy Crow is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Boston College. Their book-in-progress, Austerity Measures: The Poetics of Hunger in Early Modern English Literature, explores poetics and food scarcity in seventeenth-century literature. Their recent work has appeared in English Literary History, Shakespeare Quarterly, and SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900.

9. A Culinary Embassy: Diplomatic Home Making in Lady Ann Fanshawe’s Booke of Receipts Melissa Schultheis1

Abstract In 1651, Joseph Averie transcribed Lady Ann Fanshawe’s recipes into Mrs. Fanshawes Booke of Receipts of Physickes Salues, Waters, Cordials, Preserves and Cookery. Averie’s hand allows us to date the recording of recipes as pre- and post-1651 and examine which sections received the most additions. This reading method reveals the way that recipe books record domestic aspirations, and in the case of Fanshawe, show how those aspirations changed over the course of the Civil War and her time in Iberia. While some features in later recipes appear to be influenced by her time in Spain, all indicate an increased attention to cuisine that asserts her, and her book’s, status as a culinary ambassador and cosmopolitan emissary in a globalizing world. Keywords: Lady Ann Fanshawe, domesticity, diplomacy, England, Iberia, culinary history

In December of 1651, Joseph Averie transcribed Lady Ann Fanshawe’s recipes into Mrs. Fanshawes Booke of Receipts of Physickes Salues, Waters, Cordials, Preserves and Cookery.2 While it is unclear how much agency Averie had in the resulting manuscript’s format, his title anticipates the recipe book’s organization into six distinct sections, which he used to arrange the recipes 1 I am deeply grateful to the editors of this collection and to Andy Crow, Deanna Danforth, and Sara Pennell for their conversations and ideas about earlier iterations of this essay. 2 Fanshawe, Mrs. Fanshawes Booke of Receipts. All subsequent references will be provided parenthetically.

Bassnett, M. and Hillary M. Nunn (eds.), In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463721646_ch09

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that Fanshawe had collected or inherited prior to 1651.3 In examining the extant manuscript, we see that a majority of the recipes that appear in Fanshawes Booke of Receipts do not appear in Averie’s hand, yet later transcribers and contributors to the manuscript often abide by the structure that this amanuensis imposed on it. Together Averie’s hand and the manuscript’s organization allow us to date the recording of recipes as pre- and post-1651 and examine which sections received the most revisions and additions. This timestamp is significant as it allows for a comparison of the manuscript’s recipe conventions before and after Fanshawe’s decision to collate her recipes in 1651, including her time in Portugal and Spain in the mid-1660s. Although many seventeenth-century English receipt books contain recipes from or show the influence of other parts of Europe, Fanshawe’s decision to record recipes while travelling with her Cavalier husband during the Interregnum and early Restoration of Charles II makes her notable among royalist women. Attuned to Averie’s hand and organization, this essay asks what Fanshawe’s recipe book shows us about her changing social and political networks and what type of food culture and home she imagines for herself before and after her later and more extensive travels in the 1660s. Her recipe book holds not only a record of her past homes, but also an idealized pattern for constructing a new one: a culinary embassy where English food culture embraces international cuisines and food customs with help from Fanshawe herself, in her distinct role as a skilled domestic ambassador. Fanshawe’s recipe book indicates the values and customs she aspires to uphold as much as it provides us with a view of recipes, methods, and flavours she may have reproduced in her own kitchens, whether during her time abroad or upon her return. It is this underlying feature of recipe books that animates the following study. Recipe books certainly rely on and record material practices of the past, but they simultaneously anticipate the future. They portray their compiler’s expectations for the availability of home grown produce, for kitchens equipped with the tools necessary to perform procedures, and for the social and domestic occasions in which a given recipe will be helpful or necessary. The aspirations that Fanshawe records spring from her lived experience, which in turn affect how she imagines her home, her future homes, and her role in those domestic spaces. Comparing 3 Averie divides the manual as follows: Physic from fols. 4r–29v; Salves from fols. 30r–37v; Cordials from fols. 57r–57v (nearly twenty pages are missing between the sections for cordials and waters); Waters from fols. 76r–93v; 96v–100v contain recipes that seem to belong to the Cookery section but perhaps did not fit within the space Averie left for this section; Cookery from fols. 126r–173r; and Preserves from fols. 174r–228v.

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the recipes transcribed by Averie to those written in by later contributors, and reading these recipes alongside Fanshawe’s account of her life, this essay examines the way that Fanshawe’s book alchemizes life events into two possible culinary futures: one in which familial and social networks indicate a kitchen practice concerned with bodily healing and grounded in English places, and one in which Fanshawe’s time in Iberia contributes to a compilation of recipes that reimagine home as a culinary embassy. In considering Fanshawe’s life writings, I rely on Averie’s 1651 hand to mark these possible culinary futures. Fanshawe’s memoirs document unprecedented changes for her family and household, and, by turning to her narration of these life events, we can see a royalist’s home shaped by a food discourse increasingly influenced by her family’s political position. Her recipe book, too, reflects these changes. Pre-1651 recipes are more likely to include attributions to Fanshawe’s family and recipes for medicines than her post-1651 recipes. Later recipes, such as ‘To Dry porke like Spanish bacon’ and ‘To Pickle Cucumbers as mangoes’, appear after 1661 and tend to focus on cookery and include generic features, such as the inclusion of previously unmentioned ingredients and cooking methods that she may have encountered in Iberia, that do not appear in earlier recipes. While some of these features in later recipes appear to be influenced by her more extensive time in Spain, all indicate an increased attention to cuisine and table decorum that asserts her, and her book’s, status as a culinary ambassador and cosmopolitan emissary in a globalizing world.

Ann Fanshawe’s Booke of Receipts in 1651 Unlike many other royalist women, Fanshawe did not remain in England during the Civil War to shore up funds for her exiled husband, nor did she choose to endure political exile in Antwerp or Paris. She instead followed her husband Richard to Ireland, France, Portugal, and Spain. In looking at Fanshawe’s Booke of Receipts, we can see her self-conscious efforts to use food writing to uphold royalist rituals. The food discourse that she records before her mid-1660 travels describes a domestic practice that looks quite different from the one her manuscript’s later recipes portray. The initial transcription of Fanshawe’s manuscript occurs in a decade in which scholars have noted a resurgence of printed recipe books in the 1650s by royalists. 4 4 For discussion of the role of royalist politics in printed recipe books, see Archer, ‘The Queens’ Arcanum’; Bassnett, ‘Restoring the Royal Household’; Knoppers, ‘Opening the Queen’s Closet’;

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Books such as The Queens Closet Opened (1655), purporting to hold the recipes of Queen Henrietta Maria, and The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth, Commonly Called Joan Cromwel (1664), allegedly containing the recipes of Elizabeth Cromwell, offered a food discourse that upheld the aesthetic and royalist pleasures of eating, hospitality, and table decorum in contrast to a stingy Cromwellian table.5 Fanshawe’s manuscript, too, participates in a similar, but more personal desire to reestablish food traditions after Civil War exile and reform her home in the image of successful royalist domesticity. Fanshawe had her recipes collated and transcribed into a large, leatherbound manuscript by Joseph Averie in 1651. We may then consider Averie’s entries, as Hillary Nunn notes, as representing ‘an urge to move from the Fanshawes’ atypically mobile lifestyle to one more settled in English ways and places’.6 The very act of having her recipes transcribed into a large leather-bound book complete with metal clasp and gilt stamping seems to suggest Fanshawe’s desire for a sense of domestic security and rootedness, and the 1651 attributions that Averie records indicate a stability marked by familial and political Englishness. As the Fanshawes retire to what her Memoirs call an ‘innocent country life’,7 splitting their time between Tankersley Park near Sheffield, and London for the next eight years, her recipe book provides insights into the social and food networks on which Fanshawe drew to signal domestic and English royalist stability. Many of the recipes in Averie’s hand include attributions that make apparent the familial and social networks within which Fanshawe established herself ‘less as an imposed authority […] than as a way of authorizing herself by rooting herself in [a social] network’.8 These recipes not only locate her within familial networks but also put her in relationship to royalist and English palates. All forty recipes attributed to ‘My Mother’, for example, and many of those attributed to her in-laws, appear in Averie’s hand. Recipes attributed to Fanshawe’s mother particularly reinforce connections to English political networks. One of these, ‘Dr Burges his Directions in tyme Snook, ‘“Soveraigne Receipts” and the Politics of Beauty’; and both Crow, ‘“A Little Winter Savory, A Little Time”’ and Goldstein ‘How to Make a Bisk’ in this collection. 5 See Bassnett, ‘Restoring the Royal Household’; and Sharpe, ‘“An Image Doting Rabble”’. 6 This is especially relevant since, according to the dates in Fanshawe’s memoir, this occurs a month after Richard is released from prison in London, having escaped execution at the Battle of Worcester. Nunn and Schultheis, ‘Using the Methods of Our Manuscripts’, unpublished conference paper. 7 Fanshawe, The Memoirs of Ann Lady Fanshawe, 83–84. All subsequent references to the memoir will be provided parenthetically. 8 Goldstein, Eating and Ethics,161.

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of Plague’ appears in the recipe books of both Mary Granville (1640–1750) and Lady Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh (seventeenth century).9 Granville’s recipe book, like Fanshawe’s, spans at least three generations, and both Granville and Fanshawe record Spanish recipes in the mid-1660s that recall their family’s political ties to Spain. Granville’s grandfather and father held the position of English Consul in Cadiz.10 While Lady Ranelagh’s sympathies toward the monarchy waned over the course of the mid-seventeenth century, her family’s gentry position would certainly have made her familiar with English political and social circles and, later in the seventeenth-century, scientific networks, as she was an intimate member of the Hartlib Circle along with her brother, chemist Robert Boyle.11 That Fanshawe’s mother, Granville, and Lady Ranelagh shared a common recipe and maybe even a common source suggests the Fanshawes’ close connections with English political and social circles. Averie’s hand also records recipes associated with recognizably royalist sources, including five of the six attributed to Sir Kenelm Digby. Seventeen of Fanshawe’s recipes, as David Potter notes, also appear in royalist John Evelyn’s recipe book, indicating that they may have likewise shared a common source or were taken down at a time when both were present.12 One unattributed recipe in Averie’s hand that Fanshawe’s manuscript shares with Evelyn’s further hints at her royalist connections. Goldstein notes that Fanshawe’s ‘To make Banbury Cake’ appears in print in 1655 in The Compleat Cook as ‘The Countesse of RUTLANDS Receipt of making the rare Banbury Cake which was so much praised at her Daughters (the right Honorable the Lady Chawerths) wedding’.13 Recording this recipe four years prior to its print publication, Fanshawe thus may have had access to recipes in manuscript, which belonged to members of the English court, before they circulated in print, reminding us of her intimacy with royalists as well as a desire to recreate the flavours and customs that would come to mark the royalist table.14 9 Granville, Granville Family Receipt Book, fol. 41r; Ranelagh, Lady Rennelagh’s Choise Receipts, fol. 5v. 10 See Amy Tigner’s ‘The Granville Project’, Early Modern Recipes Online Collective. 11 Her father was the first earl of Cork, and her husband, Arthur Jones, was a member of both the Irish House of Commons and the English House of Commons. Hutton, ‘Jones [née Boyle]’. 12 Potter, ‘Household Receipt Book’, 21. 13 M., The Compleat Cook, 109; Goldstein, Eating and Ethics, 157–58. Original italics. 14 In an important note on recipe ‘originality’, Goldstein reminds us that we cannot know for certain whether this recipe circulated in a third manuscript from which courtly women and Fanshawe borrowed, 158.

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Another unattributed recipe in Averie’s hand, ‘A Vinegar to wash the Teeth for the Scuruy’, embeds Fanshawe in a specific English herbal practice. The recipe calls for the ‘tops of Firre’, which ‘are not to be had in any place in England but at Roe-Hampton near Putney’ (fol. 11r). In specifying the use of only Roehampton’s fir tops, Fanshawe’s recipe roots her in English soil—specifically at the location of an interesting transaction during the Civil War. In 1642 the royal army constructed a bridge of boats that connected Fulham and Putney, eventually erecting forts on each side. And in 1647 Cromwell had fixed his headquarters of the army at Putney to better observe Charles II at Hampton Court.15 As she and her family recovered from the Cavalier Winter, Fanshawe used her recipes to establish a food discourse and domestic practice that inserted her ‘not just into the English landscape and herb market, but into the Royalist networks on English ground’.16 This small sample of recipes is representative of her familial and political ties to royalist sympathizers, and the emphasis on English soil that the manuscript records in 1651 underscores a connection between Fanshawe’s domestic healing practice and perhaps an attempt to reclaim that practice for royalists such as herself who had been displaced from English soil during the Civil War. Fanshawe’s familial recipes in the manuscript further emphasize domestic healing. The recipes in Averie’s hand that make up the medicinal sections, ‘Physickes’, ‘Salues’, ‘Waters’, and ‘Cordials’, account for nearly half the recipes he records. When we consider the manuscript’s attributions alongside its attention to medicine and cookery, we also see that recipes attributed to Fanshawe’s family are more likely to appear in Averie’s hand and in these medicinal sections. The forty recipes attributed to Fanshawe’s mother, for example, almost exclusively appear in medicinal sections, with the exception of three culinary recipes, and her mother’s recipes account for 39 percent of the attributed recipes in ‘Physickes’.17 Averie’s placement of the medical sections at the beginning of the manuscript, moreover, emphasizes bodily healing, perhaps indicating an expectation that these recipes would be more serviceable to the home or that users would prefer them to be more readily available. This ratio of medicinal-to-culinary recipes in 1651 is significant for seeing changes to the manuscript’s implied domestic practice, as later additions to the manuscript do not give equal attention to medicine and cookery and later recipes are less likely to be attributed to Fanshawe’s family. Averie-recorded recipes suggest that Fanshawe imagined her home as one 15 Lysons, ‘Putney’, 404–35. 16 Nunn and Schultheis, ‘Using the Methods of Our Manuscripts’. 17 Nunn and Schultheis.

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of post-war recovery, where a royalist could perhaps remedy the domestic turbulence brought on by the Civil War by reclaiming traditional medical practices and relying on local herb markets to heal her family and signal and support its domestic stability.

The Usefulness of Kitchen Knowledge Fanshawe’s memoir, which she addresses to her only surviving son Richard, offers some indication of how Fanshawe spent her time in Iberia as well as her experiences of Spanish and Portuguese cuisine and kitchen practices. As a result, this life writing is helpful to consider when examining her recorded recipes, especially those recorded in non-Averie hands. Fanshawe had already completed her travels abroad and had been compiling her recipe book for over twenty years at the time she penned her memoir. Its readers often note her ‘strikingly unorthodox activities’ that seem to come straight out of an epic romance.18 In examining the memoir’s engagement with both the social and political world of the court, for example, Madeline Bassnett identifies the ways in which Fanshawe practices a ‘“career” as valuable as any pursued by a man’ and recuperates her husband’s reputation after his failed ambassadorial endeavours in Spain by attending to the political circumstances affecting her country and family.19 Fanshawe’s recipe book, too, narrates her family’s success at home and abroad. Fanshawe later gives her book of recipes to her daughter Katherine in 1678, two years after she presents her memoir to her son Richard. Like her memoir, this manuscript is a vehicle for filial counsel, albeit one that does not look explicitly at national or political affairs. Yet when we consider Fanshawe’s recipes alongside her memoir, we see a manuscript that reimagines Fanshawe’s domestic kitchen practice by adopting not only Spanish flavours and ingredients, but also Spanish food customs and 18 Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 1650–1689, 23. Goldstein compares Fanshawe’s exploits with a Turkish galleon to a Renaissance romance, Eating and Ethics, 154. Fanshawe’s memoir records fourteen pregnancies and four miscarriages exacerbated by travel, poor provisions, and flea-ridden beds, but her notable undertakings include escaping Cromwell’s army during the invasion of Cork in 1649 while smuggling out Richard’s letters, encountering a ghost in Limerick, traversing knee-deep plague-infested human refuse to flee Republican forces, obtaining a false passport by impersonating a merchant’s wife, surviving a shipwreck, and dressing as a boy during a brush with a Turkish galley (Memoirs 53, 57–58, 60–61, 88–89, 72, 63). 19 Bassnett, ‘“All the Ceremonyes and Civilityes”’, 94; Bassnett’s use of ‘career’ is borrowed from work by Barbara Harris, who examines the political involvement of elite Tudor women, English Aristocratic Women, 5.

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cooking methods, as a means of navigating her role as an ambassador’s wife. Fanshawe positions herself as one with intimate knowledge of Spanish food culture in her memoir. Her recipe book’s attention to the food landscape of her 1665 travels, as we will see, dovetails with her memoir’s recuperation of her family’s status after her husband’s failed ambassadorial endeavours in Spain. Through food discourse, Fanshawe is able to reclaim diplomatic success for her family by asserting her intimate knowledge of Spanish ingredients, cuisine, and table decorum. An initial example that demonstrates Fanshawe’s use of kitchen practices to foreground her family’s political and social position appears as she records her family’s first moments in Spain. Although the Fanshawes were greeted with the ceremony expected from the Spanish court, the English court’s eventual loss of confidence in Richard as an ambassador seems inevitable given the events surrounding Fanshawe’s first months in Spain in the mid-1660s. In a considerable breach of diplomatic etiquette, the couple learns shortly after their arrival that Spain has not provided them with lodging. Fanshawe overlooks this significant slight in her memoir, in what appears to be intentional silence about her family’s unstable relationship to both Spain and England at this time. She, instead, focuses on courtly gift-giving and food discourse.20 After nearly four months without secure lodging, Fanshawe writes that in ‘August we came to the house of Siete Chimeneas, which his Majesty did give us to dwell in’ (Memoirs 151). In refraining from mentioning the embarrassment the delay brought her family, Fanshawe instead emphasizes that their lodging was a gift, a hospitality one would expect Spain to bestow on a respected ambassador. She continues in the next sentence to describe how she and Richard ‘settled now [their] family in order, and tables’: ‘Our own consisted of two courses of eight dishes each, and the steward’s of four’ (151). Fanshawe, at what must have been a moment of heightened tension for her family, reflects on her new home’s location, the way in which it was obtained, and its domestic stability by drawing attention to table decorum and eating as an indication of her family’s affluence and proof of her family’s ability to uphold English-Spanish amity. Fanshawe uses her attention to food, recipes, and table practices to further demonstrate an intimate knowledge of Spanish culture and establish herself as a culinary ambassador. She accomplishes this not only by detailing Spanish 20 Bassnett, 101. Bassnett reads Fanshawe’s attention to gifts, and specif ically a ‘jewell of diamonds’ and the description of its monetary value, as an indication of Fanshawe’s ‘considerable influence on and interest in what was ostensibly [her] husband[’s] business’, 101.

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cuisine, as we will see, but also by highlighting this knowledge alongside her discussions of her husband’s diplomacy. In so doing, she depicts herself and Richard as ideal domestic and political ambassadors respectively. Shortly after describing her first meetings with members of the Spanish court, she recounts her tours of a convent, a hospital, an apothecary’s shop, and the King’s palace. Fanshawe establishes the splendour of Spanish resources and sites, but interrupts this project to praise her husband’s diplomacy in freeing Don Francisco de Ayala from prison, an act that ‘made a very great impression’ on ‘Spaniards of all sorts’ ‘though the chief minister of state in [England] did not value this, nor give the encouragement to such a noble action as was due’ (164). Whether to ‘underline her anger at the English’, as Bassnett suggests,21 or to deflect quickly from meditating on the negative implications for the state of the English court, Fanshawe returns to her praise of Spanish culture and its court with a lengthy description of its ingredients and cuisine, first positioning herself alongside her husband as an ideal diplomat: And I will here impartially say what I observed of the Spanish nation, both in their customs and principles and country. I find it a received opinion that Spain affords not food either good or plentiful. Sure it is that strangers that neither have skill to choose nor money to buy will find themselves at a loss. (164)

In contrasting herself to ‘strangers’, Fanshawe portrays herself as an insider to Spanish culture while suggesting that others, such as the ‘chief minister’ of England, whom she had lambasted a moment earlier, lack her and her family’s tactfulness. Moreover, these ‘strangers’, according to Fanshawe, may not have had the wealth, knowledge, or social and political position to obtain the food she would go on to describe, further emphasizing her family’s status through its experience of food in Spain. Fanshawe thus becomes an English ambassador of the Spanish court’s cuisine and food culture and an insider with the financial means, knowledge, and ability to communicate its secrets. Fanshawe most clearly substantiates her posturing in her description of the many delicacies she encountered in Spain. The sheer space that Fanshawe devotes to discussing Spanish food and the way she positions herself as one with detailed knowledge of it furthers her critique of those who do not understand the Spanish court as she and her husband do: 21 Bassnett, 108.

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there is not in the Christian world better wines than their midland wines are especially, besides sherry and canary. Their water tastes like milk; their corn white to a miracle; and their wheat makes the sweetest and best bread in the world. Bacon beyond belief good; the Segovia veal much larger, whiter, and fatter than ours. Mutton most excellent; capons much better than ours. They have a small bird that lives and fattens on grapes and corn—so fat that it exceeds the quantity of flesh. They have the best partridges I ever ate, and the best sausages, and salmon, pikes, and sea-breams, which they send up in pickle called escabeche to Madrid; and dolphins, which are excellent meat; besides carps, and many other sorts of fish. The cream called nata is much sweeter and thicker than ever I saw in England. Their eggs much exceeds ours; and so all sorts of salads and roots and fruits. That I most admired is melons, peaches, bergamot pears, and grapes, oranges, lemons, citrons, figs, pomegranates. Besides that, I have eat many sorts of biscuits, cakes, cheese, and excellent sweetmeats. I have not here mentioned especially manger blanc. And they have olives which are nowhere so good. Their perfumes of amber excel all the world in their kind, both for clothes, household stuff, and fumes; and there are no such waters made as in Seville. They have daily curiosities brought from Italy and the Indies to this court […] without partiality, I must say, it is the best established court but our own in the Christian world that ever I saw. (164–66)

In placing the events surrounding Don Francisco de Ayala among descriptions of Spanish courtesy, richness, and culinary practices, which she implies require funds, knowledge of Spanish customs, and diplomatic acuity to observe, she turns herself and Richard into knowledgeable intimates of Spanish culture. As we will see, this project continues when we examine her post-1651 recipes.

Ann Fanshawe’s Booke of Receipts after 1651 When we consider the number and location of Fanshawe’s recipes recorded after 1651, and particularly those she gathers in her mid-1660 travels, we see a collection of recipes more focused on culinary aspirations and table decorum, rather than home-grown medicine, ingredients, and social circles. Despite her husband’s and family’s souring relationship with the English and Spanish courts in the mid-1660s, the recipes she records during this period reveal a kitchen practice that aspires to integrate the flavours and table

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customs that would reflect the social and domestic stability of a successful diplomat’s family. If the collation of her recipes following Richard’s release from prison in 1651 marks an attempt at domestic recovery and royalist reclamation, then the recipes that Fanshawe gathers during her mid-1660 travels to Iberia use food discourse to foreground her intimacy with foreign cuisine and cooking practices and reestablish her family’s social standing. Averie’s hand accounts for only 40 percent of the total number of recipes in the manuscript. Fanshawe and later recipe compilers added over three hundred recipes to Averie’s two hundred, and they generally followed his organizational structure by adding recipes to the blank pages that he left after each section. For example, recorded after 1651, ‘This Medecine also is very approued for the Wormes’ and ‘Angelica Water’ appear in the ‘Physickes’ and ‘Waters’ sections respectively (fols. 11r, 86r). Compilers deviated from the organization at times—forty-one miscellaneous medical recipes appear in the ‘Cookery’ and ‘Preserves’ sections—but typically the additional 308 recipes follow the original organization. This structuring helps us to more easily see which categories received the most additions in the overall extant manuscript and allows for a helpful comparison to the compilation of recipes transcribed by Averie. The makeup of the manuscript and its recipe discourse decidedly changes after 1651, becoming more culinary in nature. Nearly 80 percent of the recipes not recorded by Averie are located in ‘Cookery’ and ‘Preserves’ and several are attributed to people Fanshawe meets or locations that she travels to during the mid-1660s. While the initial transcription of her recipe book portrays a domestic landscape where its owner divides her time between healing and feeding her family, the recipes recorded after 1651 depict a different domestic practice. The manuscript’s post-1651 recipe discourse not only reflects non-English flavours and ingredients, but it also records recipes that make use of nuanced generic conventions not present in her earlier recipes. Several of Fanshawe’s recipes recorded after 1660 also introduce generic recipe conventions, such as the inclusion of catalogues, the use of ‘like’ and ‘as’ in recipe titles and the inclusion of a method of pickling that does not appear prior to her travels.22 Such changes to recipe conventions reflect, 22 For a study of Fanshawe’s Iberian recipes, see Bassnett, ‘A Language Not One’s Own’; Tigner, ‘Trans-Border Kitchens’. In her compelling examination of the titles and attributions of Fanshawe’s recipes from Portugal and Spain, Bassnett argues that Fanshawe’s intimacy with a Spanish perfume maker ‘serves as a record of the international co-operation required to teach and learn new and foreign practices’, and demonstrates ‘an ideal relationship between an England and Spain that freely and generously exchange skills and hospitalities’. Fanshawe’s record of this

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as Francisco Alonso-Almeida argues, ‘the evolution of social and cultural codes’, which are ‘traceable in the linguistic configuration of the recipe over time’.23 The introduction of not only previously unmentioned ingredients, perhaps the convention most likely to change due to travel, but also new title, preparation, and application conventions, emphasize a growing desire for cosmopolitan kitchen and food practices and at times recall Spanish food decorum. Attributed to Lady Turnor, the recipe ‘Spanish eggs’, for example, does not appear in Averie’s hand and demonstrates a generic convention uncommon in Fanshawe’s pre-1651 recipes: its title indicates the cuisine that the recipe attempts to imitate. With the exception of one recipe—‘To Make Spanish Creame’—culinary and medicinal recipes recorded by Averie do not indicate the country or cuisine in their titles, but this feature appears in seven recipe titles recorded in non-Averie hands.24 These culinary recipes may suggest that Fanshawe experienced them while travelling in France and Spain, and at the very least indicate the way the manuscript independently continues Fanshawe’s aspiration for cosmopolitan kitchen and food practices. A focus on organizing and categorizing cuisine is also apparent later in the manuscript, where lists of different foodstuffs suggest a post-1651 interest in codifying kitchen practices. One user records a catalogue titled, ‘A Bill of fare to direct a young House=keeper for setting forth a Table’, and another hand pens two, titled ‘A meicktuer [mixture] of Seuerall dishes out of which a yong howskeper may make Choys of what is Sutable to ther fortun and Estat’ and ‘Drinkes proper to be mayd in the Cuntrey’ (fols. 230r–235r, 236r–237r, 238r). None of these catalogues includes page numbers that would direct users from their lists to specific recipes within the manuscript. But all three speak to the post-1651 manuscript’s attention to the role that culinary recipes play in expressing hospitality and cosmopolitan food decorum for the home. Although ‘A Bill of fare’ organizes dishes by cooking method and ingredient, while ‘A meicktuer of Seuerall dishes’ is a single list of products and ingredients such as ‘all sortes of Cremes’ and ‘peese’ or peas, both titles make food etiquette the purview of the housekeeper. The very dishes and ingredients served, ‘A meicktuer of Seuerall dishes’ suggests, cultivates a table that signals the appropriate social and economic state of a diplomat’s amity, Bassnett contends, is evidence of Fanshawe’s efforts to restore her husband’s reputation after his diplomatic failures, 14–15. 23 Alonso-Almeida, ‘Genre Conventions’, 69. 24 ‘To make Spanish Creame’, fol. 128v; ‘To make Spanish Hypocrist, dated Madrid 1664’, fol. 85r; ‘To make a Spanish Biske’, fol. 142r; ‘To make french broth’, fol. 149r; ‘To make French porrage of a Duck’, fol. 151r; ‘To dry porke like Spanish bacon’, fol. 157v; ‘To make french bread’, fol. 185v; ‘To make Spanish eggs’, fol. 186r.

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home. That these catalogues for table setting and kitchen oikos appear after 1651, when compilers predominantly added cookery recipes to Fanshawe’s book, draws attention to the way that culinary aspirations signal social standing for Fanshawe and a desire for her daughter, or future users, to continue this domestic and diplomatic legacy. None of the recipes for items listed in the catalogue ‘Drinkes proper to be mayd in the Cuntrey’ appears in Averie’s hand apart from one recipe that was later crossed out. Given the location of many of these recipes within the manuscript, the types of ingredients, and the hands that record them, the catalogue of recipes appears to have been influenced by Fanshawe’s time abroad. Not only does this indicate that the catalogue was penned after 1651, but the inclusion of recipes gathered in Spain also suggests that it may have been penned after Fanshawe’s mid-1660s travels. While the list is primarily composed of fruit wines common in England, the seventh recipe in her catalogue of drinks, ‘Lemonatha’, appears twice in the recipe book, once in Averie’s hand as ‘To make Lemmon Nautho the best way’, and once in an unidentified hand as ‘Madrid the 10 of August 1665 To make Lemonado’ (fols. 139r, 154r). Both recipes’ title spellings indicate that they have Iberian influences, and the inclusion of the latter’s location, month, and year situate Fanshawe clearly in Spain. Another wine recipe in the catalogue also draws on Spanish preparations and ingredients. The tenth recipe, for example, is for raisin wine, which calls for raisins from Malaga, Spain and even includes instructions for how to harvest them: ‘Pick from the large stalks, or any that are perish’d’, suggesting personal knowledge of this Spanish produce (fol. 163r). Both recipes appear in the middle of the list of thirteen beverage recipes, suggesting that they were not later additions to the list, but rather that they were recalling Fanshawe’s mid-1660 travels. The list’s blending of English and Spanish recipes contributes to the manuscript’s later emphasis on a cosmopolitan kitchen practice. This list’s lemon-infused wine is especially interesting as it also appears in Fanshawe’s memoir during her description of the Spanish king and queen’s eating habits in 1665. They, she writes, ‘drink[ ] water either cold, with snow, or limonada, or some such thing’ (170). Neither Fanshawe’s memoir nor the recipes make clear which of the two would have most closely approximated what she saw the Spanish court consuming in 1665. Fanshawe would have come across both recipes prior to making her catalogue of drinks, but it seems likely that it was the later recipe to which her memoir refers, as a user has struck out the undated lemonado recipe and the 1665 recipe remains intact. Both lemonado recipes require similar methods of preparation and ingredients. They ask users to combine white wine, sugar, and lemons in a

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vessel that is to be sealed for a time before being drunk. While the earlier recipe calls for additional ingredients that would require their own recipe, such as ‘Cittern [citron] water’ and ‘Orange Flower water’, the later recipe asks simply for ‘fountaine water’, ‘white wine’, ‘Lemons’, and ‘white sugar’, although it also includes the costly ingredient ‘Ambar Greece’. Like the other recipes on the list, ‘lemonatha’ thus has ties not only to Spain, but also specifically to Fanshawe’s mid-1660 experience. Later recipes continue this trend, begun by Fanshawe, of recording conventions that could initiate a cosmopolitan kitchen practice. Another newly introduced convention appears in the titles of one pork and two pickle recipes, whose titles and cooking methods appear to be influenced by Spanish food culture in unexpected ways. Recorded on the same page in the same non-Averie hand, ‘To Pickle Cucumbers as mangoes’ and ‘To Pickle Mellons like Mangoes’ are unattributed and do not indicate the date they were added or the individual who penned them (fol. 160r). ‘To Dry porke like Spanish bacon’ appears a few pages earlier in a different hand than these pickle recipes (fol. 157v). These recipes do not expressly indicate that Fanshawe encountered these recipes during her 1660s travels, but the hands that record them appear at other moments in the manuscript, where the recipes express knowledge of Iberian goods. ‘To Dry porke like Spanish bacon’ appears in the same hand as a note and date about Lisbon candles: ‘The best whit wax Candles were sold in the yere 1663 at Lisbone’ (fols. 96v–97r). ‘To Pickle Cucumbers as mangoes’ and ‘To Pickle Mellons like Mangoes’ appear in the same hand as the previously mentioned recipe for making and clarifying raisin wine, which calls for grapes from Malaga, Spain (fol. 163v). As these recipes seem to be recorded by those with familiarity of Spanish and Portuguese produce and goods, they allow us to consider how Iberian food culture brought new generic conventions to Fanshawe’s manuscript and continued her manuscript’s aspirations for a cosmopolitan kitchen practice. The use of ‘like’ and ‘as’ in these recipe titles suggests that they produce products similar to other recipes—in terms of either their flavour, final appearance, or cooking methods. ‘Like’ and ‘as’ were not uncommon conventions in contemporary recipe books. Both Hannah Woolley’s The Cook’s Guide (1664) and The Queen-Like Closet (1670) employ this construction, for instance, in ‘To bake Mutton like Venison’ and ‘To roste a Pig like Lamb’, respectively.25 As with Fanshawe’s pork recipe, these ask users to swap one protein for another. Woolley’s roasted pig recipe instructs cooks to 25 Woolley, The Cook’s Guide, 40; The Queen-Like Closet, 199.

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‘truss [the pork] like quarters of Lamb’, and Fanshawe’s recipe asks cooks to ‘Cutt A leg of poarke round in the shape of a Spanish gammon of bacon’ (fol. 157v). The ‘like’ in this latter recipe indicates a desire not necessarily to produce Spanish flavours but rather to create a dish that English diners could mistake for a Spanish product. Executing such a feat, then, as with Woolley’s pork recipe, requires the cook to be familiar with Spanish cuisine and food practices. The pickling recipes also assert a close understanding of Spanish foodways, since ‘like’ and ‘as’ draw attention to cooking methods and ingredients which would have been available to Fanshawe in Iberia or through Iberian trade routes with the West and East Indies. As a product native to southern India, it is unclear to what extent mangoes took hold in English cooking or food markets in the seventeenth century. Pickled mangoes likely originated in India, as a condiment that today we might recognize as chutney. The earliest exports of processed foods to Europe were South Asian pickles, or achar, and the first European references to achar appear in sixteenth-century Portuguese texts.26 As the fruit ripens quickly after being harvested, it would have been a difficult product to transport to England. As a result, English men and women who did encounter mangoes often did so as pickles, and by the mid-eighteenth century, a melon or cucumber pickled ‘like a mango’ was referred to by some, according to the Dictionary of Traded Goods and Commodities, as an ‘English Mango’.27 While the originality of a recipe that mimicked those for pickled mangoes is uncertain, the English attribute the innovation to their nation by the eighteenth century. Not only do these pickle recipes demonstrate how after the mid-1660s Fanshawe’s manuscript cultivates a cosmopolitan home, but it also situates Fanshawe’s book within a growing cultural phenomenon in which English eaters, facilitated by Spanish and Portuguese trade routes, appropriated the tastes and cooking methods of the East Indies. While neither of Fanshawe’s extant life writings indicate that she ever saw a fresh mango—indeed these recipes do not require access to the fruit at all—Iberian trade routes had carried the fruit from the East Indies through the Islamic World to Europe for nearly a century, and the fruit’s cultivation seems to have spread along those routes as well, starting in 26 Paralkar, ‘Trade, Exoticism’, 106. 27 Cox and Dannehl, ‘Mango’, n. p. This entry notes that for some in the mid-eighteenth century ‘mango pickle’ was ‘one of the six major’ imports and according to one source, mangoes, ‘because they were an exotic fruit, only [appeared] in [England] in the form of a pickle’ and further, that ‘cooks attempted to make a substitute with green WALNUT, MELON and CUCUMBER spiced with GINGER and GARLIC’.

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Andalusia, a province of Malaga, as early as the middle ages.28 The brine for these pickle recipes, moreover, calls for spices that, like mangoes, find their roots in India. While Fanshawe may have enjoyed slightly easier access to these ingredients while living in Spain, her recipes suggest that English cooks, too, could replicate the flavours applied to and tasted when eating pickled mangoes, again facilitated by Iberian spice-trade routes. Correspondingly, Fanshawe’s two pickling recipes offer instances of what Amy Tigner has called ‘trans-border’ recipes. Such recipes, Tigner writes, ‘provide a glimpse into the political, cultural and colonial history that illuminates the relationship between the Iberian Peninsula, England and the expanding globe’. The ingredients in these ‘trans-border’ recipes, Tigner notes, travelled ‘from Iberia to England—or sometimes from the New World, Africa or Asia to Spain or Portugal and then to England’ and reveal the way in which the seventeenth-century English kitchen was a part of England’s political history and its relationship with other nations.29 The instructions for preparing these recipes demand a method of preparation that is ‘like’ the treatment of mangoes—a fruit many English men and women may never have encountered fresh or at all. These pickling recipes in Fanshawe’s collection generally describe a standard preparation. They ask the user to submerge cucumbers into a seasoned vinegar and water bath that can be heated at various points in the preparation process. Fanshawe’s ‘Cucumbers as mangoes’ and ‘Mellons like Mangoes’ correspondingly call for a vinegar bath, but they also describe an additional preparation. The recipe user is to cut in half, hollow out, and stuff the cucumbers and melons with several ingredients, such as garlic and ginger, before tying the halves back together with ‘thred’ or ‘tape and Packthred’ (fol. 160r). There does not seem to be anything particularly Iberian about these Indian ingredients. Yet because Indian products often entered England through Spain and Portugal, these pickling recipes suggest Iberian influences that contribute to the manuscript’s growing attention to a cosmopolitan kitchen practice. While mangoes do not appear in some of the period’s most popular printed recipe books, similar pickling recipes do appear in mid- and lateseventeenth-century women’s manuscripts. These manuscript recipes, as Fanshawe’s, call for similar methods of preparation and exotic ingredients from Asia, Africa, and the so-called ‘New World’, and show the way the English home was being shaped by England’s relationship to European colonial 28 Squatriti, ‘Of Seeds, Seasons, and Seas’, 1206–7. 29 Tigner, ‘Trans-Border Kitchens’, 52.

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expansion and the spice trade. Anne Carr’s collection of recipes (1673/1674), for example, includes ‘To pickle cowcumbers Like Mango’. This recipe, too, asks users to fill hollowed cucumbers with spices—‘gevnea [Guinea] peper […] if you can get any instead of the other peper’.30 ‘Ginnie of Indian Pepper’, John Gerard records in his Herball (1597), is a plant ‘brought from forren countires, as Ginnie, India, and those parts, into Spaine and Italy’. Gerard goes on to say that the plant’s seeds have been brought into English gardens, but laments the fruit’s ability to mature in England, which he hopes will be ‘better when God shall sende vs a hot and temperate yeere’.31 Carr’s conditional clause—‘if you can get any’—appears to corroborate Gerard’s indication that the plant is not particularly suited to England’s climate, or at the least, it suggests that it was a commodity that was not readily available to Carr and other English users in the mid-1660s and perhaps depended, as it did almost a century earlier, according to Gerard’s record, on Spanish exports to England. The late seventeenth-century manuscript, Cookeries, also includes the recipe, ‘To pickle Mellons’, which instructs users to gather melons ‘near the size of Mangoes’ and to stuff them with ‘Garlick a little Jamaica pepper a Race of Ginger’ before tying them ‘a little like a Mango’.32 As in Carr’s and Fanshawe’s books, this recipe calls for exotic ingredients that rely on Europe’s access to the East—and here, also, the West Indies—along with a cooking method associated with an East Indian fruit. While in Fanshawe’s manuscript these pickling recipes make no reference to ingredients’ specific locations, they do use items such as ‘ginger’, ‘Cloves & Mace’—ingredients that, like mangoes, are native to the East Indies. The Cookeries manuscript, Carr, and Fanshawe all contribute to the way that the English kitchen had claimed and would continue to claim flavours and cooking methods as their own, reflecting an increasing reliance on global expansion, colonial endeavours, and proliferating trade routes between the East and West Indies and Iberia. By welcoming recipes with foreign influences into their English kitchens, these recipe compilers demonstrate what Goldstein refers to in this collection as the ‘productive tension’ between ‘hospitality and assimilation’.33 In attempting to replicate the spice profile and cooking methods applied to a fruit that is not even present in these cucumber and melon pickling recipes, the recipes highlight 30 Carr, Choyce Receits, fol. 41r. 31 Gerard, Herball, 292. 32 Cookeries, 260–61. 33 Goldstein, ‘How to Make a Bisk’, 152.

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the global foodways that were shaping the English kitchen and palate. They also indicate the complicated negotiation between English desires for the flavours and cooking methods of other parts of the world and the way that the Spanish and Portuguese facilitated such desires. In this way, ‘To Pickle Cucumbers as mangoes’ and ‘To Pickle Mellons like Mangoes’ function as moments that continue Fanshawe’s culinary ambassadorship for her family of English readers, as these recipes reproduce the flavours and methods of India, South America, Spain, and Portugal using common English fruits and vegetables. Without considering Averie’s hand as a timestamp, the distinctive contributions and perspectives of recipes such as these may be overlooked. But in being attuned to Averie’s hand, we can see that Fanshawe’s manuscript is a confluence of diverse kitchen practices and aspirations. This essay has aimed to illuminate two: one that performs royalist and familial stability and recovery through English medicine and cuisine, and one that aims to reproduce, and at times appropriate, the flavours and cooking methods of Iberia and the East Indies for the English table. The patterns that emerge when we examine Fanshawe’s manuscript in this way speak not only to changing food routes and table customs, but also to the values transmitted by the recipes themselves. Although Fanshawe’s collection, like many manuscripts, moves out of her hands and into the hands of her daughter and other future contributors, her influence, inspired by her experiences as a diplomat’s wife, lives on. Her cosmopolitan focus and her personal knowledge of and fascination with Spanish foodways are embedded both in her memoir and in the recipes she collects during her time in Spain and Portugal. These outward-looking, diplomatically savvy, and continentally influenced recipes not only continue Fanshawe’s work of infusing English cuisine with global ingredients and knowledge, but also reveal an instance of a growing trend among English recipe compilers to alchemize foreignness in their kitchens. In using these recipes to set their tables, Fanshawe’s and other English women’s recipe books imagine an English cuisine that welcomes foreign ingredients, cooking methods, and culinary decorum into their homes only to render them English. This subtle inoculation is essential for Fanshawe’s successful diplomacy. While her manuscript seems to have had little circulation during Fanshawe’s life, her culinary embassy is not so insular. It is rather an indication of a tendency for English recipe books to both champion and elide their cuisine’s dependence on foreign travel and colonial expansion, reminding us that political history is very much in the kitchen.

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Works Cited Alonso-Almeida, Francisco. ‘Genre Conventions in English Recipes, 1600–1800’. In Reading and Writing Recipe Books, 1550–1800, edited by Michelle DiMeo and Sara Pennell, 68–90. New York: Manchester University Press, 2013. Archer, Jayne. ‘The Queens’ Arcanum: Authority and Authorship in The Queens Closet Opened (1655)’. Renaissance Journal 1, no. 6 (2002): 14–25. Bassnett, Madeline. ‘“All the Ceremonyes and Civilityes”: The Authorship of Diplomacy in the Memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe’. The Seventeenth Century 26, no. 1 (2011): 94–118. Bassnett, Madeline. ‘A Language Not One’s Own: Translational Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen’s Iberian Recipes’. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19, no. 1 (2019): 1–27. Bassnett, Madeline. ‘Restoring the Royal Household: Royalist Politics and the Commonwealth Recipe Book’. Early English Studies 2 (2009): 1–32. Carr, Anne. Choyce Receits Collected out of the Book of Receits, of the Lady Vere Wilkinson, 1673/1674, Folger MS V.a.612. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Chalmers, Hero. Royalist Women Writers, 1650–1689. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Cox, Nancy and Karin Dannehl. ‘Mango’. Dictionary of Traded Goods and Commodities 1550–1820. Wolverhampton: Wolverhampton University Press, 2007. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/ traded-goods-dictionary/1550-1820. Cookeries, late seventeenth century, Folger MS V.a.561. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth, Commonly Called Joan Cromwel. London, 1664. Crow, Andy. ‘“A Little Winter Savory, A Little Time”: Making History in Elizabeth Cromwell’s Kitchen’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 177-95. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Fanshawe Ann. The Memoirs of Ann Lady Fanshawe. Edited by Herbert Charles Fanshawe. London: John Lane, 1907. Fanshawe Ann. Mrs. Fanshawes Booke of Receipts of Physickes Salues, Waters, Cordials, Preserves and Cookery, 1678, Wellcome MS 7113. Wellcome Library, London, UK. Gerard, John. Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes. London, 1597. Goldstein, David B. Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Goldstein, David B. ‘How to Make a Bisk: The Restoration Cookbook as National Restorative’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and

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Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 151-75. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Granville, Mary. Granville Family Receipt Book, 1640–1750, Folger MS V.a.430. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Harris, Barbara. English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Hutton, Sarah. ‘Jones [née Boyle], Katherine, Viscountess Ranelagh’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2008. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. ‘Opening the Queen’s Closet: Henrietta Maria, Elizabeth Cromwell, and the Politics of Cookery’. Renaissance Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2007): 464–99. Lysons, Daniel. ‘Putney’. In The Environs of London: Volume 1, County of Surrey, 404–35. London, 1792. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/ london-environs/vol1. M., W. The Compleat Cook. London, 1665. M., W. The Queens Closet Opened. London 1665. Nunn, Hillary M. and Melissa Schultheis. ‘Using the Methods of Our Manuscripts’. Conference paper, Modern Language Association Conference, New York City, NY, January 2018. Paralkar, Anil. ‘Trade, Exoticism and the English Appropriation of South Asian Pickles, c. 1600–1750’, Cultural History 9, no. 1 (2020): 106–122. Potter, David. ‘The Household Receipt Book of Ann, Lady Fanshawe’. Petits Propos Culinaires 80 (2006): 19–32. Ranelagh, Katherine. Lady Rennelagh’s Choise Receipts, seventeenth century, Sloane MS 1367. British Library, London, UK. Sharpe, Kevin. ‘“An Image Doting Rabble”: The Failure of Republican Culture in Seventeenth-Century England’. In Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution, edited by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, 25–56. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Snook, Edith. ‘“Soveraigne Receipts” and the Politics of Beauty in The Queens Closet Opened’. Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 15 (2007): 1–19. Squatriti, Paolo. ‘Of Seeds, Seasons, and Seas: Andrew Watson’s Medieval Agrarian Revolution Forty Years Later’. Journal of Economic History 74, no. 4 (2014): 1205–20. Tigner, Amy L. ‘The Granville Project’. Early Modern Recipes Online Collective. https://emroc.hypotheses.org/ongoing-projects/the-granville-project. Tigner, Amy L. ‘Trans-Border Kitchens: Iberian Recipes in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts’. History of Retailing & Consumption 5, no. 1 (2019): 51–70. Woolley, Hannah. The Cook’s Guide. London, 1664. Woolley, Hannah. The Queen-Like Closet. London, 1670.

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About the Author Melissa Schultheis is a PhD candidate at Rutgers University. Her dissertation is titled ‘Harrowing Poetics: Home Making in Early Modern English Poetry’. It examines the intersection of English agrarian and domestic labour and poetry to suggest that the material aspects of the rustic home—its methods for organizing time, performing hospitality, and circumscribing its social and physical boundaries—were significant to the development of English vernacular poetry.

Section 4 Around the Hearth

10. Minding the Fire: Human-Fire Coagency in Margaret Cavendish’s Matrimonial Trouble and SeventeenthCentury Recipes Rebecca Laroche Abstract This chapter begins with the example of The Lady Grace Castleton’s Booke of Receipts (Folger MS V.a.600), a recipe collection from the late seventeenth century, which uses six words to describe a low fire: ‘soft’, ‘easy’, ‘gentle’, ‘slow’, ‘small’, and ‘sober’. The chapter then turns to a consideration of this wonderfully evocative language alongside other moments that denote attention to f ire within a new searchable recipe corpus in LUNA, the Folger digital manuscript repository. It ends with a meditation upon the vigilance needed to maintain the right amount of heat for certain recipes and the implications for our understanding of the role of kitchen work in the development of human psychology. Keywords: fire and hearth, recipes, coagency, Margaret Cavendish, Lady Castleton, ecofeminism

In her analysis of the creation of a fire barrier in Alberta, Canada to help curtail the spread of pine beetle kill, which could contribute to uncontrollable forest fires in the province, ecofeminist Donna Haraway writes that ‘Fire in the North American West has a complicated multispecies history; fire is an essential element for ongoing as well as an agent of double death, the killing of ongoingness’.1 On the other side of the globe, in the early months of 2020, ‘defensive burning’ as practiced by Aboriginal people in 1 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 24.

Bassnett, M. and Hillary M. Nunn (eds.), In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463721646_ch10

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Australia was receiving international recognition for its effectiveness in curtailing the damage done by wildfires and for the resulting reduction in greenhouse emissions. Haraway’s analysis looks largely at the present time of a particular geographic region and ends with a projection into a fictional future; the Aboriginal practices draw on centuries-old knowledge about how to use fire as a ‘tool’ in ‘protecting the land’.2 Here I would like to consider how the wildfires of our current moment and the ways they have made some of us aware of this ‘complicated multispecies history’, such as described above, signifies a return to another time and place. That is, when fires, hearths, and chimneys were central to the early modern English home, the human relationship to all of these domestic features was particularly mindful, in part because of the dangers fire could bring. That awareness led to developments in the name of safety that were at once detrimental to that relationship and co-creative within it. Because of the hazards of chimney f ires that set households ablaze in the seventeenth century, humans developed technologies that kept fire and its heat increasingly under control, and as an unanticipated result, humans lost the meditative, vigilant awareness that their relationship with fire had earlier required. The fact that this relationship existed largely within the sphere occupied by women is an aspect of the coagential history that my analysis here works to elucidate. In the interest of discovering how both ecological crisis and ecological consciousness are related to kitchen work, my juxtaposition of seventeenthcentury recipe descriptions of fire with Margaret Cavendish’s play Matrimoniall Trouble seeks to articulate the relationship between heightened cognizance—the ability to process and temper one’s emotions—and the tending of kitchen fires. I draw attention to recipe language used to describe low and controlled fires, valuable in particular kinds of recipes, then consider Cavendish’s characterization of women’s interiorities through their consciousness (or lack thereof) of kitchen fires, and conclude with a consideration of the mindfulness that extends from early modern kitchen work. A version of this kitchen-originated mindfulness is what our current climate crisis, where wildfires raze entire towns despite heroic human efforts, requires of us. Fire, in this analysis, is not simply supporting evidence for symbolic or thematic readings. Nor does it repeat discussions of how ‘the fireplace had its own language’ as Una Robertson does in her description of technological developments in the kitchen and the various tasks Kristine Kowalchuk 2

Fuller, ‘Reducing Fire’, n. p.

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outlines as undertaken there.3 While these discussions have value in a reclamation of women’s work space, I am more interested in the fundamental connection between the tasks of the hearth and the development of the individual’s interiority. This is not simply to say that fire has an effect on that interiority, but rather that it is enmeshed in its very evolution. As cognitive evolutionary archaeologist Thomas Wynn has summarized, Focusing on a specific object—in this case, fire—is a way to achieve a meditative state. The brain regions that activate to trigger meditation overlap extensively with the regions governing working memory. And, since meditation also has benefits for health […] evolution would have favored those who were good meditators, allowing them to pass their ability along to their progeny. 4

In considering the ongoing connection between humans and fires reflected in seventeenth-century recipes and Cavendish’s drama, I look for evidence that the early moderns knew the importance of a respectful relationship to fire for both material and cognitive attainments. My intent here is to bring current ecofeminist theoretical understanding to recipe language in a way that countermands interpretive practice that separates material language—words used to describe actual things, especially quotidian things—from metaphysical language, words meant to describe states of being that are only ascribed to humans. My contention is that the cognitive separation of human from non-human that is at the heart of our current ecological crisis is in part achieved through interpretive compartmentalization. Even though I revel in imaginative texts as much as the next English literature scholar, the segregation of ‘practical’ texts from those more literary has ecological ramifications. That is, the separation of works overtly aligned with human interiorities, with imagination and reflection, from those that have more to do with material life, codify within interpretive practice what Val Plumwood describes as ‘the idea that human life takes place in a self-enclosed, completely humanized and cultural space that is somehow independent of an inessential sphere of nature which exists in a remote space “somewhere else”’.5 My analysis seeks to reverse this tendency by examining the early modern dependency on 3 Robertson, Illustrated History, 92, qtd. in Kowalchuk, Preserving, 17. 4 Wynn, ‘Fire Good’, n. p. 5 Plumwood, Environmental Culture, 51, qtd. in Laroche and Munroe, Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory, 41.

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and resulting intimacy with fire and demonstrating how both practical and literary texts of the seventeenth century reflected a fuller embeddedness. The use of words in recipes denoting class structures and female morality to describe fires was not incidental language but rather a manifestation of the intermeshed relationship between material practice and human cognizance. The circumstance that this enmeshment was haunted by the spectre of housefires heightens the rhetorical imperative surrounding it, an instructional voice that defines the recipe genre but one that takes on added weight in precarious times.

Describing the Fire: Folger MS V.a.600 On November 9, 2016, the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC) conducted its second annual international transcribathon. Its focus was the Folger Shakespeare Library’s MS V.a.600, The Lady Grace Castleton’s Booke of Receipts, a seventeenth-century compilation subsequently owned by Lord Castleton’s second wife, Sarah, into the eighteenth century. The successful event meant that the book’s content was to become part of a growing online corpus created through crowdsourced transcription of early modern recipe manuscripts, and its vetted contents have now become searchable in the LUNA digital repository.6 It was during its transcription, moreover, that my present inquiry began in earnest. That fall the chapter Jennifer Munroe and I composed on the ecological domestic was in press and subsequent conversations I was having with Thomas Ward, Stephen Schmidt, and Mary Trull compelled my interest into the attention women, particularly serving women, were required to give fires in especially sensitive recipes.7 Ointments with expensive ingredients needed long hours over low temperatures to optimize melting and avoid burning; for example, the recipe ‘To make the grene oyntment’ from the Castleton manuscript ends with the directive to ‘take heed of burning / it in the boyling therefore stur it continu / =ally boyling it softly & on an easy fire till / it be grene’.8 Recipes for syrups and preserves of various kinds cautioned against 6 LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collections. For a description of how to search these transcriptions in LUNA see Laroche, ‘Search Transcriptions in LUNA’, https://emroc.hypotheses.org/ search-in-luna. 7 Laroche and Munroe, Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory; Trull and Laroche, ‘“From a Drudge”’; and Stephen Schmidt, conversations with the author in 2011–2012. Also see Ward, ‘Hamlet’s “Moderate Haste”’. 8 Castleton, Booke of Receipts, 19.

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boiling the sugary mixtures (for example, Castleton’s ‘To dry peaches’, which required a pound of sugar to match the same amount of fruit),9 otherwise efficacy would be compromised or the product would become bitter.10 Other recipes required boiling, but only for a walm (the bubbling of a liquid) or two, as when in the making of pepper cakes (good for the stomach) Margaret Baker advises one to add broom buds to a boiling mixture ‘& give them a walme’.11 I mentioned to the two dozen or so transcribers at the Folger my interest in how fires—particularly low fires because of the meditative state their maintenance necessitated—were described, and throughout the day individuals read out examples they encountered while transcribing. By the time someone—and I can only thank them without name as I didn’t realize at the time how significant it would be—called out ‘I’ve got a sober fire’, it was clear that my interest would intensify. A more methodical combing through the unvetted manuscript revealed six different words describing fires meant to give off a slight or simmering heat. These were ‘soft’, ‘easy’, ‘gentle’, ‘slow’, ‘sober’, and ‘small’ (notably the word low was never used to describe such fires), and as the list accrued, it struck me that these were not simply synonyms for a slightly warm fire, though five (excluding sober) all have an OED definition mentioning fire.12 These could also be words denoting the sensory affect of sitting in front of a fire, soft and gentle being now associated as much with a caress as a flame. It also occurred to me, however, that in a culture so intimate with the hearth, the fire may have had precedence, so that a kiss or touch being described as gentle may imply a comparison to the comfort of a small fire rather than vice versa. We now have the ability through LUNA’s digital transcription repository to move beyond the six words used in the Castleton manuscript, and a search for fire/fier/fyre/fyer in over forty pre-1700 recipe manuscripts included in the transcribed repository reveals three other words used to describe low fires: sweet, leisurable, and temperate, all requiring similar kinds of attention from the recipe-maker.13 Through LUNA, I have also been able to ascertain 9 Castleton, 114. 10 For a discussion of other implications of this care, see Laroche, ‘Take Good Syrup of Violets’. 11 Baker, Receipt Book, fol. 83v. 12 In the Castleton manuscript, the pages on which these words can be found are as following: ‘soft’, 113; ‘easy’, 18; ‘gentle’, 84 and 105; ‘slow’, 140; ‘sober’, 8; and ‘small’, 229. See OED Online for definitions. 13 LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection. This analysis occurred in January 2020. This collection continues to grow, and additional means of describing fire are likely to be discovered as more manuscript recipe books become available.

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the frequency of each of the Castleton manuscript words and have found that gentle (36 times) and soft (116 times) are most often used to describe such fires across several collections, suggesting a shared sensual experience with the fires. Sober’s and easy’s use in two separate recipes in two different collections demonstrates that these are not simply incidental usages and may refer to specific lost knowledge having to do with particular qualities of fire.14 Indeed, the fact that there are nine descriptors for virtually the same level of fire along with five others denoting other intensities or qualities, and that some books include a variety of descriptors while others use only one or two, suggests nuances that our training as readers of multivalent literature may have been disregarding because of our bias toward the ‘literary’ and are thus worth further exploration. After all, in reducing a gentle fire to the lowness of its heat, we have overlooked any fire’s potential to become wild or quick or otherwise ungentle. All nine of the words describing relatively contained fires (gentle, sweet, easy, leisurable, slow, sober, temperate, soft, and small) also have connotations relating to either social status or moral/sexual bearing, and these connotations are not wholly separate from the fires described within recipes. For example, in a recipe ‘for a heate in the stomak Inflamacon / of the Liuer’, ‘3 gallons of Morninge Milke whey’ are to be placed over ‘a sober fire’ and boiled, but in the boiling, the recipe maker is to ‘be sure to wilde it’, ‘wilde’ being a variant of wield, that is, ‘to rule over’.15 The significant fact that a heated stomach and liver inflammation may well be symptoms of intemperance is perhaps reflective of the description of the fire in the first place, and the control placed over the fire parallels the moral self-governance required outside of the recipe’s making. Similarly, a late seventeenth-century recipe describes making ‘A Balme water Against wind mellancholy / To Comfort the head heart and stomack’ in the following manner: ‘the most green and tender tops of Balme’ and ‘the red blossomes of the most sueet and tender apples and other herbs’ are steeped in good wine, then added to well brewed ale, and finally distilled with ‘a temperate and Leasureable fire’.16 As such, in the recipe, the ingredients and fire seem to work toward calming both maker and patient. What is more, a survey of recipes requiring a ‘gentle’ fire involve stirring times of an hour 17 or distilling times of six hours.18 They 14 Comparatively, a search for ‘small’ fires only yielded ten examples. 15 Medicinal and Cookery Recipes, fol. 3r. ‘wilde v., 1.’, OED Online. 16 Receipt Book, 6–7. 17 Patrick, Receipt Book of Penelope Jephson, fol. 15v. 18 Castleton, Booke of Receipts, 85.

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necessitate attention to a fire that cannot die out nor flame too high and thereby demand the extreme patience of, and indeed, a gentle demeanour in the practitioner. And while it is likely that this recipe-making was overseen by gentlewomen, it is unlikely that women of more elite status spent hours sitting in front of a fire making sure that the fire did not go out. The word choice ‘gentle’ thus perhaps speaks to the aspirations of the chamber-maid or waiting gentlewoman making the salve or water.19 These moralizing/social valences of language are part of kitchenwork, yet interpretive practice that separates the literary from practical texts, which may stem from modern biases against manual labour in general, wants to make this language simply practical and one-dimensional. My contention here, however, is that to read multivalency in these recipes is not overreading. Rather, in reflecting moral and social interiorities tied to sensuality (even sexuality) and to societal hierarchizations through their word choices, recipes reveal how imagination and contemplation are latent in hearth practice and demonstrate that neither cook nor fire is simply a mechanism in the kitchen. Instead both human tending the fire and the fire itself are coagents in kitchen work and in the life of the mind.

Attending the Fire: Cavendish’s Matrimoniall Trouble Cavendish’s Matrimoniall Trouble helps us to see how the choice of such words in recipes may be more than incidental and maps for us the relationship between kitchen fires and mindfulness. Admittedly, this analysis did begin with the examination of Shakespeare’s language in light of Plumwood’s theory, such as that found in an exchange between Julia and Lucetta in Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which Lucetta tells her mistress that ‘I do not seek to quench your love’s hot fire, / But qualify the fire’s extreme rage, / Lest it should burn above the bounds of reason’ (2.7.21–23).20 Shakespeare, however, only intermittently provides the means to examine the language of fire in these terms. And as new theories bring new works to light, Margaret Cavendish, a very good reader of the dramas before her,21 has gone beyond 19 I am thankful for conversations I have had with food historian Stephen Schmidt around this topic. 20 Shakespeare, qtd. in Laroche and Munroe, Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory, 70. In our chapter, ‘Of mouseholes and housefires’, we consider the ways that the illusion of the house as non-porous is undone by the ‘outside’ elements that come into the home—whether invited (such as cats and fire) or uninvited (mice and fleas). 21 Thompson and Roberts, Women Reading Shakespeare, 11–14.

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mere fragments and in doing so has made something wholly her own, thus giving us an opportunity to extend insights first suggested by her more canonical precursor. In her seldom critically considered play, The First Part of the Play, Called the Matrimoniall Trouble, A Comedy, first published in 1662, Cavendish provides a sustained proto-ecofeminist theorization of human relationships with the element of fire by dramatizing the ways in which the interiorities of female characters are exposed through these relationships.22 In the play, various marriages are shown in relation to their level of uncontrolled emotions, existing along a spectrum of complete disarray to peaceful cohabitation. At the discordant terminus reside the aptly named Sir and Lady Disagree as well as Lady Jealousie and her husband Sir Edward Courtly; on the extreme of peace is Sir Henry Sage and his younger wife Lady Chastity. In between lie households of varying amounts of disorder, but notable here are also Lady Hypochondria and her indulgent husband Lord Lovewell, whose home is not entirely peaceful but is nonetheless a loving one. Through these characters, Cavendish goes beyond Galenic conceptions of bodily humours and invokes actual fires as a means of character development in her play.23 Indeed, certain characters are choleric (i.e., elementally fire-based), as the constant yelling of the Disagrees demonstrates, but the characters also occupy different stations within their respective households, servants often owning as much stage time as their employers, adding economic variety within these humoral kinds. What is more, in these status differences between the characters, the language of fire often becomes differently illuminating; for example, Briget Greasy (kitchenmaid) and Nan Lightheel (chambermaid) negotiate their actual tasks in front of the fire depending on their specific household duties, while Lady Hypochondria imagines her household going up in flames and Lady Chastity personifies her creative capacities as female servants, the latter thus separated from actual fires and wholly engaged with the question of mindfulness. In their reflection of human-fire intimacy and the resulting cognitive formations/malformations in humans, these character developments comment upon the hierarchization between material and 22 All references to Cavendish’s play are to the text as it appears in Playes Written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle (1662); the text is divided by act and scene but offers no line numbers. I have stayed primarily within the world of Part One, because, though it contains many of the same characters, Part Two, a come-tragedy, is a wholly different generic space, changing thematics and characterization as a result. 23 By stating that ‘none of my Playes are so long as Benjamin Johnson’s Fox, or Alchymist’ in her collection’s second epistle ‘To the Readers’ (Playes, sig. A4r), Cavendish at once acknowledges her indebtedness to Jonsonian comedy in her plays where the humours are ever-present, but she also, in true Cavendish fashion, makes a claim for improvement.

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intellectual practice and anticipate Haraway’s current conception of the ‘tentacular’, the ongoing and co-creative relation between the human and the elemental aspects of the nonhuman world such as the Alberta fire barriers.24 Through the vigilance needed to maintain the right amount of heat and the concomitant understanding of the fire that may burn and thus change the body that tends it, interiorities are transformed and apprehended. There is no inside or outside, only the relationship between. The ultimate achievement of mental discipline is held by a character who does not literally tend to a fire in the play, but one who seems wholly aware of the dangers of unmindful spaces. In our very first meeting with Lady Chastity, she describes an ‘idle Mind’ in terms that look similar to what modern meditation practice has come to call ‘monkey mind’: It were better that my Body should be sick, than my Mind idle; my Beauty decay, than my Understanding perish; my Youth waste, than my Fame lost; my Life blinking, than my Honour sinking: for an idle Mind, now well imploy’d, creates a restless body, which runs from place to place, and hates to be at home. Thus Mind and Body both being out, extravagant Words and Actions run about, and Riot keeps possession. (2.23)

Her husband replies that he thus sees the muses ‘have kept [her] company’ in his absence, and her answer theorizes the play’s forays into psychomachia: ‘but the Muses are never with me, but when you are imploy’d about serious Affairs: for though they are my Visitors, yet they are your Domestick servants’ (2.23). A play that only had Chastity and Sage’s philosophizing would hardly entertain, but the ‘Riot’ that ‘keeps possession’ of most of the play in various characters’ jealousy and disagreements, not to mention Lady Hypochondria’s existential fears, is what makes it a comedy that becomes, in Part 2, a come-tragedy. Let loose for a spell then contained, the monkey mind can create a bit of hilarity, but kept unchecked, it can burn the house down. At the opposite extreme from Lady Chastity in both station and bearing is Briget Greasy, named a Kitchen-maid in the dramatis personae. In the first act of the play, Briget stands as the most overt example of a female character who is developed (or rather underdeveloped) through her relationship to fire and consequently establishes the material-psychological importance of the imagery. From the moment we meet her in Act 1, Scene 2, it is clear that she is a product of both theatrical and other textual traditions. James Fitzmaurice has convincingly made a connection between this character 24 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 24.

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and the brief reference in Love’s Labor’s Lost to Greasy Joan who ‘keel[s] the pot’ (5.2.903); moreover, Fitzmaurice rightly sees this play as working with the same general precepts around hierarchies of female labour captured in Hannah Woolley’s (unauthorized) The Compleat Servant-Maid, in which lower servants aspire to rise in station through education and culinary and medical skills.25 We find that she is an anti-type to such models when Sir Dotard’s steward Thrifty reprimands her: ‘by your carelessness you do waste and spoil so much, as it is unsufferable: for you will fling whole ladlefuls of dripping into the fire, to make the fire blaze underneath the pot’. Briget’s bad habits, moreover, precede her time in Dotard’s household and contribute to an economic decline as she responds to Thrifty, ‘I’m sure I never serv’d in any place for so small wages and few vails as in this service’ (1.2). It would thus seem that her move to Dotard’s household was a result of losing a more lucrative position. The reasons for her having lost that previous position, starting with Thrifty’s citation, become clearer as the dramatic action progresses. Thrifty’s limited worldview cites the fat-on-fire method of building a flame as mere wastefulness, but later scenes reveal a deeper concern about the intemperance this action reflects. Briget’s impatience becomes her defining characteristic, as she flirts with Sir Dotard, the lord of the house, becoming his laundry maid, then housekeeper, then lady of the house in a matter of two acts, the fat thrown on the fire becoming a precursor to her sexualized ambition. Briget’s relationship to her fellow servants is less than civil, and as a symbol, the blazing fire also comes to represent her irascibility and its effects on household mismanagement. Nevertheless, from the time she enters the old man’s mismanaged domicile, she ascends, particularly once she enters the lord’s bedchamber. In Scene 7, only halfway through the first act, Dotard determines that Briget will become his laundry maid, and the other maids gossip about her loose character, again in terms of her relationship to fire; but now that her work has been moved away from the fire, it is her inattention that is foregrounded: 1 Maid. […] nay, she is so proud, as she turns her head aside when Richard the Carter comes to kiss her, and she strives to shun his company, when once within a short time, she would make haste to wash her dishes, that she might have time to sit in Richards Lap, and there they would sit colling and kissing until the sea-coal-fire was burn’d out. 2 Maid. But now she sits in a better seat. (1.7)

25 Fitzmaurice, ‘Margaret Cavendish and Hannah Woolley’, n. p.

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Her passive relationship to the fire, here only invoked as an indicator of the amount of time spent on her sexual exploits before her ascent, presages her mismanagement of the household she has come to run because of her liaisons. By the end of the first act, she has been made housekeeper, much to the disgruntlement of her fellow servants, and the first maid relates a second incident. In this passage, the candle comes to represent the greasy fires that were once Briget’s to oversee and the choler, the heat and anger, that then is caught by the first maid: she call’d for a candle. […] and so I put the candle into her hand: with that, she up with her hand, and gave me a box on the ear, what, said she, do you give me a greasie candle to hold? I will teach you more manners, said she, against the next time: I being heated at the blow she gave me, told her, that she had forgot since the Mouse bit her greasie face when she was asleep, taking it for a candles-end, or a piece of bacon: with that, she flew upon me, and I at her, where in the combat we made such a noise, as my Master came forth of his Chamber, and parted us, and then he bid me get me out of his house but kiss’d her, and pray’d her to pacifie her anger, and not to distemper her self with a rude wench as I was. (1.14)

Named for the grease and sweat of her position by the fire, Briget looks to leave her position and her name—not to mention Richard—behind; nonetheless, her ‘heated’ and ‘distempered’ nature surfaces, inflaming the other maids and spurring their leaving the household, because she has not learned to regulate the fire, either inside or out. The effect of having ascended through her sex rather than her work of tending the fire thus acquires her a privileged status without having attained a gentle demeanour (others in the play who are born to higher status—i.e., never having properly tended fires either—lack this demeanour as well). Implicit in Briget’s anti-example is the gendered dictum given by Woolley: ‘you must be careful to be diligent and willing to do what you are bid to do […] this course will advance you from a drudge, to be a Cook another day’.26 In order for kitchenwork to be successful work, the maidservant who is attending the fire must embody the virtues denoting female gentility—a kind of placid acceptance of one’s position while maintaining a disciplined practice—with the promise of gaining legitimate status through the household hierarchies. Importantly, the play not only posits one’s relationship to 26 Woolley, Compleat Servant-maid, 155, qtd. in Trull and Laroche, ‘“From a Drudge”’, 239. These concepts are expanded upon by Michelle Dowd in ‘Labours of Love’, discussed below.

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fire as a metaphor for one’s reflective cognizance but also shows the deep connection between the two. The effect of mistreating fire as a means of reaching a desired conclusion rather than tending the fire and treating it as an opportunity for learning discipline thus results in both material and emotional turmoil. Conversely, one who can keep the fire at the appropriate level is also able to control one’s own inner volatility. As a counterexample, a servant character who seems to be taken directly out of the Woolley handbook is that of Nan Lightheel, of the Sir Courtly and Lady Jealousie household. Described in the dramatis personae as ‘the Lady Jealousies maid, and likewise a Waiting-gentlewoman’, Nan initially has a higher status than Briget, so her ascent is not so precipitous. Rather, hers is a steady climb executed through the aforesaid diligence and an opportunity found in her mistress’s intemperance. While her name may point to sexual laxity, the play’s actions show her overworked and cerebrally contained, in contrast with her idle mistress. Her first scenes represent her status as a chambermaid below the Waiting-gentlewoman giving her orders, and we thus get to know her as she is running back and forth from the kitchen crafting first caudle (3.26), then sack-posset (3.29), then burnt wine (4.32). All of these require a certain amount of time in front of the hearth, but the second in particular is known for the labour required in its making. In a recipe for a sack posset found in a book of verses collected by Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington (1612–1698) requiring ten eggs, a pint of wine and a half pound of sugar, the recipe maker is to stir the mixture continuously over a chafing dish of coals until it is ‘as thick as a cadell’ then add ‘a quart of sweet cream’ stirring while pouring from high above the dish.27 While the chafing dish and coals mitigate the requirement of keeping the fire low, the constant stirring and nearly acrobatic feat of pouring and stirring simultaneously indicate a considerable amount of attention in the posset’s crafting, care quickly dismissed by the increasingly inebriated Lady Jealousie when she drinks the posset quickly and then asks her maid for burnt wine.28 The Waiting-gentlewoman relays the demands of Lady Jealousie every third scene, and not until Act 4, Scene 32, when her posset is rejected and she registers a protest do we find that this chambermaid is named Nan. Whereas before she stayed below the radar, the scene after her naming reveals Nan to be in the midst of an affair with the master of the house, who, when confronted by his wife replies, ‘Nan is a careful and industrious 27 Boyle, ‘A book of verses’, fol. 53. 28 Sasha Handley is currently conducting research around the making and imbibing of sack possets, a piece of which can be seen in ‘“Lusty” Sack Possets’.

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Wench! for she strives to serve us both, for she serves you caudles and feeds me with kisses’ (4.33). Nan’s industriousness next to Jealousie’s chiding idleness—and increasing drunkenness—provides another version of household mismanagement, one that begins at the top. Unlike Briget, Nan takes pride in her work; even while Lady Jealousie dismisses Nan’s cooking as substandard, the lady nonetheless eats and drinks readily with no appreciation for the attention required to make these delicacies. And while it is not entirely clear how much choice Nan has in ‘serving’ either the lady or the lord of the house, it is clear that she is not Briget, who makes the flame blaze and ascends with no plan. Nan’s ascent, as the fires she uses to make her caudles, is methodical and thoughtful, and ultimately more successful in that it is less disruptive.29 Briget’s ‘carelessness’ and Nan’s ‘carefulness’ show them to represent alternative modes of social ascent, and the play censures the former while reticently applauding the latter, with the difference of their interior states represented by their relationship to fires. Within the ‘wage labour system’ of service described by Michelle Dowd, the only directives provided for social ascent are the recipes given to them. Without such step-by-step instructions, Briget follows the flames of sex in her rapid social climb.30 What I want to add through this analysis to Dowd’s keen observations about the relationship between women’s work, their sexuality, and social ascendance is that social conditioning is latent in the recipes that are directing that work. Beyond these two characters, the theme of temperance is one that is repeated throughout the play and embodied by Lady Chastity and her husband Lord Sage.31 In contrast, it is Briget’s ‘dis-temper’ that marks her as ungentle, even while characters of upper status such as Lady Jealousie, Lord and Lady Disagree, and Lord Spendall exemplify this intemperance as well. Thus Cavendish’s play infers how, in describing a fire as gentle, leisurable, sober, or temperate, recipes may indeed be providing a reflective space in the developing social bearing of those in service; otherwise, all fires would be described as low, period, and this word does not appear in any recipe yet transcribed into the LUNA repository. 29 Caudle, posset, and burnt wine have a life of their own in the Cavendish oeuvre, as in The Comical Hash, where Lady Bridlehead exclaims ‘Faith a Sack Possit will make me drunk’ (559), and in The Second Part of the Matrimoniall Trouble, where Lady Inconstant looks to poison her husband through a ‘little Burnt Wine’ (5.42). 30 Dowd, ‘Labours of Love’, 103. 31 Among many such descriptions of these characters, for example, the Lady describes her husband and his aged wisdom as ‘Paths made by Experience, in which walks Prudence, Fortitude, Justice, and Temperance’ (2.27).

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While The Second Part of the Matrimoniall Trouble may take on the results of this intemperance more fully, one wonderfully comedic scene in the first part hints at the tragic material consequences of losing control: the threat of house fires.32 Briget’s inattention to the fire, and worse, her setting it ablaze, is not simply a symbol of her moral laxity, nor the intemperance of the larger society, as the intensity of Briget’s ascent comes to its full thematic realization in the overall dis-temper of Matrimoniall Trouble’s Act 3. Rather, it is a real threat to the household she serves and those surrounding it. The moment in question follows a short scene (3.30) visiting the choleric unrest between Lord and Lady Disagree that ends with the stage direction ‘hear the shovel and tongs flung about’ (3.30), highlighting the misuse of the implements of fire control. Moving seamlessly from the Disagrees’ disharmony, the next scene (3.31) begins with an argument between Lady Hypochondria’s maid Joan and Lord Lovewell’s man Trusty about the lady’s unceasing ill health. Their disagreement escalates in volume to the point where they ‘are beating one another’, which frightens the lady of the house. Lady Hypochondria enters exclaiming, ‘What in the name of Juno is the matter? What Thieves are enter’d? or is my house on fire?’, as her husband Sir Lovewell is sent for (3.31). Lady Hypochondria explains the matter to him while in her heightened state: O Husband, I was dying of an Apoplexie, my Spirits were stopt, and my Brain was smother’d in a cloud of gross vapours; but your Man and my Maid falling out, they fell a beating each other, and she crying out for help, did so affright me, as I came running hither, thinking Thieves had broken in, or Fire had broken out of our house, which fright hath unstopt the Sluce-passages, and dispers’d the Vapour. (3.31)

The language of breaking in and breaking out reflects the vulnerability of the house, and Lady Hypochondria’s fear, although extreme in its expression, is nonetheless deeply felt. Published four years before the great fire of London, the lady’s lines draw on the all-too-common occurrence of housefires in early modern England.33 What is more, this scene also represents early moderns’ intimacy with those housefires. As Lady Hypochondria articulates 32 The threat of housefires has been treated more extensively in an earlier discussion of the ‘transcorporeal domestic’ with regard to Shakespeare in Laroche and Munroe, Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory, 63–73, which draws on Stacy Alaimo’s theories of transcorporeality (Bodily Natures) and looks at the way such language in Shakespearean drama taps into known fear in the audience. 33 Laroche and Munroe, Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory, 64–66.

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her general malaise, a ‘cloud of gross vapours’, and the fright around the noise of the argument as a veritable cure in terms that reflect a chimney (a sluice-passage for smoke) dammed by too much soot (a clog that could result in housefires) that is then cleared up through the sweep of fear, Lovewell makes gestures of rewarding her maid for causing the uproar, and Trusty, in hopes of sharing the reward, explains his role: It were more just to treble my wages than hers; for I was the cause of the Out-cry: for when I beat her, she roared, and her voice thorough her throat, made as great a rumbling noise, as a foul chimney set on fire, and in my Conscience as much sooty flegm fell from her head, as from a Cooks Chimney, and when she scolded, her words were so harsh, as they creake just so as when a door is taken off the hinges, which made my Lady strait apprehend either Fire, or Thieves, or both. (3.31)

In these lines, the sights and sounds of the housefire and their causes/ preventions are so vividly realized, one has to wonder if Cavendish herself had first-hand knowledge from household management of chimney f ires or the prevention thereof. The need for cleaning the cook’s chimney—chimneys made sootier through the burning of fat as practiced by Briget—demonstrates how domestic entities are to be the object of vigilant attention. None in the play is more aware of this than Lady Hypochondria, whose extreme watchfulness is a source of great comedy in the first part of Matrimoniall Trouble. Distemper is tied to the imagery of fire most overtly in these imaginings of Lady Hypochondria and as a result, to the very real threat of housef ires in the period. As a result of her intemperance and unreflective potential, Briget fades away before the end of Act 3 of the First Part; a character of little depth, she is left as scarcely more than social commentary. Lady Hypochondria, however, in her attention to fire (if overly executed) acquires a complex interiority that sustains her character through the end of Part 2. Ultimately, her hypervigilance plays an important part in a drama filled with characters blazing and neglecting both interior and exterior fires. Even though Cavendish does not specifically anticipate the long evolution of human cognition as described by archaeologists such as Thomas Wynn, discussed above, she does articulate the relationship between fire watching and mental discipline. After all, in the terms of the play, Briget Greasy’s inability to sit still and pay attention to the fire prohibits her from seeing the shortcomings of her particular brand of ascent; her recklessness with fire indicates an incompetence in maintaining a household, which in turn

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leads to that household’s chaos. Nan Lightheel’s position, on the other hand, as she repeatedly returns to the fire and has to attend to its low flame in order not to burn the caudle, is more sustainable and valued; in contrast, Jealousie’s intemperance and irascibility makes the lady the least esteemed character in the household. Lady Hypochondria, while extreme in her reactions, is praised for her loving vigilance; she’s not as self-aware as Lady Chastity, but her extreme attentiveness errs in the right direction. Cavendish’s play shows us the real f ires that constitute the heart of domestic spaces. These fires, burning in the play’s kitchens, are not simply symbolic seats of passion, of Galenic heat and unruly desire. Rather, they are the material underpinning of women’s labour, the location of sweat and pain where things get done. These fires are also the loci of vigilance, regular study, mindfulness, and care. In thus checking our preconceptions through attention to early modern material practice, we see that the play depicts female characters as variously negotiating that vigilance and care. Cavendish’s characterizations are more than those born within a Galenic imbalance and are not simply shadows in a post-Jonsonian comedy of humours. Beyond gendering the environment, Cavendish’s use of fire in the play shows a contiguity, porousness even, with it. Her depictions are thus not essentializing; instead, they allow for complexities of female characterization linked to their attentiveness to and intimacy with the elements around them even as they do not leave their houses.

Minding the Fire: Kitchen Work and Ecological Futures The literary evidence provided by Matrimoniall Trouble thus allows us to read the themes of temperance and intemperance in Cavendish’s play as extending from and reflecting back upon the material practices represented within it. The play imaginatively demonstrates the intimate relationship between household maintenance, particularly of fires, and internal discipline. In this light, Cavendish’s play works to theorize this coagential relationship between interiority and fire in articulating an overt connection between material practice and moral development as seen in Briget and Nan Lightheel. In the upper-status characters, moreover, the awareness of (or obliviousness to) the work of the household conducted by others also demonstrates this development, as Lady Hypochondria inserts her anxieties into domestic unrest. However, an analysis that ends with Cavendish ends too quickly, and would seem to conclude with a metaphoric understanding that holds human agency as the ultimate goal. This cohabitation of human and fire

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is not simply about human control and domination. In an ecofeminist—as well as a cognitive archaeological—understanding, the fire works upon the human, adding dimensions to cognition that would not be possible without this enmeshment located most readily in the kitchen. As artifacts of this work, recipes reflect a kind of moral making in their practitioners. In requiring material vigilance, recipes simultaneously may develop in their makers a kind of spiritual rigour; in the obverse, they imply how inattention or a kind of material ease may result in a species of moral laxity. One final example from the recipe books illuminates these implications for us as it shows how ‘material mindfulness’ may be overtly articulated as such in the recipes.34 The eighteenth-century recipe ‘To make an Omlet’, recorded by Mrs. Knight, may resonate for anyone today who appreciates the delicacy of the task, bringing home how much more difficult the art would be if the cooking element was an open flame: Take six eggs, Leaving out two of the whites Beat them up well, Then add some Chives a Little Parsley Choppe these together very fine and mix it with the eggs, season it with pepper and salt, then have ready some Butter Frying in your pan, put it in, and Let it fry for 5 minutes If your Fire is brisk, mind and shake it well ‒ it should only be Frid on one sid [sic]35

Here, it is the fire’s non-low state that makes it a locus of concern, and the object being watched is the omelet, not the flame. But the use of ‘mind’ in this recipe seems to fall somewhere between a fifteenth-century usage (now archaic), which has to do particularly with ‘minding one’s book’, or studying,36 and an arguably later development that persists in the phrase ‘minding the children’. In this later usage of the word, the OED puts the earliest use in 1640 (i.e., the age of Cavendish): To take care of, take charge of, look after, watch over (esp. a baby or child, or a shop, store, etc.), now usually for a short or limited period; (now also) to look after (a child, etc.) in an official or paid capacity; to mind the shop 34 I am thankful to Thomas Ward for coming up with this phrase during our conversations. 35 Knight, Mrs. Knight’s Receipt Book, 32. 36 ‘mind, v. trans., II.4.’, OED Online.

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(also store): to be in temporary charge (of an operation, enterprise, etc.), take over temporary authority.37

A perusal of the illustrative quotations reveals how the seventeenth-century usage is tied to women’s domestic duties, in effect separating the imagined terrain of the intellect (of books and study) from that of the body as it engages in the physical world (e.g., carrying, washing, and feeding children), and in this separation creating a gendered hierarchy between mindful and material concerns. Against these two meanings, the usage in Knight’s recipe would seem to be one of the earliest that combines the material and the metaphysical; the meaning ‘To be careful or attentive about, take care of; to use or perform carefully’, according to the OED, was first used in 1740, the date ascribed to Knight’s collection. This usage in effect attenuates the binaries between inside and outside and works to articulate the relationship between, demonstrating the co-creative relationship between mind and matter that is found throughout historical recipe making.38 My contention ultimately is that the development of the mind has a place in kitchen work and has conceivable origins in the work of the hearth. My analysis strives to demonstrate another way we may turn to recipe books for evidence of the minds-in-bodies at work. Rather than delineate the elements of experiment or autobiography in the recipe as others have done, I have been most interested in the development of mind outside of the discourse of intellectual inquiry or self-formation.39 Instead, it is the mind of the in-between or the antechamber of knowledge, of the quiet of the flame, of the moment before inspiration, that has propelled this inquiry, as has the attention to the quality of the flame itself. As such, for one example, we may come to view the many recipe collections that contain prayers or devotions intermingled or at the beginning of their recipes as being purposeful preparations for the act of making, bolstering the spirits of the maker for those long hours maintaining a fire in its sober state.40 The gentle lull before a soft fire, therefore, is not necessarily a will simply constrained by mores, or let go into reverie, but could be a mind spiritually, not just socially, harnessed and enhanced. It is with this insight that I return to the age of ecological crisis, as I write this in a time of global pandemic from my home in a canyon increasingly 37 ‘mind, v. trans., II.6.’, OED Online. 38 ‘mind, v. trans., 8c.’, OED Online. 39 See as examples, Field, ‘“Many Hands Hands”’; Pennell, ‘Perfecting Practice’; and Wall, Recipes for Thought. 40 Laroche, ‘Anne Layfield Reading Bishop Andrewes’.

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affected by aridification, on the outskirts of a city that has twice experienced wildfires in the past decade and where every summer is clouded by smoke from fires throughout the region. I invoke this context not as a means of pointing to my singular precarity, but rather in bearing witness to the heightened vigilance and material action in the world around me. Wildfires and contagion actuate spark, rain, and air molecules into our consciousness as we rake pine needles away from our houses, more closely survey our use of water, watch weather maps for any chance of precipitation, wear masks to filter the air we breathe. As such, the age of climate change has made an increasing number of humans aware of the co-creative relationship that we have with the elements. We know that wildfires are not simply ‘out there’ in the ‘great outdoors’ but can have origins as intimate and minute as a pine beetle or campfire spark. The question remains, is it only the imminent threat of disaster, of our houses ablaze or our shelters and hospitals overflowing, that can make us conscious of where we build, what we do with our waste, how often we go to the store? In the age of climate change, these fires in one sense start in our kitchens, in what we cook (or not cook) and how and where we eat. In the continued pattern of globally outsourced making, do we serially binge on products (both alimentary and otherwise) oblivious of what went into their production? If the house that will burn down is not our own (is on another coast or continent), do we throw figurative fat on the fire to meet our goals and desires when a lengthier and more mindful process would do less overall long-term damage? The benefits of slow food and small living have long been tenets of culinary and ecological discourse. What would happen if we enhanced the array of adjectives, extended them outward from the use of the kitchen and from the size of the house? What if ours became a world of gentle, temperate, leisurable, sober, soft, and sweet flames tended by humans of similar description? Yes, the world would hold a bit less drama, literally less heat, but in this moment, clearly that could only be a good thing.

Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010. Baker, Margaret. Receipt Book of Margaret Baker, seventeenth century, Folger MS V.a.619. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Boyle, Richard, Earl of Burlington. A Book of Verses Collected by me, R. Dungarvan, c. 1630, Folger MS V.a.125. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC.

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Castleton, Grace. The Lady Grace Castleton’s Booke of Receipts, seventeenth century, Folger MS V.a.600. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Cavendish, Margaret. The Comical Hash. In Playes Written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, 558–77. London, 1662. Cavendish, Margaret. The First Part of the Play, called the Matrimoniall Trouble, A Comedy. In Playes Written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, 422–57. London, 1662. Cavendish, Margaret. The Second Part of the Matrimoniall Trouble. In Playes Written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, 458–88. London, 1662. Cavendish, Margaret. ‘To the Readers’. In Playes Written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, sig. A4r. London, 1662. Dowd, Michelle. ‘Labours of Love: Women, Marriage, and Service in Twelfth Night and The Compleat Servant-maid’. Shakespearean International Yearbook 5 (2005): 103–26. ‘easy, adj.’. OED Online. January 2020. Oxford University Press. Field, Catherine. ‘“Many Hands Hands”: Writing the Self in Early Modern Women’s Recipe Books’. In Genre and the Development of Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England, edited by Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle, 49–63. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Fitzmaurice, James, ‘Margaret Cavendish and Hannah Woolley: Kitchen Work, Fancy Food, and Social Class’. Margaret Cavendish, Houses, and Gardens. January 7, 2016. https://margaretcavendish.net/2016/01/07/15-margaret-cavendishand-hannah-woolley-kitchen-work-fancy-food-and-social-class/. Fuller, Thomas. ‘Reducing Fire, and Cutting Carbon Emissions, the Aboriginal Way’. The New York Times, January 16, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/ world/australia/aboriginal-fire-management.html. ‘gentle, adj.’. OED Online. January 2020. Oxford University Press. Handley, Sasha. ‘“Lusty” Sack Possets, Fertility, and the Foodways of Early Modern Weddings’. The Collation. February 13, 2020. https://collation.folger.edu/2020/02/ lusty-sack-possets/. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Knight, Mrs. Mrs. Knight’s Receipt Book, 1740, Folger MS W.b.79. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Kowalchuk, Kristine. Preserving on Paper: Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen’s Receipt Books. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Laroche, Rebecca. ‘Search Transcriptions in LUNA’. Early Modern Recipes Online Collective. December 3, 2019. https://emroc.hypotheses.org/search-in-luna.

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Laroche, Rebecca and Jennifer Munroe. Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Laroche, Rebecca, in consultation with Steve Turner. ‘“Take Good Syrup of Violets”: Robert Boyle and Historical Recipes’. The Recipes Project. April 14, 2015. https:// recipes.hypotheses.org/5475. Laroche, Rebecca, with Hillary M. Nunn. ‘Anne Layfield Reading Bishop Andrewes’. The Recipes Project. August 27, 2015. https://recipes.hypotheses.org/6498. LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection. https://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet. Medicinal and Cookery Recipes, compiled c. 1625–1725, Folger MS V.a.490. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. ‘mind, v. trans.’. OED Online. January 2020. Oxford University Press. Patrick, Penelope. Receipt Book of Penelope Jephson, 1671, Folger MS V.a.396. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Pennell, Sara. ‘Perfecting Practice? Women, Manuscript Recipes, and Knowledge in Early Modern England’. In Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium, edited by Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson, 237–58. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Receipt Book, late seventeenth–early eighteenth century, Folger MS V.b.400. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Robertson, Una A. The Illustrated History of the Housewife, 1650–1950. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Shakespeare, William. Love’s Labor’s Lost. In The Complete Pelican Shakespeare edited by Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller, 214–48. New York: Penguin, 2002. Shakespeare, William. The Two Gentlemen of Verona. In The Complete Pelican Shakespeare edited by Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller, 115–42. New York: Penguin, 2002. ‘slow, adj.’. OED Online. January 2020. Oxford University Press. ‘small, adj. and n.2’. OED Online. January 2020. Oxford University Press. ‘sober, adj.’. OED Online. January 2020. Oxford University Press. ‘soft’, adj.’. OED Online. January 2020. Oxford University Press. Thompson, Ann, and Sasha Roberts. Women Reading Shakespeare. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Trull, Mary and Rebecca Laroche. ‘“From a Drudge, to … a Cook”: Hidden and Ostentatious Labor in the Early Modern Household’. In The Routledge Companion to Women, Sex, and Gender in the Early British Colonial World, edited by Kimberly Anne Coles and Eve Keller, 239–53. New York: Routledge, 2019. Wall, Wendy. Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

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Ward, Thomas. ‘Hamlet’s “Moderate Haste” and the Time of Speech’. ELH 87, no. 4 (2020): 911–941. ‘wilde, v.’. OED Online. January 2020. Oxford University Press. Woolley, Hannah. The Compleat Servant-Maid; or, The Young Maiden’s Tutor. London, 1677. Wynn, Thomas. ‘Fire Good. Make Inspiration Happen’. Smithsonian, December  2012. https://w w w.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ fire-good-make-human-inspiration-happen-132494650/#hSkEZLIj7Lwiqo4g.99.

About the Author Rebecca Laroche is Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. During spring term 2019, she was a Before ‘Farm-to-Table’ Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She has published books and articles on Shakespeare, ecofeminist theory, early modern women, print herbal texts, and manuscript recipe collections. She was a founding steering committee member of the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective.

11. ‘Teâgun kuttiemaûnch: What Food Shall I Prepare for You?’: Exchanges in Early New England Kitchens Julie A. Fisher

Abstract Seventeenth century New England was home to a critical mass of both English and Indigenous bilinguals, which reveals that these neighbours lived in intimate proximity to one another for decades and spoke each other’s languages in ways that directed the politics, trade, and cultural development of the region. These bilinguals included the more familiar figures of adult men involved in trading, colonial politics, and missionary work, but a closer look reveals these bilinguals also included English and Indigenous women and children. Cooking, both the process and physical space of the kitchen, was a vital part of their language acquisition. Peering into the kitchen offers a rare glimpse into the regular interactions between English and Indigenous men, women, and children on New England’s borderlands. Keywords: New England history, early American history, borderland studies, women’s history, captivity, language acquisition, enslaved labour

It was the spring of 1653 and Grace Minor must have been tired as she made the roughly thirty-mile trek southward along the western side of Narragansett Bay. She was headed toward home, a community now known as Stonington, Connecticut, but which was then commonly known by its Indigenous name of Pawcatuck. Though the Minors were one of the few families in her southern New England community that owned horses, Grace and her husband had travelled on foot, all the while carrying their newborn son Samuel. Grace was just shy of her fortieth birthday and this

Bassnett, M. and Hillary M. Nunn (eds.), In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463721646_ch11

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child, her tenth, proved her last. At some point in their journey a Niantic Indian messenger intercepted them.1 Grace and her husband Thomas listened carefully to the man’s invitation to accompany him to the home of the Niantic sachem (or leader), Ninigret.2 Given the sachem’s influence in the region, Grace and Thomas knew this invitation was less a request than a command. After the Minors had arrived, settled, and accepted refreshments from Ninigret’s family, the couple listened carefully as the sachem laid out a series of complaints for them to convey to English officials. In the letter Thomas wrote about the meeting, he referenced Grace’s participation repeatedly. Again and again he used the phrases ‘As near as we understand’ or ‘This is as near as we can [remember]’ when describing the conversation.3 Grace, like much of her family, was bilingual in an Algonquian language. This was not the first time she was involved in verifying what she heard a Niantic speaker say. Three years earlier she affirmed the deposition of an unidentified (though likely Niantic) woman, and officials recorded that Grace ‘understandeth the language’. 4 Three of the Minors’ seven sons eventually served as paid interpreters, including their eldest son, John, who served the Commissioners of the United Colonies and missionaries in the Hartford area. John’s son, Joseph, was also reportedly ‘well acquainted with the Indian language’.5 Where did Grace, her husband, and their children acquire knowledge of an Algonquian (most likely Pequot-Mohegan and/or Narragansett) language or languages? Evidence suggests the Minors acquired at least some of their second language in perhaps the most ancient and enduring of language 1 ‘Thomas Minor to John Winthrop, Jr., 2 April 1653’, in Freiberg, Winthrop Papers, 6:275–76. Regarding Samuel’s birthdate see Anderson, The Great Migration Begins, 1264–65. 2 A note on terminology: I have made every effort to use community names when identifying individuals and groups based on the expressed preference by tribal community members. I use the terms tribe and nation interchangeably even as both can impose a sense of stability on what were fluid social and political organizations. I use the terms Indigenous, Indian, and Native but not Native American to reflect the preferences of some, but by no means all, Indigenous people I speak with today. Finally, tribal names appear here without an s when describing people in the plural, again, out of the expressed preference of some, but not all, knowledge keepers in New England who have informed my work. This is all to say that I have done my best to use language that reflects the stunning, dynamic past while paying respect to the evolving, dynamic present. 3 ‘Thomas Minor to John Winthrop, Jr., 2 April 1653’, in Freiberg, Winthrop Papers, 6:275–76. The word remember is missing in the original manuscript, but the editors believe that Minor implies the word remember or a word to that effect. In context, I agree with their assessment. In both quotations, the emphasis is mine. 4 ‘Deposition of Thomas Minor, Robert Hempstead, and William Nicholls, 17 April 1650’, Freiberg, 6:34–35. 5 Pulsifer, Acts of the Commissioners, 1:66 and 2:128; Trumball, Public Records, 1:265, 3:276.

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classrooms: the family’s kitchen. There, in the place where Grace cooked while tending to her children and directing the constant work of gathering and preparing food, she and her family encountered the language of the neighbouring Pequot, Narragansett, Niantic, and Mohegan. For most of her life, Grace’s kitchen lay in Indian country. Though she had first settled in Salem in 1629 with her parents, by 1646 she had married Thomas and their family moved out to southeastern New England with its scattering of small English settlements nestled alongside and amongst the larger Wampanoag, Narragansett, Niantic, Mohegan, Pequot, and Nipmuc communities. This region rested between the Pawcatuck and Mystic rivers of what is now southeastern Connecticut, but which was then contested territory among the victors of the recent Pequot War (1636–1637), namely Mohegan, Narragansett, and English communities but also the surviving Pequot. English communities in these places, including Grace’s, were founded by English traders who were drawn by the large bases of Pequot, Narragansett, Wampanoag, and Mohegan customers; access to important transportation routes; and lax colonial governmental oversight. The Minors themselves had followed Grace’s father towards the coast, first out to Pequot in 1646, and then Pawcatuck in 1652, to take advantage of increased opportunities to trade and acquire land. They had done well, establishing themselves as respected traders and farmers in the area with Thomas serving in a variety of town offices including assistant magistrate.6 There, in southern coastal New England, while the Minors and their English neighbours remained at a distance from English colonial centres, they lived near the centre of multiple Indigenous seats of power. This meant that in their everyday activities of food production and cooking there was a good chance they would encounter someone who spoke what the English referred to as the ‘Indian language’ on a regular basis. For the most part, English records described only a single ‘Indian language’, but speakers like Grace and Thomas were aware that there were multiple languages in what linguists today refer to as the larger Algonquian language family.7 Some Englishmen, particularly those interested in missionary work, studied this language family and a few even published on it. One such man was Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island colony and a thorn in the side of neighbouring puritan establishments. Also during his life, he committed himself to learning the Narragansett and Wampanoag 6 Anderson, Great Migration Begins, 1262. 7 See Goddard, ‘Eastern Algonquian Languages’, 70–77. For a succinct description of the ‘linguistic “map” of Native Southern New England’ see Bragdon, ‘Native Languages’, 173–74.

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languages. In 1643 he felt confident enough to publish a Narragansett language guide, A Key into the Language of America. The text is a complicated work of proto-anthropology, which is to say it consists of his political and religious thoughts posing as a language guide. Problematic as it may be, it remains a rare glimpse into Narragansett society, knowledge, and practices of that time.8 Each section heading that follows contains phrases, as best as Williams could render them, drawn from the Key, and I include them here to offer something of Grace’s soundscape. Tellingly, of the thirty-two chapters he wrote, Williams followed his opening chapter, ‘Greetings’, with ‘Eating and Entertainment’, a section dedicated to food, cooking, and eating. Williams assumed many roles in Narragansett and Wampanoag country—diplomat, governor, interpreter, and minister among others—but he was first and frequently a guest in Narragansett and Wampanoag homes. He saw more than his fair share of cooking and the title for this piece, ‘Teâgun kuttiemaûnch: What Food Shall I Prepare for You?’ is drawn from that chapter. For Williams, these phrases surrounding eating and cooking were not theoretical or arbitrary; they formed an important part of his and Grace’s lived experience in and around Indigenous cooking.

Nippenowàntawem. I speak another language. Learning Languages in Early America

The Minors’ story speaks to the larger critical mass of both English and Indigenous men, women, and children who acquired the language, to varying degrees, of their neighbours in seventeenth-century southern New England. Uncovering this bi/multilingual population reveals that Indigenous and English neighbours lived in intimate proximity to one another for decades and spoke each other’s languages in ways that directed the politics, trade, and cultural development of the regions. For linguists, a bilingual or multilingual is a person who uses two or more languages on a regular basis.9 For this study, particularly with its paucity of details in the written record, studying 8 I am using the most recent (and only) Narragansett Tribal publication of Williams’s Key. This edition benefits from the combined work of Narragansett knowledge keepers, tribal educators, and linguists to offer an exceptional rendering of this work; see Williams, Key into the Language. There has been and continues to be tribal-led efforts in Algonquian language revitalization in southern New England. For one example, see the work of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, https://www.wlrp.org/. 9 Grosjean and Li, The Psycholinguistics of Bilingualism, 5, 7. Also see Grosjean, Bilingual: Life and Reality, 3–4, 18–22.

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bilingualism leans on that definition, especially the frequency element. This approach studies language acquisition as a lived experience. This approach also highlights that men and women like Grace Minor tend to acquire additional languages in ways specific to the demands and opportunities of their circumstances.10 Because people often learn other languages in a site- or task-specific way, they are strongest in their second language when discussing familiar topics. There are also receptive bilinguals, which is to say, individuals who can understand a language when spoken by others, but do not speak it (at least not yet) themselves.11 A definition of bilingualism that accounts not only for usage in spoken dialogue, but also recognizes different levels of skill and variety of languages, expands the conversation surrounding bilinguals in ways that capture people’s lived experiences. Many of the English bilinguals near Grace’s home were the usual suspects—traders, missionaries, and official interpreters—but their ranks also included English women and children, often the wives and children of the Englishmen at the frontlines of colonists’ Indian affairs. As was the case when Grace listened to a powerful local sachem and then helped her husband convey that message, the language skills of women and children played an important role in regional English-Indigenous relations. Explaining the range of bilinguals and their skill set requires shifting the lens of inquiry from important but less frequent diplomatic encounters and instead refocusing on the steady interactions that filled the home life for English families like the Minors. Grace, her husband, and their children—sons and daughters alike—learned local Algonquian languages to varying degrees because they heard them and used them on a regular if not daily basis. This steady interaction stemmed in large part from the time spent gathering, preparing, and cooking in and around English kitchens. One reason they heard Algonquian languages on a regular basis was that their husbands’ and fathers’ business brought Algonquian language speakers into their homes. A number of men in this region were active in what their contemporaries called the ‘Indian business’. Generally, the phrase referred to trade, but it also encompassed interpreting, surveying, and land speculation, with one activity facilitating another. Trade had lower start-up costs than either farming or fishing, so a motivated colonist could gain financial independence and even accumulate a small fortune within a short number of years. Likewise, the most polished bilingual traders profited as paid interpreters in diplomacy, for colonial governments valued 10 Grosjean, ‘The Bilingual Individual’, 163–87. 11 Yip, ‘Simultaneous Language Acquisition’, 120.

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their language skills and personal relationships with Indigenous leaders. Bilingualism provided an entry into the lucrative ‘Indian business’.12 With a husband or father in this business, these English families lived where they did, not despite the presence of Pequot, Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Mohegan communities, but precisely because of them. Consequently, the family business, combined with their location, ensured the regular presence of Native guests that women like Grace Minor hosted in her kitchen.

Awássih. Warm yourself.

Máttapsh yóteg. Sit by the fire. Hospitality and Good Relations For English traders and many others, their ability to operate in Indian Country demanded they return the hospitality of their Pequot, Narragansett, Wampanoag, Mohegan, and Niantic hosts. Indigenous hospitality included hosting English traders in communities, permitting Englishmen land from which to run their trading posts and build their homes (which frequently were one and the same), serving as guides and messengers, among other gifts that escape the historical record. Indigenous hospitality was a striking feature to many English observers, including Roger Williams. He described arriving late one night in a Narragansett community and, despite ‘nothing [being] ready, the men and their wives’ roused themselves to prepare him a meal.13 With his banishment from Massachusetts still a painful memory, Williams was compelled to offer this observation on Indigenous hosting to his English audience: ‘It is a strange truth that a man shall generally find more free entertainment and food among these barbarians than among thousands who call themselves Christians’.14 For any English businessmen attempting to work with an Algonquian community in southern New England, demonstrating they could host Wampanoag or Narragansett or any other Indigenous guests in return was not optional; it was essential. At the same time, Wampanoag, Narragansett, Pequot, and Mohegan visitors provided English traders with an additional valuable commodity during these visits: an opportunity for the sons of traders to practice 12 Goddard, ‘The Use of Pidgins and Jargons’, 62–63, 74–75; Goddard, ‘Some Early Examples’, 37–41; Goddard, ‘A Further Note’, 73; Buccini, ‘Dutch, Swedish, and English Elements’, 63–87. On traders in New England learning languages see Axtell, ‘Babel of Tongues’, 48–49. 13 Williams, A Key into the Language, 14. 14 Williams, 15.

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their Algonquian language skills. By the 1650s, traders in southern New England had begun apprenticing their sons in their family business, a job that demanded linguistic skills.15 The challenge for traders and interpreters who wanted to prepare their sons for the ‘Indian business’ was that puritan society did not permit the time-tested method of sending a child to live in the community of native speakers of the desired language. This was probably a strictly puritan, rather than broadly English, taboo, as colonists in Virginia showed no such compunction.16 Since puritan officials refused to condone traders and interpreters sending their sons out to Wampanoag, Narragansett, Pequot, or Mohegan communities to learn the language, bringing Algonquian speakers to English fields and English kitchens proved the next best thing. This began with hosting Indigenous guests and customers. In an English home, hospitality summoned effort from the entire family but most importantly, it depended on the wife’s cooking. English wives and their households made the husband’s dealings possible by making meals, big and small, for the Native men and women visiting their homes on trade or other business. Guests could be making a brief visit or, in the case of more active political figures like Roger Williams, staying upwards of a week and bringing a party of dozens of people.17 Such visits required a tremendous amount of work from the household, from sleeping arrangements to the laundry that inevitably followed in the guests’ wake. For a less politically important family like that of Grace and Thomas Minor, any hosting would have likely not required such extensive arrangements, but it would have required cooking.

Aupúmmineanash. Parched corn, roasted or baked. Nasàaump. Thick corn meal porridge or hominy. Puttuckqunnége. A round cake or loaf of bread. Corn and Cooking in English Kitchens

Englishwomen were more than capable of meeting the demands of hosting their Indigenous guests, in part because they had incorporated local ingredients and some Indigenous cooking ways into their own.18 In a 15 On puritan ideas about apprenticing, work, and professions see Wilson, Ye Heart of a Man, 15; Bailyn, ‘The Apologia of Robert Keayne’, 568–87; Morgan, The Puritan Family, 67–68, 71–72. 16 On Virginia, see Kupperman, Pocahontas and the English Boys. 17 Fisher, ‘Roger Williams and the Indian Business’, 352–93. 18 On Indigenous cooking in the present but with an eye towards tradition and the past for the Mohegan Tribal Nation, see Sayet, ‘Wikôtamuwôk Wuci Ki tà Kihtahan’. Also see Raine, A

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number of ways, English cooking already shared features with nearby Pequot, Wampanoag, and Narragansett hearths, including, in particular, pots of slow cooked grains to which women added sweet or savoury items. For surrounding Indigenous communities this was ‘Nasàump’ (or something closely related) and for the English this was pottage, porridge, or pudding. For guests, Grace Minor and neighbouring English wives served dishes that reflected their adoption of maize, or what they referred to as ‘Indian corn’, as a staple grain. Born of necessity in the early years when Wampanoag people gifted and traded maize to starving colonists at Plymouth (or when starving colonists simply stole the grain from Wampanoag communities), consuming maize endured long after the first decades of English colonization.19 Centuries of Indigenous maize horticulture continued to benefit and fill English kitchens. Though English colonists preferred the same wheat they grew in the home country, the fact remained that in their would-be ‘new’ England, planting an acre of the grain yielded significantly less than an equal acre of corn. This fact, combined with wheat’s susceptibility to a fungus known as ‘the blast’, made corn a common and enduring feature in English colonial cooking.20 Colonists associated the grain as being something constitutive for their Indigenous neighbours, so much so that English used ‘corn’ and ‘Indian’ at times synonymously (hence ‘Indian pudding’ or ‘Indian bread’ simply signified it was made with corn). That English phrasing gestured toward an important truth: Indigenous communities did place great importance on corn cultivation. Native women had introduced the crop to their homelands at least two centuries before the arrival of English colonists in the Northeast, after the grain’s centuries’-long journey from Mexico.21 Of Narragansett women, Roger Williams described a flurry of activity: ‘Their women constantly grind all their corn by hand. They plant it, weed it, gather it, barn it, pound it’.22 Whether he fully comprehended it or not, he was observing processes the women had refined over centuries. Like the Indigenous women before them, Englishwomen incorporated corn into their existing cooking methods, particularly for the popular boiled puddings. Boiled puddings grew in popularity as the seventeenth century progressed thanks to a key advancement: a cloth boiling bag. Cloth Woodland Feast. 19 On an early, and fateful, episode of the English stealing food from Wampanoag food stores see, Silverman, This Land Is Their Land, 136–38. On the broader problem of food scarcity and its ramifications, see Grandjean, ‘New World Tempests’, 75–100. 20 Stavely and Fitzgerald, America’s Founding Food, 24; Rutman, Husbandmen of Plymouth, 27. 21 Silverman, This Land, 37, 447 n18. 22 Williams, A Key into the Language, 35.

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bags were a ready-made, year-round alternative to entrails, which required more effort to prepare and were only available during slaughtering times. Now, Englishwomen such as Grace had the year-round option of placing her pudding in boiling water and letting it simmer for the next two to five hours. While not quite a situation of ‘set it and forget it’, this popular method allowed women to leave the pudding less attended while they turned to the numerous other responsibilities in and around the home.23 Like the Narragansett, Pequot, and Wampanoag women around them, Englishwomen added local berries to corn puddings. As soon as dairy livestock allowed, Englishwomen also added butter or milk to what they called ‘sampe’ (shortened from nasàump) or hominy, which Connecticut’s governor declared ‘the best sort of Food which the English make of this Corne’.24 Grace also could have served dome-shaped loaves of bread made from a mixture of cornmeal and rye or wheat which was then wrapped in or rested on oak or cabbage leaves while it cooked in an oven. Grace Minor herself counted ‘Indian corn’, in addition to rye, wheat, cabbage, and robust dairy production, as part of the Minor family farm, and the Minor-raised honey would have made for a particularly sweet addition.25 Her husband Thomas noted receiving large amounts of corn—‘17 bushells of corn’ and ‘three score and seventeen bushells of Corne’—from local Pequots or Narragansetts.26 For the Minors, like their English and Indigenous neighbours, corn was vital. Records describing what Indigenous guests thought of these Englishadapted dishes and technology are scattered but suggest Native communities incorporated select ingredients and cooking technology into their homes. By the 1630s, English governors were fielding, and fulfilling, requests from Narragansett leaders for gifts of sugar.27 This new addition fell under the descriptor that Williams recorded as, ‘Weékan. It is sweet’.28 While sugar from sugar cane was exotic, Indigenous knowledge ways had long since incorporated sweeteners into cooking and social relations, including gathering sap from maple trees, as Edith Snook describes in her chapter in this volume.29 Williams’s vocabulary also reveals that there was already a Narragansett word for ‘a kettle’, Aúcuck, and ‘a red copper kettle’, Míshquockuk, when 23 Stavely and Fitzgerald, America’s Founding Food, 12–14. 24 On ‘Sampe’ and ‘very good bread’ see Winthrop, ‘On Indian Corn’, 130. 25 Anderson, ‘Thomas Minor’s World’, 499. 26 Minor, Diary, 36 (1659) and 56 (1662). 27 ‘Williams to Winthrop, 9 May 1639’, in Williams, Correspondence, 196. 28 Williams, Key into the Language, 12. 29 Williams, 35 n31; Snook, ‘“A New Source of Happiness to Man”?’

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he published his Key in 1643.30 Archaeological findings and court records suggest that Indigenous women did indeed incorporate metal pots into their own cooking.31 With the inclusion of local ingredients in her cooking, Grace and her English neighbours offered Niantic or Pequot visitors a familiar sensory experience while the men, women, and children inside spoke and listened to languages that were less familiar. While these meals over visits provided opportunities for the Minors to practice their guests’ language, such conversations existed alongside the more frequent exchanges in daily food preparation and cooking between English families and Algonquian speakers. These speakers were in English kitchens not as guests but as captive, hired, or enslaved labour.

Nowéchiume. He is my servant. He is with me.

Tackhúmminnea. Grind the roasted corn meal for me. Language and Labour Increasingly in the seventeenth century, Native people were in English homes and kitchens not as guests but as labour. Indigenous men, women, and even children began working on English farms and in English homes to meet the colonists’ growing demand for labour in food production and household work. While scholars are still trying to settle on a term to characterize New England’s labour system of family workers, hired hands, indentured servants, temporary Indian captives, and lifelong enslaved Indigenous and African people, the reliance of colonists on Indigenous men, women, and children, free and unfree, is clear.32 In the mid-seventeenth century, English homes in Grace’s area, with their growing families and expanding farms, wanted additional hands. Englishmen wanted help in the fields and in the construction of new homes, buildings, and the soon-to-be quintessential feature of New England landscapes: stone walls. Even the Minors, with their robust line of sons, recorded hiring additional wage workers for seasonal farm-related tasks such as trimming cider barrels or construction.33 Of these hired men and women, there was one man, Agedouset (probably Pequot or Niantic) whom the Minors hired periodically for over a decade. 30 Williams, 13. 31 Simmons, Cautantowwit’s House, 46; Rubertone, Grave Undertakings, 155. 32 Newell, Brethren by Nature; Fickes, ‘“They Could Not Endure That Yoke”’, 58–81. 33 Anderson, Great Migration Begins, 501.

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Thomas recorded Agedouset as performing various work for him over the year including running errands, breaking up farmland, and even giving testimony in certain disputes.34 On the rare occasion Thomas mentioned the labour of Indigenous women, they were busy with a task that was familiar to those who had grown up with regular horticultural work: they weeded the orchard.35 Englishwomen, just like Englishmen, hunted for help with their work. Forced Indigenous labour began with the English bringing Indigenous women into English kitchens to help with cooking and food preparation. In the beginning these were notably Pequot women and children the English had taken captive during the Pequot War (1636–1637). During this period, colonial women in New England were giving birth, on average, to eight children over the course of their child-bearing years. Grace Minor was above the average: she bore ten children over the course of twenty years.36 Of those children, seven were sons, leaving Grace in more need of help in her kitchen than the size of her brood might suggest. Not to mention that English home sites, particularly the kitchens, were danger zones for young ones with their large open hearths and boiling kettles, while further afield lay unfenced water holes and large livestock.37 Grace, her husband, and her English neighbours wanted help.38 Whether an English family was hosting Indian guests or holding an Indian captive, English homes were intimate spaces that obliged regular interactions, including conversations or language exchanges. And the place where this was most likely to happen was the kitchen. Most seventeenthcentury New England homes were small; the common width was just sixteen feet.39 Most of the f irst houses constructed were single bay, one-room structures. For a household of anywhere from four to fourteen people, even with the additional space a loft or lean-to provided, these were compact accommodations. Within these small structures, cooking spaces were prominent features in the home. Cooking relied on the most important and striking feature of the single or double room first floor layout: the hearth. 34 Minor’s spelling of the man’s name varies; the man also appears as Agedouhet, see Minor, Diary, 60, 77–78, 91, 196. 35 Minor, 117. 36 Anderson, Great Migration Begins, 1264–65. 37 On deaths and injuries in and around the English home, including the kitchen, see Ulrich, Good Wives, 157–58. 38 On English desires for Pequot labour, see J. Pulsipher, Swindler Sachem, 45. 39 Deetz and Deetz, The Times of Their Lives, 226; on Plymouth see Deetz, ‘Plymouth Colony Architecture’, 43–59.

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These were open hearths, big enough for Englishwomen like Grace to set up multiple cooking fires and an oven while still having the ability to move around. Consequently, the kitchen took up anywhere from a quarter to a third of an English home. Any captive or labourer would have shared these close quarters with the family which made the kitchen an essential and inescapable place of interactions. 40 A home with a cooking fire that served as a central feature was familiar to any captive Indigenous woman, Pequot or otherwise. The home of a Wampanoag, Narragansett, Pequot, or Mohegan woman was a wetu (or wetuash in the plural). These dome-shaped structures varied in size, ranging from a small, round home that housed six to eight people to a longer, multi-family structure that housed forty to fifty people. Cooking fires were (and remain) a key feature in the construction of the wetu; the more families in the home, the more cooking fires it needed to accommodate. The larger wetu, referred to as a nush wetu, means a ‘house with three fire pits inside’. 41 The people who built the wetu created a corresponding number of smoke holes at a height of at least ten feet high because, as present-day wetu builder Darius Coombs attests, ‘it draws nice to fire’ and ‘allows smoke to go out’. 42 While the shapes may have differed, English and Indigenous men, women, and children lived with cooking spaces as central features in their homes.

Anaskhómmin. To hoe or break up. Mattacúcquass. Cook or Dress. Food Gathering and Preparation

Once in the kitchen, the other components that encouraged conversation were the extended periods of time that cooking itself demanded, first in gathering, then in preparation, followed finally by cooking time over a fire or baking. The common English preparation of samp or hominy provides the perfect example. There was the harvesting and drying of the corn, a task 40 There is excellent scholarship on the violence, including that against unfree and enslaved people, particularly women, inside colonists’ homes. Specific to New England in that century see W. Warren, ‘The Cause of Her Grief’, 103–49. 41 On wetuash, and ongoing Wampanoag-led building of wetuash at Plimoth Plantation, see the work of Darius Coombs, the Director of Wampanoag and Eastern Woodlands Research and Interpretative Training at Plimoth Plantation and the other Wampanoag educational instructions at the Wampanoag Homesite in Plimoth Plantation, ‘Historic Patuxet’ and ‘Building a Home’. 42 See the work of Darius Coombs as featured in Mayflower 400 UK, ‘The Making of the Wetu’, and ‘Re-informed’.

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Indigenous communities considered the purview of women. Afterwards, the rendering of dried corn into cornmeal remained a labour-intensive process. Likely drawing on a combination of observation and conversation (but probably not firsthand experience), Connecticut’s governor, John Winthrop, Jr., described the process that involved hulling the grain either by grinding it with a mortar and pestle or boiling the kernels in lye. 43 If an English family was adding dairy items such as butter to their samp, it was likely someone in the household who churned the butter. Once the household had assembled and readied the ingredients, cooking in the kitchen necessitated many hours of work as well. This began with the vigilance needed to ensure that embers or flames were ready to meet the cooking demands throughout the day. Much of English cooking involved longer cook times such as those needed to simmer porridges and roast meats. Recipes for the bread made of rye and cornmeal required longer bake times because, as later cookbook writers noted, using cornmeal in the bread required more time in the oven, up to three or four hours.44 Some of this labour was performed individually, while other preparations, such as baking bread, required less attention. And, as Rebecca Laroche explores in her chapter, the hours spent cooking food opened up the possibility of hours of introspection, but also conversation, whether that was with someone living in the home or a visitor stopping by.45 Shared work and shared food began to produce mutually shared words. While reconstructing these conversations will never be possible, it is logical to assume they would have focused on, or at least included, the topic of foods and food preparation. There is reason to believe that food-related vocabulary was not restricted to English and Indigenous women alone. Thomas Minor recorded that he had received ‘six peck of nunip’ without comment. 46 As someone that received nunip from Indigenous customers and probably saw Indigenous women gathering or planting nunip in their garden, it is easy to understand why he would have written nunip instead of the English word, bean. And it is also clear that free and unfree labourers alike were acquiring language skills in English homes, particularly around the hearths that dominated these spaces. Though the evidence is equally scattered, references to bilingual captives exist and support the commonsensical idea that captivity in English homes forced Indigenous men, women, and children to learn the English language as 43 Stavely and Fitzgerald, America’s Founding Food, 22–23; Winthrop, ‘On Indian Corn’, 129. 44 Hale, Mrs. Hale’s New Cook Book, 425. 45 Laroche, ‘Minding the Fire’. 46 Minor, Diary, 9.

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well. After the English victory in the Pequot War and the ensuing captivity of Pequot prisoners in English homes, Pequots began appearing in the records as interpreters.47 Probably more Pequot women learned English during the late 1630s and early 1640s than any other Indigenous subgroup, women like ‘Hannah’, ‘who’, according to colonial officials, ‘well understood the Indian language and English’. 48 There were also male Pequot youths who took advantage of their bondage to learn the English language and customs before they either ran away or were manumitted from service. Once home, they parlayed this knowledge to raise their social status. 49 To what extent each captive Pequot learned the language is impossible to gauge, but clearly some of that learning took place by participating in food production, or cooking, or eating around family tables. A closer look reveals other English women and children who most likely learned Indigenous languages in ways similar to the Minor family. The evidence of these speakers is scattered but suggestive when compiled together; what follows are a few particularly striking examples. There was Grace’s contemporary Damari Arnold, the wife of Rhode Island trader and colonial governor Benedict Arnold, who himself occasionally served as an interpreter in official diplomacy. Damari’s skills were on display in 1645 amid English fears of a burgeoning pan-Indian revolt. The Englishwoman told commissioners from the United Colonies of New England that an Indian man had been travelling through her neighbourhood ‘feineing himself to be of Connecttacut and spake in that dialect, but could not put of the Narragansett tone’.50 In other words, she knew from his speech that he was a Narragansett man but was pretending to be Mohegan or Pequot. Damari’s ability to distinguish between accents in a foreign language indicates that she possessed more than a rudimentary knowledge of southern New England’s Algonquian tongues. A survey of English wives with husbands in the Indian business reveal other such glimpses of language skills.51 The records of English children speaking Indigenous languages are equally scattered but illuminating. A place not far from Grace’s home offers the striking case of Ephraim Osborne. Ephraim was only twelve years old when he testified to local English authorities in 1669 about an alleged ‘Indian Plot’ in which local Narragansett, Pequot, and Mohegan powers were plotting 47 Rhode Island Historical Society, Collections, 3 (1835): 265–66. 48 Trumball, Public Records, 3:276. 49 For example, see the life of Cockenoe in Tooker, John Eliot’s First Indian Teacher. 50 Pulsifer, Acts of the Commissioners, 9:54–55. On this episode, also see Grandjean, American Passage, 101. 51 See Chapter Four in Fisher, ‘Speaking Indian and English’.

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to ‘kill all the English’.52 His account gained traction quickly because it was one of a number of reports that local English authorities believed hinted at a multi-tribal attack against English settlements in the area.53 When his mother Mary brought this information to town officials, a collection of local English interpreters questioned Ephraim about his claim. As part of their efforts to confirm his explosive charge, they ‘demanded’ Ephraim respond to them using the language he heard it in and he did indeed ‘perficktly relate over these things in Indian’.54 The man leading the questioning would have known, since he was the leading interpreter of Connecticut. Given the details Ephraim included and his grasp of the rumour’s content, his bilingual skills went well beyond a rudimentary knowledge of the (likely Pequot) language.55 As with the Minor children, Ephraim’s testimony suggests his language skills developed around his home and in and around neighbouring Indigenous homes. There are few records to suggest much about Ephraim’s early life and there is no indication that his father was an active trader with Indigenous communities, only that his family settled in the area around 1663. That move was important for Ephraim and his language skills, however, because he spent most of his childhood living in Pequot country. During this episode, Ephraim described visiting the field of a neighbour, Mosomp, and speaking to him there. The boy then described visiting the home of ‘Naupasshuat and his wife’ and having another conversation with two others who were there, ‘Mashenawuggas and Nawaghos.56 This was all in addition to an unnamed Native woman who visited the Osborne household and relied on Ephraim to translate the rumour to his mother. Another Indian man, ‘Chan’, affirmed he too ‘was in the house all the while the squaw told of these things’.57 His testimony to authorities made clear that the backdrop to all these conversations was people’s homes, including the places of the daily and ongoing task of gathering and preparing food. Places where everyone seemed to think nothing was out of the ordinary as they were visiting or being visited by their English and Indigenous neighbours.

52 Osborn, ‘Testimony of Goodwife Osborn’, n. p. 53 On the 1669 rumour see Fisher and Silverman, Ninigret, 104–12. 54 Osborn, ‘Testimony of Goodwife Osborn’, n. p., emphasis mine. 55 Grandjean is more skeptical about Ephraim’s language skills, commenting that ‘How well the boy truly spoke the “Indian tung” is doubtful’, Grandjean, American Passage, 101–2. 56 Osborn, ‘Testimony of Goodwife Osborn’, n. p. 57 Osborn, n. p.

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Enapwáuwwaw, or, Eississûmo. He speaks Indian. After the Cooking

Grace Minor lived out the remainder of her years in southern coastal Connecticut, survived by seven of her ten children. Before she died, she and her family lived through what may have been New England’s darkest years, a conflict now often known as King Philip’s War (1675–1676).58 Those English and Indigenous communities in southern coastal Connecticut—including Grace, her English and Pequot, Mohegan, and Niantic neighbours—fared better than many others. Connecticut’s success was, in no small part, thanks to the contribution of Pequot, Mohegan, and Niantic forces to the English war effort.59 Connecticut deployed interpreters to speak with Indigenous allies as well as enemies. Among them was Grace’s youngest son, Samuel, the same infant she had taken to meet the sachem over two decades earlier.60 While we will never be able to fully reconstruct everything that contributed to Samuel’s language skills, we do know that, after his birth, the earliest record of his existence is of him swaddled near a cooking fire, surrounded by the Narragansett language as his mother and father accepted food and drink from their Niantic hosts. For Samuel, this moment portended of more such scenes to come. Expanding the inquiry around cooking to consider language acquisition offers an additional opportunity to study the nature of cultural encounters and exchanges—in languages, knowledges, and foodways—between English and Indigenous people in early America. Scholars have long studied if, how, and to what extent people of different cultures interacted and adapted when living alongside one another. Foodways have been, and remain, one avenue of exploration for scholars as they consider the ways in which societies integrated new ingredients and culinary knowledge.61 Language acquisition invites the possibility of interrogating the nature and frequency of these cultural encounters. Language acquisition is always, and only, the result of repeated interactions. The nature of interactions surrounding cooking cannot be fully knowable, but the daily regularity of cooking begins to

58 See Drake, King Philip’s War. 59 On Connecticut’s work with Indigenous allies during King Philip’s War, see J. Warren, Connecticut Unscathed. 60 Minor, Diary, 136. 61 For a small sampling see, LaCombe, Political Gastronomy; Norton, Sacred Gifts. For an excellent overview of early American foodways scholarship, see the bibliography Rachel Herrmann includes in her notes, ‘Early America’, 31 n4.

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explain some of the frequency of English and Indian conversations in New England’s borderlands.62 Expanding inquiries around cooking to consider language acquisition also offers new ways to study the lives that continue to challenge early American scholars, namely English and Indigenous women and children. Though they typically appear only in passing in the written records, these trace references shed light on their sustained, regular, and frequent use of Algonquian and English. A bilingual speaking their second language, much like a musician playing an instrument, can reveal a tremendous amount of practice in the space of a single, brief performance. Locating language acquisition for English and Indian men, women, and children in and around English homes, as opposed to more public diplomatic, missionary, or commercial settings, increases the number of English-Algonquian bilinguals in early New England. In turn, this broadens the roster of participants in Indian-English politics beyond the handful of publicly identified, even employed, interpreters. By attending to English kitchens and the cooking therein as likely places and activities that cultivated these exchanges of knowledge, we are reminded that cultural encounters and colonial politics owed as much to hearths and homes as they did to courtrooms and council fires.

Works Cited Anderson, Robert Charles. The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620–1633. Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1995. Anderson, Virginia DeJohn. ‘Thomas Minor’s World: Agrarian Life in SeventeenthCentury New England’. Agricultural History 82, no. 4 (2008): 496–518. Axtell, James. ‘Babel of Tongues: Communicating with the Indians in Eastern North America’. In The Language Encounter in the Americas, 1492–1800: A Collection of Essays, edited by Edward G. Gray and Norman Fiering, 15–53. New York: Berghahn Books, 2000. Bailyn, Bernard. ‘The Apologia of Robert Keayne’. The William and Mary Quarterly 7, no. 4, (1950), 568–87. Bragdon, Kathleen Joan. ‘Native Languages as Spoken and Written: View from Southern New England’. In The Language Encounter in the Americas, 1492–1800:

62 For scholarship that discusses the growing intimacy in colonial societies, proving both beneficial and problematic for all involved, see Preston, The Texture of Contact; Sweet, Bodies Politic.

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A Collection of Essays, edited by Edward G. Gray and Norman Fiering, 173–88. New York: Berghahn Books, 2000. Buccini, Anthony F. ‘Dutch, Swedish, and English Elements in the Development of Pidgin Delaware’. American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literatures 11, no. 1 (1999): 63–87. Deetz, James. ‘Plymouth Colony Architecture: Archaeological Evidence from the Seventeenth Century’. In Architecture in Colonial Massachusetts: A Conference Held by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 51:43–59. Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1979. Deetz, James, and Patricia E. Scott Deetz. The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony. New York: W.H. Freeman, 2000. Drake, James. King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675–1676. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Fickes, Michael L. ‘“They Could Not Endure That Yoke”: The Captivity of Pequot Women and Children after the War of 1637’. The New England Quarterly 73, no. 1 (2000): 58–81. Fisher, Julie A. ‘Roger Williams and the Indian Business’. The New England Quarterly 94, no. 3 (2021): 352–93. Fisher, Julie A. ‘Speaking Indian and English: The Bilinguals of Seventeenth Century New England’. PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2016. Fisher, Julie A. and David J. Silverman. Ninigret, Sachem of the Niantics and Narragansetts: Diplomacy, War, and the Balance of Power in Seventeenth-Century New England and Indian Country. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014. Freiberg, Malcolm, ed. Winthrop Papers. Vol. 6. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1992. Goddard, Ives. ‘Eastern Algonquian Languages’. In Handbook of North American Indians, edited by Bruce Trigger, 15:70–77. Washington, DC.: The Smithsonian Institute, 1978. Goddard, Ives. ‘A Further Note on Pidgin English’. International Journal of American Linguistics 44, no. 1 (1978): 73. Goddard, Ives. ‘Some Early Examples of American Indian Pidgin English from New England’. International Journal of American Linguistics 43, no. 1 (1977): 37–41. Goddard, Ives. ‘The Use of Pidgins and Jargons on the East Coast of North America’. In The Language Encounter in the Americas, 1492–1800: A Collection of Essays, edited by Edward G. Gray and Norman Fiering, 61–78. New York: Berghahn Books, 2000. Grandjean, Katherine. American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. Grandjean, Katherine. ‘New World Tempests: Environment, Scarcity, and the Coming of the Pequot War’. William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 1 (2011): 75–100.

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Grosjean, François. Bilingual: Life and Reality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Grosjean, François. ‘The Bilingual Individual’. Interpreting 2, no. 1/2 (1997): 163–87. Grosjean, François and Ping Li. The Psycholinguistics of Bilingualism. Malaysia: Blackwell Publishers, 2013. Hale, Sarah Josepha Buell. Mrs. Hale’s New Cook Book. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson and Brothers, 1857. Herrmann, Rachel B. ‘Early America’. In The Routledge History of American Foodways, edited by Michael D. Wise and Jennifer Jensen Wallach, 23–36. New York: Routledge, 2016. Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught between Cultures in Early Virginia. New York: New York University Press, 2019. LaCombe, Michael A. Political Gastronomy: Food and Authority in the English Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Laroche, Rebecca. ‘Minding the Fire: Human-Fire Coagency in Margaret Cavendish’s Matrimonial Trouble and Seventeenth-Century Recipes’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 221-42. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Mayflower 400 UK. ‘The Making of the Wetu – Creating a Lasting Wampanoag Legacy’. https://www.mayf lower400uk.org/education/the-making-of-the​ -wetu-creating-a-lasting-wampanoag-legacy/. Mayflower 400 UK. ‘Re-informed: The Making of the Wetu’. Premiered on January 30, 2021, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR953rHuRu4. Minor, Thomas. The Diary of Thomas Minor, Stonington, Connecticut. 1653–1684. Edited by Sidney H. Minter and George D. Stanton, Jr. New London, CT: Day Publishing Company, 1899. Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Family: Religion & Domestic Relations in SeventeenthCentury New England. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Newell, Margaret Ellen. Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. Norton, Marcy. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Osborn, Mary. ‘Testimony of Goodwife Osborn, July 20, 1669’. In Yale Indian Papers Project, edited by Paul Grant-Costa et al. Yale University. http://hdl.handle. net/10079/digcoll/2996. Plimoth Plantation. ‘Building a Home’. https://plimoth.org/for-students/homework​ -help/building-a-home. Plimoth Plantation. ‘Historic Patuxet’. https://www.plimoth.org/explore/historic​ -patuxet.

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Preston, David L. The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667–1783. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Pulsifer, David, ed. Acts of the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England. 2 vols. In Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, edited by Nathaniel B. Shurtleff and David Pulsipher, vols. IX–X. Boston: William White, 1859. Pulsipher, Jenny Hale. Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Raine, Carolyn. A Woodland Feast: Native American Foodways of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Huber Heights, Ohio: Penobscot Press, 1997. Rhode Island Historical Society. Collections. 10 vols. Providence: The Society, 1827–1902. Rubertone, Patricia. Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. Rutman, Darrett B. Husbandmen of Plymouth: Farms and Villages in the Old Colony, 1620–1692. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967. Sayet, Rachel. ‘Wikôtamuwôk Wuci Ki tà Kihtahan (A Celebration of Land and Sea): Modern Indigenous Cuisine in New England’. In Dawnland Voices 2.0: Indigenous Writing from New England and the Northeast 4, no. 9 (May 2017). https://dawnlandvoices.org/rachel-sayet-issue-4/. Silverman, David J. This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. Simmons, William S. Cautantowwit’s House: An Indian Burial Ground on the Island of Conanicut in Narragansett Bay. Providence: Brown University Press, 1970. Snook, Edith. ‘“A New Source of Happiness to Man”?: Maple Sugaring and Settler Colonialism in the Early Modern Atlantic World’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 265-86. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Stavely, Keith W.F., and Kathleen Fitzgerald. America’s Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Sweet, John. Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Tooker, William Wallace. John Eliot’s First Indian Teacher and Interpreter, CockenoeDe-Long Island: And the Story of His Career from the Early Records. London: Henry Steven’s Son and Stiles, 1896. Trumball, J.H., ed. Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, 1636–1776. 15 vols. Hartford: Brown and Parsons, 1850.

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Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750. New York: Knopf, 1982. Warren, Jason W. Connecticut Unscathed: Victory in the Great Narragansett War, 1675–1676. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. Warren, Wendy Anne. ‘“The Cause of Her Grief”: The Rape of a Slave in Early New England’. The Journal of American History 93, no. 4 (2007): 1031–49. Williams, Roger. The Correspondence of Roger Williams. Edited by Glenn W. LaFantasie. Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1988. Williams, Roger. A Key into the Language of America, edited by Dawn Dove, Sandra Robinson, Dorothy Herman Papp, Loren Spears, and Kathleen Bragdon. Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2019. Wilson, Lisa. Ye Heart of a Man: The Domestic Life of Men in Colonial New England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Winthrop, John Jr. ‘On Indian Corn’. Edited by Fulmer Mood. New England Quarterly 10, no. 1 (1937): 121–33. Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project. ‘Project History’. https://www.wlrp.org. Yip, Virginia. ‘Simultaneous Language Acquisition’. In The Psycholinguistics of Bilingualism, by Francois Grosjean and Ping Li, 119–44. Malaysia: Blackwell Publishers, 2013.

About the Author Julie A. Fisher is an educator and historian of early America. Currently at the National Historical Publications and Records Commission of the US National Archives, she has previously worked with the Yale Indian Papers Project, the National Park Service, the American Philosophical Society and Bard High School Early College in Washington, DC. She is the co-author of Ninigret, Sachem of the Niantics and Narragansetts: Diplomacy, War, and the Balance of Power in Seventeenth-Century New England and Indian Country.

12. ‘A New Source of Happiness to Man’?: Maple Sugaring and Settler Colonialism in the Early Modern Atlantic World Edith Snook Abstract This essay will look at how cooking becomes manufacturing in eighteenthcentury North America. The paper’s focus is ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar’, an extended recipe that appeared in American and English periodicals, in the Nova Scotia Magazine, and as a pamphlet in London and Philadelphia in 1790–1791. With the stated goals of efficiency, profit, replicability, and patriotism, the instructions seek to deploy the techniques and ethos of cane sugar ref ining in the making of maple sugar. The ‘Remarks’ and the short-lived efforts of the Pennsylvanian settlers behind the text illustrate manufacturing’s ties to settler colonialism: in the recipe’s documentation of settlers’ adoption of Indigenous knowledge in ways that erase the presence of Indigenous peoples in their territories and in the overt use of maple sugar manufacturing to further settler claims to that land. Keywords: settler colonialism, maple sugar, Indigenous knowledge, Mi’kmaki, Nova Scotia, Pennsylvania

Interested in the conceptual and economic distinction between manufacturing and cooking, this essay looks at one attempt to encourage the manufacturing of maple sugar in the settler colonial context of the early modern Atlantic world. If cooking is characterized by the transformation of raw materials into more palatable (and safe) food through the application of heat (by boiling, simmering, steaming, poaching, roasting, grilling, frying, or

Bassnett, M. and Hillary M. Nunn (eds.), In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463721646_ch12

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baking, for example), manufacturing might be defined by the deployment of these techniques on a larger scale, one that exceeds the needs of a household for which cooking is done.1 The labour of cooking in a household is typically undertaken in ways that historically have been marked by social hierarchy (class, race, and gender), age, and physical capacity—as B.W. Higman says, ‘whereas everyone ate, not everyone cooked’.2 The labour of manufacturing is often similarly marked, but in manufacturing I would suggest that the scale of creation is expanded not only by large numbers of workers, but also industrial technologies, by what Higman calls ‘crop determinism’ (the technological capacity of particular crops to become monocultures), and capitalism, in the production of food to make a profit in the market.3 My focus is an eighteenth-century recipe, ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar; with Directions for its Future Improvement’ that was printed in Nova Scotia Magazine in October 1790. 4 This is a recipe that takes a cooking technique—boiling—and shifts it to manufacturing, a transformation of scale and also of human relations that was influenced by the cane sugar manufacturing industry. In the early modern Atlantic world, cane sugar production in the Caribbean was the site of ‘some of the largest private industrial enterprises in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, where ‘plantation factory complexes’ processed sugar cane into molasses and rum for sale in Europe and America.5 Proposing that industry developed in the colonial world before it appeared in Europe, Sidney Mintz argues that eighteenth-century sugar production involved many features of industry, including the organization of agricultural production and processing under one disciplinary authority, the organization of labour, a time consciousness around scheduling of production and processing, the separation of production from consumption, and the separation of the worker from his tools.6 Paradigmatically manufacturing and not cooking, cane sugar production was intrinsically tied to colonialism: the Caribbean land where sugar cane grew was claimed by colonial powers, the native plant habitats 1 Although he is not particularly distinguishing cooking and manufacturing, I rely here on the world historical survey of cooking and the list of types of cooking in Higman, How Food, 146 and throughout. 2 Higman, 143. 3 Higman, 77–78. 4 All references to this text, unless otherwise noted, are to ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar; with Directions for its Future Improvement’, Nova-Scotia Magazine 3 (October 1790): 249–54, Early Modern Maritime Recipes, https://emmr.lib.unb.ca/recipes/63. 5 Higman, How Food, 110. Amy L. Tigner writes about this industry’s impact on English cakes in her chapter in this volume, ‘Cake: An Early Modern Chronicle’. 6 Mintz, Sweetness, 51–52.

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were destroyed to enable monocultural agriculture, and European land owners imported enslaved people from Africa to do the work of planting, harvesting, and processing the product in large quantities.7 ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar’ tells a story that is perhaps less well known than cane sugar’s history: the way that settlers in the Americas sought to use Indigenous knowledge of maple sugar and syrup-making to develop an alternative sugar manufacturing industry. The proposal outlined in the ‘Remarks’, which emerged from a Quaker community that sought to avoid the enslaved labour that dominated the manufacturing of cane sugar, also sought to expand settler control of the traditional territories of Indigenous peoples through maple sugar manufacturing. I became aware of the ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar; with Directions for its Future Improvement’ when Shawna Guenther included it in the collection of materials she was gathering from eighteenth-century Nova Scotia newspapers for Lyn Bennett’s and my Early Modern Maritime Recipes database (the database includes recipes in print and manuscript that circulated before 1800 in what we now call Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick in Canada).8 Although at over 4,000 words ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar’ is longer than a typical recipe, it maintains all of a recipe’s generic features: an outline of ingredients, an explanation of the process, and notes on the expected outcome. It is, like many recipes printed in the region in this period, a reprinted item, here ‘From a late Philadelphia Publication’.9 The text had first been produced in Philadelphia in 1790 as a pamphlet and then in two parts in Universal Asylum, & Columbian Magazine in August and September, just before it appeared in Nova Scotia. It would go on to be printed in Boston in the Columbian Centinel (October 6 and 9, 1790), in New-York Magazine; or, Literary Repository (January and February 1791), and in Portsmouth in Osborne’s New-Hampshire Spy (February 23 and 26, March 2, 1791). In London, the ‘Remarks’ were printed in their entirety as a pamphlet in 1791 and in the periodicals European Magazine and London Review (March 1, 1791) and The Annual Register, or a View of the History, Politics and Literature, for the year 1791 (1795).10 Popular for a short period of time, it seeks overtly to improve on ‘long established’ cooking techniques—implicitly on Indigenous knowledge of maple-sugar making—by proposing a technique that would make the 7 Higman, How Food, 50–53. 8 Bennett and Snook, Early Modern Maritime Recipes. 9 ‘Remarks’, Nova Scotia Magazine, 249. 10 The Works Cited provides the full publication details for each of these texts.

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large-scale production—manufacturing—of maple sugar possible. It also offers a conceptualization of the manufacturing process, focused on boiling, that shows how food production was intimately engaged with colonialism in the Americas.

The Manufacturing Process Described The many details in ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar’ seem intended to lay out a process designed to produce larger quantities of maple sugar and be successfully replicated in multiple locations, wherever maple trees grow in the Americas. This is apparent from the beginning, with the long list of requisite, often large tools: sixteen fifteen-gallon kettles; two iron ladles that have bowls of three or four quarts; sixteen pot racks to put under the kettles; screw augers of ½, ¾, and 1 inch, four of each; eight or ten three-gallon-buckets to collect the sap; eight or ten boards to cover the sap buckets; three or four fifteen-gallon tubs to receive the syrup from the boiler; yokes for each of the collectors; 800 troughs to collect sap; wooden storage vessels; two sheds, one to cover a hearth large enough for sixteen kettles and another in which to heat two kettles of syrup with charcoal; pieces of cast iron to keep the wood in the fire; wooden sugar moulds and frames for the moulds; gutters to fix within the frames to ensure cleanliness; and prickers, to run up the moulds after they are unstopped.11 The number and sizes of the pots, buckets, tubs, and ladles, the size of the moulds, and that of the sheds, all become the materials of mass production. ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar’ further emphasizes replicability and efficiency in its comprehensive account of the process. To get the sap from the tree, a screw auger, placed on a downward slant, should bore two holes, each up to the depth of two and a half inches. Four hundred trees should be tapped in February, with another four hundred to be bored in the middle of the season to add to the production in a way manageable for the workers: ‘four, active, industrious men’.12 Eight- to twelve-inch spouts of elder or sumach should then be fixed in these holes, ‘to project from the tree, from eight to twelve inches, and not to enter the tree more than about half an inch’. After the sap has been collected, it should be boiled over a fire. Different from the ‘soft’, ‘easy’, and ‘gentle’ fires that Rebecca Laroche contemplates in her chapter in this collection, 11 ‘Remarks’, Nova Scotia Magazine, 250–52. 12 ‘Remarks’, 250.

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the fire here is ‘smart’, ‘regular’, and ‘uniformly and equally kept up’—all descriptors that emphasize standardization and efficiency.13 Before it boils, the sap should be mixed with a tablespoon of slaked lime (limestone that has been heated to remove the carbonic acid) in the fifteen-gallon kettles, to ‘promote[ ] the rising of the scum and forming of the grain’.14 The scum that forms with boiling should then be taken off. When the liquid in a kettle is reduced by half, the liquids from two kettles can be put into one, and the boiling continues until the contents of all the kettles can be contained in one; when a kettle empties it should then be f illed with fresh sap to begin the boiling again. The condensed liquid must be strained ‘through a good blanket, or woollen cloth’ and left to stand for twelve hours or more so that the lime settles to the bottom.15 After being poured into another kettle, this syrup should be placed over a separate charcoal fire, where the fire is confined to the bottom of the pot, and boiled further, before a fat, such as butter or ‘hog’s lard’ is added. The fat is added because ‘the evaporation is much more expeditious’ and ‘the quantity of sugar made, is larger’ as it ‘prevent[s] the sap, and particularly the syrup, when graining, from rising’.16 The syrup, done when it can be drawn into a thread between the thumb and finger, should then be put into a tub, stirred, cooled, and poured into moulds. To further promote the transformation of the syrup into sugar, the sugar mould should be covered with a layer of white clay mixed with water. The intended purpose of the text is surely to spread a technique that promises efficient, large-scale production, akin in that way to Caribbean sugar production, amongst people with little experience of maple sugaring. Tapping the tree twice and adding more trees in a second round seems intended to maximize the quantity of sap collected. Mixing large kettles of evaporated syrups together allows more kettles to be freed to start more sap boiling. The adulteration of the sap with lime and fat also aims at efficiency, speed, and consistency. Making maple sugar in ‘the back country’ ‘has many inconveniences’, such as wind and the ashes and leaves that get in the pots.17 Shifting the space of cookery to a purpose-built shed capable of sheltering a fire for sixteen kettles is not just expansive but also presented as civilizing and as a maximization of energy expenditure. The shed allows the process 13 14 15 16 17

Laroche, ‘Minding the Fire’. ‘Remarks’, 250–52. On slaked lime, see ‘lime, n.1’, OED Online. ‘Remarks’, 252. ‘Remarks’, 253. ‘Remarks’, 251.

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to hurry along and removes distractions (the fire will not be needed by others as it might be in a home). The approach construes itself as rational and focuses on quantification—sizes and amounts—and productivity. It proposes a method by which four men might regularly create the greatest amount of maple sugar as quickly as possible during the short sap-running season. ‘Remarks’ further ties its approach to maple sugar production to ideas of colonial experiment and progress. The method is said to be devised by a man in Stockport, Pennsylvania. Unnamed, he is nevertheless described as a man with judgment, experience in the business, and ‘an established character for candour and integrity’.18 He has what Stephen Shapin calls ‘gentlemanly truthfulness’, an important source of authority in early modern science.19 The Stockport man’s knowledge includes being ‘acquainted with the usual way of making this article’, but he is ‘desirous of improving the method’. Through conducting experiments with the instructions from a ‘refiner of sugar’ at hand, he claims to have developed a means to use maple sap to ‘produce sugar, in colour, grain and taste, equal, if not superior in reputation, to any imported’.20 Evidence of the cane sugar refiner’s influence might appear in the interest in the factory model and in the addition of lime to ensure granulation, as these were components of Caribbean sugar production.21 As proof of the effectiveness of the method, the recipe reports on a chest of maple sugar sent to Philadelphia that is ‘equal to the best sugars imported from the West-India Islands’.22 This shift from cooking into manufacturing also has a philosophical underpinning: ‘He who enables another to obtain any necessary of life, either cheaper or more independently than heretofore, adds a new source of happiness to man; and becomes more or less useful, in proportion to the number of those who participate in the benefits of his 18 ‘Remarks’, 250. 19 Shapin, A Social History, 410. 20 ‘Remarks’, Nova Scotia Magazine, 250. 21 ‘Directions for the Manufacturing Sugar from the Maple Tree’, 53, says ‘The greatest part of the maple sugar I have seen, has too small a grain; which is owing to two causes; one is the makers of it do not use lime or lye, or anything else, to make it granulate’. The use of lime in the making of sugar from sugar cane is described in The Art of Making Sugar, 14–15. This work also describes a boiling house that houses f ive copper boilers heated by furnaces, as well as a method for heating all boilers with one fire (10–14). Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar, 244–55, indicates that the latter method was called in French colonies ‘the English train’ and was adopted after 1725 when the need to economize on fuel emerged as a result of deforestation; Tomich also indicates that clarifiers, which included the introduction of lime, began to be used after 1778; the use of lime as a temper became standard by 1815 in Martinique (257, 279–81). 22 ‘Remarks’, Nova Scotia Magazine, 250.

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discovery’.23 For this recipe, manufacturing—large-scale cooking that aims at the cheaper production of maple sugar for more people—is presented as efficient, a source of progress, and a social good. The ‘Remarks’ emerge from the efforts of a group of abolitionist Quakers in Philadelphia. Benjamin Rush had proposed in 1789 to his Quaker coreligionists that encouraging the manufacturing of maple sugar in Pennsylvania would reduce the consumption of Caribbean sugar and thereby destroy slavery.24 The proposal was taken up by Henry Drinker, the probable author of the ‘Remarks’, who directed his agent in Stockport, Samuel Preston, likely the man of ‘established character’, to work on a process for making maple sugar.25 Drinker sent a box of maple sugar, a result of their efforts over the winter of 1789–1790, to President George Washington with a letter outlining the scheme.26 Washington replied, not mentioning the implications for slavery, but expressing his approval of the sugar, which he described as being of ‘so good a quality’, and of its local production, from which ‘considerable benefit may be derived to our country’.27 The publication of ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar’ in Philadelphia represented the next stage in the project: encouraging settler residents of Pennsylvania to get involved.28 Rush furthered the effort by writing a letter to Thomas Jefferson, which was delivered as an address to the American Philosophical Society in 1791 and printed in 1793.29 Jefferson, too, responded positively and wrote to Washington expressing enthusiasm that William Cooper—a lapsed Quaker and judge who was also working with Drinker—would be able to deliver 3,000 pounds of sugar.30 The project developed further with Drinker’s acquisition of Union Farm, seven miles from Stockport, and the organization of the ‘Society for Promoting the Manufacture of Sugar from the Sugar-Maple Tree, and furthering the interest of Agriculture in Pennsylvania’ in 1792. Stocks were issued to raise capital, but in 1793 the project started to fall apart as they were unable to make a good quality sugar, a failure which was repeated in the following year and resulted in the proposal to sell Union 23 ‘Remarks’, 249. 24 Maxey, ‘The Union Farm’, 612. 25 The authorship of a pamphlet on the best method of manufacturing maple sugar—presumably ‘Remarks’—is attributed to ‘Mr. Drinker’ in de Warville, ‘On Replacing’, 485. 26 Maxey, ‘The Union Farm’, 614. 27 Maxey, 614. See Washington, ‘George Washington to Henry Drinker’, 222. 28 Maxey, 615. 29 Maxey, 616–17. 30 Jefferson, ‘To George Washington from Thomas Jefferson, 1 May 1791’. On Drinker and Cooper, see Maxey, 618, and Gellman, ‘Pirates’, 57.

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Farm, which did not happen until 1833, in the settlement of Drinker’s estate to discharge his debts.31 ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar’ thus represents the optimistic epoch of a failed effort to create an effective method (lime, butter, and clay are not additions that have persisted) and expand the production of maple sugar in Pennsylvania and other parts of eastern North America.

Indigenous Knowledge, Settler Colonialism, and the ‘Remarks’ The method also failed at improving human happiness. Implicit in ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar’ are the settler experimenters’ unacknowledged debts to Indigenous knowledge and their commitment to settler colonialism, which existed alongside their interest in undermining Caribbean slavery. Maple sap has an important place in many North American Indigenous cultures, as is evident in the many stories about it.32 Writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, whose Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg people have territories on the north shore of Lake Huron, tells a story, which was important in her family, about a child, Biniijinhoo, who makes a ‘little slide’ and a hole in a maple tree to collect the water. She brings the sap to her mother who cooks the meat in it because she thinks it will be lovely and sweet. It is a story, Simpson says, in which children learned the sheer joy of discovery. They learned how to interact with the spirit of the maple. They learned both from the land and with the land. They learned what it felt like to be recognized, seen, and appreciated by their community. They came to know maple sugar with the support of their family and elders. They come to know maple sugar in the context of love.33

Biniijinhoo’s story is about pedagogy, epistemology, and a world view, and through it Simpson problematizes Indigenous engagement with contemporary settler educational institutions. Of Biniijinhoo’s learning about maple syrup, Simpson says, Settlers easily appropriate and reproduce the content of the story every year when they make commercial maple syrup in the context of capitalism, 31 Maxey, 621–29. 32 Pendergast, The Origin, 28–33. 33 Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 150, original emphasis.

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but they completely miss the wisdom that underlies the entire process because they deterritorialize the mechanics of maple syrup production from Nishnaabeg intelligence, and from Aki [land]. They appropriated and recast the process within a hyperindividualism that negates relationality. The radical thinking and action of this story are not so much in the mechanics of reducing maple sap to sugar but lie in the reproduction of a loving web of Nishnaabeg networks within which learning takes place.34

In Simpson’s explanation, the meanings of maple sugar extend well beyond the technical practices of its production to include relationships with the land, family and community. From this perspective, the technique is not divorced from its social relations. Mary Louise Bernard, the former chief of the Wagmatcook First Nation in Mi’kma’ki, the territories of the Mi’kmaq in what are now also known as the Atlantic provinces of Canada, tells a comparable story, which she learned from her mother. In this story, a young Mi’kmaw woman, worried about her grandfather, follows him into the forest. Seeing his tomahawk in a tree, she finds him and cooks a meal for him. Because water has dripped from his tomahawk into the meal, she learns about the sweet taste of maple sap, as well as how ‘the creator has given us a gift to be shared by all’.35 As Leroy Little Bear explains Indigenous approaches to knowledge more broadly: ‘In the Indigenous world, knowledge is about relationships. […] Knowledge, accordingly, is not something contained in a book, a CD or other memory mechanisms. Knowledge, from an Indigenous perspective, is the relationships one has to “all my relations”’.36 When settlers interact with Indigenous knowledges and practices relating to maple sugar, Simpson argues, they have a history of erasing this crucial intellectual and social context that both she and Bernard value. ‘The Remarks’ is further evidence to her point. Although ‘The Remarks’ emerge from, and in Nova Scotia are reprinted in, a context where Indigenous people made maple syrup and sugar, the text never mentions this—although other settlers do. In what is now Pennsylvania, David Zeisberger, a Moravian missionary to the Lenape people between 1766 and 1781, described how they used troughs to collect the sap through gashes cut with an axe and boiled the sap in kettles.37 34 Simpson, 154. 35 Bernard, Indian Maiden Story, 34. Bernard published this story as a children’s book and established interpretive panels in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, which is in Mi’kma’ki. See Patterson, ‘Sweetwater Maiden Story’. 36 Little Bear, Naturalizing, 7. 37 Zeisberger, History, 48–50.

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His assessment is that ‘the sugar becomes granulated and is as fine as the West Indian sugar’, although he derides its makers. He impugns the Lenape with laziness when he suggests that they usually do not care to take the time to prepare the sap slowly and instead form it into cakes and does not consider the possibility that they have an alternative preference.38 Zeisberger’s comments are part of a longer history of European settlers and explorers recording their observations of Indigenous peoples drinking sap and making maple syrup and sugar through tapping the tree, collecting the sap, and boiling it down.39 Nicolas Denys in 1672 remarked on maple sap being made into a good tasting beverage in Acadia (largely the French name for Mi’kmaki). His description of the method of tapping is much like that recommended in the ‘Remarks’, if on a smaller scale: To obtain it in the spring or autumn, when the tree is in sap, a gash is made about half a foot deep, a little hollowed in the middle to receive the water. This gash has a height of about a foot, and almost the same breadth. Below the gash, five or six inches, there is made a hole with a drill or gimlet which penetrates to the middle of the gash where the water collects. There is inserted a quill, or two end to end if one is not long enough, of which the lower extremity leads to some vessel to receive the water. In two or three hours it will yield three to four pots of the liquid. This is the drink of the Indians, and even of the French who are fond of it. 40

The first European reference to maple sugar (rather than to sap or syrup) seems to come in 1692 when Chrestien LeClercq recorded that in Gaspésie, also in Mi’kmaki (his travels stretched from Gaspé through what is now coastal New Brunswick to Cape Breton), both the French and Mi’kmaq made it:

38 Zeisberger, 50. 39 Although an earlier generation of settler historians claimed that Indigenous people in North America did not produce sugar from maple sap until after contact with Europeans, this has been solidly debunked, not least by evidence of the stories about maple sweeteners in Indigenous cultures. On this issue, and for the references to maple syrup and sugar making in European accounts, see Schuette and Schuette, ‘Maple Sugar: A Bibliography of Early Records’; Schuette and Ihde, ‘Maple Sugar: A Bibliography of Early Records. II’; Pendergast, The Origin, 8–27. 40 Denys, The Description, 380–81. Denys travelled to what are now called Québec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and Maine first in 1632 and spent time in the region, where he became a landowner and promoted settlement until his death in Nepisiguit (now Bathurst, NB) in 1688. He returned to France to publish this work, which was printed in Paris in 1672. See Reid, ‘Nicholas Denys’.

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through a very little opening which is made with an axe in a maple, ten to a dozen half-gallons may run out. A thing which has seemed to me very remarkable in the maple water is this, that is, by virtue of boiling, it is reduced to a third, it becomes a real syrup, which hardens to something like sugar, and takes on a reddish color. It is formed into little loaves which are sent to France as a curiosity, and which in actual use serve very often as a substitute for French sugar. 41

Although the French seemed more aware of maple sugar making than the English, the English knew of the technique, too. Members of the Royal Society, including Robert Boyle and Tancred Robinson, recorded that in New England and Canada the native inhabitants made sugar from tree sap.42 The Society’s publication, Philosophical Transactions, contains a notice in 1685 which describes the technique with linguistic violence and condescension: ‘the Savages of Canada, in the time that the Sap rises, in the Maple, make an Incision in the Tree, by which it runs out; and after they have evaporated 8 pounds of liquor, there remains one pound as Sweet, and as much Sugar, as that which is got out of the Canes […] The Savages have practiced this Art, longer then any now living among them, can remember’. 43 Indigenous knowledge, here, merits the attention of the Royal Society—at the apex of early modern English knowledge hierarchies—but the Society’s record not only accords Indigenous makers no respect, it erases the civilization around the practice. All of these European observers, with their references to cutting the tree, the troughs, the collecting containers, and the use of heat to transform sap into syrup and sugar, testify to the origins in Indigenous knowledge of the techniques described in ‘Remarks’. Even the space of labour, the shed which ‘Remarks’ recommends, might be a European expansion—modelled on Caribbean sugar factories—of an Indigenous space. The shed seems very much like that which appears in one of the plates in Father Joseph François Laf itau’s Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times, printed in France in 1724—a book that problematically extends his observations of the Iroquois in what is now Québec to all ‘American Indians’. Nevertheless, Lafitau’s description of ‘occupations 41 LeClercq, New Relation, 122–23. Le Clercq’s missions lasted for twelve years, beginning in 1675. Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie was printed in France in 1691. 42 Boyle, ‘Essay IV’, 112; ‘Dr. Robinson to Mr May’ and ‘Mr. Ray in Answer to Dr. Robinson’, 177–78. 43 ‘An Account’, 988.

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of the women’ includes a description of how they make sugar in March by making ‘transverse incisions’ with an axe on tree trunks, collecting the sap in bark vessels, boiling the liquid over a fire until it forms a syrup, and then forming a loaf sugar, if the heat is right for it.44 The engraving accompanying this text shows a three-walled Iroquoian longhouse with a fire inside. There is a hole in the roof to release smoke and a bar stretching from wall to wall on which three pots have been hung. 45 Since the image includes both bark and earthenware vessels and European metal vessels, Pendergast suggests that the image conveys the method used by the Iroquois in the early years of contact. 46 The shed recommended by the ‘Remarks’ draws a great deal from the pots and fires of this longhouse, simply expanding their number so that its scale is more like that of the cane sugar industry. In adopting this knowledge while also directing derision at Indigenous makers, Europeans participate in what Drew Lopenzina describes as ‘unwitnessing’: the habit of European observers to see ‘Native customs, traditions, and spiritual practices before concluding that these very same qualities were, in fact, nonexistent in indigenous life’. Europeans took this approach, he contends, because ‘to maintain the ideological framework of the colonial endeavor the evidence of the senses had to be rhetorically undone’. 47 ‘Remarks’ is an outcome of unwitnessing, entirely eliding this history of intellectual exchange that brought maple sweeteners to the attention of colonists and Europeans and erasing the technique’s Indigenous origins. It treats maple sugar production entirely as settler knowledge, known by ‘the inhabitants of the Eastern States’. That the practice is long-standing is acknowledged only through language that constitutes the past as inferior, ‘the beaten path’ and the ‘long established custom’ that will be surpassed by ‘better information’ of the purportedly scientific experiments of these settler Pennsylvanians. 48 The recipe thinks about maple sugar not in relation, as it is in Simpson’s story, but as property to be possessed; knowledge is not gained in joyful discovery but is stolen, uncredited, to be offered as expert advice shared across many miles by 44 Laf itau, Customs, 94. Moeurs des sauvages amériquains, comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps was printed in Paris in 1724. Sent to what they called Sault Saint Louis (now called Kahnawake) in 1713 by the Jesuits, Laf itau stayed for f ive years. See Baker, ‘Joseph-François Lafitau’. 45 Lafitau, Customs, Plate VII. 46 Pendergast, The Origins, 39. The making of sugar was not dependent on European metal vessels. 47 Lopenzina, Red Ink, 10. 48 ‘Remarks’, Nova Scotia Magazine, 249.

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the medium of print. It proposes not care for family but economic and national profit. Thus, in addition to claiming Indigenous knowledge for settlers and extracting it from its social dimensions, ‘The Remarks’ proposes a particular, settler-colonial relationship to land. ‘The primary object of settler-colonization’, says Patrick Wolfe, ‘is the land itself […] The logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct—invasion is a structure not an event’. 49 ‘Remarks’ explicitly imagines that settler access to and control over ever increasing tracts of land will be effected through sugar making when it ends with suggestions for ‘keeping’ maple trees, such as removing other species of trees, augmenting the soil, and planting more trees. It advocates transforming forests into ‘sugar plantations’, where trees ‘may from a natural state be greatly and essentially improved by the hand of art’.50 Even more, the recipe imagines settler inhabitants in land they do not currently hold, enthusing about ‘many thousands of people who now inhabit, or may inhabit the immense tracts of lands, which abound with the Sugar Maple tree!’ Alongside the exclamation mark punctuating the text’s settler-colonial zeal, the recipe positions sugaring as the work of nation building: ‘What a new and extensive field opens from these considerations! What an interesting and important object to the cause of humanity, presents itself to our View! An object that deserves the countenance of every good citizen, and that highly merits even national encouragement’. Rapturously, the text constructs manufacturing maple sugar as a patriotic act. Settlers can even move into lands where maples do not grow by propagating more maples ‘from the seed or young plants’ in the ‘more interior parts of the States’. If maple trees can so readily be ‘strewed over the country, without the aid of man’, what might be the result if men took up planting them: ‘To what an extent of cultivation may not this lead! There will be no risk or disadvantage attending the experiment’.51 In this assessment, Indigenous claims to the land are not countenanced, the people, their lives, culture, and knowledge are not visible, the land does not have a natural ecology, and settlers can expand their land claims as they wish, in search of maple sugar production. That the settler colonialism of the ‘Remarks’ emerges from a group of Quakers concerned about Caribbean slavery also draws attention to the text’s 49 Wolfe, Settler Colonialism,163. 50 ‘Remarks’, Nova Scotia Magazine, 253. 51 ‘Remarks’, 254.

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construction of labour. For Tracey Banivanua-Mar and Penelope Edmonds, slavery was a historically important component of settler societies: ‘the very establishment of populated and economically viable settler colonies was deeply reliant on the managed migration of labour’, including women’s reproductive labour and enslaved, indentured, and immigrant labour. In their view, ‘settler colonialism’s political economies have always pivoted on relations of race, with all of its sexual and gendered constructions’.52 Sugar was at the very centre of the eighteenth-century slave economy and the British empire; as James Walvin says, sugar ‘put into place a major economic and strategic system’.53 Thus, when Pennsylvania Quakers sought to develop another source of sugar at a scale that aimed at replacing the product produced by enslaved labour, they still had to consider who would do the work. Drinker’s idea, proposed in the ‘Remarks’, was that four strong men should undertake the labour. The text does not explain how or whether the four hard-working men would be paid—if they are working their own land cooperatively with their neighbours, working for wages paid by an employer who reaps the profits of selling the sugar, or indentured or enslaved labourers. What is clear is that the work is not done by families or women, as in Indigenous accounts. Rather, here the relationship of the work to the maple sugar is more strictly an economic one, one that has more in common with manufacturing than cooking. Drinker’s strong men are seemingly chosen for their productivity: ‘Remarks’ proposes they can produce 4,000 pounds of sugar in a season, or about 1,000 pounds per worker; by way of comparison, on a Caribbean plantation, a hundred enslaved labourers, with eighty acres of cane, could make eighty tons of sugar, a comparable amount.54 In contrast, another Quaker, Benjamin Rush, in An Account of the Maple-Tree, of the United States, and on the Methods of Obtaining Sugar from it (1792), uses his account more explicitly to confront slavery. He proposes that sugar is ‘to be conducted by associated labour’—that is the labour of ‘private families’ (the farmer, his wife, and children above ten years old)—and imagines that the family might produce 200 to 400 pounds.55 He prefers the family because, he says, the ‘men who work for the exclusive benefit of others, are not under the same obligations to keep their person clean while they are employed in this work; that men, women, and children 52 Banivanua-Mar and Edmonds, ‘Introduction’, 4. 53 Walvin, Fruits, 124. 54 Mintz, Sweetness, 49. Each enslaved worker manufactures 1600 to 1800 pounds (depending on whether Mintz is assuming imperial or US measures). 55 Rush, An Account, 10–11.

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are, who work exclusively for the benefit of themselves, and who have been educated in the habits of cleanliness’.56 Not as overtly interested in these ethical aspects of labour, the ‘Remarks’ appears instead to be more strictly interested in efficiency and profit. Considering the nation-building aspects of maple sugar production is not unique to ‘Remarks’ and the Pennsylvania Quakers who were working on making it; other white Americans saw the nation-building possibilities.57 Thomas Jefferson, for instance, thought that ‘with no other labor than what the women and girls can bestow’, the United States through maple sugar could not only supply its own demand but create sugar for export: ‘What a blessing to substitute a sugar which requires only the labour of children, for that which it is said renders the slavery of blacks necessary’.58 When ‘Remarks’ gestures to maple sugar’s superiority to the sugar of the West Indies, it hints at this political context, but when ‘Remarks’ fails explicitly to explain the payment scheme for the workers, neglects to credit Indigenous practices, and celebrates expansion into lands hitherto unoccupied by settlers, the concern with slave labour evident elsewhere seems more of a settler appeal to innocence, a gesture to construct as moral settler colonialism and taking Indigenous land and knowledge. Settler maple sugar manufacturing in this context is invested in the work of settler nation building. Its creation emerges in ways that are antagonistic to the relationships of love and learning that are core to the stories of maple sugar cooking undertaken by Biniijinhoo and the Mi’kmaw maiden. Indeed Drinker and Rush were part of a Quaker community that had a complex relationship with Indigenous peoples in a state that now has no official reserves. The largest landowner in the British empire as the result of a 1681 grant of 29 million acres by Charles II, the Quaker leader William Penn famously thought of Pennsylvania as a ‘holy experiment’ where Indigenous peoples should be treated humanely: he bought their land rather than taking it through violence. But as Kevin Kenny explains, ‘Penn wanted harmony with Indians, but he also needed to own their land outright’.59 Penn did not recognize different, Indigenous relationships to land, but instead, like other settlers, treated it as private property. Penn’s sons effected the infamous ‘Walking Purchase’ that defrauded the Lenape 56 Rush, 12, original emphasis. Rush also wrote against slavery in ‘On Slave-Keeping’. 57 Gellman, ‘Pirates’, 56, indicates that in New York State, ‘Proposals to free the new nation from dependence on an expensive foreign commodity and to reduce the nation’s moral responsibility for the worst excesses of New World slavery coalesced around the potential of the maple tree’. 58 Jefferson, ‘From Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Vaughan, 27 June 1790’. 59 Kenny, Peaceable, 2.

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of 1,100 square miles of their land.60 In 1753, Penn’s pacifist legacy was further undermined when Pennsylvania formed for the first time a militia to defend Pennsylvania from the French and their Indigenous allies; in 1756, the governor declared war on the Lenni Lenape and offered a bounty for scalps.61 Quakers did become prominent in advocating for alternatives to violence against Indigenous peoples, for what was called ‘expansion with honor’, and this policy approach was followed by presidents from Washington to Jackson.62 Importantly, honour did not have to include not taking Native land. Rather, Quakers wanted to use missionary activities to encourage the removal of Indigenous peoples from their traditional territories, to transform Indigenous peoples into European-style farmers, and reduce their interest in their traditional hunting territories.63 In Pennsylvania, Kenny argues, ‘Unlike their counterparts in Virginia, revolutionary Pennsylvanians did not find the bedrock of white freedom in black slavery. Instead they built their new society by annihilating the Indians in their midst’.64 Printed in Pennsylvania, ‘The Remarks’ emerges from this ethos. If others sought a way to reduce the reliance on slave-produced sugar, ‘The Remarks’ sees maple sugar as a reason to claim Indigenous lands and put it into production. When it was printed in Nova Scotia, the ‘Remarks’ participated in a similar expansionist, capitalist-settler approach to land. By the late-eighteenth century, the Mi’kmaq had endured a drastic population decline, a loss of access to traditional hunting and fishing territories, and a murderous governor. They had made a series of treaties with the Crown that did not cede land, but after the influx of Loyalists with the American Revolution, says Mi’kmaw historian Daniel Paul, the English used licenses of occupation to allow the Mi’kmaq to remain on some lands while in effect claiming all of Nova Scotia for settlers.65 Thus, when instructions for manufacturing maple sugar appeared in a Nova Scotia newspaper, they entered a territory where the technique was already well known by both the Indigenous and Acadian inhabitants but where English-speaking settlers were as enthused as those in Pennsylvania about expansive land claims (the English had also sought to expel the Acadians from Nova Scotia between 1755 and 1764). In this context, settler dedication to innovation of a technique that actually has its origins in Mi’kmaw knowledge furthers the erasure of the Mi’kmaq 60 Kenny, 3, 45–49. 61 Kenny, 79–82. 62 Tiro, ‘“We Wish”’, 355. 63 Tiro, 364. 64 Kenny, Peaceable, 231. 65 Paul, We Were Not the Savages, 173.

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from the land. They are not part of the story, even though many Europeans originally learned the origins of the technique from them, and even though the Mi’kmaq were already making maple sugar; the ‘Remarks’ positions settler experiments in manufacturing maple sugar as valued knowledge, techniques that will enable their claims to Indigenous lands.

Conclusion ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar’ aims not just at offering instructions that will translate a cooking technique from one fire to another but explains how to grow the fire to support sixteen kettles. Outside the kitchen, which Julie Fisher discusses in her chapter as a site of a cultural encounter in early America,66 the instructions nonetheless adapt Indigenous knowledge while imagining not cooking for a family and community, but rather four strong men stirring multiple pots in a large, purpose-built shed for an expanding nation. If its technique was a failure—the introduction of lime and fat did not persist—its ideology continues. Canada and the US are settler colonial states, and maple syrup and sugar are commonly produced within a capitalist economy (Canada’s maple industry, for example, accounts for 71 percent of the world’s maple products).67 Understanding the rise of food manufacturing has implications for how we think about food. Talking about our current moment, Michael Pollan describes how ‘cooking implicates us in a whole web of social and ecological relationships: with plants and animals, with the soil, with farmers, with the microbes both inside and outside our bodies, and, of course, with the people our cooking nourishes and delights’.68 ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar; with Directions for its Future Improvement’ highlights how some of these relationships are deeply political and oppressive and how the shift to manufacturing from cooking supercharges the damage that can be done. In its publication history, the text connects Quakers in Pennsylvania to the Loyalists of Nova Scotia but persistently disconnects the technique from Indigenous knowledge makers. The implicit relationship with plants and with land is defined not by the Indigenous concept of living in good relation but by expansion, profit, and control. Michif filmmaker Amanda Strong’s stop motion short film Biidaaban, based on short stories by Leanne Betamsamosake Simpson, provides a powerful rebuttal to 66 Fisher, ‘“Teâgun kuttiemaûnch: What Food Shall I Prepare for You?”’. 67 Werner, ‘Maple Syrup’. 68 Pollan, Cooked, 18.

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this colonial history. Her film is a hopeful, futuristic story of a young person, who with the help of a shapeshifter friend, engages in rebellious, reclamative, restorative maple syrup making in territories that are now Ontario suburbs, returning to the land and good relation.69 It is the settler attitudes documented in ‘Remarks’ that Strong’s film is, in part, contesting.

Works Cited ‘An Account of a Sort of Sugar Made of the Juice of the Maple, in Canada’. Philosophical Transactions 15, no. 171 (1685): 988. The Art of Making Sugar. London, 1752. Baker, G. Blaine. ‘Joseph-François Lafitau’. In The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada, 2008, last edited October 7, 2015. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia. ca/en/article/joseph-francois-lafitau. Banivanua-Mar, Tracey and Penelope Edmonds. ‘Introduction’. In Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity, edited by Tracey Banivanua-Mar and Penelope Edmonds, 1–24. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Bennett, Lyn and Edith Snook. Early Modern Maritime Recipes. https://emmr.lib. unb.ca. Bernard, Mary Louise. Indian Maiden Story: Sismoqnapui’skwe’j. Wagmatcook, NS: Indian Maiden Maple Products, 2013. Boyle, Robert. ‘Essay IV. Presenting Some Things Relating to the Hygieinal Part of Physick’. In Of the Usefulnesse of Natural Philosophy, Part 2, 95–116. Oxford, 1663. de Warville, M. ‘On Replacing the Sugar of the Cane by the Sugar of Maple’. New York Magazine; or, Literary Repository 3, no. 8 (August 1, 1792): 484–86. Denys, Nicolas. The Description and Natural History of the Coasts of North America (Acadia). Translated by William F. Ganong. Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1908. ‘Directions for the Manufacturing Sugar from the Maple Tree’. In Laws and Regulations of the Massachusetts Society for Promoting Agriculture, 53–56. Boston, 1793. ‘Dr. Robinson to Mr. May’ and ‘Mr. Ray in Answer to Dr. Robinson’. In Philosophical Letters Between the Late Learned Mr. Ray and Several of his Ingenious Correspondents, Natives and Foreigners, 177–79. London, 1718. Fisher, Julie A. ‘“Teâgun kuttiemaûnch: What Food Shall I Prepare for You?”: Exchanges in Early New England Kitchens’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 243-63. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. 69 Strong, dir., Biidaaban.

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Gellman, David. ‘Pirates, Sugar, Debtors, and Slaves: Political Economy and the Case for Gradual Abolition in New York’. Slavery and Abolition 22, no. 2 (2001): 51–68. Higman, B.W. How Food Made History. Somerset: John Wiley & Sons, 2011. Jefferson, Thomas. ‘From Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Vaughan, 27 June 1790’. In Founders Online. National Archives. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/ Jefferson/01-16-02-0342. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Vol. 16, November 30, 1789–July 4, 1790, edited by Julian P. Boyd, 578–80. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961]. Jefferson, Thomas. ‘To George Washington from Thomas Jefferson, 1 May 1791’. In Founders Online. National Archives. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/ Washington/05-08-02-0110. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington. Presidential Series. Vol. 8, March 22, 1791 – September 22, 1791, edited by Mark A. Mastromarino, 142–45. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999]. Kenny, Kevin. Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Lafitau, Father Joseph François. Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times. Edited and translated by William N. Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore. Vol. 2. Toronto: Champlain Society, 1977. Laroche, Rebecca. ‘Minding the Fire: Human-Fire Coagency in Margaret Cavendish’s Matrimonial Trouble and Seventeenth-Century Recipes’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 221-42. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. LeClercq, Chrestien. New Relation of Gaspesia: With the Customs and Religion of Gaspesian Indians. Translated by William F. Ganong. Toronto: Champlain Society, 1910. ‘lime, n.1’. OED Online. March 2020. Oxford University Press. Little Bear, Leroy. Naturalizing Indigenous Knowledge: Synthesis Paper. Saskatoon: Canadian Council on Learning, 2009. https://www.afn.ca/uploads/ files/education/21._2009_july_ccl-alkc_leroy_littlebear_naturalizing_indigenous_knowledge-report.pdf. Lopenzina, Drew. Red Ink: Native Americans Picking up the Pen in the Colonial Period. Albany: State University of New York, 2012. Maxey, David W. ‘The Union Farm: Henry Drinker’s Experiment in Deriving Profit from Virtue’. The Pennsylvania Magazine of History of Biography 47, no. 4 (1983): 607–29. Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin, 1985. Patterson, Elizabeth. ‘Sweetwater Maiden Story Shared with Visitors to Cape Breton Highlands National Park’. Cape Breton Post (Sydney, NS), October 18, 2018. https://

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www.capebretonpost.com/news/local/sweetwater-maiden-story-shared-withvisitors-to-cape-breton-highlands-national-park-250765/. Paul, Daniel N. We Were Not the Savages: A Mi’kmaq Perspective on the Collision between European and Native American Civilizations. Halifax, N.S.: Fernwood, 2000. Pendergast, James F. The Origin of Maple Sugar. Ottawa: National Museum of Canada, 1982. Pollan, Michael. Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. New York: Penguin, 2013. Reid, John. ‘Nicholas Denys’. In Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada, 2008, last edited December 16, 2013. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/ article/nicolas-denys. ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar’. Columbian Centinel 14, no. 7 (October 6, 1790): 25. ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar’. Columbian Centinel 14, no. 8 (October 9, 1790): 29. ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar’. European Magazine & London Review 19 (March 1, 1791): 214–15. ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar; with Directions for Its Further Improvement’. New-York Magazine; or, Literary Repository 2, no. 1 (January 1791): 34–37. ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar; with Directions for Its Further Improvement’. New-York Magazine; or, Literary Repository 2, no. 2 (February 1791): 69–72. ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar; with Directions for its Future Improvement’. Nova-Scotia Magazine 3 (October 1790): 249–54, Early Modern Maritime Recipes, https://emmr.lib.unb.ca/recipes/63. ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar, with Directions for Its Further Improvement’. Osborne’s New-Hampshire Spy 9, no. 35 (February 23, 1791): 133. ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar, with Directions for Its Further Improvement’. Osborne’s New-Hampshire Spy 9, no. 36 (February 26, 1791): 137. ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar, with Directions for Its Further Improvement’. Osborne’s New-Hampshire Spy 9, no. 37 (March 2, 1791): 141. ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar’. In The Annual Register, or a View of the History, Politics and Literature, for the year 1791, Vol. 2 of 2, 93–95. London, 1795. ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar; by a Society of Gentlemen, in Philadelphia’. Universal Asylum, & Columbian Magazine 5, no. 2 (August 1790): 106–7. ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar; by a Society of Gentlemen, in Philadelphia’. Universal Asylum, & Columbian Magazine 5, no. 3 (September 1790): 153–56.

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Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar: with Directions for its Further Improvement. London, 1791. Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar; with Directions for its Further Improvement. Philadelphia, 1790. Rush, Benjamin. An Account of the Sugar Maple-tree, of the United States and on the Methods of Obtaining Sugar from it. Philadelphia; rpt. London, 1792. Rush, Benjamin. ‘On Slave-Keeping’. In The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush, ed. Dagobert D. Runes, 3–18. New York: Philosophical Library, 1947. Schuette, H.A. and A.J. Ihde. ‘Maple Sugar: A Bibliography of Early Records. II’. Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 38 (1946): 89–184. Schuette, H.A. and Sybil C. Schuette. ‘Maple Sugar: A Bibliography of Early Records’. Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 29 (1935): 209–36. Shapin, Stephen. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Strong, Amanda, dir. Biidaaban. Spotted Fawn Productions, 2018. https://youtu. be/vWjnYKyiUB8. Tigner, Amy L. ‘Cake: An Early Modern Chronicle of Trade, Technology, and Exchange’. In In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, edited by Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn, 109-29. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Tiro, Karim M. ‘“We Wish to Do you Good”: The Quaker Mission to the Oneida Nation, 1790–1840’. Journal of the Early Republic 26 (2006): 353–76. Tomich, Dale W. Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World-Economy, 1830–1848. 2nd ed. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016. Walvin, James. Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660–1800. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Washington, George. ‘George Washington to Henry Drinker, 18 June 1790’. In Extracts from the Journal of Elizabeth Drinker, edited by Henry H. Biddle, 222, note 1. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincot, 1880. Werner, Leo H. ‘Maple Syrup Industry’. In Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada, 2006, last edited January 18, 2018. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/ en/article/maple-sugar-industry. Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology. London: Cassell, 1999. Zeisberger, David. History of Northern American Indians. Edited by Archer Butler Hulbert and William Nathaniel Schwarze. Columbus: Ohio State Historical Society, 1910.

286 Edith Snook

About the Author Edith Snook is Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick (Fredericton). Her current research project, with Dr. Lyn Bennett (Dalhousie), is the Early Modern Maritime Recipes project, an open access online database of recipes from before 1800 circulating in what are now the Maritime provinces of Canada.

Index adaptation 38–40 adustion 45, 60–66 Africa 124, 212 agriculture 12, 31, 40, 266–67, 271–72 biodynamic 40 see also husbandry Alaimo, Stacy 29–30, 234 n32 Albala, Ken 12 n8, 32 n16, 115, 159 n33 alchemy 47–48, 59–60, 74–82, 84 see also science ambergris 40, 77, 84, 187 Americas 13, 14, 20, 22, 132–33, 137, 142–43, 212, 214, 221, 243–59, 265–82 angling 131–39, 143 animals cow 15, 36, 141 fawn 86 hen 36 horse 36, 243 lamb 64–65, 162, 163, 210–11 pig 36, 140, 141, 186, 210–11 Anthropocene 18, 132 n5, 142 Appelbaum, Robert 12 n7, 60, 153 n10 Aristotle Meteorology 49–56 assimilation 14, 19, 61, 151–58, 213 Averie, Joseph 20, 121, 197–203, 207–10, 214 Baker, Margaret 225 see also recipe books Baker, Richard 135 Barad, Karen 38 n35, 41 Barker, Thomas 139 barm 93–98, 100, 114, 122 Bassnett, Madeline 153, 155, 182, 199 n4, 200 n5, 203, 204 n20, 205, 207 n22 becoming-with 30–34, 38 Berners, Juliana 134 Bible 92, 101–6, 169 Geneva 103 bilinguals 21, 243, 247, 259 birds 163, 164, 167, 183 n13, 206 capon 160, 162, 206 chicken 162 cock 84, 161, 162 godweath 162 hen 36, 118 knot 162 lark 162 partridge 162 peacock 165 pheasant 161, 163 pigeon 137, 162, 163 plover 162 poultry 118, 126, 161

pullet 162 quail 162 raven 34, 36 ruff 162 sparrow 84 blood 10, 37, 75, 100, 105, 116, 125, 140–43, 166–67 Boorde, Andrew 94–95 Boyle, Richard, Earl of Burlington 232 Boyle, Robert 201, 275 bread 17–18, 91–106, 110, 118–19, 122, 161, 162, 178, 188, 206, 208 n24, 249, 250, 251, 255 biscuit (bisket) 110, 119 buns 110, 112, 117 cheat 94 corn 250, 251, 255 hot cross buns 112 manchet 94, 97 sourdough 65, 91 n1, 93–103 spice 110, 112 sweet 112, 117, 118 toast 118 see also barm, leaven, yeast Brears, Peter 12 n8, 56 n37–39, 58, 93, 94 n12 brewing 94, 96–98, 114, 186 ale 35, 36, 94, 96, 109, 112, 114, 118, 120, 122, 226, 288 beer 65, 94, 96, 98, 114, 135 see also barm Burton, Robert 138 cake 109–29 Banbury 201 fruit 95, 112, 113, 114, 116, 119, 123 ‘katsura’ or castella 126 King 112 Paõ de ló 111, 121–26 seed 111, 115–21, 126 simnel 93 n4, 95 spice 35, 110, 112–15 sponge 122–23, 126 Twelfth Night 112–15 Woodstreet 35, 120 captivity 252–56 Caribbean 14, 266, 269, 270, 271, 272, 275, 277–78 Barbados 124–25 Jamaica 124 carp 18, 131–43, 206 Asian 132, 133, 142, 143 common 132 farms 136–37 silver 132 n4 preparation of 133–34, 137–42 Carr, Anne 140, 213 see also recipe books

288  Castleton, Grace 221, 224–27 see also recipe books Catherine of Braganza 121 Cavendish, Margaret 21, 222–23, 227–36, 237 The Comical Hash 233 n29 Matrimoniall Trouble 21, 222–23, 227–36 Charles II, King 121, 152, 154, 183, 198, 202, 279 Chetham, James 135 chocolate 14, 115 Civil War 19–20, 165–68, 171, 179–80, 199–200, 202–3 climate 211, 213 climate change 21, 46, 56, 65–66, 136, 221–22, 238–39 coagency 21, 221–24, 227 Cochran, John 66 co-creation 16, 51 coffin 82, 119–20 Cogan, Thomas 94, 95, 97 n25, 98 cognition 222–24, 227–39 collaboration 16, 22–23, 31–33, 138–39, 191–92 colonialism 18, 20–22, 109–11, 121–26, 131–36, 154–55, 168 n66, 212–14, 243–59, 265–82 commensality 19, 30, 151–71 Commonwealth 178–92 see also Interregnum concoction 45–66 Connecticut 243–45, 251, 255, 257, 258 contingency 16, 29–40 cook, the 10–11, 13, 15–17, 21, 37–38, 45–66, 71–87, 126, 139–42, 143, 180, 188, 190, 211, 222, 226–27, 229–33, 236–38 cooking fuel charcoal 56, 268, 269 coal 56, 232 sea coal 230 wood 38, 56, 64, 268 cooking implements 13 basin 122, 123 boiling bag 250–51 cauldron 10, 47, 57, 58 chafing dish 10, 232 de fartes 122, 123 fritter pan 79 griddle 133 hoops 18, 115–21, 123, 126 kettle 37, 38, 141, 251–52, 253, 268–69, 273–74, 281 knives 16, 36, 97 ladle 57, 268 mortar and pestle 36, 77, 255 pan 38, 79, 140, 237 paper 18, 111, 115–16, 118–19, 120–23, 126 pipkin 162–63 pots 10, 15, 16, 21, 36, 81, 82, 123, 141, 143, 230, 269 cooking techniques baking 10, 18, 49, 86, 91–102, 105, 109–26, 141, 161, 162, 183 n13, 186, 210, 254–55, 265

In the Kitchen, 1550–1800

boiling 37, 38, 47, 49, 50, 55, 57–58, 83, 84, 86, 118, 139, 141, 142, 161, 183 n13, 265 chopping 9, 14, 237 crushing 51, 65 dissolving 37, 38 gathering 14, 16, 29, 30, 34–36, 51, 64, 143, 156, 213, 245, 247, 250, 251, 254–57 heaping 51, 53–54, 55 mingling 34, 35, 36–41, 59–60, 112, 178 mixing 9, 14, 34, 36, 38, 39, 59, 97, 98, 104, 116, 122, 225, 232, 237, 269 parboiling 83, 162 pickling 20, 183 n13, 199, 206, 207, 210, 211–14 pouring 10, 53, 65, 163, 232, 269 roasting 79, 83, 86, 160, 183 n13, 210–11, 249, 252, 255, 265 scalding 37, 38, 62 scumming 47, 55, 57, 58 seasoning 61–62, 96, 141, 182, 187, 212, 237 stirring 10, 36, 57, 77, 141, 226, 232, 269, 281 tempering 37, 51, 52 n26, 58–59, 73, 112, 114, 270 n21 violent 139–42, 166–70 Cooper, Joseph 142 see also recipe books copia 154–63, 169–71 coral 84 Corlyon, Mrs. 17, 99–100 see also recipe books court cookery 19–20, 121, 138, 151–71, 177–92, 197–214 Cromwell, Elizabeth 19–20, 177–92, 200 see also recipe books Cromwell, Oliver 19–20, 177–92, 202 cuisine French 94, 152, 155, 156–63, 169, 171, 192, 208 n24 International 19, 20, 122, 198, 155 Spanish 124, 126, 152, 161, 169, 171, 199, 201, 203–8, 209–11, 213, 214 Portuguese 111, 121–25, 126, 198, 199, 203, 207 n22, 210, 211, 212, 214 David, Elizabeth 153 Day, Ivan 177 Defoe, Daniel 133 n9 dessert comfits 116–18, 124, 190 jelly 60, 82, 165, 187 marzipan (marchpane) 117, 119, 156–57, 190 preserves 11, 34, 183 n13, 190, 198 n3, 207, 224–25 trifle 117 whigs 117 see also cake de Warville, M. 271 n25 de Worde, Wynkyn 134 Denys, Nicolas 274

Index

diet 12, 14, 32–34, 79–80, 113, 118, 124, 133, 137–38, 141, 156–59, 178, 187–90, 192 Digby, Sir Kenelm 119, 201 see also recipe books digestio 156, 160–61 digestion 46, 48–49, 57, 94–95, 99, 117, 155–56, 159–60, 169–170, 192 DiMeo, Michelle 12 n9, 139, 182 n9, 184 n15 diplomacy 9, 20, 197–214, 243–44, 246–47, 256, 259 dishes bisk/bisque 19, 58, 151–71 dumpling 86 epigram 156–57 fricassee 33 hominy 249, 251, 254–55 kickshaw 157–59 olio (podrida) 58, 157–58, 161–62, 169 n70, 171 omelet 237 pie 82, 119, 120, 161, 162, 183 n13 porridge 208 n24, 249–50, 255 pottage 57, 170, 250 pudding 157–58, 177–80, 183, 184 n15, 187–89, 250–51 quelque chose 157, 191–92 salad 81, 170, 206 sampe 251, 254–55 soup 151–71 stew 34, 57, 58, 119, 133, 141, 143, 170, 183 n13 distillation 10, 226 Dodoens, Rembert 117 domesticity 14–15, 31–34, 50–55, 187–89, 199–200, 224–25 see also labour Donne, John 18 ‘Devotion XXII’ 102–5 ‘The Exastie’ 38 drama 15, 71–87, 221–39 Drinker, Henry 271–72, 278–79 drinks broth 80, 81, 161, 162–63, 169 n70, 183 n13, 187–88, 189, 208 n24 caudle 232–33, 236 cordial 84, 86, 121, 183 n13, 197, 198 n3, 202 lemonado 209–10 mead/meath 37–39 posset 232, 233 n29 rum 266 see also brewing, wine, water Dubravius, Jan 136 Early Modern Maritime Recipes (EMMR) 22, 266, 267 Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC) 22, 201 n10, 224–25 East India Trading Company 114 ecocriticism 15, 17, 29–30, 39–40, 143 ecofeminism 221–24, 227–39

289 ecological 131–33 Edward IV, King 164–65 eggs 35, 36, 37, 77, 94 n12, 116–19, 120, 122–23, 126, 157, 161, 162, 164, 170, 177, 187, 188, 206, 208, 232, 237 Elyot, Thomas 95, 98 embodiment 12–13, 14, 15–17, 18, 20, 29–42, 45–66, 71–87, 92, 169 Erasmus, Desiderius 154, 160 Estienne, Charles 10 Evelyn, John 201 excretion 55–56, 58 n47, 60–61 faith 17, 91–92, 101–6, 170–71 fancy 72, 73–82, 84, 85 Fanshawe, Ann 18, 20, 111, 121–24, 126, 197–214 Memoirs 199, 200, 203, 204–6, 209 see also recipe books Fanshawe, Katherine 121, 203 Fanshawe, Richard 111, 121, 199, 200, 203 n18, 204, 205, 206, 207 fermentation 16, 37, 45, 47–66, 96–98, 114 Fettiplace, Elinor 18, 111, 112–15, 118, 120, 122, 124 see also recipe books Fettiplace, Richard 113 Field, Catherine 12 n9, 32, 182 n9, 238 n39 fire 55–60, 64–65, 221–39 chimney 222, 235 cookery 55–60, 221, 224–39 easy 221, 224, 225–26 gentle 221, 225–26, 227, 233, 239 hearth 10 leisurable 225, 226, 233, 239 management 221–22, 227–36 slow 221, 225–26 small 221, 225–26 sober 221, 225–26, 233, 238, 239 soft 221, 225–26, 238, 239 sweet 225, 226, 239 temperate 225, 226, 233, 239 wild 221–22, 226 fish and sea creatures 18, 61, 131–43, 161, 170, 183 n13, 206, 247, 280 bream 136, 137 n2, 139, 141 n46, 170 cod 143 dolphin 206 flounder 142 haddock 143 lobster 142 oyster 163 perch 133 pike 136, 141, 142 pond 132, 133 n9, 136–38, 139–40 river 131–32, 134, 135, 136, 137, 140, 143 roach 133 salmon 206 sea bream 206 tench 136

290  trout 132 n5, 133, 136 tuna 143 see also carp fishponds 18, 132 n6, 133–34, 136–37, 141 food shortages 110 Fitzpatrick, Joan 12 n7, 32 n16 Folger Shakespeare Library 23, 99 n30, 100, 141, 221, 224–25 Fowler, Elizabeth 141 see also recipe books France 112, 121, 155–58, 160, 199, 208, 274–75, 280 Franck, Richard 138 French cookery 10, 94, 152, 155–61, 163, 169, 170–71, 192, 208 n24 fruit 45, 49, 51–55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 62–65, 95, 112, 113, 114, 116, 119, 123, 161, 206, 209, 214 apple 61–62, 226 apricot 34, 52 n27 currants 114–15, 120, 124, 187, 188 dried 113, 114, 124 fig 206 grapes 35, 48, 54, 65, 143, 206, 210 lemon 161, 163, 206, 209–10 mango 20, 199, 210–14 melon 206, 211, 212, 213 olives 65, 206 orange 40, 206, 210 peach 52 n27, 206, 225 pear 206 pippin 78, 135 pomegranate 206 quince 34–35 raisins 35, 187, 209 Fumerton, Patricia 139 Galen 39, 72, 99, 228, 236 gardening 11, 31, 32, 40, 52, 65, 213, 255 gathering 34–36, 51, 64, 143, 156, 213, 245, 247, 250, 254–55 Gerard, John 99, 114 n19, 213 Giard, Luce 14–15, 32 n15, 51, 53, 54, 64, 66 globalism 11, 12, 17, 18, 20, 109, 110, 111, 114, 125–26, 135–36, 142–43, 161, 197, 199, 212, 213–14, 239 Goldstein, David B. 12 n7, 30–31, 50–51, 58 n47, 59 n51, 61 n59, 62 n61, 139, 153 n9, 156 n24, 167 n61, 177 n1, 182, 200 n8, 201, 203 n18, 213 grain 59, 60, 64, 65, 93–94, 97, 101, 110, 250 barley 96, 118, 187–88 corn 21, 65, 206, 249, 250–51, 254–55 cornmeal 249, 251, 252, 255 flour 65, 94–95, 96–98, 100, 103, 112, 113, 118, 119, 120, 157, 188 maize 250 rice 115 rye 98–99, 100, 251, 255 wheat 92 n4, 94, 97, 99–100, 206, 250, 251 Granville Family 16, 18, 33, 34–35, 36, 37–39, 40, 111, 115–17, 118, 120–21, 122–23, 124, 126, 201

In the Kitchen, 1550–1800

see also recipe books Granville D’Ewes, Ann 16 Granville, Mary 16, 33, 126, 201 Hale, Sarah Josepha Buell 255 n44 see also recipe books Hall, Constance 16, 18, 33, 34–35, 36, 39, 40, 111, 119–21, 123, 140–41 see also recipe books Hall, Kim F. 14, 125 Haraway, Donna 18, 29–30, 34 n21, 39, 137, 143, 221–22, 229 Harrison, William 114 Hartlib Circle 201 hearth 9, 10, 20–22, 221–39, 249–50, 253–54, 255, 259, 268 Henrietta Maria, Queen 159, 171, 182 n9, 183, 186 n23, 200 Herbert, George 18, 91–92, 100 n37, 104–6 The Country Parson 91–92, 100 n37 ‘The H. Communion’ 104–5 herbs 10, 16, 33, 34–35, 36, 37, 61, 74, 117, 160, 202–3, 226 agrimony 37 apple blossom 226 balm 226 borage 40 broom 225 chives 237 elderflower 35 eringo root 117 hops 114 n16, 135 lavender 40 orange flower 40, 210 parsley 161, 237 pellitory of the wall 37 rosemary 40, 169 n70 sage 40, 177 savory 19, 177, 180 thyme 19, 169 n70, 177, 180 Hiebner, Israel 74 historiography 177, 185 n19, 191–93 Hobbes, Thomas 61, 164, 165, 167 holidays 110, 112–15, 118, 124 honey 37–39, 251 horticulture 65, 125, 250, 252–53 hospitality 12, 19, 21, 50–51, 62, 151–71, 200, 204, 208, 213, 248–49 Howard, Charles 116 humours/humoralism 32–33, 39, 47, 60, 72–73, 98–100, 115, 228, 236 husbandry 31, 137 see also agriculture Iberia 111, 121–25, 157, 197, 199, 203, 207–14 imperialism 18, 19, 111, 124–25 importation/imports 11, 14, 18, 38, 110–11, 114–15, 117, 122, 131, 133, 136, 143, 160, 211–14, 270 India 14, 114, 211–14

Index

instinct 13, 16, 71–87 intemperance 64, 226, 230, 232–36 see also temperance interiority 21, 223, 235–36 Interregnum 21, 124, 152, 166, 168, 198 see also Commonwealth invasive species 18, 131–33, 137, 142–43 isinglass 60 Japan 126, 143 n59 Jefferson, Thomas 271, 279 Jeffrey, Joyce 120 Jephson, Penelope 266 see also recipe books Jones, Inigo 78, 80 Jones, Katherine, Lady Ranelagh 201 see also recipe books Jonson, Ben 228, 236 Neptune’s Triumph for the Return of Albion 78 n19, 80 n21 ‘To Penshurst’ 52 n27, 113 The Staple of News 16–17, 71–73, 77–82, 87 kitchen global 11–12, 17, 18, 20, 111, 125, 213–14 knowledge 9, 12–13, 16–17, 18, 20, 21–22, 32, 34, 53, 71–74, 77, 80–82, 84–86, 92, 101, 105, 125, 209–10, 214, 259 practices 11–17, 19, 21, 29–42, 53, 60, 72, 79, 80, 82, 91–100, 119, 123, 125, 140–142, 181, 183, 198–199, 203–204, 206–14, 227, 236–38 spaces 9–12, 16–17, 20, 34, 56, 79, 83, 84, 91–92, 101, 111, 178–180, 186, 198, 236, 239, 243, 253–54 technologies 10, 12, 13–14, 18, 20, 56–58, 109–111, 115, 118–21, 122–23, 222 work 9–12, 14–17, 19, 21, 29–30, 34, 36, 38, 46–47, 179, 192, 221–22, 227, 230–32, 236–238, 245, 249–55 Knight, Mrs. 237–38 see also recipe books knowledge 92, 96, 101, 105, 134–35, 204–6, 209–210, 214, 222, 226, 238, 270 domestic 9, 12–13, 51, 53, 116, 235, 258 embodied 12, 16, 53–54, 71–77, 80–87, 186 n24 exchange of 20–22, 125, 259 Indigenous 21–22, 246, 250–51, 256, 258–59, 265, 267, 272–81 and making 13, 16–17, 32, 191 linguistic 244, 256–258 medicinal 40, 72, 74–76, 81, 84, 92, 116 Tree of 50 Kowalchuk, Kristine 222 La Varenne, François Pierre 157, 161, 163, 170 see also recipe books

291 labour 34, 38, 52, 57–58, 62, 64–65, 77, 79, 81, 84, 86, 126, 227, 233, 266, 275, 278–79 captive 252–55 domestic 10, 15, 113, 117, 123, 180, 230, 232, 236, 278 enslaved 11, 14, 21–22, 124–25, 252–55, 267, 278–79 hired 11, 21, 252–55 indentured 125, 252–55, 278 Lafitau, Father Joseph François 275–76 Lane, Bridget 141 see also recipe books language acquisition 21–22, 243, 246–48, 258–59 Laroche, Rebecca 139, 227 n20, 234 n32 leaven 17–18, 92–106, 114, 117–18, 122 see also bread LeClercq, Chrestien 274–75 Leong, Elaine 32, 120 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 46 liberality 19, 165–171 local, the 11–12, 14 n13, 15, 17, 18, 65, 112–15, 116, 133, 137, 139–40, 143, 159, 165, 203, 249–52, 271 Lord Clerk of the Markets 110 LUNA 100, 221, 224–25, 233 Lupton, Julia Reinhard 76 n11 M., W. 169 n70, 153, 182–84, 186 n23, 200, 201 see also recipe books maple sap 22, 251, 268–70, 272–76 see also water maple sugar 22, 265–82 Indigenous knowledge of 22, 251, 265, 267, 272–82 manufacturing 22, 265–72, 277–82 maple tree plantations of 22, 277 tapping 269, 274–75 Markham, Gervase 9–10, 13–14, 93, 96–97, 119, 136 see also recipe books Marnettè, Mounsieur 77–78 see also recipe books Mascall, Leonard 135 Massinger, Philip A New Way to Pay Old Debts 16–17, 71–73, 75, 77–78, 82–87 May, Robert 19, 58, 151–61, 164–71, 182, 184 see also recipe books Mayerne, Thomas 159 meat 10, 58, 151, 158, 160–63, 169 n70, 170–71, 190, 255, 272 bacon 162–63, 199, 206, 210–11, 231 beef 10, 163, 177–78, 183 n13 cockscomb 161, 163 kidney 161 lamb 64–65, 162–63, 210–11

292  liver 140, 187–88 marrow 84, 162, 163, 187 mutton 161, 165, 183 n13, 206, 211 sausage 157–58, 206 veal 84, 161–63, 206 venison 210 medicine 9, 11, 12, 15–18, 29, 32–34, 39–40, 71, 74–76, 81, 91–92, 95, 98–101, 105, 116–17, 120, 143 n59, 183, 199, 202, 206, 208, 214 angelica water 207 aqua mirabilis 33 balm water 226 for boils 99–100 for colic 100 cordial 84, 86, 183 n13 elderberry water 100 for melancholy 226 for migraine 99–100 ointment 35, 36 n30, 169, 224 palsy water 40 for plague 33, 39, 200–1 for scurvy 202 for stomach 99–100, 225, 226 for worms 207 meteorology 49–50 milk and milk products butter 35–36, 79, 112–14, 116, 119–20, 157, 187, 237, 251, 255, 269, 272 cheese 48, 65, 161, 206 cream 35, 37, 116, 117, 120, 177–78, 183 n13, 187, 206, 208, 232 cream cheese 122 milk 15, 36, 48, 112, 114, 206, 226, 251 whey 226 Milton, John monism 45–46, 50, 54, 66 Paradise Lost 15, 16, 45–66, 159 vitalism 46, 66 mindfulness 20–21, 222, 227–29, 236–39 minerals 16, 38, 49, 56–57, 59 mining 45, 47, 56–60 Minor, Grace and Thomas 21, 243–54, 256, 258 Mintz, Sidney 125, 266 Morton, Anne 141 see also recipe books Moryson, Fynes 113, 159 Munroe, Jennifer 224 musk 40, 77 national identity 9, 13–14, 17, 18, 19–20, 154–56, 169–71 naturalization 133, 137–43 New England 21, 243–59, 275 Nicosia, Marissa 22–23, 95 n19, 188 n26 nonhuman 13, 15, 16, 29–36, 40–41, 45, 54, 137, 229 Nova Scotia 22, 265–67, 273, 274 n40, 280 Nunn, Hillary M. 36 n31, 200

In the Kitchen, 1550–1800

nuts 117 almonds 60, 81, 187 pistachios 161, 163 walnuts 211 n27 Paracelsus 71, 73–75, 81, 87 Park, Jennifer 14 n13 Parkinson, John 94, 114 n19 Partridge, John 119 see also recipe books pisciculture 133, 136–38, 143 Penn, William 279–80 Pennell, Sara 11 Pennsylvania 265, 270–72, 273, 276–81 Philosophical Transactions 275 Plat, Sir Hugh 117–18, 190 see also recipe books Pollan, Michael 18, 31, 37, 45, 46, 48, 55, 65–66, 143, 281 Portugal 121, 126, 198, 199, 212, 214 Powell, Captain John 124 Protectorate 19–20, 177, 181, 183 puritans/puritanism 19, 110–11, 124, 160, 169, 171, 245, 249 Puttenham, George 73, 15, 157, 159 Quakers 22, 170–71 n73, 267, 271, 277–81 Rabisha, William 19, 60, 142, 151–71, 182, 184 Adam Unvailed 153, 164 see also recipe books reason 75, 159, 160, 227 recipe books Manuscripts Book of Choice Receipts, 1675, Folger MS V.a.452 (Thomas Sheppey) 100 Booke of Such Medicines as have been Approved by the Special Pracitze of Mrs. Corlyon, 1660, Folger V.a.388 17, 99–100 Booke of divers Medecines, Broothes, Salues, Waters … by the speciall practize of Mrs. Corlyon, 1606, Wellcome MS 213 99 n30 Choyce Receits, 1674, Folger MS V.a.612 (Anne Carr) 140, 213 Cookbook, 17 th c., Folger MS V.a.19 141 Cookbook of Ann Smith, 1698, Folger MS V.a.434 141 Cookbook of Constance Hall, 1672, Folger MS V.a.20 33–36, 39–40, 111, 119–20, 140–41 Cookbook of Elizabeth Fowler, 1684, Folger MS V.a.468 141 Cookeries, late 17 th c., Folger MS V.a.561 213–14 Cookery and Medical Remedy Book, 1732, William Andrews Clark MS 2015.002 (Bridget Lane) 141

Index

Cookery and Medicinal Recipes, 17 th c., Folger MS V.a.562 100 Cookery and Medicinal Recipes of the Granville Family, 1640–1750, Folger MS V.a.430 33–35, 36 n30, 37–40, 111, 115–21, 122–26, 201 Cookery Book of Lettis Vesey, c. 1725, Folger MS W.b.456 140 The Ladey Mortons Booke of Receipts, 1693, Whitney Cookery Collection MS 4 141 Lady Grace Castleton’s Booke of Receipts, 17th c., Folger MS V.a.600 221, 224–27 Lady Rennelagh’s Choise Receipts, 17 th c., (Katherine Jones) Sloane MS 1367 201 Medical Miscellany, c. 1634 Folger MS E.a.5 96 n24 Medicinal and Cookery Recipes, c. 1625–1725, Folger MS V.a.490 226 Mrs. Fanshawes Booke of Receipts, 1651–1707, Wellcome MS 7113 20, 111, 121–26, 197–214 Mrs. Knight’s Receipt Book, 1740, Folger MS W.b.79 237–38 Receipt Book, c. 1690, Folger MS V.b.400 100, 226 Receipt Book, c. 1700, Folger MS E.a.4 100 Receipt Book of Margaret Baker, 17 th c., Folger MS V.a.619 225 Receipt Book of Penelope Jephson, 1671, Folger MS V.a.396 226 Receipt Book of Rebeckah Winche, c. 1666, Folger MS V.b.366 100 Print The Accomplish’d Ladies Delight (Woolley) 142, 184 The Accomplisht Cook (May) 19, 58, 151–61, 164–71, 182, 184 Art of Cookery Refin’d and Augmented (Cooper) 142 Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Opened 119 The Compleat Cook, or the Whole Art of Cookery (W.M.) 169 n70, 201 The Compleat Cook … By T.P., J.P., R.C., N.B. 141 The Compleat Servant-Maid (Woolley) 230–32 The Cook’s Guide (Woolley) 119, 210 The Court & Kitchen of Elizabeth, Commonly Called Joan Cromwel 19–20, 177–92, 200 Delights for Ladies (Plat) 117 Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book 111, 112–15, 118, 120, 122, 124 The English Huswife (Markham) 13–14, 93, 96–97, 119

293 The French Cook (La Varenne) 157, 163, 170 The Gentlewoman’s Companion (Woolley) 184 Mrs. Hale’s New Cook Book 255 The Perfect Cook (Marnettè) 77–78 The Queen-Like Closet; Or, Rich Cabinet (Woolley) 10–11, 13, 76–77, 78, 210–11 The Queen’s Closet Opened (W.M.) 153, 182–84, 186 n23, 200 ‘Remarks on the Manufacturing of Maple Sugar’ 22, 265–82 Sundrie New and Artificiall Remedies Against Famine (Plat) 190 Treasurie of Commodious Conceits (Partridge) 119 Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books 133–34 The Way to Save Wealth (Tryon) 190 The Whole Body of Cookery (Rabisha) 19, 60, 142, 151–71, 182, 184 Recipes Project 22 resilience 16, 136 Restoration 19–20, 124, 152–53, 155, 160, 165, 167–68, 177–79, 182, 185, 191–92, 198 ripening 16, 45, 47, 49–50, 51–54, 58–60, 63–64, 99, 100, 211 Robinson, Tancred 275 rosewater 77, 187, 188 Royal Society 275 royalism/royalist 19, 121, 124, 153, 164, 169 n70, 170–71, 178–79, 181–82, 184–87, 189, 192, 198–203, 207, 214 Rush, Benjamin 271, 278–79 Ruscelli, Girolamo 74 saltpetre 59 sauce 36, 77, 81, 83, 85–86, 138, 140, 152, 156–57 Schoenfeldt, Michael C. 60, 61 science 72–73, 76, 81–85, 96, 270 chemistry 110, 111, 115, 120–21, 123, 126 technology 111, 115, 251 see also alchemy seeds 40, 45, 51, 60, 77, 116–17, 119, 213, 277 servants 10, 13, 21, 83, 93, 113, 114, 139, 165–66, 228–33, 252–53 settler colonialism 13, 22, 265, 272–81 Shahani, Gitanjali G. 14, 111 Shakespeare, William Coriolanus 164, 168 Julius Caesar 181 Love’s Labour’s Lost 230 Sonnets 35 Twelfth Night 109–10, 112 Two Gentlemen of Verona 227 Winter’s Tale 115 Sheppey, Thomas 100 see also recipe books Sidney family 113

294  Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake 272–73, 276, 281 slavery 111, 125, 271–72, 277–80 see also labour, enslaved Smith, Pamela H. 31–32, 77 Smith, Ann 141 see also recipe books Snart, Charles 138 Spain 20, 121, 169, 197–201, 203–14 Spenser, Edmund Faerie Queene 57–58 spice 10, 11, 14, 33, 35, 37–38, 77, 111–15, 117, 124, 142, 160, 161, 212–13 aniseed 119 bayberry 114 caraway 117, 124 cinnamon 35, 37, 112 clove 35, 112, 114, 177, 187, 213 ginger 37, 112, 114, 160, 211 n27, 212, 213 Indian pepper 213 Jamaica pepper 213 long pepper 114 mace 35, 112, 114, 162, 169 n70, 178, 187, 213 mustard 160, 178 nutmeg 35, 37, 112, 114, 141, 162, 178, 187 orris root 114 pepper 160, 178, 225, 237 saffron 40 salt 96, 99, 103, 114, 140–41, 162, 178, 237 sugar consumption 14, 115, 118, 124–25, 271 cost 115, 118, 124–25 and enslavement 111, 125, 267, 271, 278–80 as ingredient 13, 14, 18, 37, 40, 77, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116–18, 119, 122–25, 157, 164, 187, 209–10, 225, 232, 251 molasses 266 plantation 14, 22, 125, 266 production 111, 124, 265, 266–67, 270, 275–76 see also maple sugar sweetness 18, 54, 58, 61, 112, 115–18, 124–26, 138, 140, 187–88, 206, 250–51, 272–73, 275 sympoesis 29–30, 39, 41 Taverner, John 136 Taverner, Mrs. 116–18, 119, 121, 126 temperance 57, 64, 233, 236 see also intemperance Thirsk, Joan 115, 118, 190 n28 Tigner, Amy L. 30, 207 n22, 212 tolerance 19, 152, 153–54, 163, 167, 169, 171 toleration 153–54, 155, 164, 171 trade 20, 111, 125, 210, 211–13, 243, 245–50 transcorporeal 30, 34, 39, 234 n32

In the Kitchen, 1550–1800

travel 18, 114 n16, 121, 126, 198, 199, 203–4, 206–12, 214, 243, 256, 274 Tryon, Thomas 190 see also recipe books Vaughan, William 159 vegetables 161, 163, 183 n13, 214 artichoke 162 cabbage 48, 65, 251 cucumber 199, 210–14 lettuce 160 mushrooms 161 onion 162, 163 peas 192, 208 potato 84, 163 Vesey, Lettis 140 see also recipe books vinegar 140–41, 202, 212 Wall, Wendy 14 n13, 30, 77, 139, 167, 182, 186 n23 Walton, Izaak 135–36, 138–39, 143 Washington, George 271 water in baking 94, 97, 98, 99, 119, 122 in cooking 36, 37, 38, 78, 140, 141, 162, 164, 210, 212, 251, 269 drinking 52, 206, 211 elemental 49, 50, 53, 139 maple 272, 273, 274, 275 medicinal 33, 39, 40, 100, 206, 207, 226, 227 natural 18, 34, 52, 103, 131, 132, 137–38, 239, 253 weather 50, 63, 66, 110, 239 Westcomb, Martin 116 Williams, Roger 245–46, 248, 249, 250, 251 Willoughby Family 113 Wilson, C. Anne 115 Winche, Rebeckah 100 see also recipe books wine 13, 48, 65, 104, 105, 226 burnt 232, 233 n29 canary 206 claret 142 fruit 209, 210 sack 95, 122, 232, 233 sauce 141, 142 sherry 206 spiced 117 white 162, 187, 206, 209, 210 Winthrop, John 255 Woolley, Hannah 10–11, 13, 76–78, 119, 142, 152, 184, 210–11, 230, 231, 232 see also recipe books yeast 35–36, 94–99, 101–2, 114, 116, 117, 118, 122–23