Reading and writing recipe books, 1550–1800 9781526129901

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READING WRITING

R ECIPE B OOKS



1550–1800

Michelle DiMeo and Sara Pennell

Edited by

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Reading and writing recipe books, 1550–1800

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Reading and writing recipe books, 1550–1800

Edited by

Michelle DiMeo and

Sara Pennell

Manchester University Press Manchester

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2013

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While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN

978 07190 8727 1 hardback

First published 2013 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Action Publishing Technology Ltd, Gloucester

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Contents ‫ﱬﱫ‬

List of figures and tables Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Abbreviations

page vii ix xiii xv

1 Introduction Sara Pennell and Michelle DiMeo

1

PART I: Methodologies 2 Authorship and medical networks: reading attributions in early modern manuscript recipe books Michelle DiMeo 3 ‘A practical art’: an archaeological perspective on the use of recipe books Annie Gray 4 Genre conventions in English recipes, 1600–1800 Francisco Alonso-Almeida

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47 68

PART II: Textuality and intertextuality 5 Reading recipe books and culinary history: opening a new field Gilly Lehmann 6 The ‘Quintessence of Wit’: poems and recipes in early modern women’s writing Jayne Elisabeth Archer

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114

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Contents

7 The Foote sisters’ Compleat Housewife: cookery texts as a source in lived religion Lauren F. Winner

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PART III: Cultures of circulation and transmission 8 Cooking the books, or, the three faces of Hannah Woolley Margaret J. M. Ezell 9 Crossing the boundaries: domestic recipe collections in early modern Wales Alun Withey 10 ‘Lett her refrain from all hott spices’: medicinal recipes and advice in the treatment of the King’s Evil in seventeenthcentury south-west England Anne Stobart 11 Making livings, lives and archives: tales of four eighteenthcentury recipe books Sara Pennell

159

Select bibliography Index

247 261

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203

225

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List of figures and tables ‫ﱬﱫ‬

Figures 4.1 Recipe for ‘The Lady Allens Water’, Wellcome MS 1322. Wellcome Library, London 5.1 Numbers of British and French cookery books published by decade, 1480s–1780s 6.1 Frontispiece [attrib. John Shirley], The Accomplished Ladies Rich Cabinet of Rarities (London, 1687), Shelfmark 1037.e.25 ©The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved 24/4/2012 9.1 Index from a Welsh-language recipe book, Wellcome MS 417. Wellcome Library, London 10.1 Loose recipe for a glister for the King’s Evil, Devon Record Office, Fortescue of Castle Hill papers, 1262M/FC/8. Countess of Arran 11.1 ‘To make a Venson Pastey’, opening from Wellcome MS 1176, recipe collection of Hannah Bisaker, compiled 1692. Wellcome Library, London Tables 4.1 Formulaic templates in recipe titles 4.2 Characteristics of a discourse colony exhibited in Wellcome MS 1321

75 110

117 185

216

230

73 84

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Notes on contributors ‫ﱬﱫ‬

Francisco Alonso-Almeida is Senior Lecturer of English Historical Linguistics at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. His major research area is in the field of medical manuscripts and texts from a pragmatic and discourse perspective, and he currently heads up the Corpus of Early English Recipes (CoER), which aims to construct a corpus of English recipes from 1350 to 1900. He has published extensively on recipes and their linguistic configuration in the Journal of Historical Pragmatics and Neuphilologische Mitteilungen; and is preparing an edition of the remedy book MS Hunter 185 (University of Glasgow) for publication in the Middle English Text Series (Heidelberg). Jayne Elisabeth Archer is Lecturer in Medieval and Renaissance Literature in the Department of English and Creative Writing, Aberystwyth University. She is also an Associate Fellow of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick. She is coeditor of the essay collections The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford, 2007) and The Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court (Manchester, 2011), and General Editor of John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth: A New Edition of the Early Modern Sources, 5 vols (Oxford, 2012), as well as author of articles on Elizabethan and Jacobean masques, early modern women’s recipe books, and alchemy in early modern literature.

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Notes on contributors

Michelle DiMeo is S. Gordon Castigliano Director of Digital Library Initiatives, College of Physicians, Philadelphia. She completed an interdisciplinary Ph.D. at the University of Warwick, where she was a Warwick Postgraduate Research Fellow. Her doctoral thesis concerns the medical and scientific manuscripts of Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh (1615–1691), including letters, recipe books and treatises. She has also contributed to the ODNB and has published book chapters on the Hartlib Circle and on early modern women and medicine. Margaret J. M. Ezell is Distinguished Professor of English and the John and Sara Lindsey Chair of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. She is the author of the books The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill, 1987), Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore, 1993) and Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore, 1999). She is currently working on the volume 1645–1714: The Later Seventeenth Century for the Oxford English Literary History Series (Oxford, forthcoming). Annie Gray is honorary research fellow at the University of Liverpool. Her recently completed Ph.D. thesis covers aspects of dining c.1750–1900 from an archaeological perspective. Her main areas of interest are the negotiation of gender tension through foodrelated goods and the relationship of servants and the served in Victorian England. She works as a consultant to the heritage industry on the presentation of kitchens and below-stairs areas, as well as being a professional historical interpreter at sites across the UK. She is currently leading a team based at Audley End, Essex, interpreting the workings of a Victorian service wing. Gilly Lehmann was Professor of English at the University of Franche-Comté in Besançon, before she retired in 2007. Her research field since the early 1980s has been the history of English cookery, and she is the author of The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Totnes, 2003) and of numerous articles published in French and in English in such publications as Papilles, PPC, and Food and History; she has

Notes on contributors

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contributed to the Oxford Companion to Food (1999, and the second, revised edition, 2006) and to the ODNB, and is currently writing a book on the history of culinary styles in England from 1300 to 1800. Sara Pennell is Senior Lecturer in early modern British history at the University of Roehampton. She has published on aspects of the material culture of non-elite foodways, kitchens and second-hand goods in early modern England, as well as on the uses of manuscript recipe collections. She is currently writing a book on British kitchens between c.1600–1850. Anne Stobart was formerly Director of Programmes for Complementary Health Sciences at Middlesex University, London and now practises as a consultant medical herbalist in Devon, England. She is on the editorial board of the Journal of Herbal Medicine, and is a founder member of the Medicinal Receipts Research Group and the Herbal History Research Network. Her research interests are varied, from gender in complementary health practice to the history of herbal medicine, and she is currently coediting a book on herbal history research (Continuum Books, forthcoming). She is also involved in a long-term project investigating sustainable practices in the cultivation of medicinal trees and shrubs in Britain. Lauren F. Winner is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School, North Carolina. She is the author of five books, including A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practices in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia (London/New Haven, 2010). Alun Withey is an historian and lecturer in early modern medical history. His research concentrates on the social and economic history of medicine in early modern Wales, and his first book, Physick and the Family: Health, Medicine and Care in Wales, 1600–1750, was published in 2011 by Manchester University Press. His next project aims to explore technologies of the body in the eighteenth century.

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Acknowledgements ‫ﱬﱫ‬

This collection was born out of a conference, ‘Reading & Writing Recipe Books 1600–1800’, held at the University of Warwick on 6–8 August 2008. The editors would like to thank the American Study and Student Exchange Committee (ASSEC) of Warwick University, the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Historical Society for financial support for the conference. We would also like to thank Professors Margaret Ezell, Mary Fissell, Gilly Lehmann and Janet Theophano for delivering plenary papers at the conference, as well as all the other speakers who participated in what was a lively, fruitful and above all, friendly, event. Michelle DiMeo would like to thank the English Department at the University of Warwick for financial support, encouragement and academic mentoring. Elizabeth Clarke first introduced me to the wealth of manuscript recipe books held in the Perdita Project’s microfilm collection – when I first arrived at Warwick she told me to ‘do something with them’, so I hope she is pleased with this volume. Influential conversations with Jayne Archer and Elaine Leong held early in my career helped me develop my own approach to these texts. Margaret Ezell, Bernard Capp, Alice Eardley and participants in the 2007 Making Publics summer seminar at McGill University have helped by answering questions, reading drafts, debating methodologies and offering continuous support. Finally, thanks to Chad Nelson and Theo Nelson DiMeo for not making me feel (too) bad when I worked evenings and weekends to complete this book. Sara Pennell would like to thank the University of Roehampton and in particular the then School of Arts for a small grant towards

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Acknowledgements

her attendance and co-convening the conference; her colleagues in the now Humanities Department, in particular Trevor Dean and William Gallois; Lauren Kassell; Elaine Leong; Margaret Pelling (who first pointed out that manuscript recipe books might be an interesting source); Richard Aspin, Ross Macfarlane and Helen Wakely of the Wellcome Library, London; Heather Wolfe of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC; Susie West, who has always been willing to read and comment on my work, and cook for me when I needed it; and of course, my artistic patron, Daniel Simon, and patron-in-the-making Raphaella Simon, who would both like me to make more use of my own recipe books rather than writing about them. The editors would like to thank all the contributors to the book for their enthusiasm towards the project; Sally Osborn for making the index and Wellcome Images for providing several of the images reproduced here so affordably.

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Abbreviations ‫ﱬﱫ‬ Add. MS BL CCL DRO EEBO

ESTC Field, ‘“Many hands hands”’

Lehmann, British Housewife

Leong and Pennell, ‘Recipe collections’

Leong, ‘Medical recipe collections’

Additional Manuscript British Library, London Cardiff Central Library Devon Record Office Early English Books Online (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey/ProQuest). Accessible by subscription at http.eebo.chadwyck.com English Short-Title Catalogue. Available online via http.estc.bl.uk (accessed 1 July 2011). Catherine Field, ‘“Many hands hands”: writing the self in early modern women’s recipe books’, in Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle (eds), Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 49–64 Gilly Lehmann, The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in Eighteenth Century Britain (Totnes: Prospect Books, 2003). Elaine Leong and Sara Pennell, ‘Recipe collections and the currency of medical knowledge in the early modern “medical marketplace”’, in Mark S. R. Jenner and Patrick Wallis (eds), Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c. 1450– c. 1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 133–52 Elaine Leong, ‘Medical recipe collections in seventeenth-century England: knowledge,

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xvi

Abbreviations

text and gender’ (D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 2006) NLW National Library of Wales ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). This volume has used the online edition available at www.oxforddnb.com (accessed 1 August 2011) OED Online Oxford English Dictionary, Online Edition, available at www.oed.com (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010: accessed 1 July 2011) Pennell, ‘Perfecting Sara Pennell, ‘Perfecting practice? Women, practice?’ manuscript recipes and knowledge in early modern England’, in Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (eds), Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 237–58 PPC Petits propos culinaires RO Record Office Stine, ‘Opening Jennifer Stine, ‘Opening closets: the closets’ discovery of household medicine in early modern England’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1996) Theophano, Eat Janet Theophano, Eat My Words: Reading My Words Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote (New York/Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) Thirsk, Food in Early Joan Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England: Modern England Phases, Fads, Fashions 1500–1760 (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007) Wellcome Wellcome Library, London, Archives and Manuscripts Wing Donald Wing, Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700, 3 vols (New York: Index Society, 1945–51)

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Introduction SARA PENNELL AND MICHELLE DIMEO

‫ﱬﱫ‬ Let us begin with a familiar early modern figure, Lady Ann Fanshawe (1625–80). Well known to literary historians of the early modern period, chiefly because of her manuscript Memoirs (written c.1676), intended for her surviving son, Fanshawe is a touchstone for those seeking to construct and validate the identity of the early modern female writer and her motivations and frameworks for writing.1 She was indeed an exceptional woman, not least in her support of her diplomat and scholar husband Sir Richard, and her tireless efforts to try to recoup some of the vast loans made by the Fanshawes to Charles II to aid his Restoration. Less well known is the fact she also compiled a manuscript recipe book, which she began in about 1651; and which survives in the Wellcome Library, London (MS 7113). It comprises culinary and medicinal recipes collected from her own family, but also reflects time spent on diplomatic mission with Sir Richard in Lisbon and Madrid. As Peter Davidson, the author of her ODNB entry, puts it rather glibly: A complementary insight into Ann Fanshawe’s life is given by her manuscript household book. This remains unpublished despite its considerable interest as a reflection of the degree to which an elite woman of the mid-seventeenth century was directly involved with the quotidian running of her household.2

But is this all that Lady Ann’s recipe book can supply the scholar? It is telling that, while her Memoirs have positioned Fanshawe within the front rank of a new canon of early modern women writers, her recipe book should be seen as merely able to ‘reflect’ her ‘quotidian’

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Introduction

life.3 Certainly, recipes have been promoted by some historians of food as central to comprehending what ‘we’ ate in the past; the pioneering food historian, Karen Hess, indeed contended that ‘the story of cookery is in the recipes, if we but had them all’.4 Yet the story of cookery is not all that recipes can be seized upon to supply. Lady Ann’s recipe compilation is so much more than simply the scribbling of an early modern domestic goddess. With entries detailing how to make drinking chocolate and ‘icy cream’ (believed to be among the first such recipes in an English-language recipe book, printed or manuscript),5 recipes for cures for plague and other prevalent diseases, its register of familial relations (including the note by her daughter Katherine Fanshawe, ‘Given mee by my Mother March 23th 1678’),6 network connections (with recipes from the natural philosopher and courtier Sir Kenelm Digby (1603– 65) and others) and ethnographic insights into early modern diplomatic embassy life (the recipe for chocolate is dated at Madrid on 10 August 1665), it is as much a life-register as Fanshawe’s Memoirs.7 Indeed, to take up Sharon Cadman Seelig’s concern that the Memoirs seem overly concerned with ‘an attention to the surface’, with maternal matters ‘secondary’, the recipe collection provides evidence of Fanshawe’s deep concerns with her family’s health; although not dated, the recipe ‘The Lady Allens Water for the Stomacke Small pox or Surfett’ contains directions for dosage for a child, which may link it directly to Fanshawe’s own treatment of her two daughters, Betty and Anne, in 1663 and 1664, when both suffered with the disease.8 This collection of essays rehabilitates the early modern recipe text as more than simply a document of domestic life and a functional text of instruction by revealing and debating some of its varied cultural contexts and meanings. Recipes as a format inhabit both speech and text, and have a documented pedigree stretching back into prehistory.9 But it is their register in text in multiple formats between c.1550 and 1800 that provides the chronological and subject framework of this collection. In a broader context, this collection also seeks to debate the question raised by Susan J. Leonardi in a short, but influential 1989 article: ‘what importance . . . can recipes have to the reading, writing mind?’10

Introduction

3

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Recovering recipes Amongst the most popular non-fiction print genres of the period covered by this collection, and one of the most common forms of manuscript compilation to survive from the early modern period,11 recipe books or collections in print and manuscript have only recently received mainstream attention from academic scholars. Further, they have not traditionally been seen as important sources beyond particular disciplinary arenas, notably food history and the history of medicine. In the former, beyond the bounds of specialist periodicals like Petits propos culinaires and the occasional publications of culinary history symposia, early modern printed and manuscript cookery texts in English have only begun to be explored in critical detail since the late 1990s, as Gilly Lehmann’s chapter here discusses.12 In the history of medicine, the focus on non-professional practitioners and the circulation of popular medical advice has led scholars such as Mary Fissell and Andrew Wear to consider recipe books alongside other types of vernacular medical text.13 That several scholars of culinary and medical recipes come from a background in English literature, while others from a base in social sciences (Janet Theophano from anthropology, Stephen Mennell from sociology), points up both the multidisciplinary potential of the source material, but also its categorical slipperiness.14 Manuscript compilations have fared somewhat better than their printed counterparts. Since the mid-1990s, there has been a rising tide of academic scholarship on English-language recipe compilations represented in the published work of scholars such as Catherine Field, Elaine Leong, Sara Pennell and Linda Pollock.15 The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, and the Wellcome Library, London, each of which holds a large collection of manuscript recipe texts, have both produced microfilm editions of their collections, while Adam Matthew Digital has published some digitisations in Defining Gender 1450–1910 and Perdita Manuscripts, 1500–1700.16 The recent free-to-access digitisation of the Wellcome Library’s seventeenth-century recipe manuscripts will undoubtedly widen both access and approaches to such texts.17 While there has been some vibrant and important recent scholarship on the pre-modern recipe text, the essays presented here

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Introduction

attempt to capture the diversity of purposes and meanings for print and manuscript recipes before 1800, in the same way that Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster wished, in their 2003 edited volume The Recipe Reader, to capture the ‘variousness’ of modern (late nineteenth- and twentieth-century) culinary recipe texts. Yet we also wish to characterise the pre-modern recipe text as a distinct (and perhaps substantively different) form to those discussed in Floyd and Forster’s volume.18 First, our use of ‘recipe book’ is not limited to mean culinary texts alone. The modern view of recipes is made clear in the cataloguing data for Floyd and Forster’s volume: they belong to ‘cookery – handbooks, manuals, etc. – history’, ‘food in literature’ and (most succinctly of all, in the Library of Congress cataloguing data) ‘cookery’. What we are gathering under the admittedly limiting heading ‘recipe book’ was neither standardised, nor even on occasion the object we denote a ‘book’, in the ways that Floyd and Foster understand for their more modern recipe texts. In this collection, our contributors utilise printed and manuscript collections that are physically distinguished as ‘books’: by being bound series of leaves, with covers (although by no means always leather ones), and sometimes (but not always) containing some of the informational apparatus of a book. But some chapters, particularly Anne Stobart’s, also use what might be called simply ‘collections’ of recipes: a set of papers, possibly gathered together for the purposes of making a ‘book’, but sometimes simply drawn together by archivists in later centuries. The survival of these scraps of paper with recipes jotted down upon them, or sent as a letter enclosure, or snipped from the emerging magazine press of the mid-eighteenth century, should remind us that not every piece of information we try to record is fated to become embodied in and as a ‘book’.19 The issue of ‘authorship’, and what is constituted by that term, is another point of difference between the recipe books studied here, and their post-1800 successors. What it is to ‘author’ and be an ‘author’ in the early modern period has been much debated in recent years, especially in the field of women’s writing. For reasons as diverse as legal frameworks (or lack of them, protecting intellectual property in text), moral anxieties around the public persona of the author (particularly the female author) and the difficulties of assigning modern notions of

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Introduction

5

authorship to certain text formats, the ‘author’ is an elusive quarry in many early modern texts, recipes and recipe books included. Several contributors here explore authoring and authorship, with Margaret J. M. Ezell suggesting that, for late seventeenth-century recipe books at least, we have been too preoccupied with hunting down authors to consider the other chief players in printed recipe circulation: the publishers and printers. Likewise, Michelle DiMeo engages with early modern author-citation methods as embodying a broader, more collaborative sense of authorship, which she sees as essential to exploring medical networks and knowledge transmission through manuscript recipe books. Francisco Alonso-Almeida offers up a perspective from linguistics, where the concept of the recipe book as a ‘discourse colony’ sees the importance of authorship recede altogether. Thus pre-modern recipe collections, especially in their manuscript manifestations, did not structure, formalise and control consumption (of food or medicines) in the same normative ways as Floyd and Forster suggest modern cookery texts do.20 This collection addresses a period in which recipes were increasingly being captured and crystallised in text, but could also still be encountered and communicated orally.21 Both William Eamon and Jack Goody have considered the transition from oral to written recipe in terms of standardisation of information conveyed, with some degree of empowerment (for certain groups, if not for all) potentially contained within the written, and especially the published, recipe.22 Yet there is no simple linearity in the transition from practice (and orality) to record (and textuality), nor from manuscript to print forms of registered text, as Alun Withey’s chapter on early modern Welsh medicinal recipe collections and Sara Pennell’s discussion of four manuscripts and one print text demonstrate.23 Furthermore, what the physical recipe book cannot embody or re-enliven is that realm of knowledge which they did not entirely displace or replace (the remembered recipe, perhaps not written down as not worth repeating, or not included for other reasons; and the recipe so simple it does not need recording); or the mobility of recipe texts, as they moved between mind, mouth, paper scrap and page and back to scrap.

6

Introduction

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Forms of pre-modern recipes and recipe books A recipe book, whether printed or manuscript, is one which collects together and communicates information about the preparation of foodstuffs, drink, medications, cosmetics, household substances and other materials, including veterinary treatments, paints and occupationally specific materials (for example, lacquers).24 For the purposes of this volume, however, we have limited our purview to those texts most associated with recipes: culinary, medicinal and general household productions, primarily intended for domestic consumption, rather than recording specialised or occupational applications. Nevertheless, what this volume intends by ‘recipe book’ is much broader than simply a culinary text. This is not to say that some books did not focus more heavily on one subject, as demonstrated by the titles of (and, indeed, the recipes within) publications such as Hannah Woolley’s The Cooks Guide (London, 1664) and Robert Boyle’s posthumously published Medicinal Experiments, or, a Collection of Choice Remedies (London, 1692). While some chapters in this collection consider recipe books which are mixed in content (Ezell, Pennell), others focus on those concerned primarily with culinary recipes (Gray, Lehmann, F. Winner); with medicinal and therapeutic remedies (DiMeo, Withey, Stobart); and on recipes that escape the bounds of the recipe book altogether (Archer). The building blocks of these print and manuscript texts are the recipes themselves, but the pre-modern recipe appears a very foreign body when compared to the precision and guidance typical of those in a twenty-first-century copy of Good Housekeeping.25 The dominant form of recipe encountered throughout these texts is, as Alonso-Almeida discusses, a schema involving a rehearsal of actions as they are or should be carried out, concluding with serving suggestions and/or dosage, rather than a true prescription, in the medical sense of the term. Unlike a prescription, these recipes (whether culinary or medicinal) lack a separate formula (the list of ingredients) and do not always indicate the quantity of dish/medication that is produced. Not until the second quarter of the nineteenth century did the printed recipe begin to take the form we are now accustomed to consulting, with a list of precisely quantified ingredi-

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Introduction

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ents separated from, and usually preceding, a logically arranged set of instructions for preparation (which assume a reading and assembling of the ingredients as a preliminary to preparation), cooking and quantities produced.26 These differences of form structurally and linguistically suggest differing epistemological roots, information ownership and practical applications between culinary, medicinal and other recipes, which several other authors have also attempted to clarify. In his study of the early modern culture of ‘secrets’ and experimentation, William Eamon confidently presents the recipe as ‘the record of trial-and-error experimentation. They are the accumulated experience of practitioners boiled down to a rule. We trust recipes because we know that behind them stands someone who does not use them.’ The recipe is a clarified, even simplified, and standardised version of a memory, reliable because of the fact of its (usually textual) register.27 In this definition, however, a problematic gap arises between prescription and practice, and indeed between the legibility of the recipe and the knowledge required to understand it. As JeanFrançois Revel has suggested, pre-modern recipes are ‘far removed from the finished product. Between the two there lies the indefinable domain of tricks and knacks and basic tastes that are always implicit, never explained in so many words.’28 This suggestion of complicity between text and reader is persuasive but also problematic, as it emphasises a recipe’s omissions or silences, wherein the reader is incited to utilise his or her culinary resources. It therefore regards the recipe text not so much as unfinished, as perpetually in the shadow of practice, an aide mémoire rather than assisting fully in its replication. And without records of what skill levels practitioners had in preparing such recipes – if they did indeed prepare them – we have only one side of the equation. In his cultural history of wedding cakes, the anthropologist Simon Charsley’s identification of culinary recipes as ‘immediately practical instructions, apparently directed to those familiar with the processes of cookery and their [sic] ingredients’, lies between Revel’s and Eamon’s characterisations. He also acknowledges that ‘what can be inferred from a published recipe’ is indeed limited by what prior knowledge and experience the reader brings to the recipe; and warns that ‘the history of the

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publication of recipes [is] not the same thing as the history of dishes being consumed even amongst the book-buying classes’, a concern directed towards those historians wishing to read off from cookery books the dietary experiences of communities. As Annie Gray’s exploration of how different archaeological approaches might enhance our reading (and use) of historic recipe books similarly suggests, what seems strange or impractical, or simply weird, on the page may indeed be borne out as eminently sensible in practice.29 The chronology we have adopted here, 1550–1800, covers a vibrant and complex period in the history both of recipe texts and the knowledge they embodied: one in which the confluence of a diversifying print market and a vibrant culture of knowledge circulation in myriad forms framed recipe collections as significant texts, not only in the domestic sphere, but also in medical, natural philosophical and literary spheres, as Archer’s chapter discusses. Around 1550, the printing of non-religious texts in English took off, a phenomenon in which recipe books and other how-to manuals were prominent.30 Both Lehmann and Archer note that there was already a wide variety of printed recipe books available to late sixteenth-century consumers, including culinary guides focused on ‘banquetting stuffe’, conserves and distilling, as well as more expansive how-to manuals containing culinary and medicinal recipes, perfumery, dyeing, and so on.31 Indeed across the entire period, medicinal, culinary and household recipes often shared space (and prominence) in printed and manuscript recipe texts. The title-page of Gervase Markham’s The English Husvvife (London, 1615), the first English-language recipe book to identify geographically its imagined reader, lists its concerns as ‘Physicke, Cookery, Banquetting-stuffe, Distillation, Perfumes, Wooll, Hemp, Flaxe, Dairies, Brewing, Baking and all other things belonging to an Household’; over one hundred years later, Sarah Harrison’s The House-keeper’s Pocket-Book and Compleat Family Cook (London, 1733) was slightly less encyclopaedic but still contained ‘above Three Hundred Curious and Uncommon RECEITS’ in cookery, pastry, candying, preserving, pickling and collaring, as well as ‘many Excellent PRESCRIPTIONS of the most Eminent Physicians’.32 By 1800, the wider use of illustrations (unknown in printed English recipe books before 1660), an increasing standardisation of recipe format and the specialisation of printed books to focus

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upon culinary and housekeeping matters (with only residual medical, veterinary and even confectionery content) underpinned changes in format in printed recipe books that were to be consolidated by the publishing phenomena of Eliza Acton and Isabella Beeton by the middle of the nineteenth century.33 Yet recipes within even these behemoth manuals of domestic economy, and manuscript recipe books begun in the nineteenth century, are sometimes early modern (or medieval) in origin, and formats did not always become more ‘scientific’.34 As Lauren F. Winner points out in her contribution, we cannot even point to secularisation within society as a current that changes recipe books: the directions for fastingday dishes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century recipe books have their modern corollaries in Jewish and other denominational cookery books. The period covered by this collection is also one in which the practice of compiling domestic manuscript recipe books in English, if not began, then expanded significantly: archives across the UK and North America contain several hundred examples surviving from these 250 years.35 The production of household recipe books derived from several manuscript traditions, including that of the receptaria developed and used in medieval monasteries; the circulation of alchemical, natural philosophical and artisanal trade ‘secrets’; and the collecting practices found in literary miscellanies and commonplace books (which often included culinary, medicinal and other recipes).36 Yet although sixteenth-century manuscript recipe texts do survive,37 it is really not until the turn of the seventeenth century that manuscript compilations began taking the form we now more typically associate with the early modern manuscript recipe book. Although there was no prescribed format for compiling a manuscript recipe book (unlike the various guides to compiling a commonplace book),38 many recipe collections from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often carried some of the following features: a title-page or declaration of ownership; recipes with titles separated from the main body of the text in some way; ‘author’ or donor names attached to some recipes; numbering (either page or entry or both); indexing or other information-retrieval apparatus. Many books also feature structuring devices to distinguish between

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types of recipe, from separating ‘medicinal’ and culinary recipes (into distinct volumes or at either ends of a single book), to chapterlike groupings of differing dishes and preparations (either by type of dish, such as pies; or by preparation/condition treated). Examining the physical characteristics of these manuscripts, from the orthography, to the size and type of binding, as DiMeo, Pennell and Stobart do in their contributions here, reveals that while some of these collections were used, others may have been compiled primarily as ‘presentation copies’ or for specific purposes, such as a matrimonial gift or ‘starter’ collection.39 While the majority were owned or compiled by members of the aristocracy or upper gentry and urban elites, the attributions of recipes to authors/donors within these collections demonstrate that compilers drew recipes from a wide range of individuals. Thus both the recipes and the texts they are collected in can be seen as unfixed formats that seem to defy classification as a genre; and where transmission, as well as practice, patterns (but does not standardise) received forms. Indeed, the Latin root of recipe in recipere stresses the mobility of the information carried by the text (a point explored further by Archer), and the most common terminology employed across our period was ‘receipt’ or ‘receipt book’, rather than the modern ‘recipe’ and ‘recipe book’.40 Moreover, given that recipere carries the sense of being responsible for something, the recipe text (both singly, and as a book) can also embody a relationship of credit and trustworthiness between the giver and recipient, the bequeather and the legatee, as DiMeo’s and Pennell’s chapters explore.41

The recipe text as palimpsest: the self and communities in ‘conversation’ The complexities of pre-modern recipe books extend beyond this brief survey, but it is clear that their ‘variousness’ makes their erstwhile (and common archival) classification as simply ‘domestic papers’ sorely one-dimensional. Pre-modern recipe books are more than simply instructional formulae for making cheesecakes, washing balls or Daffy’s Elixir (all popular recipes in print and manuscript during this era), and here it is worth reiterating some of the

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valencies such texts may have carried for compilers, users and readers. As we have already suggested for Lady Ann Fanshawe, recipe books can represent life-writing, or perhaps (to reflect a more cautious approach to the conscious literary agency at work here), life-registers. Even printed texts often commenced with an author biography that served both authorising and contextualising purposes. As Elaine Hobby has shown for Hannah Woolley (1622?– d. in or after 1674), such self-representation could expose the recipe writer to identity theft in the frenetic publishing culture of late seventeenth-century London that Ezell’s contribution maps in this volume.42 But for the manuscript compiler (especially where texts are attributable to one identifiable compiler), the acts of collecting, collating and circulating the compiled text were a means of selfformation and self-presentation. When a compiler stressed his or her role in the making of a recipe collection – ‘written by me’ is an oft-encountered inscription – he or she was making a claim on a par with the artistic signature fecit. Certainly, not all recipe collections were continued beyond the first enthusiastic flush of compilation, but those which represent compilation over a lifetime, and indeed into subsequent generations, can supply what Janet Theophano has called ‘testimonies [of] existence’, if not consciously constructed biographical materials. As importantly, such a collection is not usually the creation of, in Ezell’s colourful but appropriate imagining, ‘a transgressive radical female preacher nor a maddened aristocratic lady shut up in her tower’, but of ‘the woman sitting at home, going about her domestic life’.43 In this sense, recipe texts extend the range of materials available for studying female, and indeed male, conceptions of material and moral domestic life, if read in conjunction with other documents (inventories, household accounts, diaries) over which householders often exercised some degree of control.44 Given that the household was the primary (and yet already seldom, the exclusive) site for both food preparation and medical care well into our period, the ways in which recipe collections constructed domestic practice – as ideally frugal, even self-sufficient, yet bountiful and fruitful – was not simply a publishing ruse or hollow aspiration on the part of the compiler. Just as printed cookery books urged readers to imbibe the

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‘art of œconomy or the managing of household affairs . . . that being the most proper feminine business from which neither Wealth nor greatness can totally absolve you’, so manuscript compilers imagined, fashioned and possibly even materialised their own domestic order through the recipes they collected and inscribed, and the annotations they made to them.45 These are texts that have some relation to the quotidian, even if it is an imagined, rather than a fully realised, quotidian. Of course, that order might not always accord with prevailing expectations of early modern female domestic virtue. The following entries are recorded in the ‘great diurnall’ of the Lancashire gentleman, Nicholas Blundell, between May 1719 and the following March: [11 May 1719] Mr Sheppard brought my wife some good Receipts for Cookery [17 May 1719] Edward Howerd was here . . . I gave him some Receipts to writ out for my Wife [27 February 1720] I was very busy most of the day making an index for some of the Receipts as Edward Howerd has writ in my wives book of Cookery [2 March 1720] I payed Edward Howerd for writing Receipts of Cookery, etc., in my Wives book.46

As these notes clearly demonstrate, exchange of domestic information was a crucial medium of both female and male association, conversation and friendship, and was clearly conceived of as an acceptable conduit for communication between men and women, of whatever marital status. It is also clear that Blundell was the primum mobile in structuring and compiling his wife’s manuscript recipe book, at least in this period. The predominantly culinary manuscript collection compiled by John Martin of Brundish (near Woodbridge, Suffolk) between May 1715 and April 1718, probably as a gift to Elizabeth Bear, is testimony to at least his understanding of the domestic meaning of such a gift, to a woman he perhaps intended to wed.47 That Bear returned the collection to Martin’s mother after his early death also turns the collection into not only a

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love gift no longer appropriate for a woman to hold on to (particularly if she had become involved with someone else), but into a memorial for Martin himself, through his mother’s record of his death within its pages.48 Acknowledging male interest and participation in domestic recipe collection and preparation, as Withey’s chapter does, enables us to move on from seeing ‘domestic papers’ as a long overlooked but now recuperated form of women’s writing, towards reinserting men into the domestic environment and activities as more than simply patriarchal ciphers and mere consumers of the foods and medicines made by wives, sisters, daughters or female servants.49 Considering male participation in recipe exchange and compilation at the domestic level also further complicates the conventional historical distinction within print literature, between male cookery authors as somehow representing a more ‘professional’ cuisine in their writings than their ‘housewifely’ female counterparts.50 Certainly both print and manuscript recipe texts are invaluable in extending our knowledge of how women – albeit those possessing a degree of literacy – were educated, even if this learning was never put into practice. The collection and learning of recipes was a predominantly (but not exclusively) domestic act, lying therefore beyond conventional studies of female schooling. Although to date we have lacked published studies of how manuscript recipe compilers encountered and collected their texts (although see DiMeo, Pennell, Stobart and Withey in this volume),51 there is material evidence of such texts being sites of early and adolescent learning, with pages clearly devoted to handwriting practice.52 But recipe compilations, especially manuscript ones, are not simply gatherings and gleanings to embody the lived self or its immediate networks. As Floyd and Forster and Theophano suggest, the ‘intertextuality’ of recipes makes them prime sites for ‘conversing’ with the past, distant presents, and, in their mobility, even the future.53 Recipes provided the focus for vicarious and actual interaction with not only other people, but other times, places and cultures, and the compilation of a manuscript, or the reading of a cookery book, could take its makers far from the kitchen hearth – aesthetically (as Lehmann explores in her chapter), geographically, socially and intellectually. Troy Bickham and others have argued that the

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distant and dangerous exotic could be encountered, and culinarily and culturally colonised, in a recipe for Indian pilau, just as annotations which note that a recipe originated in seventeenth-century Madrid or colonial Virginia provide a textual entrance, albeit momentarily, into those locales.54 The collecting together of veritable medicine chests of recipes to cure or ward off particular (and at the time, usually incurable) conditions, from plague to rabies, might serve a talismanic, prophylactic purpose, as well as targeting specific experienced illnesses. The multiple recipes to relieve the ‘bite of a mad dog’ on two pages of Anne Lisle’s c.1748 manuscript volume of medical recipes are drawn in part from the many cures in print circulation at the time, but also reflect Lisle’s participation in what was a very widely shared Georgian phobia, rather than being a response to an actual incidence of rabies. This practice contrasts with a very specific focus upon remedies and the search for a personalised therapeutic regime, such as that amassed to deal with the King’s Evil by the Boscawen and Fortescue families, discussed by Stobart.55 As a form through which celebrated figures or the dead might be memorialised and re-encountered every time one read or made a dish or medicine, recipe collections exert a powerful associative and even psychic force.56 Certainly, the names of significant donors or authors of recipes – physicians, aristocrats, royalty – imbued the texts with the cachet ascribed to such figures, and set the parameters for the trust one could invest in such recipes. Witness one manuscript annotation for the recipe of ‘The Countess of Kents Pouder’: ‘given my Mama by one who assured my Mama that she had it from ye Countesses own hand’.57 The readings by Jayne Archer, Laura Lunger Knoppers and Edith Snook of The Queen’s Closet Open’d (London, 1655 and subsequent editions) as a precious textual cabinet containing recipes that ‘perform royal authority’ (Snook’s phrase) takes the recipe collection even further, into complex, and historically specific, ideological waters.58 Yet, within less celebrated recipe collections, we can identify no less powerful currents, and the recipe book as a carrier of strong religious, emotional and regional connotations is explored by several contributors here. As Pennell and Archer both note, recipes were not only a reproducible form textually, but carried value as a

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text framing women’s reproductive abilities. Indeed, more broadly, the collection asserts Leonardi’s claims for recipes and their writing as being particularly analogous to ‘women’s reproductive capacity’, including not only childbearing, but domestic proficiency in regularly (re)producing food, medicines, clothing and other textiles, through cooking, distilling, sewing, laundering and mending and other household acts of material (re-)creation.59 Studying recipes helps to reinvest these quotidian activities of making, maintaining and mending with the significance they carried for early modern householders; and, as Archer reiterates, to reinvest the recipe text itself with a rhetorical force that was strategically deployed by writers of both sexes in the early modern era.60 That the reading and writing of recipes might represent or ridicule regional and national characteristics has been a strand of food, and indeed broader historical, investigation at least since Stephen Mennell’s seminal All Manners of Food (Oxford, 1985).61 Although we have limited this collection to recipe books written, published and read in England, Wales and its colonies in the period under study, as Lehmann’s, Winner’s and Withey’s contributions all stress in differing ways, the recipe was a text which bridged languages and oceans (and still does, through their modern archival dispersal). While English-language printed recipe books shared characteristics (and indeed recipes) with French-language culinary publications immediately before and after 1700, and indeed contained recipes that were Italian, Dutch, German, ‘Indian’ and indigenous American in origin, they were also distinctively English, and seen to convey distinctively English ideas about food, eating and diet.62 Only in England (and to a lesser extent in the Netherlands) did the published ‘housewifely’ recipe-book genre become a common alternative to the ‘courtly’ or professional culinary recipe book before 1750.63 Reading and writing recipes in manuscript was also not a solely English pursuit in this period; but we lack as yet the comparative research to assess the extent to which manuscript recipe collections in English were distinctive from their continental (or even English-language colonial) counterparts at this time.64

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Conclusion In viewing recipe texts as ‘choreograph[ies] of connection’, to use the novelist Nora Seton’s evocative phrase, there is clearly much that recipes can signify for the ‘reading, writing mind’.65 Structured as three interdisciplinary and overlapping sections, concerned with methodologies (DiMeo, Gray, Alonso-Almeida), textuality and intertextuality (Lehmann, Archer, Winner) and cultures of circulation and transmission (Ezell, Withey, Stobart, Pennell), the chapters in this collection highlight diverse scholarly approaches to the genre. However, as far-reaching as this book is, we do not claim that it is exhaustive: we note in particular that it does not foreground literary and dramatic representations of recipes or recipe books, which can help illuminate the cultural significance of, and stereotypes associated with, these texts.66 Nonetheless, this anthology strives to provide a representative sample of the current scope of recipe and recipe-book scholarship; and to promote further investigation into recipe texts. We hope such scholarship will further dispel the ‘academic scepticism’ which still surrounds such subjects, and with which Leonardi was much concerned in 1989. Indeed, there can no longer be any doubt that reading and writing recipes in the early modern world was about so much more than just ‘who ate what and when’.67

Notes 1 For example, see Sharon Cadman Seelig, Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern English Literature: Reading Women’s Lives 1600–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 90–109; The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett, and Ann, Lady Fanshawe, ed. and intro. John Loftis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). 2 ODNB, ‘Fanshawe, Lady Ann (1625–1680)’. 3 A similar treatment has been given to Elizabeth Freke (1642–1714), whose Remembrances have received much more attention in print than her substantial recipe collections, until recently. See The Remembrances of Elizabeth Freke, 1671–1714, ed. Raymond A. Anselment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); cf. Elaine Leong, ‘Making medicines in the early modern household’, Bulletin for the History of Medicine, 82 (2008), 145–68. 4 Karen Hess, ‘The Jonny-Cake papers and other tales: problems in American

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culinary research’, in The Culinary Historians of Boston (eds), Proceedings of a Conference on Current Research in Culinary History: Sources, Topics and Methods, Radcliffe College, Cambridge MA, June 14–16 1985 (Boston: Culinary Historians of Boston, 1986), p. 47. David Potter, ‘The household receipt book of Ann, Lady Fanshawe’, PPC, 80 (2006), 19–32. Wellcome MS 7113, fol. 2r. The Memoirs for March 1663 record the gift to the Fanshawes of ‘a great quantity of chocolate and as much sugar . . . with a very large silver pot to make it in, & twelve very fine cups to drink it in’: cited in Potter, ‘Household receipt book’, p. 32 n. 9. Cadman Seelig, Autobiography and Gender, pp. 102, 105; cf. Wellcome MS 7113, fol. 76r. For another manuscript occurrence of this recipe, see AlonsoAlmeida, this volume, Figure 4.1. Cuneiform tablets dating to the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries BCE containing recipes have been excavated: Jean Bottéro, Textes culinaires Mesopotamiens (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1995). Susan J. Leonardi, ‘Recipes for reading: Summer pasta, lobster à la Riseholme, and Key Lime pie’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 104:3 (1989), 340–7 (on p. 347). See the data collected for the Perdita Project, which calendared seventeenth-century manuscript writings by identifiable women, available at www.warwick.ac.uk/english/perdita/html/ (accessed 1 July 2011) and Adam Matthews Digital, The Perdita Manuscripts 1500–1700, www.amdigital.co.uk/Collections/Perdita.aspx (accessed 24 April 2012). Elaine Hobby, ‘A woman’s best setting out is silence: the writings of Hannah Wolley’, in Gerald MacLean (ed.), Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 179–200; Lehmann, British Housewife; Sandra Sherman, ‘The Whole Art and Mystery of Cooking: what cookbooks taught readers in the eighteenth century’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 28:1 (2004), 115–35; Eileen White, ‘Domestic English cookery and cookery books, 1575–1675’, in Eileen White (ed.), The English Cookery Book: Historical Essays (Totnes: Prospect Books, 2004), pp. 72–97; Sandra Sherman, The Invention of the Modern Cook Book (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Press, 2010); Elizabeth Spiller, ‘Recipes for knowledge: makers’ knowledge traditions, Paracelsian recipes and the invention of the cookbook, 1600–1660’, in Joan Fitzpatrick (ed.), Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 55–72; Wendy Wall, ‘Reading the home: the case of The English House-wife’, in Helen Smith and Louise Wilson (eds), Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 165–84. Mary Fissell, ‘Readers, texts, and contexts: vernacular medical works in early modern England’, in Roy Porter (ed.), The Popularization of Medicine,

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14

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17 18

19 20 21 22

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Introduction 1650–1850 (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 72–96; Mary Fissell, ‘Making meaning from the margins: the new cultural history of medicine’, in F. Huisman and J Warner (eds), Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meaning (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), pp. 264–89; Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Theophano, Eat My Words; Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). Linda Pollock, With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993); Pennell, ‘Perfecting practice?’; Leong and Pennell, ‘Recipe collections’; Field, ‘“Many hands hands”’; Leong, ‘Making medicines’. See also Stine, ‘Opening closets’; and Phyllis Thompson, ‘Uncovering the traces left behind: manuscript recipes, middleclass readers and reading practices’, in Laura Runge and Pat Rogers (eds), Producing the Eighteenth–Century Book: Writers and Publishers in England, 1650–1800 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009), pp. 70–94. See Sara Pennell (ed.), Women in Medicine: Remedy Books, 1533–1865 (35 reels; Woodbridge, CT: Primary Source Microfilm, 2004); Elaine Leong (ed.), Receipt Books c. 1575–1800 from the Folger Shakespeare Library (15 reels; Marlborough: Adam Matthews Publications, n.d.). For the digitised collections, see www.amdigital.co.uk/Collections/Defining-Gender.aspx and www.amdigital.co.uk/Collections/Perdita.aspx (both accessed 1 July 2011). See http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/etexts.html (accessed 28 July 2011). Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster, ‘Introduction’, in Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster (eds), The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 1–11. The Post-it note is a late modern case in point, itself perhaps now outmoded by the e-note on a mobile phone or tablet computer. Floyd and Forster, ‘Introduction’, pp. 4–5. Cf. Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 136. Ibid., p. 143; William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), esp. p. 131. Gilly Lehmann, ‘Echanges entre livres de cuisine imprimés et recueils de recettes manuscripts en Angleterre, 1660–1730’, Papilles 10–11 (1996), 35–50; Lehmann, British Housewife, p. 47. For example, John Stalker (and George Parker), A Treatise of Japaning [sic] and Varnishing, Being a compleat Discovery of those Arts (Oxford: printed for the author, 1688). For early modern cosmetic recipes, see Edith Snook, Women, Beauty and Power in Early Modern England: A Feminist Literary

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History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 21–62. 25 Recipes were more often called a ‘receipt’ or ‘receit’ in early modern texts. However, for clarity, we have used the modern ‘recipe’ throughout this introduction in order to avoid confusion with other contemporaneous and modern meanings of ‘receipt’. 26 Eliza Acton, Modern Cookery In all its Branches Reduced to a System of Easy Practice for Private Families (London: Longman Brown Green & Longman, 1845). Recipe texts continue to evolve; published recipes now frequently include data on calorific and nutritional values, as well as being a popular feature of websites and internet blogs. 27 Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, pp. 7, 131, 360. For a critical discussion of Eamon’s reading of recipe texts, see Pennell, ‘Perfecting practice?’ 28 Jean-François Revel, Culture and Cuisine: A Journey Through the History of Food (Garden City: Doubleday, 1982), p. 112. 29 Simon Charsley, Wedding Cakes and Cultural History (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 32–4. 30 Natasha Glaisyer and Sara Pennell, ‘Introduction’, in Natasha Glaisyer and Sara Pennell (eds), Didactic Literature in England 1500–1800: Expertise Constructed (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 1–18. 31 For general household manuals, see Thomas Dawson, The Good husvvifes Iewell (London: John Wolfe for Edward White, 1587); G[ervase] M[arkham], The English Husvvife, part of Countrey Contentments, in Two Bookes (London: I. Beale for R. Iackson, 1615). 32 Markham, Countrey Contentments, title-page. Sarah Harrison, The Housekeeper’s Pocket-book, and Compleat Family Cook (London: printed for T. Worrall, 1733), title-page. 33 Lehmann, British Housewife, pp. 132, 166, 279; Ivan Day, ‘From Murrell to Jarrin: illustrations in British cookery books, 1621–1820’, in White (ed.), English Cookery Book, pp. 98–151; Margaret Beetham, ‘Of recipe books and reading in the nineteenth century: Mrs Beeton and her cultural consequences’, in Floyd and Forster (eds), Recipe Reader, pp. 15–30. 34 See Peter C. D. Brears, ‘A North Yorkshire recipe book’, in C. Anne Wilson (ed.), Traditional Food East and West of the Pennines (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1994), pp. 187–212; Ivan Day, ‘Jellies, flummeries and creams’, available at www.historicfood.com/jellies.htm (accessed 1 July 2011). 35 See Select bibliography. 36 For receptaria see Stine, ‘Opening closets’, pp. 19–20; for secrets see Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature and Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin (eds), Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); on miscellanies see Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); on commonplace books see Peter Beal, ‘Notions in garrison: the seventeenth-

20

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37

38 39 40 41 42 43

44

45

46

47

48 49

50 51 52

Introduction century commonplace book’, in W. Speed Hill (ed.), New Ways of Looking at Old Texts (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies with Renaissance English Text Society, 1993), pp. 131–48; and David Allan, Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Perhaps the best known late Elizabethan/early Jacobean example being that of Elinor Fettiplace (1570–1647): Hilary Spurling (ed.), Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book: Elizabethan Country House Cooking (London: Viking, 1986). See [John Locke], A New Method of Making Common-place Books (London: printed for J. Greenwood, 1706). Leong, ‘Medical recipe collections’, Ch. 2. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, p.131; cf. Floyd and Forster, ‘Introduction’, p. 6. See Pennell, ‘Perfecting practice?’ and Leong and Pennell, ‘Recipe collections’. Hobby, ‘A woman’s best setting out’. Theophano, Eat My Words, p. 121; Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘Domestic papers: manuscript culture and early modern women’s life writing’, in Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle (eds), Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 33–48 (on p. 43). Danielle Clarke, The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing (Harlow: Longman, 2001), p. 2; Paul Salzman, Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 9. The Whole Duty of a Woman, or a Guide to the Female Sex, Written by a Lady, 3rd edn (London: printed for J. Guillim, 1701), p. 35. For a fuller discussion of the domestic rhetoric of early modern cookery books, see Wall, ‘Reading the home’. J. J. Bagley (ed.) and Frank Tyrer (transcr.), The Great Diurnall of Nicholas Blundell, of Little Crosby, Lancashire. Volume II 1712–19, Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 112 (1970), pp. 257–8, and idem, The Great Diurnall of Nicholas Blundell, of Little Crosby, Lancashire. Volume III 1720–28, Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 114 (1972), p. 6. University of Chicago Library, Special Collections, Crerar MS 114, MS recipe book of John Martin (d. 28 April 1718). The start date of May 1715 is beautifully calligraphed on fol. 1v. Ibid., inside front cover. Lisa Smith, ‘The relative duties of a man: domestic medicine in England and France, c.1670–1740’, Journal of Family History, 31:3 (2006), 237–56; Karen Harvey, ‘Men making home: masculinity and domesticity in eighteenth-century England’, Gender & History, 21:3 (2009), 520–40. Lehmann, British Housewife, pp. 81–104. Although see Leong, ‘Medical recipe collections’, Ch. 2. See, for example, Wellcome MS 3498, recipe book attributed to the Goodall

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53 54 55

56 57

58

59 60 61

62 63

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and Matthey families, c.1750–1900, fols 95r–v, 109v; Theophano, Eat My Words, pp. 156–7. See also Heather Wolfe, ‘Women’s handwriting’, in Laura Lunger Knoppers (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 21–39. Floyd and Forster, ‘Introduction’, p. 2; Theophano, Eat My Words. Troy Bickham, ‘Eating the Empire: intersections of food, cookery and imperialism in eighteenth-century Britain’, Past and Present, 198 (2008), 71–110. Wellcome MS 3295, attributed to Anne (de) Lisle (d. 1752), begun 1748, fols 43–45r. See also John D. Blaisdell, ‘Situation frightful but not necessarily fatal: rabies in eighteenth-century England’, Veterinary History, 6:4 (1991/2), 125–33. Cf. Leong, ‘Making medicines’. Theophano, Eat My Words, pp. 85–116; Floyd and Forster, ‘Introduction’, pp. 7–8. Leong and Pennell, ‘Recipe collections’; Leong, ‘Making medicines’; Folger Shakespeare Library MS W.a.318, Jane Wake Pennyman recipe compilation, fol. 22v (inverted). For more on this MS, see Pennell, this volume. Jayne Elisabeth Archer, ‘The Queen’s arcanum: authority and authorship in The Queen’s Closet Opened (1655)’, Renaissance Journal, 1:6 (2002), 14–26; Snook, Women, Beauty and Power, pp. 47–51; Laura Lunger Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 94–139. Leonardi, ‘Recipes for reading’, p. 344; Wall, ‘Reading the home’. Cf. Leong, ‘Making medicines’, p. 149. See also Gilly Lehmann, ‘Politics in the kitchen’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 23:2 (1992), 71–83. David Allan, ‘Manners and mustard: ideas of political decline in sixteenth-century Scotland’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37 (1995), 242–63. Lehmann, British Housewife; Wall, ‘Reading the home’. Lehmann, British Housewife; Sarah T. Peterson, The Cookbook that Changed the World: The Origins of Modern Cuisine (Stroud: Tempus, 2006); Sara Pennell, ‘Professional cooking, kitchens and service work: Accomplisht cookery’, in Beat Kümin (ed.), A Cultural History of Food in the Early Modern Age (1600–1800) (London: Berg, 2012), pp. 103–22. See, for example, Alisha Rankin, ‘Becoming an expert practitioner: court experimentalism and the medical skills of Anna of Saxony (1532–85)’, Isis: Journal of the History of Science Society, 98 (2007), 23–53; and Leong and Rankin (eds), Secrets and Knowledge. For French and Dutch recipe collections in print and manuscript, see Berthe Meijer, ‘Dutch cookbooks printed in the 16th and 17th centuries’, PPC, 11 (1982), 47–55; Peter G. Rose, The Sensible Cook: Dutch Foodways in the Old and the New World, pbk edn (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998); (no author or editor given), Livres en bouche: cinq siècles d’art culinaire français (Paris: Bibliothèque

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nationale de France/Hermann, 2001); and Lehmann, this volume. 65 Nora Seton, The Kitchen Congregation: A Memoir, pbk edn (London: Phoenix, 2001), p. 57. 66 See Snook, Women, Beauty and Power for cosmetic recipes; on sugarcraft, see Lynette Hunter, ‘“Sweet secrets” from occasional receipt to specialised books: the growth of a genre’, in C. Anne Wilson (ed.), ‘Banquetting Stuffe’: The Fare and Social Background of the Tudor and Stuart Banquet (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), pp. 36–59; and Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 111–67. For studies of the dramatic recipe text, see Catherine Field, ‘“Sweet practicer, thy physic will I try”: Helena and her “good receipt”’, in Gary Waller (ed.), All’s Well That Ends Well: New Critical Essays (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 194–208; Tracy Thong, ‘Performances of the banquet course in early modern drama’, and Chris Meads, ‘Narrative and dramatic sauces: reflections upon creativity, cookery, and culinary metaphor in some early 17th-century dramatic prologues’, both in Fitzpatrick (ed.), Renaissance Food, pp. 107–26 and 145–66. 67 Leonardi, ‘Recipes for reading’, p. 347; Margaret Atwood has her protagonist Tony use this phrase to denigrate her social historian colleagues in her 1993 novel, The Robber Bride (see the pbk edn, London: Virago, 1994, on p. 22).

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Part I

Methodologies

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2

Authorship and medical networks: reading attributions in early modern manuscript recipe books MICHELLE DIMEO

‫ﱬﱫ‬

Across the early modern period and well into the eighteenth century, recipe-book compilers named the author or donor for some individual recipes in their collections. Elaine Leong’s survey of 15 seventeenth-century manuscript recipe books, comprising 6,554 individual recipes (the most comprehensive to date), found that just over one-third of recipes named an author.1 While one occasionally finds evidence of more detailed notations of textual circulation, the majority simply include a name after the recipe title, in the last line of the recipe, or in the margin, making it unclear whether this person is the author or donor of the recipe, or both: ‘A Syrupe good for a greate colde ~Lady Sheffielde’.2 Though the majority of recipes in these compilations do not have a name affixed to them, this practice of naming a source is so common across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that it is difficult to find an English manuscript without some evidence of such attributions. This notation style has intrigued recipe-book scholars, who have used the names to aid wide-scale studies of social and medical networks. By analysing attributions in small samples of texts, scholars have attempted to document the transmission of knowledge among diverse social groups. Jennifer Stine was the first to show that men and women of diverse social standings are represented among the attributions in popular printed collections.3

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Leong’s study demonstrates that the majority of medical recipes were taken from either the compiler’s circle of family and friends, or medical practitioners; however, the percentage of each category varied greatly between each manuscript.4 She found that all 15 compilations in her survey included at least one recipe from someone who was a ‘doctor’, and many also included recipes from servants and dependants. The scribal communities in medical recipe books, therefore, appear more socially diverse than those presented in the more literary manuscripts discussed by Arthur Marotti and Harold Love, who both discuss elite coteries based on university and courtly cultures. Leong astutely argues that this is because elevated social status and academic credentials were not required to legitimise a medical recipe.5 Furthermore, Sara Pennell has drawn similar conclusions in her sampling of culinary manuscript recipe books, suggesting the wide variety of donor names might reflect the geographical position and diverse social networks of the compiler, reinforcing that domestic knowledge of various subjects travelled freely across socio-economic and gender barriers.6 Such wide-scale surveys are necessary for documenting typical trends in knowledge transmission, inviting disciplinary and interdisciplinary methodologies to investigate gendered, literary and intellectual currents. But is it possible to conduct a close reading of a single manuscript recipe book to gain more information about the compiler’s network? Because early moderns rarely distinguished between whether someone was the author or donor of a recipe, it is difficult for us today to use these attributions as direct evidence of social connections or exchanges. As such, an interdisciplinary methodology allows for the most sensitive reading of these texts: any attempt at re-creating a medical network through recipe attributions requires an exploration of early modern authorship and the function of author citation. Contemporaries used the term ‘author’ when referring to someone who composed a recipe, but the term is not used in our restrictive modern sense.7 In Attributing Authorship, Harold Love gives many historical examples of collaborative authorship and incorrect attributions in both print and manuscript, demonstrating that our modern definition of an ‘author’ as the sole creator of a text is limited and usually unhelpful. He explains that in his study, ‘[t]he

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term “authorship” . . . will not therefore denote the condition of being an originator of works, but a set of linked activities (authemes) which are sometimes performed by a single person but will often be performed collaboratively or by several persons in succession’.8 This more collective view of authorship can help us think more accurately about the role of the recipe author. The introduction to this book discusses the problematic nature of recipe-book authorship, but a more detailed analysis of authorcitation methods can benefit this study on networks. While the great majority of recipes with attributions name only one individual as the author, this vague tag tells us little about the actual creation or reuse of the recipe, and it does not directly indicate how the recipe made it into the compilation. A recipe may have originated with someone, but it could also be that the compiler received it from an unnamed intermediary or copied it from a friend’s manuscript. Alternatively, an individual recipe with a named donor may have been copied from a printed recipe book, as print and manuscript books continued to influence and mimic each other’s styles across the seventeenth century, and both shared an attention to authorship.9 Some recipes, such as ‘The Countess of Kent’s Powder’ and ‘Dr Stephens Cordial Water’, appear in many print and manuscript recipe books and certainly do not suggest the compiler had any affiliation with the named source.10 Several recipes originating with a ‘King’ or ‘Queen’ are also frequently anthologised in the manuscripts of gentry households who had no court connections, demonstrating either that a popular recipe could travel far from its original author or that displaying links with royalty was desirable for some. Just as many early modern manuscript poems found their way into print under what we today know to be the wrong attribution, subtle amendments to original recipes and changes to authorship were common once copied into a new manuscript compilation.11 In short, without corroborative evidence, using a recipe book to conduct a micro-study of an individual’s network leaves much room for error. Instead of reading the recipe book in isolation, this chapter elaborates on the suggestion in this book’s introduction that these documents should be read against the larger archive, where it exists. It will offer two case studies of seventeenth-century manuscript

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Methodologies

recipe books in the British Library – a copy of Lady Katherine Ranelagh’s recipe collection, and two related recipe books from the Brockman family – using detailed textual analysis to explore how the author names function and if they may be used as evidence of the compiler’s medical networks. The examples suggest two methods of integrating other texts to support a microanalysis of a single manuscript recipe book. The extended archives reveal a more complex, and sometimes contradictory, set of textual evidence than what may be gathered from the recipe book alone – a situation also revealed in Anne Stobart’s chapter in this collection. Through such contextualisation, these case studies expose the problems with reading attributions as direct evidence of medical networks and reopen debates on how early modern ideologies of authorship, authority and propriety functioned in this genre.

BL Sloane MS 1367: a copy of Lady Katherine Ranelagh’s recipe book At 7.5 cm wide and 20 cm high, BL Sloane MS 1367 is an unusually tall, thin octavo. It contains 291 numbered recipes for sophisticated medical treatments, many of which include rare ingredients, complicated chemical procedures and alchemical cipher. There are no dates in the manuscript and the book was rebound by the British Library in the mid-nineteenth century, but it appears to be a midseventeenth-century collection that was corrected, annotated and added to over many years. The title-page reads ‘My Lady Rennelagh’s Choice Receipts as also some of Capt Willis who valued them above gold’, with Captain Willis probably referring to the physician Thomas Willis (1621–75).12 Though often remembered only as the older sister of Robert Boyle (1627–91), Lady Katherine Ranelagh (1615–91) was one of the most well-known intellectual women in seventeenth-century England. She enjoyed an international reputation as a medical and scientific authority throughout most of her lifetime and was an active member of the Hartlib Circle.13 This manuscript appears to have been written entirely in one hand, but a comparison with over fifty autograph letters confirms it is not that of Lady Ranelagh herself.14 It was probably written by a man, as the hand exhibits traces of secretary influence, a style of handwriting

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women were not taught. On folio 32v, the compiler marks the beginning of his section of Willis’s receipts with the sub-heading ‘Capt ^Dr^ Willis receipts’, and on folio 38v he notes the end: ‘thus Capt Willis’, with a solid line drawn below it. This careful method of note-taking, coupled with the statement of authorship on the title page, suggests that while numbered recipes 126–64 are attributed to Willis, the remainder of the recipes were copied from Lady Ranelagh’s recipe collection. Indeed, after the solid line used to conclude Willis’s section, there is a recipe for sore eyes, and then recipe 166 has the heading ‘My Lady:’, indicating a return to Lady Ranelagh’s recipes. We cannot confirm if the anonymous scribe copied from a single recipe book, multiple books or a collection of loose papers written by Ranelagh, as no such documents appear to be extant; therefore, we do not know if her own collection included this section of Willis’s recipes. There are 43 unique attributions in this manuscript, and an overview of individuals’ titles demonstrates that most of the recipes were collected from those who were socially below Ranelagh.15 Thirteen sources have the title ‘M[istres]s’ and six have the title ‘M[aste]r’, representing the largest social grouping. These were probably members of the lower gentry whom she could have met either in Ireland or London. For example, there is a remedy for the stone offered by ‘Mr Green’, who might be the apothecary in great St Bartholomew Street, as her correspondent Samuel Hartlib (c.1600– 62) was also collecting recipes from him around 1659.16 While this recipe may have originated with an apothecary, others may have come from upper servants in the household. Robert Boyle’s work diary from 1666 mentions ‘my sisters Woman (Mrs Margeret Manning)’, demonstrating that a lady’s maid or ‘companion’ could also have this title.17 Though Mrs Manning is not mentioned in this manuscript, one recipe gives ‘Ms. Mary Manner’ as a source, a name close enough to raise the question of whether they are indeed the same person, and if her name was wrongly transcribed by the copyist.18 The second largest groupings are aristocrats and upper gentry and doctors, both with eight attributions. Comprising the former group are three ‘Ladies’, three ‘Lords’, one ‘Sir’ and one ‘Earl’; they may be described as Lady Ranelagh’s social equals.19 This is the only

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Methodologies

social grouping for which the familiar phrase ‘My’ is used before their names, possibly because she was intimate with the person. Unlike the other categories, the names occasionally include people whom we can confirm she knew, such as Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–65), a fellow member of the Hartlib Circle and avid recipe collector.20 This may suggest that while her social circle comprised equals, she willingly collected medical advice from diverse members of society with whom she interacted for other reasons, such as purchasing medicinal ingredients. The latter category, ‘physicians’, comprises eight recipes originating with a ‘doctor’.21 Some of these must have been copied from other textual sources instead of having been received from the doctor himself. For example, Dr Burges’s frequently anthologised recipe for the plague is included here.22 Most of the doctors, however, have irregular names and have been untraceable, such as ‘Dr Swallows’.23 These could be mistranscriptions from the original manuscript or misspellings of foreign doctors’ names. Alternatively, they may not be accredited physicians, as some medical practitioners adopted this title without necessarily possessing relevant professional or academic qualifications.24 The final categories are much smaller. There are two names which have no title: ‘Kircher’ is the source of three recipes, and another three originated with a ‘Harvey’. The former is probably Athanasius Kircher (1602–80), the Jesuit natural philosopher and polymath; and these Latin excerpts attributed to him were probably copied from one of his many published books.25 The latter may be the physician William Harvey (1578–1657), who had a professional relationship with Willis.26 There is one ‘Captain’ who, as I have argued based on contextual evidence, is actually ‘Doctor’ Thomas Willis. At least four other names indicate that the recipe in question is probably from a printed source, suggested by page numbers after the recipe, or simply by it being recognisable through its popularity.27 The inclusion of printed sources could indicate that some of the other recipes within were also gathered from printed or manuscript sources and not directly from the individual named. Finally, one recipe to treat corns originated with ‘a German shoomakers wife’, an anonymous woman holding the lowest social ranking in this manuscript.28

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When viewed collectively, these attributions suggest Lady Ranelagh maintained a very diverse network encompassing men and women of various social standings, but primarily social inferiors. The proclivity to document every source’s name went as far as noting the ‘German shoomakers wife’, reinforcing the idea that medical authority was not undermined by social status. However, a single recipe book should not be used as a definitive representation of an individual’s medical network, and when viewed in isolation it can only provide partial evidence. Turning to Lady Ranelagh’s extant letters can help by identifying more sources for medical knowledge and confirming whether these generalisations about the diversity of her network are as transparent in other genres. Over one hundred of Lady Ranelagh’s letters survive, scattered in archives in England, Ireland, Scotland and the USA.29 The letters, written across the Interregnum and Restoration periods, demonstrate that for over forty years she was the primary medical authority not only for her siblings and her own children, but also for nieces, nephews and cousins in both England and Ireland.30 When a family member fell ill and asked for medical assistance, she usually offered her own advice and sometimes posted parcels of medicines she had on hand, or asked siblings for ingredients or compounds.31 While these letters suggest the majority of Lady Ranelagh’s remedies and advice were self-originating, at points she did consult other authorities for their opinions. If she herself did not know how to treat an illness or if she wanted a second opinion, she tended to consult an accredited physician first. These physicians were often the most elite practitioners of her day: Dr Daniel Coxe (1640–1730), Dr William Quartermain (c.1618–67), Dr Thomas Willis (1621–75) and Sir Edmund King (c.1630–1709).32 Her letters show that she discussed with these men treatment plans, surgery and individualised patient prescriptions, and that she sometimes subtly contradicted their advice when she passed it on. Aside from these doctors, there are also occasional references to male medical advisers without such an esteemed reputation, such as Johann Brün, or Unmussig, a correspondent of Robert Boyle’s whom she recommended should serve as doctor for the household of her brother Richard Boyle (1612–98), earl of Cork (later earl of Burlington).33 Similarly, when her sick cousin Jenny was going on a long journey in

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1675, she consulted with a Dr Michel (possibly Andrew Michell [d. before 1689] or an unidentified foreign doctor), who judged that Jenny should be able to endure the coach ride.34 Lady Ranelagh’s extant letters also show that family members were key participants in her medical network. In addition to sending recipes and advice to her siblings, she also asked for their opinions, traded recipes, and borrowed ingredients from them. While the Boyle family was quite large, the letters suggest that Mary Rich (1625–78), countess of Warwick; Robert Boyle; Margaret Boyle (1623–89), countess of Orrery; and Burlington were the four siblings with whom she most frequently discussed medicine.35 Unlike the recipe book, Lady Ranelagh’s letters contain very few mentions of individuals with the titles ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’, and most of them are people we can confirm were in her network. Many appear to have been connected to the Hartlib circle, such as Dorothy Moore (1612–64), and Hartlib himself. Interestingly, these people are often named as sources of recipes, verifying that Lady Ranelagh did collect from a wide variety of individuals. Some of her letters, particularly those saved in Hartlib’s own comprehensive archive, demonstrate that she circulated recipes from various sources, including Sir Kenelm Digby, Moore and Dr Gerard Boate (1604–50).36 Viewing her extant letters collectively suggests that while Ranelagh resorted to expert opinion for more serious ailments, she was happy to collect and disseminate recipes from many sources. When comparing the 43 unique names that appear in the copy of Lady Ranelagh’s recipe book with the rich assortment of people named in her letters, there is little overlap. The only people we can definitely confirm are Digby, whose recipes appear in both her letters and the recipe book, and Dr Thomas Willis, who has two recipes included in Lady Ranelagh’s section of the manuscript and with whom she mentions having discussed medicine in her letters to her brother, Burlington, in 1667. While the recipe book includes some recipes from individuals who certainly may have comprised her medical network, including Lady Joan Barrington (c.1558– 1641) and the Wentworths, earls of Strafford, no supporting evidence may be found in her letters.37 When viewed as a whole, the medical network shown through her letters comprises a much more elite group of individuals,

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primarily consisting of the very best physicians of her day and men and women of relatively equal social status. While the recipe book makes it appear as though Lady Ranelagh’s medical network comprised primarily social inferiors, the letters suggest the opposite. The great differences between the networks presented in the recipe book and the letters are seen at both a micro- and macro-level: only two names match, and the overall social distribution of titles do not complement each other. This result could raise questions about the authenticity of the Sloane manuscript. After all, none of Lady Ranelagh’s family members was named, as one would expect of the genre and from what we know of her biography. Yet the difference is likely the result of using two incomplete collections of medical knowledge written in two distinct genres. As Pennell discusses in her chapter in this collection, the chance survival and dispersal of archival records inevitably distorts the historical picture we can re-create today; as such, the recreation of any network is bound to be incomplete. Further, if one is corroborating evidence of networks in recipe books and letters, it is important to reflect on different conventions for each genre and how authority functioned in each. Recipes were tried as a first solution when one fell ill, and it was a genre in which people of different social ranks were able to write, collect and communicate. Because the recipe was often a record of domestic knowledge, reading and writing recipes was deemed an appropriate extension of household responsibilities. Extant books with recipes from household servants suggest these documents also registered traces of oral communication.38 Therefore, it is not surprising that recipe books should reveal such diverse medical networks. Correspondence, on the other hand, may have been used to circulate a recipe, but it had other exclusive functions, such as contacting a professional medical practitioner once domestic remedies had failed. The letter also allowed for a transmission of medical advice that could not be easily distilled into recipe form, including much of the regimen advice that would originate with a physician (which, for example, may have been personalised to an individual’s humoral balance or may have related to more complex dietary or lifestyle changes). This is certainly true in the case of Lady Ranelagh’s body of extant writings: while this recipe book associated

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with her contains some doctors’ remedies, a collection of recipes would not have been the most obvious place for her to record her more complex discussions with physicians, which she chose to do by letter. By collating sources from two partial archival records, a more complete and complex view of Lady Ranelagh’s medical network emerges. She drew medical advice from a diverse network of men and women of various social standings and educational credentials, and a comparison of letters and recipes shows how reading either genre in isolation can seriously distort the larger picture. However, the fact that so few names in the recipe book match those in her letters – even the letters that include recipes – invites a further study of how author citation functions in recipe books. Through analysis of two recipe books in the same family archive, the next case study raises similar questions about the relationship between author citation and medical networks.

BL Add. MSS 45197 and 45199: the Brockman family recipe books Among the extensive family archive of the Brockmans of Newington, Kent, are two seventeenth-century recipe books by grandmother and granddaughter: those of Ann Brockman (1616– 60) and Elizabeth Brockman (d. 1687).39 The earliest dated recipes in the family archive are in Ann’s collection, which bears the titlepage ‘A Booke of Receits for Divers uses The Dame Ann Brockman June: Ano 1638’.40 This quarto (rebound by the British Library) contains 76 numbered pages of medical recipes, and ends in a comprehensive index where key words like ‘Burne’ and ‘Melancholy’ are followed by page numbers. The majority of the manuscript is written in a tall, thin italic hand that makes frequent use of dramatic descenders. A holograph letter from Ann Brockman elsewhere in the archive suggests this is not her hand.41 The other recipe book, also rebound by the British Library, is a quarto of 30 folios compiled by or for Ann’s granddaughter, 36 years after Ann’s book was compiled and 14 years after Ann’s death. The title-page reads ‘Eliz: Brockman May 8th: 1674’, and the following page says on the top ‘receiued of my mother anno: 1674’, referring to

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either the book itself or the money she received for quarterage in 1674, which is also detailed on this page. Sixteen folios of recipes in various hands follow, with ample blank space around them suggesting this may have been a ‘starter’ collection given to Elizabeth with some recipes already filled in.42 The recipes are mostly culinary and roughly organised by type (for example, meat preparation, cakes, wines, and so on). Folios 17v–28r are written upside down, as Elizabeth began the book from the other end, thereby inverting the book, and using it to practise her French. The differences between the books by grandmother and granddaughter are numerous: Ann’s is primarily medical, includes an index to aid the user and begins with a more serious title-page that uses her name to authorise the recipes within; Elizabeth’s is far less organised, is half-filled with French exercises and has a title-page that does not explicitly identify this as a recipe book and which is decorated with doodles, including an owl smoking. The materiality of each manuscript immediately invokes different feelings in the reader. Ann’s book appears to have been created with an audience in mind, and its organisation and presentation confirm her trustworthiness as an experienced medical practitioner. Elizabeth’s book seems an intimate piece of juvenilia, and the number of pages given to practising French and the lack of overall organisation or attempts at creating an authoritative identity suggest she was not creating this as an item to be passed down as Ann may have intended hers to be. Finding a grandmother’s and granddaughter’s recipe books preserved together in a family archive offers a rare chance to explore theories posited by historians of medicine and literary scholars alike, as both disciplines argue domestic manuscripts frequently passed down through a female lineage.43 Because we do not know Elizabeth’s birth date, it is unclear if she knew her grandmother. However, both lived around and died in Newington, a small village near Folkestone, about 70 miles south-east of London. Having lived in the same village for several hundred years, the Brockman family were necessarily intimate, and their comprehensive archive shows they saved both important and mundane items for future generations. Therefore, regardless of whether they actually knew each other, it is fair to assume that Elizabeth would have grown up

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hearing stories about her grandmother Ann, a bold woman with an extensive knowledge of medicine who petitioned a committee in Kent during the civil wars when her Royalist husband William was imprisoned for over thirteen months.44 An initial comparison of the authors named in both recipe books surprisingly reveals no overlap. There are 12 unique attributions in Ann’s manuscript, most of which come from the aristocracy or upper gentry: two ‘Lords’, two ‘Ladies’ and one ‘Sir’.45 There are four recipes from ‘Doctors’ and two recipes attributed to the King.46 One recipe is from a ‘Mr’, and the only familial connection is found in two different recipes both entitled ‘A Note of my Mothers Salve water’.47 This is in contrast to Elizabeth’s recipe book, in which there are only two attributions: a recipe for ‘Cowslip wine’ from a ‘Mrs Stones’ and a note ‘to my freind [sic]’ squeezed between two other recipes which might suggest one came from an anonymous acquaintance.48 Not a single recipe in Elizabeth’s book appears to be taken from her family, and she makes no note of having received or copied any recipes from her grandmother. This could perhaps be explained by the women’s differing areas of expertise: Ann’s book is entirely medical and Elizabeth’s is mostly culinary. Other surviving recipe books from unmarried young women suggest the tendency was to initially focus on culinary recipes and collect medicinal recipes later, when they were married.49 If Elizabeth wanted to fill her new recipe book with more culinary recipes, she would not have looked to her grandmother’s recipe book for these. However, Elizabeth’s book does contain three recipes for medicinal waters, and closer inspection of these reveals a fascinating compilation decision.50 The first recipe in this section is ‘To make Cherry Water’: Take 4 pd of red cherries clarett wine 5 pints rosmary half a handfull Balm two handfulls Sinamon bruised 2 ounces burrage flowers 2 or 3 handfulls 2 nutmegs sliced take the stones out of the cherries and infuse all these together in an earthen pot close covered all night next day distill them in a glass still when you use itt take two spoonfulls of sirrup of giliflower to five of the water with a littill amber suger att night when you goe to bed you shall find itt to be good a gainst the pasion of the heart & to make one sleep well tis good against malancholly & a great Cordiall[.]51

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This recipe is almost exactly the same as ‘To make excellent water for Cherries’ in Ann’s book: Take Fower pound of red Cherries, Clarrett wine Five pints, rosmary halfe a handfull, Balme two handfulls, Synnamon bruised two ounces, burrag flowers two or three handfulls, two nuttmegs sliced, take the stones out of the cherries, and infuse all these together in an Earthen pott close covered all night, next day distill them in a glasse still; and when you use it, take two spoonfulls of sirrup of cloves, gilly flowers, and five spoonfull of the water, and alittle amber sugar, it must be taken at night when you goe to bed, the vertue you shall find to bee good against the passion of the hart, and to make one sleep soundly, it is good against Malancholly and a greate Cordiall[.]52

Though there are changes to spelling and punctuation, all the quantities and ingredients are the same and are given in the same order. There are only minor differences in the title and in describing administration of the final product, where their choice of words is slightly different and where Elizabeth eliminates cloves from the syrup. Essentially, it is the same recipe, but neither woman names an author. It is quite rare to find two recipes that offer exactly the same quantities and ingredients, especially two that were written almost forty years apart. This is typical of early modern manuscripts more generally. Marotti has demonstrated how manuscript compilations are ‘inherently malleable’ and he gives many examples of how transcriptions of the same poem varied greatly in different manuscripts.53 These variations are even more acute in recipe books, where recipes were constantly evolving through a process of practice. Pennell has noted that ‘[r]ecipes are the ultimately fluid text’, as the act of trying and ‘perfecting’ a recipe was important to its validation and longevity.54 A recent examination of 23 versions of the recipe ‘Oil of Swallows’ found in printed and manuscript collections revealed that no two recipes were exactly the same.55 Similarly, when inspecting other seventeenth-century ‘cherry water’ recipes, I did not find another that shared all the same ingredients and amounts as do these two Brockman recipes.56 The wide variation between recipes of the same name makes it striking when one stumbles upon two very similar renditions of the

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same one and suggests the two must be closely linked. Janet Theophano gives a clear example of a Mrs Maddison having copied a recipe from the Countess of Kent’s popular printed recipe book into her own manuscript, mimicking the font and even the ‘funnel shape’ of the title and copying the ingredients and procedure almost verbatim.57 However, Maddison’s manuscript names the Countess of Kent as the author, as one would expect. This raises questions about the Brockman manuscripts, as they both include the same recipe but neither gives an author. It is most probable that Elizabeth copied the recipe from her grandmother’s book into her own. Elizabeth used this recipe to begin a section on medicinal waters, and the index in Ann’s book gives the page number for this recipe under the heading ‘Water’. One can imagine that, as Elizabeth probably grew up hearing stories about her grandmother’s esteemed medical reputation, she likely would have pulled out her grandmother’s compilation when wanting to add a medicinal water recipe to her own book. However, this naturally leads to the question: why would she have neglected to cite Ann Brockman as the source? Or did Ann and Elizabeth both copy from a common source and neither cited the author? Or did Elizabeth simply forget to write her grandmother’s name? Jennifer Stine notes that a recipe for ‘My Lady Warwicks Juyce of Liquorish’ found in Johanna St John’s manuscript also appears in the Boyle and Orrery family manuscript, only without Lady Warwick’s name attached.58 Stine’s similar example shows how the Brockman case study is indicative of larger manuscript culture, and further demonstrates why author citation in recipe books can only ever be used to gain a partial understanding of early modern networks of knowledge.

Re-evaluating recipe book attributions Through these case studies of a recipe book associated with Lady Ranelagh and those of two generations of Brockman family women, the process of re-creating an individual’s medical network only through attributions in his or her recipe book appears flawed. In the case of Lady Ranelagh, the authors named in the recipe book were very different from the individuals mentioned in her letters, suggesting two distinct medical networks with little overlap, and raising

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questions about the validity of the sources in her recipe book. In the case of the Brockman family, Elizabeth appears to have copied her grandmother’s recipe without noting it, creating doubt in the reliability of her author-notation methods and offering the possibility that their networks overlapped more than the recipe-book attributions suggest. Aside from this anonymous copying, there is no direct evidence of domestic knowledge passing through the female line of the Brockman family, which runs counter to dominant historical paradigms. Both studies caution against reading any single recipe book in isolation, and raise wider questions about the relationship between authorship, attributions and networks. As discussed earlier, viewing an attribution in a recipe book as a reliable documentation of the recipe’s original creator is problematic because it assumes a modern definition of authorship that is anachronistic for a seventeenth-century text, and particularly those in manuscript. It also assumes there was a cultural ideology of authorship shared by everyone, with all manuscript compilers using the same note-taking methods and sharing a common responsibility to the reader to document their careful transmission of knowledge. In reality, individuals had very limited rights over their words on the printed page, especially before the 1710 copyright law. Therefore, while there are several ways in which attributions may have functioned, accessing these involves an exploration of seventeenthcentury textual culture. While it remains difficult to discern an individual compiler’s unique system of author citation, some hints may be gained through history of the book scholarship. Margaret Ezell has reminded us to consider the relationship between both readers and writers when analysing the authorship of manuscript compilations, and the same should apply to recipe books.59 The value for a manuscript compiler to document his or her source relies on his or her understanding of their audience. This may be best determined by drawing on the material artefact, applying bibliographic methodologies to suggest plausible theories for the author/reader relationship inherent in each manuscript. Some manuscript recipe books were intended for very public lives, while others appear to have been created as more personal documents. Likewise, it seems some recipe books were compiled for personal use, or for use by a select circle of friends or

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family members, while others were created primarily as gifts or heirlooms that may have been too valuable to be used in daily practice. One example of the latter is Wellcome MS 213, a beautiful folio presentation copy probably given to Aletheia Howard (1585–1654), countess of Arundel, by her mother-in-law Anne Dacre (1557–1630) as a matrimonial gift. A corresponding recipe book containing many of the same recipes exists in the Folger Shakespeare Library, suggesting that Arundel’s manuscript had a wider audience than just her.60 While one might assume that all printed books intended for commercial circulation were created with an audience in mind, the intended readership of any particular manuscript would vary greatly. It is worth now considering the two Brockman manuscripts, to explore how compilation choices might reflect their understanding of intended readers. As mentioned in the previous section, Ann Brockman’s recipe book appears to have been compiled with an audience in mind: probably written by a scribe, with a comprehensive index and bold title-page including both her name and a book title. It is unclear how widely the manuscript circulated, but it was probably intended for use by family members, if not also members of the community; and it was probably intended to last. Elizabeth, on the other hand, probably compiled her book primarily for personal use, as suggested by the lack of organisational method and conscious stylistic presentation; this, coupled with her interspersed drafts of French exercises, suggests the manuscript was far from a final copy. If each woman conceived of different readers, she probably also perceived differently her role and responsibility as compiler. If Ann included her name on the title-page to authorise the recipes within, adding an additional layer of authority through the naming of authors of individual recipes further validated their effectiveness. It was, after all, a process frequently employed by recipe-book compilers and therefore expected by recipe-book readers and users. For Elizabeth, who was less concerned with creating a user-friendly compilation for a wide readership, she may have also been less careful about faithfully documenting all her sources. If the intended reader might only be herself, she would not need to further support her own authority through naming additional sources.

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The fluid definition of authorship in the recipe book genre allowed contemporaries the opportunity to switch between naming the author or donor at their own discretion; likewise, it permitted them the option of not naming anyone. As such, this could allow the manuscript compiler to use attributions to fashion an idealised network or establish a political alliance, as Lynette Hunter, Jayne Archer and Madeline Bassnett have discussed for printed recipe books of the 1650s.61 Similar conventions were found in manuscript recipe books, as recipes by the ‘King’ or ‘Queen’ frequently appear across the seventeenth century, and the two case studies in this chapter provide two opposing examples. The title-page of Ann Brockman’s manuscript dates the composition to June 1638, the beginning of the Scottish Revolution and a time when many English people doubted the abilities of Charles I to rule effectively. The Brockmans were staunch Royalists, and it is therefore no surprise to find two recipes attributed to the monarch within this collection. Likewise, in the collection associated with Lady Ranelagh (which was probably compiled only slightly after Ann Brockman began her own book) the first recipe after the title-page is ‘My Lady Barrington’s Balsum’, where the name is prominently displayed in large letters at the top. Through the intimate use of ‘My Lady’, Ranelagh is connected with this premier Parliamentarian household from the very first page. While the names in the recipe book do create a diverse circle of people with differing politics – something that can also be corroborated by Ranelagh’s extant letters – there are no popular recipes from a ‘king’ or ‘queen’ within, and the Barrington link establishes from the opening page Ranelagh’s Parliamentarian sympathies. Such fluid definitions of authorship made it easier for compilers to manipulate the appearance of their networks, and Commonwealth print conventions linking many types of publication, including recipe books, to Royalism meant readers were used to decoding such political encryption.62 By training ourselves to think about attributions in a more historically sensitive and specific way, we necessarily complicate our understanding of how early modern recipe-book compilers thought about and used author citation.

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Conclusion The uncertain function of recipe attributions should not suggest that no recipe book can provide evidence of the compiler’s network, but rather that each manuscript should be treated individually, requiring careful attention to detail and supporting archival evidence. For example, Wellcome MS 1340, a seventeenth-century recipe book compiled by members of the Boyle and Orrery families, has letters to the family copied into the compilation and many authors of individual recipes can confidently be identified as family members or friends.63 But while some recipe books may give evidence of familial knowledge and local networks, the examples in this chapter show that not all do. Without a stable definition of authorship or a dominant set of rules regarding the responsibility of the recipe-book compiler’s role, individuals may have used the author-citation system differently, changing between authors and donors without distinguishing, or by choosing not to document either. Though macro-level studies of recipe-book attributions have documented overall trends in knowledge transmission, the detailed case studies in this chapter highlight the potential problems with using such textual evidence to document an individual compiler’s network. By studying additional archival materials and careful attention to how authorship functioned, these attributions can allow us a partial glimpse into early modern medical, social and political networks. But by widening our definition of authorship, we must also widen our definition of a network. If we understand a network to include individuals at multiple removes, and comprising a series of connections that evolve over one’s lifetime, or possibly even ‘imagined’ communities, recipe books can help us begin remapping this.64 The process of documenting medical knowledge and practice in seventeenth-century England was deeply entrenched in textual culture, where contemporaries were constantly reshaping definitions of authorship and authority among rapid technological and scientific advances. As such, an interdisciplinary methodology drawn from the history of medicine and literary studies is best for approaching such multi-faceted texts. Further investigation into the relationship between authority and authorship could help us reflect

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on the methodological tools we use upon these historical documents, and might help us understand how these names functioned for the early modern men and women writing, reading and using these manuscripts.

Notes 1 Leong, ‘Medical recipe collections’; Leong and Pennell, ‘Recipe collections’, p. 138. 2 Wellcome MS 213, ‘A booke of diuers medecines’, Mrs Corlyon, 1606, fols 135r–v. 3 Stine, ‘Opening closets’, pp. 187–8. 4 Leong, ‘Medical recipe collections’, Ch. 3. 5 Ibid., p. 198. 6 Pennell, ‘Perfecting practice?’, pp. 243–5. 7 For example, see Wellcome MS 1340, medical and culinary recipe book, c.1675–1710, fol. 139v: ‘The Authour of this Receipt is not very Exact either in ye time of taking it or in the quantity of the Garlick, but says he drinks it often especially at those Seasons when there is most danger of the Gout.’ 8 Harold Love, Attributing Authorship: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 39. 9 For example, see Natura Exenterata, or Nature Unbowelled by the Most Exquisite Anatomizers of Her (London: printed for H. Twiford, G. Bedell & N. Ekins, 1655), which lists all contributors of individual recipes at the beginning of the collection, separated by their gender and status. See also Ezell, this volume. 10 For an example of Dr Stephens’s water, see Wellcome MS 4338, recipe book attributed to Johanna St John, late seventeenth century, fol. 29r. 11 Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric; Love, Attributing Authorship. 12 In this manuscript, the title ‘Captain’ may refer to when he served in an auxiliary regiment of the King’s army from 1644 to 1646. The sub-heading of fol. 32v, discussed here, offers further verification that ‘Capt Willis’ is the physician Dr Thomas Willis. See ODNB, ‘Willis, Thomas (1621–75)’. 13 Michelle DiMeo, ‘Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh (1615–91): science and medicine in a seventeenth-century Englishwoman’s writing’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Warwick, 2009). See also ODNB, ‘Jones (née Boyle), Katherine, Viscountess Ranelagh (1615–91)’. 14 For a detailed palaeographic comparison of the hands, see DiMeo, ‘Katherine Jones’, Ch. 4. 15 I have not included the name ‘Dr Chayme’ in this count, as his name was listed in the section of the volume attributed to Thomas Willis. For a list of

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all attributions, see DiMeo, ‘Katherine Jones’, Appendix E-1. 16 BL Sloane MS 1367, fol. 52v. In a bundle of notes, Hartlib includes a recipe ‘Pro hydrope’ that names ‘Mr Green Apothecory [sic] in great St Bartholomew’ as the source. The date is given earlier in this bundle in relation to another recipe, but it may reflect the date of this bundle as a whole. See Sheffield University Library, Hartlib Papers 30/1/7B, notes and recipes, in German, Latin and English. 17 BL Add. MS 4293, Robert Boyle work diary vol. 26, entry for 13 April 1666, fols 50r–v: see www.bbk.ac.uk/boyle/workdiaries/ (accessed 1 July 2011). 18 BL Sloane MS 1367, fol. 39r. 19 She became Viscountess Ranelagh in 1643, but I refer to her as ‘Lady’ because it is the title used by most contemporaries. 20 For Digby’s recipes, see BL Sloane MS 1367, fols 19v–20r. 21 Dr Willis is also not included in this count, as he is usually referred to as ‘Capt Willis’ in this volume; see also n. 12 above. If these were added to the overall count, more recipes would be from physicians than aristocrats and upper gentry. 22 ‘Dr Burges Souveraigne Receipt agt the Plague’ (fol. 5v) was a very popular print and manuscript recipe of the mid- to late seventeenth century: see, for example, John French, The Art of Distillation (London: E. Cotes for Thomas Williams, 1653), p. 53. 23 BL Sloane MS 1367, fol. 17v. 24 Margaret Pelling, Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians, and Irregular Practitioners 1550–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. Ch. 5. 25 BL Sloane MS 1367, fol. 77r. 26 Ibid., fol. 42v. Harvey knew Dr Francis Prujean, another physician possibly referenced in this manuscript, as the two worked together at the Royal College of Physicians. See ODNB, ‘Prujean, Francis (c.1597–1666)’. 27 ‘Gerard’s Powder for to conserve & restore the sight’ (fol. 26r) is probably from the herbalist John Gerard (c.1545–1612). Three of the six recipes attributed to ‘Culpeper’ (fols 45r–46r, 50v) include a page number at the close which suggest they were copied from one of the many Culpeper publications of this period. The source ‘[Acbillier]?’ also has page numbers after his recipes (fol. 52r). For Dr Burges see n. 22 above. 28 BL Sloane MS 1367, fol. 55r. 29 DiMeo, ‘Katherine Jones’, Ch. 1. 30 Ibid., Ch. 5. 31 When her sister-in-law Lady Burlington was ill, Ranelagh procured ‘two smale Botles of sperit of Sal Armoniacke’ from her brother Robert Boyle, and asked her sister Mary Rich to send Burlington ‘missleto of ye Oake’: see BL Add. MS 75354, letters from Lady Ranelagh to Lord Burlington, 1667, fols 61–5.

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32 See BL Add. MS 75354, fols 61–5 (Dr Quartermain); 66–7, 97–8 (Dr Coxe); 70–3 (Dr Willis). For King, see National Archives of Scotland, GD 45/14/237/1–5. 33 The Correspondence of Robert Boyle, eds Michael Hunter, Antonio Clericuzio and Lawrence M. Principe, 6 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001), I, pp. 163–5. 34 BL Add. MS 75354, letter from Lady Ranelagh to Lord Burlington, [1675], fols 118–19. 35 Lady Margaret Orrery was Ranelagh’s sister-in-law through marriage to her brother Roger Boyle (1621–79), first earl of Orrery: see ODNB, ‘Boyle, Roger’. 36 Sheffield University Library, Hartlib Papers 60/4/20A-B, 66/8/1A. On Dorothy Moore and Lady Ranelagh’s medical collaboration, see Lynette Hunter (ed.), The Letters of Dorothy Moore, 1612–64: The Friendships, Marriage, and Intellectual Life of a Seventeenth-Century Woman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 37 BL Sloane MS 1367, fols 2r, 16r–v, 20v. The latter recipe reads ‘E. of Stafford [sic]’, and may indicate either Thomas Wentworth (1593–1641), first earl of Strafford, who had a long history with Lady Ranelagh’s father, Roger Boyle (1566–1643), first earl of Cork; or William Wentworth (1626–95), the second Earl. 38 See also Introduction and Withey, this volume. 39 Elizabeth was the eldest daughter of Ann’s son James Brockman (d. 1683) and his wife Lucy (née Young) (d. 1706): see ‘Genealogical tree of the Brockmans and Drake-Brockmans (Senior Branch)’, in D. H. DrakeBrockman (comp.), Record of the Brockman and Drake-Brockman Family (privately published, 1936), unpaginated. 40 BL Add. MS 45197, ‘Booke of Receits’ attributed to Ann Brockman, fol. 1r. 41 BL Add. MS 42618, ‘The Humble petition of the Lady Brockman to the Honourable Committee for the Parliament Affairs in Kent’, 7 February 1643, fol. 4. The petition, written in a more typically feminine italic hand with larger letters formed of softer curves, is signed ‘Ann Brockman’. 42 On ‘starter’ collections, see Leong, ‘Medical recipe collections’. 43 Pennell, ‘Perfecting practice?’; Field, ‘“Many hands hands”’, pp. 55-6. 44 BL Add. MS 42618, ‘Humble petition’, fol. 4. 45 BL Add. MS 45197, fols 5v, 38v (for ‘Lord’); 31r, 37r (‘Lady’); 18r (‘Sir’). 46 Ibid., fols 5r, 6v, 15r, 31r (‘Doctor’); 21v, 22r (‘the King’). 47 Ibid., fols 28r (‘Master’); 34v–35r (‘My mother’). 48 BL Add. MS 45199, fol. 8v. 49 Wellcome MSS 373, 3731, recipe collections attributed to Letitia Mytton (née Owen), early eighteenth century. 50 The three medicinal waters are ‘To make Cherry Water’, ‘an excellent water for ye Scurvy’ and ‘A special water to wash hands’: BL Add. MS 45199, fols

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51 52 53 54 55

56

57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64

Methodologies 16r, 17r (16v is blank). BL Add. MS 45199, fol. 16r. BL Add. MS 45197, fol. 38r. Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric, p. 135. Pennell, ‘Perfecting practice?’, p. 239. Michelle DiMeo and Rebecca Laroche, ‘On Elizabeth Isham’s “Oil of Swallows”: animal slaughter and early modern women’s medical recipes’, in Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche (eds), Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity (New York: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 87–104. Wellcome MS 635, anonymous early seventeenth-century recipe book, fol. 42v; Wellcome MS 1026, recipe book attributed to Lady Ayscough, 1692, fol. 84r; Wellcome MS 3712, recipe book attributed to Elizabeth Okeover and others, c.1675–c.1725, fol. 95r. Theophano, Eat My Words, pp. 179–82. Stine, ‘Opening closets’, pp. 155–9. Margaret Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Stine, ‘Opening closets’, pp. 144–6. Lynette Hunter, ‘Women and domestic medicine: lady experimenters, 1570–1620’, in Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (eds), Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700 (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), pp. 89–107; Jayne Elisabeth Archer, ‘The Queens’ Arcanum: authority and authorship in The Queens Closet Opened (1655)’, Renaissance Journal, 1:6 (2002), 14–25; Madeline Bassnett, ‘Restoring the royal household: royalist politics and the Commonwealth recipe book’, Early English Studies, 2 (2009), 1–32. Ibid. For more on the reattribution of authorship for Wellcome MS 1340, see DiMeo, ‘Katherine Jones’, Ch. 4. Robert Mayhew, ‘Mapping science’s imagined community: geography as a republic of letters, 1600–1800’, British Journal for the History of Science, 38 (2005), 73–92.

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3

‘A practical art’: an archaeological perspective on the use of recipe books ANNIE GRAY

‫ﱬﱫ‬ Archaeologists have a long history of drawing upon the materiality of food and dining. Excavated food remains have been used to consider diet and nutrition, health and access to food. Butchery marks on bones can reveal whether animals were killed for their skins or their meat, and may show changing ways of dividing carcasses, into smaller or larger joints, or cuts.1 Meanwhile the artefacts associated with food have been used to study migration within countries or continents, power relations and trade networks.2 Cooking and dining are universal aspects of the human experience, and their material remains survive at most archaeological sites.3 Since the mid-1990s, the archaeology of the post-medieval period, usually taken as being c.1450 onwards, has emerged as a specific field its own right. In the UK the discipline is sometimes termed post-medieval archaeology. An alternative term, ‘historical archaeology’, is, however, increasingly preferred, as it can be linked more seamlessly with the parallel growth of post-colonial archaeological work, especially in Australia, Canada and North America. Current scholarship explores gender, class and the development and effects of Western capitalism, as well as always seeking to broaden and challenge its own methodological paradigms. Methodological tension over the use of text versus material culture, and excavated data versus items in museum collections, has occupied a great deal of space in historical archaeological writing, and, while a consensus has generally been reached about the utility of texts within an archaeological framework, such underlying methodological

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questions continue to have an influence.4 The field incorporates, and encourages, non-traditional ways of approaching the data, including experimental archaeology, reconstruction and recreation.5 Work on ‘ways of telling’, ranging from biography to theatrical presentation, forms a significant theoretical strand, one to which this chapter contributes, as it uses experimental and experiential work to inform its conclusions. This chapter addresses some of the ways in which written sources, specifically recipe books, and, within them, culinary recipes and associated writings (such as prefaces, general cookery advice and suggested table plans) can be used by archaeologists. It concentrates on printed sources, not least because discussion of the relationship between print and manuscript can be found elsewhere in this volume. Didactic literature is a particularly problematic area, no matter the disciplinary approach taken to it, but is also potentially highly rewarding. The most obvious, and least debatable (though by no means entirely straightforward) use of such sources is in identifying the use to which specific objects were used – especially pertinent in the nineteenth century, by which time recipe books frequently published illustrated lists of kitchen equipment.6 However, the usefulness of recipe books extends far beyond this. Very little archaeological work has drawn upon them, not least because relatively few food-focused studies have yet emerged from the corpus of historical archaeological writing, although studies of ceramics and associated material culture are increasing, and the body of work including elements of food history is substantial.7 This chapter draws upon my own doctoral research into gender, class and dining in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and therefore concerns the later part of the period covered by this volume.8 It considers the pitfalls for the archaeologist seeking to explore the materiality of food in the past through cookbooks, before illustrating the uses of books beyond their function as a simple tool for the identification of obscure kitchen gadgets; namely in providing information for experimental archaeology, in aiding in understanding attitudes towards the objects used for cooking and dining; and as material culture in their own right.

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Theorising recipe books

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All is performed in so exact a manner, that infallible Methods are thereby pointed out . . . so that all other Direction and Assistance . . . is thereby render’d unnecessary.9 They are mistaken that think a Tract of this kind can be very beneficial unto any, but such as have been in some measure Practitioners.10

Recipe books are the single most-used category of data for the study of cookery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Termed ‘by far our best source for any examination of the history of cookery’,11 culinary recipe books have been used to draw conclusions about subjects as diverse as meal times, settings, and the development of specific recipes.12 That said, they are not the only source of information on foodways (a term used by archaeologists and anthropologists to refer to the various manifestations of food in culture) more generally. Written sources include official records of taxation, imports and exports; household and personal account books; diaries; and fictional depictions of cooking and eating.13 Objects and spaces are also of fundamental importance, and may be complemented by inventories and/or purchasing records.14 Critical discussion of the usefulness of recipe books as a source, and the nature of the relationship between contemporary readers and published or unpublished sources is less in evidence. Didactic literature was regarded with ambivalence even by its authors. All promoted the idea of text as teacher, but while some, such as Charles Carter, cited above, seemed to believe in the infallibility of their work, others, including William Rabisha, also cited above, were explicit in denying that they were teaching ‘kitchen wenches’ to rival courtly cooks.15 Questions can be asked about the reliability of advice given in books, especially given the tension between aspiration and reality in the increasingly competitive early modern publishing industry. Studies of reading habits, specifically of didactic books, have illustrated the multiplicity of ways in which readers approached books, treating even instructional texts as merely a pleasurable way to pass time.16 Alternatively, many were simply not read, either due to the impracticality of the advice offered, or of the limitations of

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literacy.17 Any given set of instructions might result in an infinite number of finished products, as the interplay of individual taste, experience, resources and equipment came to bear on the original text. For the archaeologist seeking to explore how individuals interacted with the material world around them, the risks of assuming that the actions suggested by writers were acted out faithfully are manifest. While the rewards of approaching recipe books within an archaeological framework seem tantalising, it is still therefore difficult to know how to make use of seemingly detailed data when we have no idea how, or even if, it was used in a contemporary context.

Print authority and the aspirational ideal The aspirational quality of recipe books is twofold. On the one hand, books offered the possibility to the hopeful cook that s/he might learn from them how to concoct and present quality food. On the other, they held out to employers the concept of a harmonious kitchen. In a few cases, the role of the text is made explicit. Frontispieces to cookbooks sometimes include the book itself as part of their illustrations of ideal kitchens. In engraved frontispieces to both Mrs [Eliza] Haywood’s A New Present for a Servant Maid (London, 1771) and William Augustus Henderson’s The Housekeeper’s Instructor; or Universal Family Cook (London, n.d. but c.1790), one or more copies of the volume itself are in active use, being consulted by male and female kitchen workers.18 In both cases, the staff are all busy, engaged with the processes involved in their work, and working together in harmony with the physical copy of the book the focus and driver of their work. An alternative is suggested by the c.1775 edition of Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery, in which a mistress is shown giving her cook a handwritten recipe text copied from a printed volume.19 Recipe books could still be relatively expensive. Glasse retailed at 5s for a bound volume until at least the 1770s (based on prices given on title pages from different editions). The stitched edition was somewhat cheaper, at 3s 6d, but still equated to the equivalent of a week’s wages for a kitchen maid, even in a country house; at Harewood House in the 1790s two of the four female kitchen staff earned £8 per annum

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and the remaining two, £10 10s.20 Recipe books were not therefore unaffordable for aspiring cooks, but certainly represented a significant investment. It is not surprising, then, that they appear in the inventories of employers’ libraries. Treating the recipe book as sacrosanct, and enabling access only through the intermediary of the mistress, as is the case in the Glasse illustration, enforced hierarchy. By physically restricting access, the book itself became a tool by which the aspirational ideal promoted within its pages could be advanced. The written copy of the recipe is afforded less importance, allowed to enter the potentially damaging space of the kitchen and fall into the potentially damaging hands of the cook. The printed material from which it is derived, no matter how problematic as a text itself – and Glasse was a notorious plagiariser – was therefore given an importance beyond its intrinsic value.21 Objects such as instructional manuals could in this way be used as tools in the negotiation of status and discipline within a household. The meaning attached to them could vary according to their role as a restricted object, a gift or a purchase. It is vital for the archaeologist to consider the meaning of each book as an item of material culture (as Pennell does from the historian’s point of view, later in this volume), as well as to read its contents. Cookbooks undeniably set up an ideal. The examples studied here often assume the presence of specific equipment, suggesting menus and table plans based on easy and consistent access to ingredients, unlimited by price or location. Yet they also presume that, while the world and all its riches might be open to their readers, selfrestraint will be practised. This assumption of restraint is typical of self-help books aimed at the newly wealthy middling sort, seeking to differentiate themselves from both profligate poor and debauched aristocracy by the end of the eighteenth century.22 The aspirational nature of both culinary advice in general, and recipes in particular, does not, however, preclude their use as either a qualitative or quantitative source. Qualitatively, each recipe may be compared to a specific site context. It can be used as a case study, in the same way that an individual excavation can be used as a study in itself, and as a basis from which to generalise when put into the context of other, comparable, sites. Quantitatively, trends are visible, both in recipe development, table settings and in the layout and contents of the

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books themselves. There has been debate over the representativeness of cookery books as actual practice, but it would be patronising to suggest that books of the past reflected any less accurately their readers’ desires than those published today. Ultimately, no matter how much authors puffed themselves, the readership would dictate the book’s success. William Verral’s A Complete System of Cookery (London, 1759) sold so poorly that only one edition was published.23 Meanwhile, those by authors (and publishers) more understanding of their audience, including Hannah Woolley and Hannah Glasse, as well as other bestselling writers such as E. Smith and Elizabeth Raffald, had publication lives that long post-dated the deaths of their writers. Study of such books may be to some degree a study of their readers’ aspirations, but they are at least closer to being mass-market aspirations.

Kitchen equipment The most obvious archaeological use of cookbooks is in contextualising surviving materials and objects drawn exclusively from the archaeological and artefactual record. Not only do books contain illustrations useful in identifying artefacts, but the instructions contained within them demonstrate the multiplicity of uses to which equipment might be put. They act as a warning against the straightforward association of form and function, and the assumption that any object will be used for its given purpose by a given user. Artefacts can change or be changed over their lifespan, and may carry different meanings at different times. Although a manufacturer may have designed and sold an item with both a purpose and end-user in mind, the impact of the second-hand and rental markets, along with the sale of old-fashioned and defective goods, should not be disregarded. 24 Careful reading of the detail in recipes indicates the use of numerous items not immediately associated with cookery.25 String is used for trussing, and writing paper is vital for stopping delicate parts of an animal drying out before the heat of a fire. Wetted fabric is wrapped around cake tins to ensure an even rise, and they may be stood on sand to stop the bottoms burning. Even where an object is clearly intended for the kitchen, a multitude of uses may still be possible. Food moulds, for example,

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may be intended for jelly, as is often the assumption when faced with the inevitable ranks of shining copper in country-house kitchen displays. But jelly is time-consuming to make and requires sufficient specialist equipment that renders it difficult to cook without access to a landed estate, an aspect further explored below. It melts in the heat but reflects light beautifully, making it ideal for candlelit dinners. However, the same mould, whether ceramic, tin or copper, may also be used for cakes, a completely different sensory experience requiring different skills and equipment and giving a different end result. Ceramic moulds are not easy to use, particularly in unmoulding set foods. Metal moulds are easier to use, both for set foods – not just jellies, but also blancmanges, fruit cheeses and creams – and baked or steamed puddings and cakes. Technological change, while not aimed necessarily at or driven by cooks, made possible the mass production of such moulds by the early nineteenth century, and the commercialisation of ready-made gelatine and isinglass was well under way by the same period.26 It is not therefore surprising that by the mid-nineteenth century moulded foods are ubiquitous in most recipe books, and not just those aiming at the upper echelons of society. Yet this is not an area easily studied through the objects alone. In theory stain/remains analysis might elucidate the use of moulds, in the few cases where washing-up has failed to remove evidence of their last use, but in practice, without knowing exactly when the mould was last used, and how it had since been stored, it would add little to investigation of the mould’s use in a specific time period. The physical condition of moulds, particularly ceramic examples, is more useful, especially when twinned with findings from experimental work. For example, the effect of boiling a pan dry with a steamed pudding within leaves tell-tale crack marks around the bottom of the pudding mould.27 Aspects of socio-economic change are also discernible in the spread of such specialist vessels as china teacups and glasses into the kitchen as objects to be used in culinary preparation. Tea was first introduced to England in the 1650s, along with its associated material culture, from teacups (or ‘dishes’) and saucers, to slop and sugar bowls. By the early eighteenth century, printed recipes make use of china cups for serving both foods and medicines, and by the

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mid-century they appear as measuring tools or even, along with saucers, as cooking vessels.28 The American use of cups as the primary unit of measurement for baking almost certainly derives from the export of both the habit and the cups themselves in the mid- to late eighteenth century. By the 1780s, the concept of the cupcake had been established, denoting a cake where one cup of each ingredient was used. The term ‘cupcake’ was in use for both this and more complicated sponge cake-based small cakes in American and England by the 1830s.29 Significantly for excavated contexts, the subsequent use of older, formerly high-status vessels such as these in the kitchen reduces the accuracy of ceramic shards when assigning economic status to a site.30

The spaces of culinary preparation Recipe books can be useful aids in considering the spatial set-up of kitchens. Many standing examples of kitchens and food-preparation spaces survive from the period under study. They do not, however, always exist in a form that can be easily read and therefore analysed. Working-class domestic survivals are especially rare without later changes, which usually include kitchen extensions. Middle-class spaces, by their very nature, are often still in use, both in urban and rural contexts. While the original room may still be in use as a kitchen, fixtures and fittings are likely to have been swept away in later renovations. In country houses open to the public, where not replaced by later service wings, kitchens often present the most convenient spaces for locating tearooms. Increasingly, however, country-house kitchens, such as that of Audley End, Essex (in 2008), Ickworth, Suffolk and Ham, greater London (both in 2012), are being reopened, refitted and/or reinterpreted in recognition of the growing public interest in ‘below-stairs’ space. At Audley End, the development of the kitchen can be charted from a mixture of maps and plans.31 In line with general trends in country-house construction, the kitchen and appendages started life as a Jacobean hall-kitchen, similar to that at Hampton Court Palace. By 1720 it was sited in a pavilion, removed from the house and accessed via an underground corridor. No traces of either of these stages remain, except a short section of the corridor, but the 1740s

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space does survive, as it was later converted into a servants’ hall, and is now the visitor café. Internally little remains to hint at its previous use, though externally traces can be seen of a door to the gardens. The current external service wing was constructed from 1760, commencing with the kitchen and dairy, but the current built environment is predominantly that of post-1830. It consists of two larders, one of which is now a storeroom, a scullery, pastry room and the kitchen itself. A later annex was added, containing a room with coppers, a coal store and a toilet. Physical evidence of the eighteenth-century kitchens is therefore scarce, and, without removing the nineteenth-century fixtures, unlikely to be added to. The complex is set-dressed to c.1881, as part of a re-creation of the Victorian service experience. A fire in that year led to a partial refit of the spaces, including new ranges, and the surviving wooden fixtures – cupboards, dresser and shelves – are presumed to date to that year. A rough idea of earlier fittings can be gained from a partial inventory from 1797, and smaller goods can be guessed at using a 1745 list of contents drawn up as part of a house sale.32 A number of questions can be elucidated by considering the general picture presented by recipe books, along with standing evidence and inventory data. For example, the arrangement of the roasting range, which in the Audley inventory is listed as ‘range, smoak jack, spitts, skewers’, is illustrated in a number of frontispieces. That in Henderson (c.1790) shows a copper situated to one side of the main range, venting up a shared chimney. This provides a clue as to the possible role of a probable hearth in the Audley scullery. A similar arrangement to that illustrated in Henderson survives in the former kitchens at Kew Palace, confirming that illustrations such as this are not unreliable. The ubiquity of certain elements shown in frontispieces, such as a flour dredger positioned on the mantelpiece, indicates certain norms in the placing of movable equipment: the frontispiece to Martha Bradley’s The British Housewife displays just such a positioning.33 The number of recipes that instruct that flour should have been well dried by the fire before use further contextualise this particular example.

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Mentalities of cookery Recipe books also afford insights into the mentalities of culinary preparation. The ordering of ingredients and intellectual hierarchy through which raw ingredients were processed into finished dishes should not be assumed to be the same as our post-‘green revolution’ ways of ordering knowledge about foodstuffs. Analysis of the way in which books are laid out confirms the impression given by other sources that roasting was the prestige method of cooking in the eighteenth century.34 The invention and popularisation of the smoke-jack in the early eighteenth century made the English the roasting cooks of Europe, a title happily embraced by those coming into regular contact with foreigners, especially the French.35 Authors habitually laid out their chapters roughly in the order of dinner itself, starting with soups, then fish, before moving on to the roast.36 National pride was therefore reflected in the ways in which culinary techniques were mentally filed. It is important to remember that the archaeological record can equally be used the other way round, in providing contexts for data derived from print. Consideration of the percentage of recipes using various meats in selected cookbooks is just one example of quantitative examination of recipe books.37 Such percentages give an indication, not of the proportion of different foodstuffs on the table, but of the ways in which raw products were likely to have been transformed before reaching the table and, later, the ground; an aspect sometimes overlooked by authors using cookbooks to study diet.38 Further change, once deposited, can then be taken into account before coming to conclusions about exactly how representative a deposit might be. For example, from both archaeological evidence and account books it is apparent that beef was the staple meat consumed by all socio-economic groups throughout the early modern and modern period. Despite this, veal is consistently included in the highest proportion of recipes in English-authored cookbooks until the mid-nineteenth century.39 This is not a conflict. It merely shows that veal was more likely to be highly transformed – not just roasted or boiled as joints, but chopped, hashed and mixed with ragouts or sauces. Veal was the standard ingredient in dishes requiring a high level of processing, the ‘made dishes’ of the

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eighteenth century and the entrées of the nineteenth. Because of this, it was an aspirational meat, usually associated with the wealthy. The association of veal with time-consuming and often intricate preparation impacts not just on buried deposits but also surviving storage facilities, preparative tools and the meaning veal carried both above and below stairs.

The materiality of the ephemeral As will be further discussed below, cooking the food, and experiencing the tastes, of past societies, is both informative and exciting. In the context of public engagement it is currently on trend: at the time of writing chef Heston Blumenthal, of the three-Michelin-starred Fat Duck in Bray, has recently opened Dinner at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in London, whose menus draw explicitly on historic sources, albeit heavily reinvented.40 Taste, however, is only one element of a dish. Edibility is assessed not just by taste, but also presentation. It is very difficult to investigate exactly what food looked like on the historic table. Some elements are obvious – there is a limit to the way in which roast beef can be displayed – but others are not. Many cookery books of the eighteenth century illustrate roast and boiled meats as part of either trussing or carving advice. The trussing of birds, in particular, was a means of displaying knowledge for the cook and diner alike. Cooks had to know how to truss each item, while, in an era before written menus became common, diners could show their familiarity with elite dining by their recognition of, for example, the snipe from the pheasant. Methods of trussing became more precise. Elizabeth Raffald, in her Experienced English House-keeper (Manchester, 1769), merely states that birds should be trussed, as does Hannah Glasse, though the latter is careful to point out that woodcocks should not be drawn.41 Martha Bradley, writing in the 1750s, is very useful to the student of the look of food, including rare illustrations of food on the table, as well as trussing diagrams.42 By the nineteenth century, instructions have become more detailed, and pictures more common. Hence we know that the pheasant should have its head under one of its wings, and that a roast hare retain its ears in a perky pose.43 Experience suggests a

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three-day-old hare is optimum for this treatment, in line with Richard Bradley’s remarks on keeping in The Country Housewife and Lady’s Director (London, 1728): the ears are otherwise something of a challenge to skin.44 For hostesses in an increasingly competitive social milieu, something that could in one situation be merely playful could also stand as a test of social acceptability, and knowledge of how best to achieve this was invaluable. The order in which food came to, and was presented on the table, was also significant. Food in the eighteenth century was served à la française, a style which usually consisted of two courses plus dessert, and in which a number of different dishes were presented on the table at the same time.45 In the first course soups were consumed first, then fish, with ‘made dishes’ filling the rest of the places. The second course usually contained roast meats (game, when in season) and additional ‘made dishes’, including custards, creams and blancmanges as well as fruit tarts. The planning of such a meal could be immensely complicated, and printed bills of fare, some of which were certainly produced, show that the interplay of contrasting and complementing foods was carefully considered. However, a meal does not exist in a vacuum, and the diners themselves dictated the positioning of dishes, which could be placed to highlight a guest’s importance (or, indeed, lack thereof). Richard Bradley makes this explicit: ‘the head [of the carp] is accounted much the best part . . . and is therefore presented as a compliment to the greatest stranger at the table’.46 Not only their presence but also their exact placement on the table was important: meats with heads on had to face someone. Roasted meat and fish were not the only foods which could be directional. Pies, such as those illustrated in John Thacker’s Art of Cookery (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1758), had geometrical ‘coffins’: his have small pastry rabbit heads and similar identifying features.47 Thacker and Bradley also both illustrate dishes intended to be symmetrical through a number of axes, reflecting the apparent inclusivity of the à la française table at which they were served. Yet this symmetry was undercut by mixing in directional dishes, to direct diners’ (and servants’) attention and flatter important guests. Food moulds and occasional pictures such as those in Bradley enable a glimpse at the styling of ephemeral foodstuffs, but descriptive passages in cookbooks are both more common and often more

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revealing. Among the more spectacular examples is this 1755 Scottish example: ‘A calf ’s head surprise: you must bone it and not split it, clean it well, and fill up the vacant Place with Forc’d-meat, and make it in the same form as before . . . bake it, and put a savoury Sauce under it. Blanch the Tongue, and let it hang out of the Mouth.’48 In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the descriptions of garnishes in volumes such as Verral are a reminder that the recipes themselves should not be seen in isolation.49 Use of sippets (pieces of cut and usually fried bread), lemon slices and cockscombs in geometrical forms further enhanced the visual games played with food on the table. Books make clear the different methods of presenting dishes, each with their own potential for transmitting meaning. Creams, jellies and syllabubs, for example, were all usually served in individual glasses, and could be differently coloured to emphasise the individual nature of each serving. The glasses then sat upon a plate or stand. The use of such a serving device reflected the way in which à la française service, at its most developed, worked: each individual was carefully included within a group, separate, but harmoniously part of a more important whole. At the same time, honoured guests could be pointed at by use of directional styling, while symmetrical and circular forms could be used to highlight the communality of sharing dinner. None of this is obvious from simply cooking the dishes, or reading the recipes, but once visual form is put together with taste, texture and smell, the table can be populated. Unfortunately, without plans showing food in relation to real or imagined diners, the full impact of all of this is never quite seen. More work remains, therefore, to be done, in bringing together the texts and the edible elements which they could provisionally make, with surviving material culture and the people who interacted with them.

Experimental archaeology The use of experimental techniques and re-creation in exploring the past is now well established within archaeological study.50 Being founded on human interaction, physical and mental, with the material world, it is a natural corollary for the subject to embrace attempts to re-create certain interactions, with the goal of furthering

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understanding of the nature of the relationship between user and object. In some cases, experimental archaeology can also yield valuable insights into technology and engineering; in this respect cookery is an area that has been enthusiastically explored by both archaeologists and food historians. In a further demonstration of interdisciplinary working, important work is also being done by artisans producing objects in accordance with historic techniques, who in some cases then use them to understand how and why certain pots or crocks were designed in certain ways.51 Experimenting with historic food is often carried out in sites open to the public, and with an eye to visitor satisfaction, but his does not negate the opportunities for learning. Even when the constraints of modern mores (turtle is not going to be prepared, despite the Georgian predilection for it), health and safety, equipment and time are considered, valuable lessons may still be learnt. Cooking the recipes contained within the pages of books acts as a reminder of the sensory nature of food, sometimes easy to forget in the fervour of academic study. Inevitably, no recipe can be recreated exactly, as ingredients, equipment and techniques have changed in the intervening centuries. Attempting it is nevertheless valuable on a number of levels, not least in demonstrating the sheer physicality of kitchen work, a facet often far from obvious in the text. When techniques are examined, not only the excellence of some advice, but also the problems with plagiarism, in its confusing and changing of information, quickly become apparent. In what is perhaps an obvious example, nearly all books intended for use with an open range and smoke-jack or clockwork jack advise that paper be tied across the more succulent parts of a trussed animal.52 Roasting in front of a fire necessitates this approach, and, when done properly, the result is far superior to baked meat, aiding in understanding the longevity of the open range, despite its many disadvantages. Other examples of techniques which provoke scepticism in reading, but acceptance on doing include the numerous recipes calling for eggs to be beaten for outrageously lengthy times, or those for whipped syllabub which necessitate leaving the alcoholic froth draining on a sieve for several hours.53 Cooking the recipes also elucidates their aspirational nature, in that some simply cannot be cooked unless the kitchen possesses

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certain facilities. Calf ’s-foot jelly, mentioned above, is consistently one of the longest and most detailed recipes given in printed books. It requires specialist equipment, from a pan large enough to hold four or more calves’ heels (or two cows’ heels – with five pints of water this eventually produces a pint of jelly), to a jelly bag (or layers of cloth). It requires several hours of boiling to extract the gelatine and reduce the water, and further time (overnight, ideally), to allow the jelly to set so that the fat and sediment, which rise to the top, can be taken off with a spoon. It must then be melted down for a second time, at which point the other ingredients listed in whichever recipe is being used are added to enhance the taste. Most suggest the addition of extra isinglass to ensure a firmer set for moulding. Maria Rundell’s 1806 recipe is an example that does not, and which, when made, sets well, but only in a refrigerator, or, in the eighteenth century, an ice box. Ice boxes could be filled with commercially available ice, but this was difficult to obtain until the 1830s, and regular ice supplies most reliable only if an ice house was present as part of the culinary environment.54 She advises the addition of egg white and shell in the second part of the recipe, which both clarifies the jelly and aids the set at a molecular level.55 The resulting jelly should be clear, with a set that is markedly different to modern jellies, even those using leaf gelatine. In this case specialist equipment is clearly essential. In others, experimental work elucidates why some equipment might have been slow to appear in kitchens. Mixing a cake by hand, for example, often proves easier than trying to use a spoon, let alone a whisk, especially when rich fruit cake is concerned. While the egg whisking is easily done with a whisk, cake mixing, if performed with a wooden spoon, has a tendency to lead to blisters. A number of books contain admonitions to beat eggs for half an hour or cakes for three hours, which does yield manifestly superior results to doing so for shorter lengths of time (or using a food processor).

Conclusion Recipe books are a phenomenally rich resource. However, it is only through studying them in a variety of interdisciplinary ways that their full potential can begin to be realised. A historical and archae-

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ologically informed approach draws out the material ramifications of the text, using the content of the books to contextualise spaces that have often been refitted and reused, obscuring earlier usage; and to elucidate the way in which objects might have multiple uses either at the time of purchase, or later. Recipe books can assist the archaeologist in understanding reasons for the physical condition in which a space or object might be found, and encourage consideration of the various life stages through which they might go. Frontispieces are valuable visual depictions of lost spaces and the way in which workers moved through them, while the aspirational nature of books is a reminder of the tensions within those working environments. Bills of fare, meanwhile, are vital in populating the table and enabling a full appreciation of the way in which the look, feel and taste of the food might have added to the surviving material culture of the table. Recipes, crucially, provide a source for experimental archaeology, which itself yields vital information on the physicality of kitchens, the kinetics of food production and specific information on taste and texture. However, recipe books are not in themselves enough for archaeologically informed conclusions to be drawn about food in the past. While they hint at spaces, they cannot stand in for the experience of the space of the kitchen or dining room. They suggest prescribed reactions to equipment, and promulgate an idea of harmonious working below stairs, to produce always-perfect results upstairs. Study of damaged kitchen equipment, and engagement with the recipes through experimental techniques, belie the aspirational nature of books. The full version of the late Georgian dinner was a stunning experience, and food was only one element within it, albeit a vital one. In the light of the fire and artfully placed candles, reflected and refracted not just by the food, but also by silver and gold tableware, enhanced by the white tablecloths and pier glasses, the food was gradually consumed, uncovering gilded plates, themselves as carefully designed as the food. Plates and other tableware could also be directional, full of meaning and chosen with diners in mind. Recipe books are therefore a rich and rewarding source for the archaeologist, but they must always be seen in the context of the material culture that surrounded them, and ultimately the people who deployed them.

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Notes 1 K. Matthews, ‘Familiarity and contempt: the archaeology of the “modern”’, in S. West and S. Tarlow (eds), The Familiar Past? Archaeologies of Later Historical Britain (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 155–79; James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (first pub. 1977: this edn New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1996). 2 For work on slave foodways, see T. Singleton, ‘The archaeology of slave life’, in Charles Orser (ed.), Images of the Recent Past (Lanham: AltaMira, 1995), pp. 141–65; for trade networks, D. Gaimster, ‘Hanseatic table culture in northern Europe 1200–1600: the archaeology of cultural transfer and resistance’, in M. Carroll, D. Hadley and H. Willmott (eds), Consuming Passions: Dining from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Stroud: Tempus, 2005), pp. 67–85. 3 Martin Jones, Feast: Why Humans Share Food (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 1–21. 4 Linda Young, Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia, Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); D. Austin, ‘The “proper study” of medieval archaeology’, in D. Austin and L. Alcock (eds), From the Baltic to the Black Sea (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), pp. 9–43. 5 Harold Mytum, ‘Pembrokeshire’s pasts: natives, invaders and Welsh archaeology: the Castell Henllys Experience’, in P. Stone and P. Planel (eds), The Constructed Past: Experimental Archaeology, Education and the Public (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 181–93. 6 A. Marshall, Mrs A. B. Marshall’s Cookery Book (London: Marshall’s Cookery School, c.1888); C. H. Senn, The New Century Cookbook: Practical Gastronomy and Recherché Cookery (London: Spottiswoode & Co., 1901). 7 Food-focused exceptions include Anne Yentsch, ‘Chesapeake artefacts and their cultural context: pottery and the food domain’, Post-Medieval Archaeology, 25 (1991), 25–72; D. Samuel, ‘Approaches to the archaeology of food’, PPC, 54 (1996), 12–21; E. Scott, ‘“A little gravy in the dish and onions in the cup”: what cookbooks reveal about material culture’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 1:2 (1997), 131–55. For examples of work using the material culture of foodways see D. DiZerega Wall, ‘Sacred dinners and secular teas: constructing domesticity in midnineteenth century New York’, Historical Archaeology, 25:4 (1991), 69–81; C. Milne and P. Crabtree, ‘Prostitutes, a rabbi and a carpenter – dinner at the Five Points in the 1830s’, Historical Archaeology, 35:3 (2001), 31–48. 8 Annie Gray, ‘“Man is a dining animal”: the archaeology of the English at table, c.1750–1900’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Liverpool, 2009). 9 Charles Carter, The Complete Practical Cook: Or A New System of the Whole Art and Mystery of Cookery (London: printed for W. Meadows, C. Rivington & R. Hett, 1730), p. xx.

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10 [William Rabisha], The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected, Taught, and fully manifested (London: printed for Giles Calvert, 1661), sig. A4v. 11 Lehmann, British Housewife, p. 11. 12 C. Kaufman, ‘Structuring the meal: the revolution of service à la Russe’, in Harlan Walker (ed.), The Meal: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, 2001 (Totnes: Prospect Books, 2002), pp. 122–33; Lehmann, British Housewife; Eileen White (ed.), The English Kitchen (Totnes: Prospect Books, 2007). 13 For an example which incorporates most of these, see J. Unwin, ‘Conspicuous consumption: how to organise a feast’, in J. Symonds (ed.), Table Settings: The Material Culture and Social Context of Dining, AD 1700–1900 (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010), pp. 41–51. 14 L. Weatherill, ‘A possession of one’s own: women and consumer behaviour in England, 1660–1740’, Journal of British Studies, 25:2 (1986), 131–56; P. Shackel, Personal Discipline and Material Culture: An Archaeology of Annapolis, Maryland, 1695–1870 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993). 15 [Rabisha], Whole Body, sig. A4r; Carter, Complete Practical Cook, p. xx. 16 N. Glaisyer and S. Pennell, ‘Introduction’, in N. Glaisyer and S. Pennell (eds), Didactic Literature in England, 1500–1800: Expertise Constructed (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 14–15. 17 C. Steedman, Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 275. The blithe assumption that the rural poor would read recipe books and immediately convert, if they had any sense, to the nutritious delights of soup, continued unabated into the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries: for example, see Senn, New Century Cookbook, pp. 99–100. 18 Mrs [Eliza Fowler] Haywood, A New Present for a Servant Maid (London: printed for G. Pearce & H. Gardner, 1771), frontispiece; Haywood’s earlier A Present for a Servant Maid (London: printed and published by T. Gardner, 1743) does not include the frontispiece. William Augustus Henderson, The Housekeeper’s Instructor: or, Universal Family Cook (London: W. & J. Stratford, n.d. [c.1790]), frontispiece. 19 ‘A Lady’ [Hannah Glasse], The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy . . . a New Edition (London: ‘printed for a Company of Booksellers’, n.d. [c.1775]), frontispiece: reprinted in Lehmann, British Housewife, p. 128. 20 The male cook, meanwhile, took home £94 10s per annum. Data on wages at Harewood House are taken from an unpublished database compiled from wage books and oral histories, on deposit at Harewood House, Yorkshire. 21 Fiona Lucraft, ‘The London art of plagiarism, part I’, PPC, 42 (1992), 7–24. 22 S. Tarlow, The Archaeology of Improvement in Britain, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 15–16.

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23 William Verral, A Complete System of Cookery (London: printed for and sold by the author, 1759); V. Maclean, A Short-Title Catalogue of Household and Cookery Books Published in the English Tongue 1701–1800 (London: Prospect Books, 1983), p. 147. 24 N. Ewins, ‘Supplying the Present Wants of our Yankee Cousins . . .’: Staffordshire Ceramics and the American Market, 1775–1880 (Stoke-onTrent: Stoke-on Trent City Museum and Art Gallery, 1997). For second-hand goods, see S. Pennell, ‘All but the kitchen sink: household sales and the circulation of second-hand goods in early modern England’, in J. Stobart and I. Van Damme (eds), Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade: European Consumption, Culture and Practices, 1700–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 37–56. Information on the rental market is harder to come by, but for an example, see York City Archives, Accession 12, notebook of general remarks and accounts relating to the Mansion House, York, c.1779–85. 25 For example, see R. Bradley, The Country Housewife and Lady’s Director (London: printed for Woodman & Lyon, 1728); M. Eales, Mrs Mary Eales’s Receipts (London: printed for J. Brindley & F. Montagu, 1733); ‘A Lady’ [Maria Rundell], A New System of Domestic Cookery (London: John Murray, 1806). 26 N. Cox, ‘“A Flesh pott, or a Brasse pott or a pott to boil in”: changes in metal and fuel technology in the early modern period and the implications for cooking’, in M. Donald and L. Hurcombe (eds), Gender and Material Culture in Historical Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. 143–57: Ivan Day, ‘Jellies, flummeries and creams’, available at www.historicfood.com/jellies.htm (accessed 1 July 2011). 27 See, for example, the ceramic moulds in the collection of the York Castle Museum. 28 For china cups see Sarah Jackson, The Director: or Young Woman’s Best Companion (London: printed for J. Fuller, 1754), p. 22 (recipe for lobsters with butter sauce), while Hannah Glasse recommends a teacup to cut out ‘ginger bread cakes’: ‘A Lady’ [Hannah Glasse], The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (London: printed for the author, 1747), p. 139. 29 A. Simmons, American Cookery, 2nd edn (Hartford and Albany: printed for Charles R. & George Webster, 1796), p. 48: the recipe is along similar lines to pound cake. The phrase ‘cupcake’ is used in Eliza Leslie’s Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes and Sweetmeats (Boston: Munroe & Francis, 1828), p. 61 and in Richard Dolby’s The Cook’s Dictionary and Housekeeper’s Directory (London: Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley, 1830), cited in a handwritten cook’s recipe book in the author’s possession. See also A. Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 234. 30 For example, G. Miller, ‘Classification and economic scaling of nineteenth-

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33

34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41

42

43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50

Methodologies century ceramics’, in M. Beaudry (ed.), Documentary Archaeology in the New World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 172–83. P. Drury, ‘“No other palace in the kingdom will compare with it”: the evolution of Audley End, 1605–1745’, Architectural History, 23 (1980), 1–39. English Heritage (on loan from Lord Braybrooke), cat. No. 88093826, inventory and schedule of goods, 1797; Saffron Walden Museum, cat. No. 41199CAT22, printed ‘Catalogue of the entire household goods and furniture of the late Lord Suffolk, 1745’. I thank Andrew Hann at English Heritage for supplying these references. Entitled ‘The Frontispiece to the Compleat English Cook’: Martha Bradley, The British Housewife: or the Cook, Housekeeper’s and Gardiner’s Companion (London: printed for S. Crowder & H. Woodgate, [1758]). Gray, ‘“Man is a dining animal”’, Ch. 5. B. Rogers, Beef and Liberty: Roast Beef, John Bull and the English Nation (London: Vintage, 2003). For example, the first chapter of [Glasse], Art of Cookery, is ‘Of Roasting, Boiling, etc’, while E. S.[mith], The Compleat Housewife (London: printed for J. Pemberton, 1728), begins with soups and pottages. Gray, ‘“Man is a dining animal”’, p. 263. J. Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions, 1500–1760 (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007). This is based on analysis of selected books from 1700 to 1900: Gray, ‘“Man is a dining animal”’, p. 46. Available at www.dinnerbyheston.com (accessed May 2011). Glasse, Art of Cookery (1747 edn), p. 6; Eliz[abeth] Raffald, The Experienced English House-keeper (Manchester: printed by J. Harrop for the author, 1769), p. 54. M. Bradley, British Housewife, illustration of ‘A Dinner in winter’ between pp. 96–7; and diagram of ‘a Hare truss’d for Roasting’, between pp. 216–17. For the publication history of this work, see Lehmann, British Housewife, pp. 393–5. [Rundell], New System, Plate IV. R. Bradley, Country Housewife, p. 133. P. Brears, ‘A la Française: the waning of a long dining tradition’, in C. A. Wilson (ed.), Luncheon, Nuncheon and Other Meals: Eating with the Victorians (Stroud: Sutton, 1994), pp. 91–116. R. Bradley, Country Housewife, p. 132. John Thacker, The Art of Cookery (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: L. Thompson & Co., 1758), p. 122. [Elizabeth Cleland], A New and Easy Method of Cookery (Edinburgh: printed for the author by Gordon & Wright, 1755), p. 49. See, for example, Verral, Complete System, pp. 8, 10, 172. Mytum, ‘Pembrokeshire’s pasts’.

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51 For example, J. Hudson, ‘A demonstration of Roman and medieval earthenwares’, unpublished paper given at West Yorkshire Archaeology Advisory Service annual public day school (Royal Armouries, Leeds, 27 November 2010). 52 Raffald, Experienced English House-keeper, p. 35; [Rundell], New System, p. 82. 53 Raffald, Experienced English House-keeper, p. 102; Ivan Day, ‘Further musings on syllabub, or why not “jumble it a pritie while”?’: available at www.historicfood.com/Syllabubs%20Essay.pdf (accessed April 2010). 54 Sara Paston-Williams, The Art of Dining (London: National Trust, 1993), p. 275. 55 Peter Brears, Jellies and their Moulds (Totnes: Prospect Books, 2010), p. 19.

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4

Genre conventions in English recipes, 1600–1800 FRANCISCO ALONSO - ALMEIDA

‫ﱬﱫ‬ This chapter seeks to explore genre conventions in English recipes from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.1 Recipes from all periods of English provide a good reflection of language in use. Besides specific words pertaining to plants and other ingredients, recipes portray a less academic type of language in contrast with learned treatises, which exemplify more elaborated rhetorical strategies, including technicalities borrowed from other languages. Because recipes are aimed at a wider audience than simply specialists, the presence of theoretical language is kept to a minimum. In this study, although a medieval linguistic pattern seems to persist, I will show that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English recipes exhibit some variation that foreshadows the shape of modern recipes. This is clearly seen in the visual signalling of recipe stages, but also from the authors’ desire to offer more specific directions for making and applying recipes. This linguistic analysis intends to describe these changing structural patterns over time and how structure is clearly marked by recurrent lexical and grammatical items tightly associated with each one of the content parts into which a recipe is divided. This chapter also discusses the way in which volumes are compiled either for public or private use following the concept of ‘discourse colony’, thereby considering the recipe book as one single unit rather than as a collection of independent recipe texts. Both the linguistic analyses of recipes carried out in this chapter and, more specifically, the application of the concept of ‘discourse

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colony’ tell us much about the reading and writing mind. The recipe book is conceived as an artefact likely to be updated to meet the needs of their users; even printed books contain material added later in the form of marginal notes. No other genre is so adaptable and permeable to accommodate changes reflecting the evolution of social and cultural codes. While many contributions to this collection demonstrate how recipe books captured new social norms such as mealtime manners, and cultural aspects including religious beliefs, this chapter demonstrates that evolving social and cultural contexts are also traceable in the linguistic configuration of the recipe over time. This linguistic variation, whether textual, lexical or orthographical, is valuable for the linguist because it allows for, among other things, identification of the provenance and authorship of texts and authorial stance and style, as well as the author’s social status and, to some extent, his or her cultural profile. These cultural and social cues are essential for determining the meaning of texts in context. The data for this chapter have been extracted from the Corpus of Early English Recipes (hereafter CoER), a project currently under way in the Department of English in the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.2 Such a corpus is useful for linguistic study because it accounts for the representativeness of this specific genre in a selected period of time. In this way, we can elicit information as presented in a given corpus rather than information biased by personal selection. To achieve representativeness, the CoER team is compiling no fewer than three million words from texts in manuscripts and printed sources, entering them into an electronic database. The time span, 1375 to 1900, allows for contrasting analyses over time.3 For the analyses presented in this chapter, I have used a total of 29 print and manuscript English-language recipe books containing recipes from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The target audiences of these books are both specialists and laypeople of both sexes, and contents vary from cookery to magical and medical practices.

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Methodology and definitions My linguistic description of recipes is underpinned by the principles of functional grammar.4 This model favours the description of a text in terms of its function in society and the relationship of the text with the audience in terms of lexical formalities: that is, its register. The main characteristics of the text-types illustrated in recipes will be commented upon and duly exemplified with data taken from our corpus of research, corresponding to the Modern English (i.e. 1500– 1900) section of the CoER. To my knowledge, the modern English recipe has not been the object of textual study in the history of English genres, except for the work of Manfred Görlach on the linguistic configuration of the cookery recipe after 1500.5 The concepts of genre, text-type and register are fundamental to understanding what sorts of changes recipes have undergone historically. Genre is understood as a cultural construct and thus genres vary according to the speaking community that circulates them. This concept is crucial to identifying and managing changes in the structure of texts. (Think, for instance, of letters today, where the contents are organised differently in English and Spanish. In the Spanish letter, there is no need to add the address details and the date is normally placed at the head of the letter.) The parts into which the text is divided are known in linguistics as stages6 or functional sections. As time progresses, genre changes may also happen within a single culture in order to adapt to new ways of thinking. Stages may appear following a strict order, and they may be compulsory or optional.7 However, since genre must be easily identifiable by readers and speakers of a same community, a set of stages must appear. New genres may emerge in a language depending on the speakers’ needs in communication, and these new genres could also originate from previous well-established genre models (as in email). Text-types address questions pertaining to the grammatical features used, and are often defined in terms of their language features. Egon Werlich classifies them into description, narration, exposition, argumentation and instruction, and the same text-types may occur in completely different genres.8 The instructive type is used in recipes, but also in instruction manuals. Because text-types tell us about language associations, they help identify the grammat-

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ical features of texts and characterise each genre stage according to how recurrent these features are. Register is related to the situational context of a particular communicative event, and this constrains the stylistic choices in an actual text. Register does not distinguish between genre types. A sermon and a prayer are genres belonging to the register of religion; similarly, an indenture, an act and a contract all belong to the legal register. The study of register is highly productive for the study of language use in professional settings because it is also a representation of participants’ roles in a communicative exchange. One good example is that of the teacher and his or her students. The teacher adapts the lecture depending on the students’ knowledge of the subject.

Genre and text-type conventions in recipes Earlier language studies on recipes as a genre have been based on medieval material and, although linguistic scholars do not agree upon the number of stages – that is, the parts or sections within a text – there is a consensus concerning the dialogic scholastic nature of the recipe.9 The title constitutes the question, and this is answered in the remainder of the text. However, while this dialogic structure is a good starting point, it is a weak method for characterisation of the recipe in terms of genre and text-type. Recipes very often do not show titles, as we shall see below. The richness of the recipe in terms of genre has been captured in the following schema, which represents a summary of the stages identified in studies on medieval and Renaissance recipes:10 (Title) ^ Ingredients ^ (Preparation) ^ (Application) ^ (Storage) ^ (Efficacy) ^ (Number of servings) ^ (Reference to source) ^ (Further additional information)

In this notation, the parentheses mean an optional stage, the circumflex indicates fixed order and the asterisk (in the example overleaf) implies variable order within the scheme. This formula shows that only the ingredients section is deemed logically necessary for a recipe to be considered as such in this period. I have found that many of these stages appear in the CoER, with

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ingredients still representing a compulsory stage. In general, the majority of stages follow the medieval fashion both in form and content, although the recipes have undergone some formal update to include new ways of thinking and new aspects concerning cultural and social behaviour. This is, in turn, reflected in the use of more elaborate and specific language to make recipes as informative and accurate as possible – a sharp contrast to medieval recipes, which are more characterised by the presence of vague expressions and omissions (quantities, application, storage, dosage) requiring interpretation by the user. In light of the evidence in the CoER, my schema of the recipe structure in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is reworked thus: (Title) * Ingredients * (Preparation) * (Application) * (Evaluation/Efficacy) * (Storage) * (Expiry date) * (Virtues)

In my representation, I have included the stages virtues and expiry date, as recurrent in these recipes. These stages are not new to the Modern English period, but they have received little scholarly attention, and researchers have not normally included them in their analysis of earlier recipes. My own research with the CoER reveals that the virtues and expiry date sections are frequent enough to deserve being studied separately. In what follows I will describe the key language features exhibited in the CoER recipes with a focus on variation over time, since, while many recipe technicalities have remained, many others have undergone noticeable changes.

Title (T) The title has various functions, including giving the contents of the text it heads. In the absence of numbering, it can also show the beginning of the recipe. However, some recipes do not have a title and are identified only by the blank space preceding them. Another common strategy is to use dividing lines in combination with titles between two recipes to visually indicate the new recipe. Sometimes the title is absent and the beginning of the new recipe is denoted simply by the dividing line.11 The linguistic configuration of the title is varied, as presented in

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the formulaic templates in Table 4.1. All templates given here are quite common in recipe compendia. Although titles are generally short, there are lengthier titles which seek to provide the reader with extra information, as in the late seventeenth-century recipe ‘A water to stop any Rhume in the Eyes or bloud-shot, or weakness caused by Rhumes also it preserves the sight’.12 This type of title helps readers in various ways, but primarily it saves time by eliminating the need to search the whole recipe for its therapeutic purpose. Table 4.1 Formulaic templates in recipe titles Template Examples To + infinitive + NP To make good could crust [1] [Noun Phrase] For to + infinitive + NP For to make a colour like Gold [2] NP French Pottage [3] For + NP For the small pox [4] For + v-ing For stanching of blood [5] NP + for + NP A souereigne oyntment for weaknesse in the backe [6] NP + to + infinitive + NP A posset-drink to remove the Plague from ones Heart [7] How to + infinitive + NP Howe to make a sweet cake [8] Sources: [1] Wellcome MS 2323, fol. 4v, collection of cookery recipes with a few medical and household recipes, attributed to Amy Eyton and others, 1691–1738; [2] [John Partridge], The VVidovves Treasvre (London: Eliz. Allde, 1631), p. 23; [3] Wellcome MS 1796, collection of cookery and medical recipes, c.1685–c.1725, fol. 17r; [4] Wellcome MS 108, fol. 18v, ‘A Booke of Receipts’, attributed to Jane Baber, c.1625; [5] Wellcome MS 373, ‘A very shorte and compendious Methode of Phisicke and Chirurgery’, attributed to Jane Jackson, 1642, fol. 23r; [6] Widowes Treasvre, p. 10 [7] D. E., The Housewife’s Hospital (London: J. Morphew, 1717), p. 3; [8] Wellcome Library MS 144, anonymous collection of medical, cookery and veterinary recipes, c.1650–1739.

While the medieval style of titles is predominant in the CoER, there is certainly a distinction between medieval and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts. In the CoER, medieval titles occasionally present information beyond the topic of the recipe, while the latter offer more detailed information specific to the recipe, such as where

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the product should be applied and the result. This innovation appears in the CoER in recipes dating back to the sixteenth century, as in the following: ‘A water to be used with this salue to wash the sore, before ye lay to the playster, as often as ye dresse it: good to clense the sore, and to abate proud fleshe’.13 This persists in some seventeenth- and eighteenth-century recipes: an early eighteenthcentury recipe collection contains several examples of long descriptive titles, including ‘A Soueraigne Ale to bee tooke 28 daies together betweene March and May, for 18 dayes in the fall to beginne about the 10th of September who soe useth orderly shall need no other Physicke’.14 This detailed information is not repeated in the main recipe text. My analysis of the CoER recipes also shows that after 1500, the style of cooking is more often given in cookery recipe titles, with more specific cooking verbs being frequently used. The use of evaluative elements in titles is also noteworthy, especially in the medical register, where ‘excellent’, ‘approued’, ‘notable’, ‘good’ and ‘incomparable’ occur with words like ‘medicine’, ‘experiment’, ‘drinke’ and ‘water’; but also in the culinary register, as in ‘An excellent way for baking all sorts of Venison and fowle’.15 The use of these evaluative items seems not to have diminished from the medieval period, even in the number of occurrences. However, there is a gradual shift in the most frequent evaluative word: good is replaced by excellent in most cases. Similarly, the expression of efficacy and evaluation is gained by providing evidence of sources, such as mentioning authorities or the recipe’s provenance. In an eighteenth-century recipe for medicinal water, the ‘Dutchess of Marlborough’16 appears in the title almost certainly to create an effect of prestige. Sometimes the evidential information is given by a different hand, as ‘Mrs Conyers’ in ‘The stomack Plaister Mrs Conyers for a Cough’.17 There is not a fixed rule concerning the frequency of all these evaluative elements in our corpus, and in the case of the medical register their use seems to reflect the compiler’s/author’s style rather than a tradition. Nevertheless, titles in printed cookery books are more similar to the medieval tradition, with evaluation used very sparingly.

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Ingredients (I) This section very often appears together with the preparation section, as we shall see below. Key terminology used in this section is related to herbs, animal and fish products, implements of cooking, and the like. Whereas in medical texts the imperative verb ‘take’ opens the ingredients stage in both earlier and later periods, results from the CoER suggest that seventeenth-century culinary texts tend to move towards using verbs depicting more specific actions: ‘pare all the skinne’, ‘chop sweet hearbes’, ‘parboyle either of these fowles’, ‘washe greene Beets clean’. The ingredients are generally inserted in running text, as in a late seventeenth-century recipe ‘To make a rare sweet water: Take sweet Marjoram, Lavender, Rosemary, Muscovy, Maudlin, Balm, Thyme, Walnut Leaves, Damask Roses, Pinks, of all a like quantity.’18 However, there are some exceptions. In one seventeenth-century manuscript, this stage is visually separated from the remaining text and accompanied by braces on the left to indicate exact quantities (see Figure 4.1).19 In another late seventeenth-

4.1 Recipe for ‘The Lady Allens Water’ taken from Wellcome MS 1322, anonymous, ‘A booke of divers receipts’, c.1660–c.1750

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century manuscript recipes occasionally either start or end with a list of ingredients normally organised in a set of three columns. The use of braces or vertical lines is exclusively to divide the columns, but quantities are not given.20 Listing ingredients separately from the rest of the text is not frequent in our corpus, not even in medicinal recipes. The main reason for using this method seems to be to avoid a long list of products in a running text, rather than to place emphasis on quantities.

Preparation (P) The preparation stage, indicating how ingredients should be combined, very often appears together with the ingredients. The main problem with this combination of stages is that users needed to read the entire recipe to determine the required ingredients. As discussed in the previous section, texts from the seventeenth century onwards occasionally separated ingredients, foreshadowing modern recipes in which all ingredients are normally indicated at the beginning. In one late seventeenth-century recipe ‘to Make cordial Balsome’, the preparation section is clearly marked by the words ‘To Make it’ given on a separate line and centred;21 this suggests to the linguist that compilers and scribes identified the ingredients and preparation sections as being distinct within the rhetorical structure of the recipe. However, it appears that keeping them sharply separated was a matter of style and authorial decision, since the medieval way of combining both stages was still the dominant trend in this later period. The preparation section is linguistically realised by means of imperatives and use of the present tense in the second-person singular (‘you beat’, ‘you take’); and adverbs of time and conjunctions to show logical sequencing of actions. An example may be seen in Wellcome MS 1795, a late seventeenth-century manuscript: To make Jelly of Hartshorne. Take a quarter of a pound of Hartshorn and three quarts of spring water boyle it in a clean pipkin tile it will Jelly then. Strain it through a Jelly bagg into an Earthen pan lett it stand to coole. The next morning melt it and put to it half a quarter of a pint of Rennish [Rhenish] Wine the pairing of a Lemon two or three blades of large mace mix Juice of Lemon and Sugar to your

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taste. Take the whites of three Eggs beaten to a froth mixe them well with your Jelly then sett it over a quick fire. Lett it boyle ‘till the Jelly looks clear and the Eggs are hard then straine it tho’ [sic] the Jelly bagg into Glasses.22

Besides ‘take’, there are some other specialised verbs that show manipulation of the ingredients, such as ‘boyle’, ‘strain’, ‘melt’, ‘mix’, ‘sett’, ‘lett’ and ‘put’. The time expressions – ‘the next morning’, ‘then’ and ‘till’ – give the correct order of actions. Even ‘and’ in the sentence, ‘The next morning melt it and put to it half a quarter of a pint’, is to be interpreted as a time connector meaning ‘then’. Time expressions are a typifying feature of instructive text-types. In the fashion of medieval recipes, ‘take’ still remains as the preferred form to introduce ingredients in this period and, similarly, the use of time expressions to show sequencing of actions in the preparation section are most commonly indicated by ‘and’ and ‘then’.

Application (A) This stage is characterised both by the presence of vocabulary related to body parts (in medical recipes) and to products (in culinary recipes); and by the presence of the imperative mood. In culinary texts, the formulaic expression ‘serve it forth’ appears frequently. A medical recipe example may be found in ‘A Spring water Mrs Papillions’: after explaining the ingredients and preparation, it says ‘& lay it on the sore 6 or 8 drible & dresse it 3 houres a day’.23 The main difference between this stage in culinary and medical recipes is the presence of time and metrical units to indicate both dosage and duration of treatment in the latter. The use of exact quantities (number of drops, for instance) is often explicitly stated in the modern English texts; this stands in sharp contrast with medieval recipes, in which dosage was hardly ever so accurately given. Another important difference is that the medical recipes tend to give more precise verbal forms. Whereas culinary recipes continue to appear with the traditional ‘serve’ phrase (or related verbs such as ‘garnish’ and ‘dish’), medical ones include more specific verbs, such as ‘rub’, ‘apply’, ‘blow’ and ‘put (drops)’, to ensure that the product is

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correctly applied. While ‘serve’ is still the commonest way to express application in later culinary recipes, more elaborate expressions are also given. This is the case of the anonymous late eighteenth-century recipe ‘To fricasee Rabbits’, where the indication of serving takes almost three lines of text: ‘dish them up with batter beaten up with boiled parsley, and an anchovy or oyster, garnish with parsley and mary gold [marigold] flowers’.24 These elaborated expressions in culinary recipes appear a modern innovation, signalling new social and cultural values identified with the urban middling sorts, starting in the sixteenth century, and embodied in the demand for books not only for recreation but also for profit and self-improvement. In this context, books on manners were highly in demand and valued. Mealtimes allowed for displaying refined manners to guests: the way in which food was presented communicated politeness, education and hospitality.25 This new information in the culinary application section shows us food was understood as something other than simply a physiological need.

Evaluation or efficacy statements (E) Efficacy statements have been variously called ‘incidental data’, ‘statements of efficacy’ and ‘efficacy phrases’, often found at the close of recipes (Päivi Pahta has also shown them as marginal annotations).26 The lexicon associated with these expressions is adjectives with a positive value and verbs such as ‘help’, ‘heal’ and ‘cure’, as in ‘For a bruise . . . and it will helpe presently’.27 The preferred tense is the future, but the simple present is also used. This is seen in a seventeenth-century recipe for a restorative in which evaluation is expressed as a future event: ‘for it will increase bloud and strength’.28 Whereas the future seems to suggest some degree of uncertainty, the present tense implies a more reliable judgement, as illustrated in ‘This Application wonderfully drives the Venom from the Heart’, taken from an eighteenth-century recipe against the plague.29 Evaluation of this sort makes manifest the optimistic attitude of the writers with respect to the validity of the recipes they offer. Some interpret these as promises of efficacy, but I would argue they are expressions of good will rather than promises.30 In this context, it is interesting to note the reference to God at the end of this seven-

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teenth-century recipe for impaired digestion: ‘And with the help of God he shall recover, and he shall vomit or purge soon after.’31 Here, the intended promise of recovery is somehow weakened and rendered conditional by the presence of God’s grace in the life of the patient. My analysis of the CoER recipes indicates that references to divinities are in decline after 1600. Allusions to God, although still used in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century recipe compendia, are less preferred to attest efficacy than complete sentences in the present and future tenses with a high frequency of lexical verbs, such as ‘help’, ‘ease’, ‘heal’, ‘keep’, ‘recover’ and ‘cure’. Common and recurrent examples in our corpus include ‘this will ease the pain’, ‘this will presently help him’, ‘[the medicine] cures it certainly’, ‘you shall see a wonderful effect’ and ‘it cures [the disease] certainly’.32 Another way of communicating efficacy is by showing that the recipe has been recommended by a physician or experienced by another person. G. Johnson’s medical recipe collection, A Thousand more notable things (London, 1706?), contains many examples in this fashion: within two pages there are several references to Hippocrates and ‘K. Digby’,33 as well as the expressions ‘us’d by several Persons’ and ‘It cured a friend of mine.’34 The rationale behind this is to give the idea that the recipe works well because it has been proved and because eminent physicians and personalities support its usefulness.35 Similarly, the Latin formula probatum est also appears at the end of recipes or in marginal notes. In two late seventeenth-century remedies against the plague in the Ayscough manuscript, probatum est is used as validation certifying previous successful use.36 The meaning and function of this Latin phrase, however conventional and frequent, might have been obscured for many. The effects on the reader might have been twofold. First, it increases the interpersonal distance between reader and writer, in that the latter is able to communicate in the traditional language of science and so is considered academically superior. Second, the use of Latin is closely connected with both religious practice and texts, and with magic during the medieval and early Renaissance periods. While it is now widely accepted, following Keith Thomas’s work, that religious authorities worked hard across the early modern period to flush out and discredit magical practices and beliefs, and to distinguish them

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from their own faiths and practices, the continued deployment of magical or, at the very least, incantatory elements is evident in some early modern recipe texts.37 However, it is also the case that use of such Latin tags could have been seen as scholarly or a mark of professional approval, and this may in turn have increased confidence in the validity of the recipe. Probatum est was widely used in the Middle English period (1100–1500) and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its use in this later period is, however, much less frequent, likely a symptom of increased literacy and a decline in folklore knowledge, as can be deduced from Henry Bracken’s words, in an eighteenth-century text on farriery: Yet I am apprehensive, that all I can say against giving Medicines for the Cure of Broken-Winded Horses, will not have its due Weight; because I know there are many who give Credit to every Thing they see writ down, provided there is Probatum est at the Close of the Receipt. But the Family of the Wrong-Heads is, and no doubt will be, a very numerous one, while the World endures.38

For another eighteenth-century writer on horses, the deployment of this Latin phrase was to bolster the profits of apothecaries rather than offer ‘benefit to the patient’.39

Storage (S) and expiry date (Ed) Because the storage stage indicates the manner of keeping the finished product for future use, the most frequent lexical items relate to containers, such as stone and earthenware pots, bottles and glasses, as in ‘keep them in some close vessel’ and ‘put it in a little bain [bath] or double viol [vial] with a broad mouth, put strong white vinegar to it, close it up’.40 This section is to some extent connected with the expiry-date stage, which describes how long the finished product can be preserved for use: this element is most commonly associated with medicinal and preserving recipes, rather than culinary ones. Vocabulary in this stage is associated with the passage of time and the commonest verb forms are ‘last’ and ‘keep’, as shown in ‘The vertue thereof will not last past three or foure dayes’ and ‘it will last two year’.41 Indication of the expiry date is more frequently given than storage, even if an exact expiry date is

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not clearly stated. Normally the indeterminate formula ‘so keep it [for your use]’ is deployed for this purpose. Although the expiry date and storage sections may come together, our corpus does not indicate a clear tendency for this to be so; the presence of the storage section does not always result in a following expiry date. However, the absence of the expiry-date section may imply that the recipe will be good for the anticipated period of treatment, and thus there is no need to indicate a ‘use by’ phrase. This may be deduced from an eighteenth-century recipe for a drink to prevent dehydration during fever: ‘Then bottle it up in strong Bottles, well cork’d and ty’d down, and so drink half a Pint of it at anytime.’42

Virtues (V) In this section, the uses of a particular product are mentioned, as well as its positive (and sometimes negative) qualities. The language relates to diseases and includes adjectives describing good qualities. Sentences are also often given in the present simple tense, as in ‘It is good for’/‘This serveth for’, which are used extensively. Sometimes, the word ‘virtue’ is explicitly included, as in this seventeenth-century recipe for medicinal water: ‘The vertues of this Water be these’. This is followed by a list of properties given in the present tense: ‘It comforteth the Spirit vitall, and preserveth greatly the Spirit vitall, and preserveth greatly the youth of man, and helpeth all inward diseases coming of cold, . . . and whosoever useth this water oft, it preserveth them in good liking.’43 The formula with which this listing begins indicates beyond doubt the contents of what follows. The qualities of the water are given in the form of third-person singular present (habitual) tense verbal phrases, and these run one after the other, unconnected by conjunctions or otherwise connected by and. The difference between this stage and the efficacy-statement stage is its list format. From a pragmatic standpoint, in the virtues stage, the use of the present tense argues for bigger commitment from the writer. Thus, propositions like ‘It cureth the contract of Sinnews and it comforteth the stomack very much’ are seen as true rather than as possibly true, as the context does not provide more information to make the reader think otherwise. This type of virtue listing is common in recipes showing

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the complex preparation of oils, ointments or waters produced from distilling or concocted from one or several herbs, flowers and/or mineral products. It is also a format that recurs in commercial advertisements for patented and proprietary medicines, once they start to appear in English-language publications from the late seventeenth century onwards.

The recipe book as ‘discourse colony’ The term ‘discourse colony’ was coined by Michael Hoey to refer to ‘cinderella discourses that get neglected in most discourse theories’, since ‘these discourses form a relatively homogeneous class and can be described in terms that allow integration with conventional descriptions of mainstream discourses. They are homogeneous in respect of their discourse characteristics but highly heterogeneous in respect of their appearance and use.’44 The methodological implications of this definition are evident: larger textual entities (such as recipe compilations) may be studied as single units, rather than as collections of smaller texts (the recipe itself). In linguistics, Hoey’s approach provides an innovative way of analysing volumes such as encyclopaedias and inventories that are not normally covered by discourse theory. He uses a beehive metaphor to describe how a discourse colony functions: ‘the beehive and ant hill are made up of many independent units, which are not interconnected in a physical sense, and the loss of one or more of them will not affect the viability of the colony’. His definition of ‘discourse colony’ follows from here: ‘a colony is a discourse whose component parts do not derive their meaning from the sequence in which they are placed. If the parts are jumbled, the utility may be affected but the meaning remains the same.’45 In this definition, the concepts of ‘utility’ and ‘meaning’ are fundamental. In the case of a shopping list, for instance, its constituents may be altered in different orders, and one element can be also removed from the list without affecting its meaning and function. Hoey identifies nine properties which characterise discourse colonies: meaning not deriving from sequence; adjacent units that do not form continuous prose; a framing context; no single author and/or anonymous compilation; single components that can be

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used without referring to the others; components that can be reprinted or reused in subsequent works; components that may be added, removed or altered; components serving the same function; and components possessing alphabetic, numeric or temporal sequencing.46 Not all discourse colonies show all of these features, nor do all the features have the same strength. For example, the fact that adjacent units do not form continuous prose does not exclude the possibility that items in a discourse colony may demonstrate strong interconnections by means of internal referential devices. Discourse colonies differ from narrative discourses in having components that share similar if not the same functions; whereas in a narrative discourse, ‘statements are seen as following one from the other temporally or logically’. We can see that recipe texts within recipe books share function, if not always format, and that what Hoey calls the ‘sequence relations’ that act as cohesive ties between the texts are not necessarily created by date or time systems, but by more arbitrary ones, such as alphabetic or numerical ordering.47 The application of this model is not new to early English texts, notably in the work of Carroll, who demonstrates that a compilation of different directions for making laces may be treated as a text, rather than as multiple texts of identical forms and functions. Elsewhere I have similarly demonstrated that medieval English recipe compilations function as discourse colonies.48 Here I briefly want to consider one manuscript from our period, Wellcome MS 1321, within this discourse colony framework.49 An overview of how the manuscript ‘scores’ in relation to Hoey’s criteria is set out in Table 4.2. The volume contains a series of medical and culinary recipes, but the order of the constituent parts does not present a clear scheme: the recipes follow one after the other, with no more logic than occasional groups of related content (for example, preserves). The recipe texts do not form a continuous sequence, and could be moved around (or out of) it without affecting meaning or utility. However, the manuscript lacks a framing context that allows for the interpretation of the complete colony; instead of having a title-page or preface, for example, it simply has ‘receipts’ inscribed on the book spine in a contemporary hand. This may count as an authorial intention to provide framing context, but such as could only be specifically understood by the

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writer. As such, it is fairly weak (by contrast, published recipe collections often present more elaborate titles, dedicatories and prefaces).50 Table 4.2 Characteristics of a discourse colony exhibited in Wellcome MS 1321 Discourse colony criterion +/Meaning not deriving from sequence + Adjacent units do not form continuous prose + Framing context No single author and/or anonymous + One component may be used without referring to the others + Components can be reprinted or reused in subsequent works + Components may be added, removed or altered + Many of the components serve the same function + Alphabetic, numeric or temporal sequencing I have identified 15 anonymous hands in Wellcome MS 1321.51 This is extremely common in English manuscript recipe compendia of all periods, and speaks to the often accreted construction of such texts. That discourse colonies are seen to have no single author, or are often anonymous, is extremely relevant to early modern and modern English recipe books, especially in relation to Hoey’s idea of a ‘queen bee’ who might oversee the ‘colony’, but who in strictly modern terms can never be regarded as the author of the book.52 Even in the case of texts that appear to be written entirely in one hand, or at one sitting, it is still difficult (as other contributors here discuss) to construe the collection as having a single ‘author’. Wellcome MS 1321 contains few components which are titularly or textually interlinked: rare examples are the two recipes ‘To stop blooding’ and ‘Another for ye same’ (both fol. 86r). Apart from this, the titles of recipes are generally semantically complete, and they make reference only to the contents of the text they frame. Their self-contained nature means that the recipes can be used singly, without reference to other recipes; and recipes can be removed, copied out and altered without requiring any change to any other text within the ‘colony’: cross-referencing is absent or is kept to a

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minimum. The absence of any other cohesive device apart from a degree of thematic ordering makes possible the reuse of material in other compendia, as well as changes to the order of recipes within the compendium without altering meaning. Indeed, Wellcome MS 1321 does contain some recipe ‘repeats’, such as the two recipes for the ointment of tobacco (fols 10r, 76v), which differ slightly in orthography. Clearly many of the recipes in Wellcome MS 1321 do share a function, as well as relating thematically, either by giving information on culinary procedures (fols 3r– 52r) or on therapeutic procedures for the sick (fols 73r–131r). However, the arbitrary nature of the order in which these recipes lie within the manuscript is pointed up by the interpolation of medical material within the culinary recipes: notably directions for ointments and salves, sandwiched between those for creams, marmalades and jellies, and pancakes. The medical items do not present a clear arrangement either, although there are exceptions, in groupings of recipes by mode of preparation/format (for example, ointments); and by the function of the finished product.53 While other contributors to this volume discuss the textual roots of the manuscript recipe book in terms of receptaria and miscellanies, and debate the nature of authorship within such texts, thinking about the recipe book as a discourse colony enables us to accept their ‘miscellaneous’ nature as what essentially defines them, and not as a weakness. The notion of the discourse colony asserts that, although many of the recipes show a weak connection between each other, or even none at all, the intention and utility of the collection as a whole suffice to make a claim for the unity of the texts within, and thus for them to be construed as a higher textual entity, and not simply ‘miscellaneous’.

Conclusion This chapter has described the Modern English (1600–1800) recipe from a text-type and genre perspective. What is evident from the work of the CoER is that the language and structure of recipes does not greatly vary from earlier, medieval usage. Thus imperatives to show commands, temporal expressions to indicate sequence of

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events and vocabulary related to the recipe’s main topic remain key elements in the linguistic configuration of this genre. They preserve their clear content organisation, falling into eight stages or functional sections. One of these sections is, however, not described in previous recipe scholarship: the expiry-date stage. While linguistic comparison of these eight stages in medieval and modern English recipes does not yield great variation in form, some changes reflect emerging social trends and changing cultural norms. For example, the use of, and appeal to ‘God’ to assert the success of the product is clearly not so abundant here as in the medieval period. Similarly, the use (or better the abuse) of the Latin phrase probatum est in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is in contrast with the earlier period, but may be as much a habitual inclusion as any indicator of trial or authority. Such a wide-scale study not only illuminates changes over time, but also differentiation between contemporary recipes on different topics. As in medieval recipes, the way of communicating application of the product differs between medical and culinary recipes. Whereas medical recipes present more precise and varied verbal forms, the traditional ‘serve’ still predominates in the case of culinary recipes. That said, one obvious change in eighteenthcentury culinary recipes is the use of more elaborate expressions in the preparation stage, possibly in conformity with changing ideas about table etiquette and the visual appearance of food.54 The recipe text is indeed permeable to social and cultural variation. Because recipe books are normally the result of accretion, recipes frequently tend to be copied as they stand in the originals, thus perpetuating tradition. However, copyists frequently also manipulate their texts to reflect their own values and way of thinking, which might mean eliminating references to folklore beliefs or technicalities considered unsuitable to their own understanding of the world. This is especially evident in the recipe sections devoted to title, application and evaluation, which we can see as adaptable and therefore more prone to present authorial stance expressions. This is in sharp contrast with the formal rigidity of other sections, for example, ingredients and preparation, in which new developments are reflected in vocabulary, but in which one will find no reference to social and cultural values. Future

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linguistic studies of the recipe covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may confirm the special significance of the application and evaluation stages in accommodating new social and cultural realities. Such studies may also illuminate the significance of recipes in conveying new concepts, especially in vocabulary, and would allow us to see if there was, by the end of the last century, significant modification of the medieval framework seen to be so persistent in the early modern period.

Notes 1 I would like to thank the editors for their advice and assistance with this chapter. 2 For more details, see www.gi.ulpgc.es/tell/page2/coer/coer.html (accessed 1 July 2011). 3 These dates were chosen because 1375 conventionally represents the starting point of English linguistic dominance over French; and the end point of 1900 was selected because the nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed rapid technological changes which imply new ways of thinking that, in turn, may affect language and textual production. Due to the conservative nature of writing, linguistic changes are normally reflected after a period of half a century at least. 4 Michael A. K. Halliday and Christian Matthiessen, An Introduction to Functional Grammar (London: Hodder Arnold, 2004). 5 Manfred Görlach, ‘Text-types and language history: the cookery recipe’, in Matti Rissanen et al. (eds), History of Englishes: New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics (Berlin/New York: John Benjamins, 1992), pp. 736–61. 6 James R. Martin, ‘Language, genre and register’, in Frances Christie (ed.), Children Writing: Reader (Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1984), pp. 21–9 (on p. 25). 7 Suzanne Eggins, An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics (London: Pinter, 1994); Ruqaya Hasan, Linguistics, Language and Verbal Art (Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1985). 8 Egon Werlich, A Text Grammar of English (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1975). 9 See Ruth Carroll, ‘Assessing palaeographic evidence for discourse structuring in Middle English recipes’, Boletín Millares Carlo, 24–5 (2005–06), 305–25; Irma Taavitsainen, ‘Dialogues in late medieval and early modern English medical writing’, in Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds), Historical Dialogue Analysis (Berlin/New York: John Benjamins, 1999), pp. 243–68 and Irma Taavitsainen, ‘Middle English recipes: genre characteris-

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10

11

12 13

14 15

16

Methodologies tics, text-type features and underlying traditions of writing’, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 2:1 (2001), 85–113. See Francisco Alonso-Almeida, ‘Punctuation practice in a late medieval English medical remedy book’, Folia Linguistica Historica, 21:1–2 (2002), 207–32; Ruth Carroll, ‘The Middle English recipe as a text-type’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 100:1 (1999), 27–42; Görlach, ‘Text-types and language history’; Peter Grund, ‘The golden formulas: genre conventions of alchemical recipes in the Middle English period’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 4 (2003), 455–75; Tony Hunt, Popular Medicine in ThirteenthCentury England: Introduction and Texts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990); Martti Mäkinen, ‘Herbal recipes and recipes in herbals: intertextuality in Early English herbals and other medical writing’, in Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta (eds), Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 144–73; J. Stannard, ‘Rezeptliteratur as Fachliteratur’, Scripta, 6 (1982), 59–73; Taavitsainen, ‘Middle English recipes’. Data of Wellcome MSS have been excerpted from the online ‘Sources Guides list’ at http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTL039966.html and the Wellcome Archives and Manuscripts catalogue at http://archives.wellcome .ac.uk/DServe/dserve.exe?&dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqDb= Catalog&dsqCmd=Search.tcl (both accessed 1 July 2011). More information is also given in S. A. J. Moorat, Catalogue of Western Manuscripts on Medicine and Science in the Wellcome Historical Medical Library (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1962–73). All the seventeenth-century Wellcome MSS cited here are available to view digitally via the catalogue. For titles with dividing lines with and without titles, see Wellcome MS MSL.2, household, cookery and medical recipes, attributed to Elizabeth Temple or Dorothy Temple, c.1650–c.1750, pp. 39–184; and MS 1796, anonymous collection of cookery and medical recipes, compiled c.1685–c.1725, fols 35–102. MSL.2 is also described in Warren R. Dawson, Manuscripta medica. A descriptive catalogue of the manuscripts in the Library of the Medical Society of London (London: Bale, 1932). Wellcome MS 1796, p. 84. Thomas Dauson and Thomas Gardyner (eds), A booke of soueraigne and approued medicines and remedies (London: Nigh vnto the three Cranes in the Vintree, 1577), p. 12. Wellcome MS 751, medical and cookery recipes, attributed to Elizabeth Sleigh and Felicia Whitfield, c.1647–c.1722, p. 6. [Théodore Turquet de Mayerne], Archimagirus Anglo-Gallicus: Or, Excellent and Approved Receipts and Experiments in Cookery (London: printed for G. Bedell & T. Collins, 1658), fol. 6r. D. E., The Housewife’s Hospital (London: J. Morphew, 1717), p. 11.

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17 Wellcome MS MSL.2, p. 164. 18 Hannah Woolley, The Queen-like Closet: or Rich Cabinet, Stored with all manner of Rare Receipts for Preserving, Candying and Cookery, 5th edn (London: for R. Chiswel & T. Sawbridge, 1684), p. 14. 19 See also Wellcome MS 373, ‘A very shorte and compendious Methode of Phisicke and Chirurgery’, signed ‘Jane Jacksone her Booke: written in the yeare 1642’, fol. 26v. 20 Wellcome MS 1026, ‘Receits of phisick and chirurgery’ attributed to Lady Ayscough, 1692. See, for example, the recipe for a wound drink (p. 9), where the ingredients are organised in three columns, grouped in threes following an incomprehensible order by means of braces. 21 Wellcome MS 1321, collection of cookery and medicinal recipes in several hands, c.1675–c.1725, fol. 79v. 22 Wellcome MS 1795, anonymous collection of cookery, medical and veterinary recipes, c.1685–c.1725, p. 67. 23 Wellcome MS MSL.2, p. 18. 24 The Accomplished Lady’s Delight in Cookery; or, the Complete Servant’sMaid’s [sic] guide (Wolverhampton: printed by J. Smart, 1780), p. 10. 25 Ken Albala, Food in Early Modern Europe (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2003), pp. 238–9. 26 Stannard, ‘Rezeptliteratur’; Hunt, Popular Medicine; Claire Jones, ‘Formula and formulation: “efficacy phrases” in medieval English medical manuscripts’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 99:2 (1998), 199–209 (on p. 201); Päivi Pahta, ‘Code-switching in medieval medical writing’, in Taavitsainen and Pahta (eds), Medical and Scientific Writing, pp. 73–99. 27 [John Partridge], The VVidovves Treasvre (London: Eliz. Allde, 1631), p. 18. 28 [Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent], A Choice Manual of Rare and Select Secrets in Physick and Chyrurgery (London: printed by G. D., 1653), p. 17. 29 D. E., Housewife’s Hospital, p. 35. 30 Francisco Alonso-Almeida and Mercedes Cabrera-Abreu, ‘The formulation of promise in medieval English medical recipes: a relevance-theoretic approach’, Neophilologus, 86 (2002), 137–54. 31 [Grey], Choice Manual, p. 48. 32 These expressions may serve as the templates of occurrences in our corpus. Square brackets are used to indicate the type of information elided from these templates. 33 Almost certainly Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–65). 34 G. Johnson, A Thousand more notable things (London: printed for G. Conyers, 1706?), pp. 23–4. 35 See Leong and Pennell, ‘Recipe collections’. 36 Wellcome MS 1026, pp. 15, 22. 37 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971); Lauren Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London:

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39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48

49 50

51

52 53

54

Methodologies Simon Forman, Astrologer, Alchemist and Physician (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005). Henry Bracken, Farriery Improved: or, a Compleat treatise upon the art of farriery (London: for J. Clarke & J. Schuckburgh, 1737), pp. 166–7. James Clark, A Treatise on the Prevention of Diseases incidental to Horses (Edinburgh: W. Smellie for the author, 1788), p. 280. [Grey], Choice Manual, p. 169; Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook (London: printed for Obadiah Blagrave, 1685), p. 163. [Partridge], VVidovves Treasvre, p. 13; [Grey], Choice Manual, p. 92. D. E., Housewife’s Hospital, p. 15. [Grey], Choice Manual, pp. 43–4. Michael Hoey, ‘The discourse colony: a preliminary study of a neglected discourse type’, in Malcom Coulthard (ed.), Talking about Text: Studies Presented to David Brazil on his Retirement (Birmingham: English Language Research, University of Birmingham, 1986), pp. 1–26 (on pp. 1–2). Ibid., pp. 3–4. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., pp. 14, 18–19. Ruth Carroll, ‘Recipes for laces: an example of a Middle English discourse colony’, in Risto Hiltunen and Janne Skaffari (eds), Discourse Perspectives on English (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003), pp. 137–65; Francisco Alonso-Almeida, ‘All gathered together: on the construction of scientific and technical books in 15th-century England’, International Journal of English Studies, 5:2 (2005), 1–25; Francisco Alonso-Almeida, ‘Middle English medical Books as examples of discourse colonies: G.U.L. Hunter 307’, in Isabel Moskowich-Fandiño and Begoña Crespo (eds), Bells Chiming from the Past. Cultural and Linguistic Studies on Early English (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 55–80. See n. 21 above. See, for example, the full title of The Houswife’s Hospital: For the CURE of DISEASES Incident to Human Bodies. Containing One Hundred and Fifty RECIPEs: With many other Curious Preparations, Never before Extant. The collation is: (A) cookery: (1) 2r–28r, (2) 20v–36v, (3) 36v–42v, (4) 43r–43v, (5) 44r–48r, (6) 49r, (7) 51r; (B) medical: (8) 73v, (9) 74r, (10) 74v–84v, (11) 85r–v, (12) 86r, (13) 86v–130v, (14) 131r, (15) 131r. Fols 50 and 52v–73r are blank; the versos of fols 1–16 are also blank. Hoey, ‘Discourse colony’, p. 12. See ‘For Inflamations or heats in the face’ and ‘For Heats in the Face’, fol. 82r (note: MS Wellcome 1321 is incompletely paginated: on unpaginated folios, I use the later inserted foliation). See Lehmann, British Housewife, pp. 323–75; and Gray, this volume.

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Part II

Textuality and intertextuality

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5

Reading recipe books and culinary history: opening a new field GILLY LEHMANN

‫ﱬﱫ‬ Culinary history is a relative newcomer in the academic world, and is still working its way towards academic respectability: in a Times Literary Supplement review in 2000, Paul Levy described it as ‘a new, almost academic field of history’.1 Almost, but not quite, and the intervening years have not yet eliminated the ‘almost’, especially in Britain, where research into culinary history lags behind work done in France. Even in France, work on the history of cookery, as opposed to questions of food supply and nutrition, is a fairly recent development. When the Annales school began to take an interest in food, it was more concerned with questions of food supply and nutrition, in the context of a ‘total history’ of the people, than with the history of cookery itself.2 Research into cookery did not really begin until the 1970s, with French cuisine as the foremost object of study. Jean-François Revel’s Un festin en paroles came out in 1978, followed in 1983 by Barbara Ketcham Wheaton’s study of French cuisine, Savouring the Past.3 Significantly, neither author was an academic. Meanwhile, Jean-Louis Flandrin was developing the subject with his students, often using cookbooks as sources, and the result was a stream of articles from 1982 onwards. French cuisine has been a subject for scholarly research ever since, although the early practitioners were regarded with some suspicion, at least in French academic circles. Today, numerous publications have established the main lines of development of cookery in France: all aspects of its development have been analysed, from medieval spice preferences to the birth of the restaurant.

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A glance at the historiography of English cookery writing further emphasises the gap between Britain and France. C. Anne Wilson’s Food and Drink in Britain (London, 1973), based on analysis of the cookbooks in the special collections of the Brotherton Library in Leeds, did not stimulate a steady stream of publications, and no academic emerged as a leader to encourage serious study of the subject. Nor did Stephen Mennell’s comparative study of eating and taste in France and England, All Manners of Food (Oxford, 1985), have that effect; indeed, Mennell was later to complain that research into recipes had lost its way, a point which I will revert to later. The founding father of culinary studies in England was the ex-diplomat Alan Davidson, and, despite the success of the Oxford Symposium ever since its inception in 1981, and of the journal Petits propos culinaires since 1979, a mix of erudition and eccentricity still characterises the subject in England. This is not to denigrate the erudition: there is plenty of it around, but research into culinary history remains a minority interest, and, with honourable exceptions, has not entered mainstream historical studies in universities, as Davidson himself recognised in 2003, his comments on the field having ‘come of age’ notwithstanding.4 This is not to say that there is no interest in recipes, but that they have been neglected as a resource for culinary history. Recipe collections have attracted a different form of interest, however. The conference at Warwick from which this collection is derived demonstrated that there is no lack of interest in the material in Britain and in North America, but that this interest is focused on material culture, women’s studies, medical history or polite and popular culture, for all of which the recipe collections offer a rich mine of information. Studying the recipe books for what they can tell us about cookery clearly had little academic purchase (the conference organisers received few abstracts relating solely to cookery). Of course, many recipe books contain far more material than cookery recipes, and some contain no cookery at all. For this reason, I shall use the term ‘cookbook’ to refer to those recipe books which are devoted principally to cookery and/or confectionery, while the more general term ‘recipe book’ will be used for the recipe collections covering a greater variety of matter. It is the cookbooks that are the main source from which a history of English cookery can be

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constructed. Obviously, the cookbooks cannot be the sole source, and I shall not enlarge here on the need to confront the evidence of the cookbooks with that from other sources, such as household accounts and regulations, letters and diaries, travellers’ descriptions, plays and novels, not to mention non-textual sources. By ‘a history of English cookery’ I mean a history of changing preferences in dishes, of the choices concerning combinations of flavour, aroma and texture, all of which add up to a recognisably specific ‘culinary style’. I first used the term in my doctoral thesis in 1989, and my study of the cookery book and cooking in the eighteenth century, The British Housewife (Totnes, 2003), devoted one of its main sections to a description of the changing culinary styles of the period. Extending the chronological range back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and earlier makes significant changes in culinary styles stand out, and offers the possibility of defining a series of ‘periods’ in the history of cookery. The notion of a dominant style at a given period implies that cookery can find its place as a form of cultural expression in the same way as painting, architecture or gardens. Such an approach places cookery firmly within the culture of its time, emphasising the ‘unity of culture across all media of expression’, in the words of the art historian Phyllis Pray Bober.5

Reading the recipes for a culinary history: the material and its problems Before we can place the various culinary styles within their wider cultural context, an attempt to define what characterises each style is necessary. Only after the initial phase of description and definition can links to the way the style finds expression in the other arts be sought, and a multidisciplinary approach to the subject envisaged. The way art history has developed suggests how culinary history might follow along the same lines. Very broadly speaking, the history of art may be said to have focused at first on establishing attributions within a hierarchy of artists and studios, and a definition of certain styles, thus creating a narrative in which each period had its dominant artists, their influence spreading in ever-widening circles. Today, purely aesthetic discussion has been replaced by a

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discourse which takes account of the influence of patrons and the marketplace, the way in which art was used, the socio-political context, and the mental worlds of the artists and viewers. The example of this branch of history should, in theory, provide historians of cookery with a model to enable them to move more quickly towards a multidisciplinary approach to the subject. And yet in 2001 Stephen Mennell complained that culinary history was stuck in a ‘diffusionism’ zone, and that the real questions were being neglected while researchers tracked the progress of recipes backwards through the cookbooks in a vain attempt to discover their origin.6 Mennell’s complaint provoked a defence of the ‘needle in the haystack’ method from Henry Notaker, who pointed out that we need to be aware of the origins of recipes and the sources of the cookbooks before we can even describe, let alone analyse, what was going on in a given place at a given period.7 It is easy to see why researchers should seek to distinguish the ‘original’ recipes from the copies. This approach would give us a hierarchy of ‘important’ cookbooks, the ones which introduced new recipes, and the less important imitators; it would reduce the number of texts deemed significant, and it would produce a neat history with its ‘Great Masters’ and their influence. But no cookbook-based history can possibly follow this model: as Stephen Mennell points out, there are always unexamined potential sources, so that originality is impossible to prove.8 The very idea of originality belongs to a heroic narrative of culinary development, in which a defining moment can be isolated, such as the ‘culinary revolution’ of 1651, when the publication of La Varenne’s Cuisinier françois revealed a completely ‘new’ style of cookery which eliminated the spices and the sweet and savoury combinations which had characterised the earlier style. This is indeed a futile search. The Mennell–Notaker exchange serves as a useful reminder of the need to consider the question of ‘originality’ in the light of how the recipes were produced. Similar debates feature in the world of literary criticism, where researchers and editors of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry have discovered that the practice of scribal publication, with the innumerable variant texts this threw up, makes the establishment of a ‘definitive’ text representing the original author’s intentions an illusion.9 Early modern recipes circu-

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lated in print, in manuscript and through oral transmission. Furthermore, the three forms are inseparable: many recipes are clearly abbreviations of, rather than substitutes for, word of mouth; recipes moved forwards and backwards between manuscript, print and oral transmission, acquiring variations and incongruities along the way. And although manuscript sources often supply earlier versions of a dish than any printed source (ice cream is a case in point),10 it would be imprudent to conclude that printed books are always later records of earlier practice. Many, if not most, collections, whether in manuscript or printed form, contain survivals of earlier recipes alongside more recent ones, and the time lag between oldest and newest may be considerable. The problem is to try to spot the new amid the mix of old and new which permeates the cookbooks, and this is true for both manuscript and print, given the collecting habits of the owners of manuscripts, and the compilation practices of the booksellers who played the prime role in creating early cookbooks.11 One task facing the historian, then, is to attempt to distinguish the peculiar characteristics of shifting culinary styles from a chronologically jumbled mass of evidence. The difficulties of chronology are compounded in the case of English cookery by the wealth of surviving material, which enables us to range much further than does the more limited stock available for France. Cookbook production in Britain was far greater than in France, despite a smaller population, and the much wider circulation of cookbooks after the middle of the seventeenth century means that a range of culinary cultures can be examined (see Appendix 5.1, Figure 5.1). The cookery represented by the French cookbooks is essentially haute cuisine, occasionally simplified for a country or bourgeois audience from the mid-seventeenth century, albeit rather grudgingly (with one exception, Nicolas de Bonnefons’s Les Délices de la campagne (Paris, 1654)), until the 1746 appearance of the first work aimed explicitly at the female cook, La Cuisinière bourgeoise (Paris). The English books, by contrast, take us straight into a world of gentry households as early as the late sixteenth century, and by the eighteenth century the range of cookbooks spans the luxury productions displaying the high art of grand cooks, and the cheap works offering an initiation into genteel style for the aspiring lower-middle class and their servants. But by

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this date, not all cookbooks were aspirational: one also finds works devoted to cheap ways of feeding family and servants, such as William Ellis’s The Country Housewife’s Family Companion (London, 1750). In other words, we have the materials to examine a range of culinary styles, covering haute cuisine to modest domestic. With such a wide range, English cookbooks offer an insight into a continuum of styles, not merely chronologically, but across the spectrum of elite and popular practice. As Joan Thirsk has suggested, opportunities to observe elite developments were frequent enough for new fashions to have an impact far beyond these confines, and we can follow the ripples of influence in cookery just as well as in painting or gardening.12 As we observe the slow progress of a fashionable style, we can see how it was adapted and incorporated into a more familiar repertory by those at several removes from the original source. Nor was the direction of culinary exchange one-way: Philippe Meyzie’s recent work on the development of a specific regional cuisine in south-western France shows that the development of a recognisably local culinary culture is not the result of conservative stasis, but a dynamic process in which the lower orders participate just as much as their betters.13 I have suggested that ‘culinary styles’ imply a form of periodisation. Such an approach places cookery firmly within the culture of its time, and invites comparison of cookery with other arts. One of the difficulties of the comparative approach lies in envisaging how the visual forms of the better-known arts reappear in the medium of cookery, whose appeal is also gustatory. Earlier studies have been content to dwell on the visual aspects of cookery: the medieval feast as spectacle has long been something of a cliché. Trying to examine cookery on its own terms, seeing textures, flavour combinations and juxtapositions as expressions of a dominant style, is an approach pioneered recently in Ken Albala’s 2007 volume, The Banquet. In order to discuss gustatory qualities, Albala resorts to a total of 77 neologisms, which are explained in a glossary.14 Some of these seem over-exotic, such as ‘albondiguillescent’ (meaning ‘a preference for small dainty foods in meatball form’), and unlikely to catch on. But while one may have reservations about his neologisms, his need for them points to the huge gap in our conceptualisation when it comes

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to discussing cookery as an aesthetic form, and to the revolutionary nature of his approach. His book focuses on Italy, but also ranges throughout Europe as he compares the varying pace of national developments.15 Unfortunately this very wide range means that Albala has not examined the non-Italian sources sufficiently rigorously, and some of his comments on developments in English cookery need to be revised in the light of a fuller analysis of the recipe collections. Despite such caveats, Albala has done the history of cookery a great service by his fresh approach, showing one way in which culinary history may be integrated into a much wider cultural history.

Analysing the recipes: quantitative methods If such a history is to attain academic status as a discipline, it must not rely on impressionistic accounts derived from a superficial examination of the cookbooks. There are obvious rewards in using the methods of quantitative analysis pioneered by Flandrin. Quantitative analysis of cookery recipes over a long period of time reveals trends which are otherwise lost in a narrow focus on tracking the development of individual recipes. A broad time scale also makes the difficulty of dating recipes accurately less of a handicap, since it avoids the pitfalls of reliance on individual recipes, and suggests when certain ingredients or types of preparation became popular or fell from favour. By revealing long-term trends, it also helps the researcher to situate cookbooks by showing either that a given example is in line with its contemporaries, or, on the contrary, unusual for its period. Comparisons between books of the same period can also point up differences that are the result of the social origin of the recipes. It is very clear that the ‘royal’ books, such as The Compleat Cook (London, 1655), or Jos. Cooper’s The Art of Cookery (London, 1654), show more signs of the movement away from sweetness and towards purely savoury dishes which was to characterise post-Restoration cookery than other books of the 1650s. The more courtly works were in line with elite fashions, whereas in Hannah Woolley’s The Cooks Guide (London, 1664) the use of sugar and dried fruit rises again, a sign of the recipes’ lower social origin and anticipated audience.

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Another example of features which are revealed by quantitative analysis, but which require consideration of the social context, is seen in two almost contemporary books by Gervase Markham and John Murrell. The culinary section in John Murrell’s Delightfull daily exercise (London, 1621) is clearly anomalous by comparison with contemporary and even later works. It is very much in advance of its time, with its low use of sugar and the privileged position it gives to vegetables, at a time when sugar was a major presence in cookbooks and vegetables were not given pride of place. Murrell proposes such items as cauliflower or artichokes in a cream sauce, chicken in butter sauce with asparagus or with mangetout peas.16 Why? One could of course point to foreign influence here, since the title-page of this section evokes French and Dutch fashions, but the small format of the book, its use of roman rather than gothic type and its decorated borders round the text suggest that this was particularly refined cooking for an educated, upper-class, female audience (moreover, women were the ones who received gifts of fruit and vegetables),17 and that these recipes were very much up to date with elite fashions. Murrell uses the luxury vegetables in ways which would not become frequent in cookbooks for another 40 years. Gervase Markham, in his English Husvvife (London, 1615), also gives recipes showing a high vegetable count, but this proportion is due to his extensive use of everyday pot-herbs. Statistically similar results must be interpreted differently: the ambitions of the two books are totally different, in another example of the social spectrum of the cookbooks. Although Murrell’s recipes in this particular book stand apart from wider trends, his books devoted specifically to cookery (and set in gothic type, indicating a rather less-educated audience) do not. My analysis of recipes from 1580 to 1659, counting the percentage of recipes in each collection which use the ingredient, shows a new pattern in the use of spices and aromatics, cooking fats, sweeteners, fruit and vegetables, all of which add up to a style which is peculiar to the period.18 The use of spices did not diminish (contrary to Albala’s suggestion that spices were being replaced by herbs):19 spices are present in between 71 per cent and 86 per cent of the recipes in the seven ‘families’ of medieval recipes identified by C. B. Hieatt, and in between 69 per cent and 94 per cent of the recipes

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from the period of my survey. What did change were the spice preferences. The two medieval favourites were ginger and saffron, but the Tudor preference was for ginger, pepper and cinnamon, then mace and nutmeg (the latter invisible in cookery recipes before the 1580s, but for a single instance)20 took over as the most-used spices by the 1620s, while saffron virtually disappeared. The gradual trend towards less pungent spices goes with the increasing use of rosewater, and the short-lived fashion for musk and ambergris. Exotic perfumes were not banished in favour of indigenous herbs: warm, sweet aromas took the place of earlier pungency. This is not to say that herb use did not increase, but there was no major shift from spices towards herbs. The move away from the more aggressive spices went with a vast increase in the use of dairy fats. Butter had hardly figured at all in medieval recipes, but as early as 1545 its use leapt to over 50 per cent of recipes, and thereafter never fell back to earlier levels. The use of milk and cream rose too, although not significantly until the 1650s. The increased use of butter and cream represents a further move away from the aggressive medieval style, with more unctuous textures added to the aromas of the period. The impact on the flavour and texture of dishes must have been considerable. The other ingredient whose presence defines the style is sugar. Sugar has long been seen as the key ingredient in Renaissance cookery; indeed, for some writers it is the only significant item.21 But in England sugar was also present in medieval cookery (in 23–58 per cent of recipes); what changes in the sixteenth century is the quantity used in single recipes, in cookery proper as well as in the confectionery of the banquet course (which is excluded from my statistics). More striking is its rapid decline in the books of the 1650s after reaching a peak in Murrell’s Second Booke of Cookerie (London, 1628). From this peak of 89 per cent of recipes, sugar use falls to 49 per cent in The Compleat Cook (London, 1655) and to 34 per cent in William Rabisha’s Whole body of Cookery Dissected (London, 1661). Very heavy sugar use is thus a defining characteristic of early seventeenth-century cookery. Sugar was not the only source of sweetness: the pattern of dried-fruit use matches that of sugar. The almost invariable use of sugar or dried fruit with root vegetables (carrots,

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parsnips, sweet potatoes) illustrates the desire to enhance sweetness wherever it was to be found. Sweetness was often associated with a new type of acid flavour from citrus fruits, which begin to appear in recipes only in the 1580s: contrary to a widespread belief, their juices were not routinely used as a seasoning in the medieval period, at least on the evidence of the cookery recipes, where they never appear. But from the 1580s onwards, their use increased, gradually at first but more rapidly after 1600, when citrus is found in around 20 per cent of recipes. While citrus juices did not replace the traditional acids, vinegar and verjuice, their increased use suggests a desire for brighter flavours, which is also seen in the greater use of fresh fruit, not only in fruit pies and tarts, but also in savoury dishes, where a final garnish of fruit was often the finishing touch. The enthusiasm for fruit is even more obvious in the number of recipes for the dry and liquid preserves which featured so heavily in the banquet course, found in the confectionery manuals of the early seventeenth century. Indeed, in the period 1600–30 the publishers devoted more attention to confectionery than to cookery. Sugar and fruit went hand in hand. There is also a rising trend in vegetable use from the 1580s, and furthermore, more varieties were being used: 6 different vegetables are mentioned in A Propre new booke of Cokery (London, 1545), 16 by Thomas Dawson in 1587 and 24 by Rabisha in 1661. Vegetables may now feature as a main ingredient rather than an adjunct. Typical examples are spinach, pea or artichoke pies and tarts; like the preparations containing roots, they are almost invariably associated with sweetness in the form of sugar or dried fruit. Murrell’s recipes for vegetables with cream are very unusual.

Analysing the recipes: qualitative methods Statistics showing the frequency of use of ingredients can provide an outline of culinary change, but micro-analysis is also required in order to make sense of these changes, and to see the more gradual process of elaboration of a style. Dishes which appear with slight variations in all or almost all of the recipe books should be seen as signs of a common repertoire, even though they may also indicate the borrowings between books which were standard practice at the

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time. Closer analysis of particular types of dishes refines the definition of a culinary style, and it is here that I shall begin to suggest what seem to me pertinent parallels with the other arts. One example is stewed capon or chicken with lemon or orange: nearly all the late Tudor cookbooks give recipes for this.22 All the recipes offer contrasting sweet and acid flavours, using sugar as well as the citrus fruit. There are also competing seasonings of rosewater and the spices, which are left whole so as to give them a visible as well as a gustatory presence, and the use of marrow or egg yolks to make the sauce more unctuous. These are not dishes which aim at one unified flavour, but at a multiplicity of layers. In 1615 Murrell adds to these complexities with his dried fruit in the almondthickened broth, his preserved lemon used to lard the capon, and his garnish of suckets and preserved barberries; in his 1628 version of the same dish, more layers are added, with artichoke bottoms and ambergris added to the sauce, which is now thickened with egg yolks.23 The books of the 1650s either give a simplified version, or omit the recipe altogether.24 Other such series of individual recipes show the same pattern of contrasting flavours, usually of sweet and acid, intensified by the use of dried fruit or preserved lemon, plus competing seasonings of whole spices and rosewater, with a further contrast through the smoothness of sauces. After 1600, garnishes made these sophisticated contrasts visible: Murrell’s pieces of lemon larding the capon reinforce the sweet–sour effect of the dish as a whole. The aim is clearly variety within the dish, just as instructions for setting out a dinner emphasise the variety and profusion which were requisite if the feast was to be worthy, a point also made in contemporary comedies satirising the pretensions of the would-be fashionable.25 But to modern eyes, the most striking feature of the style is its use of sugar. The late Tudor and early Stuart fascination with sugar is evident here, and the way it was often used to contrast with acid fruit flavours made its presence stand out even more by contrast. Such contrasts have immediate impact, dazzling the palate; these dishes offer an equivalent to the visual allure of the portraits by William Larkin (c.1580–1619), in which the brilliant texture of shimmering silk curtains is contrasted with the depth of velvet and fur, the intricate stiffness of lace and the lustre of pearls in the sitter’s

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dress.26 Finally, one notes a tendency to keep adding extra ingredients, and to add more garnishes to many dishes. The relative simplicity of the Elizabethan cookbooks gives way to greater complexity after 1600, in a style which can only be described as flashy. I have placed the emphasis on dishes in which the flavour, rather than the visual aspect, defines the style. But in other types of dish, the visual is important as well as the gustatory. Pies and tarts offer one example of this. Fillings share the taste for sweetness which is visible elsewhere: meat and fish are combined with sugar and/or dried fruit in most recipes, and pie tops were often iced with sugar, making its presence visible; both fillings and pie shapes and decorations show signs of ever-increasing elaboration. Although illustrations of pie decoration do not figure in cookbooks before Robert May’s book The Accomplisht Cook (1660), it is clear that ‘cutlaid’ crusts to form patterns, the cut-outs showing the colours of fruit preserves or other fillings beneath, were already being used in the late sixteenth century: one Elizabethan book gives a recipe for a multicoloured tart using tart-stuffs coloured black, white, yellow and green, but no precise instructions as to using them.27 Inspiration for patterned tarts would not have been difficult to find: anyone could copy the flat patterns found in plasterwork, on embroidered clothes, in garden design, and even in the figures formed during the dance; pattern-books were often aimed at artisans working in all these areas.28 Tart fashions followed the garden: heraldic devices and knots provided the early model, according to Markham in 1623, whereas May’s illustrations show some akin to knots and others more like the swirling patterns of the later parterres de broderie.29 Another example of the importance of the visual is in the sweetmeats of the banquet course, and in the specialised manuals of the early seventeenth century we can see how the splendid sugar constructions which ultimately derived from Italian trionfi were adapted to the means of the gentry. The early confectionery recipes are for quite simple items, such as flat marchpanes which could be gilded and decorated in patterns, or sugar paste moulded to form plates, cups and dishes which could then be eaten. The trend towards increasing elaboration which we have seen in cookery is

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repeated here, as recipes propose more complex forms moulded in marchpane or in sugar: these could be heraldic, echoing garden design, or more direct imitations of nature, with fake walnuts, complete with kernels, or fruits with stones inside and leaves and stalks attached.30 Such confections are described in the cookbooks as ‘devices’ or ‘conceits’.31 Jayne Archer notes in her chapter in this volume the use of this vocabulary to describe the recipes, but it is also applied to the dishes produced by the recipes, whether for confectionery or for cookery, as is clear from the title-page of Dawson’s The good husvvifes Ievvell (London, 1587). Many of the more elaborate and time-consuming preparations must have remained in the hands of the professionals, but gentlewomen could concoct a simpler version, using moulded marchpane, fruit preserves and decorative jellies, in a folk-art version of the court banquet. The most sophisticated of these confections aimed at astonishing the guests with a virtuoso display. The mix of art and nature, producing perfect facsimiles of natural objects in artificial materials, brings us close to the princely collections of curiosities which often contained plaster or silver mouldings of natural objects, or ceramic dishes holding realistic ceramic fruits, such as those produced by the French ceramic artist Bernard Palissy (1510–90). And the convergence between art and nature, artifice and realism, lies behind Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s paintings, which use compositions of fruit and vegetables to represent faces.32 But there was also the more serious link between the artifice of the banquet and the scientific construction of knowledge. Just as John Evelyn, visiting Italy in the late 1640s, saw the garden as a natural extension of the cabinet, with a display of curiosities in both, so one might see the banquet set out in the banqueting house as offering the same connection.33 Furthermore, the artificial fruit and nuts offered a view of natural objects reproduced in another medium, a culinary version of botanical illustration, which further suggests the links to science as well as to art. The elaborate cookery of our period is typical of the style that Albala labels as Mannerist. He describes the characteristics of Mannerist cuisine as a preoccupation with contrasts: of texture, of discordant flavours, with variety and copiousness as a goal, both within the dish and within the meal as a whole, in order to show off

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the cook’s virtuosity.34 As my analysis of the recipes shows, all of these elements are present in the English recipes, even though Albala sees England as lagging behind continental trends until the midseventeenth century, citing Robert May’s ‘Olio of Sturgeon’ as an illustration of a recipe at last in line with Italian fashion, when a Baroque aesthetic was taking over.35 But the court cooks’ books of the 1660s harked back to pre-Civil War days: May’s career, and his recipes, span the whole of the early Stuart era, and do not represent a single style. Rather, one finds recipes for dishes similar to those I have described above, as well as for dishes which represent the new flavours and combinations which would develop into the Baroque style. Moreover, the progress of Mannerism was very uneven in England. Although the style appeared in the 1540s, with the decoration of Nonsuch Palace and paintings by William Scrots (active in England 1546–53), subsequent developments owed more to English isolation than to Mannerist influence, and the continental-style Mannerist garden did not arrive in England until the reign of James I.36 The evidence of the cookbooks suggests that the culinary form of Mannerism developed in the second half of the sixteenth century, and reached its apogee in the 1630s, by which time the early signs of a new style were becoming visible, while the over-elaboration of the fully developed Mannerist cookery announced its decline. In fact we should see England as developing its own style, which is recognisably related to, but distinct from, say, the Italian version, in a variant of pan-European trends. The full-flown Baroque of court cookery is not represented in English cookbooks until the early eighteenth century, after the publication in English of some of the writings of the French cook Massialot in 1702.37 Meanwhile, one can still find Mannerist elements not only amongst the court cooks of the 1660s, but as late as the 1670s. Perhaps the last, and certainly the most impressive, expression of the domestic Mannerist banquet appears in Hannah Woolley’s The Queen-like Closet (London, 1670), with a recipe for a ‘Rock in SweetMeats’ that harks back to a garden feature of the Jacobean period. The recipe tells the reader how to start with a cake base, fixing a ‘Fountain-Glass’ upright in the middle, and then piling up the cake with biscuits stuck down with gum tragacanth to ‘looke like great ill-

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favoured Stones’, adding ‘rough Almond Cakes’ for more stones, brown sugar for sand, moss made with ‘herbs of a Rock Candy’, snails and snakes and worms made of sugar plate. The glass was then to be filled with preserved grapes, and another glass, filled with hartshorn jelly, set at a distance from the rock, with a marchpane peacock, complete with real tail feathers, perched on the rim and seeming to drink. Further decoration around the rock was composed of oyster and cockle shells made of sugar plate, with branches of candied fruit stuck amongst them; to finish, a glass of wine was to have ‘a conveyance to fall into a Glass below it, which must have Spouts for the Wine to play upward or downward’, and so into a series of glasses set below each other.38 The mechanics of the wine fountain are obscure, but the desired effect is not. This extraordinary confection might have been inspired by the Parnassus grotto fountain at Somerset House in London, designed and built by Salomon de Caus for James I’s queen, Anne of Denmark, between 1609 and 1613, when a visitor described it as ‘a Mount Parnassus: the mountain or rock is made of sea-stones, all sorts of mussels, snails, and other curious plants put together’, with a cavern inside containing the Muses, and four statues representing rivers in niches around the rock, from which water ‘sprang up to the very top of the rock . . . and besides here and there out of the mountain’.39 Woolley’s amazing construction is a telling example of the way in which culinary styles overlap: we have here a thoroughly Mannerist piece at a time when the Baroque had taken over in other arts, and was already doing so in court cookery too.

Conclusion My last example illustrates the chronological gap between different levels, grand and domestic, of art forms. The gap is part of the difficulty, but also of the fascination, of seeking to define a culinary style and show how it is indeed part of the wider culture of its period. I have tried to suggest avenues of approach to culinary history here, on the methodological level and through parallels with other art forms. I find enough evidence in these parallels to justify the idea of a Mannerist period in English cookery. The vocabulary of conceits and devices deployed in the cookbooks brings a link not only to

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literature – metaphysical poetry springs to mind – but also to the love of forms and patterns in architecture and gardens, which were, incidentally, discussed using the same terminology.40 As the Mannerist style gradually gave way to the Baroque, sugar began its slow move from being a vital component of dishes throughout the meal to being kept almost exclusively for the sweet finale. In England this was a very slow process, and one can watch this dynamic make its way from elite circles down the social scale. I have analysed the recipes and described the essentials of the Baroque style elsewhere, albeit without developing the parallels with other arts, although these are evoked.41 They are not hard to find. Once again, the vocabulary of the cookbooks offers a starting point for parallels between the elaborate, monumental but harmonious dishes of the court cookery of the period, and the grandiose architecture and decoration of the ‘formal’ house described by Mark Girouard in his Life in the English Country House (London, 1978) and the equally magnificent axial vistas of gardens. Once again, the full-blown elite style represented by the court cooks is adapted to the means of lesser purses and kitchens in the works of authors offering a domestic version of the grand style. If we look for answers to Mennell’s question of why people ate what they did, the cultural aspect, the way culinary styles are in tune with other arts, is at least as important as the development of trade, horticulture and kitchen technology, not to mention economic factors, essential though these are. It may be objected that to elevate cookery to the status of art is to weigh it down with a significance that it does not possess. And yet cookery certainly reflects its time, and it is one area which enables us to see beyond the narrow limits of aristocratic culture. Perhaps the closest parallel is with fashion. Recent research by John Styles, in The Dress of the People (London, 2008), has shown that the consumption of eighteenth-century fashion was not confined to the elite: fashion, like cookery, was a continuum in which elements of elite style could, and did, reach the lower rungs of society. The decorative tarts which, I have suggested, were one component of a specifically English Mannerist style, were easily reproduced, and survived as folk art in the north of England into the twentieth century.42 The recipe books enable us to see this process at work.

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Appendix 5.1 French and British cookbook production compared ‫ﱬﱫ‬ Figure 5.1 shows the production of cookbooks in Britain and France, both new titles and reprints, for the period 1480–1789. For this purpose, a cookbook is defined as a book either entirely devoted to cookery and/or confectionery, or containing amongst other material a substantial section on one or both of these. British production covers those books printed in Britain, excluding books printed in Ireland, even though many of these may have made their way back to Britain; French production similarly excludes printings outside France. The figures are based on surviving cookbooks in libraries and private collections; the estimates are thus certainly below the reality. For both countries up to 1699, the table is based on the recently published work by Henry Notaker, Printed Cookbooks in Europe, 1470–1700: A Bibliography of Early Modern Culinary Literature (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press/Houten: Hes & de Graaf, 2010). As Notaker does not cover all editions of works on confectionery and domestic manuals, I have completed his lists by using the electronic ESTC for Britain, while for France I have used the work of Philip and Mary Hyman, in Carole Lambert (ed.), Du manuscrit à la table (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal/Paris: Champion-Slatkine, 1992), pp. 66–8, 276; and in Livres en bouche. Cinq siècles d’art culinaire français (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France/Hermann, 2001), pp. 55–67. For 1700–89, the table for Britain is based on ESTC; for France, it is based on the work of Alain Girard, ‘Le triomphe de La cuisinière bourgeoise. Livres culinaires, cuisine et société en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 24 (1977), 497–523, particularly the table on p. 523. However, a

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comparison of Girard’s and Notaker’s work for the period 1650–99 shows a considerable difference (Girard gives a total of 65 editions, against Notaker’s 103 and my 120). It is clear that Girard’s work, based on the holdings of 95 libraries, underestimates French production, although probably less for the eighteenth century than for the earlier period. But even allowing for this, British production is clearly a long way ahead of French after 1720.

5.1 Numbers of British and French cookery books published by decade, 1480s–1780s

Notes 1 The review in question is of Phyllis Pray Bober’s Art, Culture, and Cuisine: Ancient and Medieval Gastronomy (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), in the Times Literary Supplement (9 June 2000). 2 See Flandrin’s preface in Jean-Louis Flandrin and Jane Cobbi (eds), Tables d’hier, tables d’ailleurs (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999), pp. 17–18. 3 Jean-François Revel, Un festin en paroles (Paris: Pauvert, 1979); Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, Savouring the Past: the French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1983). 4 There is now (in 2012) a final-year paper in the History Tripos at the University of Cambridge, ‘Food and Drink in Britain and the Wider World, 1577–1773’, while Sara Pennell convenes a Master’s level module in ‘Eating the Renaissance’ at the University of Roehampton. In his Erasmus Prize

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5 6 7 8 9

10

11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18

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essay Food History Comes of Age (Amsterdam: Praemium Erasmianum Foundation, 2003), Davidson says ‘there is little evidence to suggest that food history, as such, will win its credentials as a fully fledged and recognised academic subject’ (p. 44). Pray Bober, Art, Culture, and Cuisine, p. 3. Stephen Mennell, ‘Plagiarism and originality – diffusionism in the study of the history of cookery’, PPC, 68 (2001), 29–38. Henry Notaker, ‘Comments on the interpretation of plagiarism’, PPC, 70 (2002), 58–66. Mennell, ‘Plagiarism’, p. 36. One example of this is the editorial dilemmas facing the scholars who have edited Rochester’s poems: The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984); The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Harold Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Nicholas Fisher’s revision of the Walker edition, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: The Poems and Lucina’s Rape (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2010). The earliest printed English recipe for ice cream is in Mary Eales, Mrs Mary Eales’s Receipts (London: H. Meere, 1718), pp. 92–3. But manuscript recipes were circulating much earlier: see the Introduction to this volume, and also Elizabeth David, ‘Fromages glacés and iced creams’, PPC, 2 (1979), 23–7; David Potter, ‘Icy cream’, PPC, 72 (2003), 45. The earliest known reference to ice cream being consumed in England places this at a Garter feast in 1671: Elias Ashmole, The Institution, Laws and Ceremonies of the Most Noble Order of the Garter (London: J. Macock for Nathanael Brooke, 1672), p. 611. See Ezell, this volume. Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, pp. 8, 19, 43, 208. Philippe Meyzie, La Table du Sud-Ouest et l’émergence des cuisines régionales (1700–1850) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007). Ken Albala, The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), pp. 199–204. Ibid., pp. 118–38. John Murrell, A Delightfull daily exercise for Ladies and Gentlewomen (London: Tho: Dewe, 1621), part 2, recipes 2, 5, 10, 30. Sugar is used in 27 per cent of the recipes, vegetables in 47 per cent. On this point, see Mark Dawson, Plenti and Grase: Food and Drink in a Sixteenth-Century Household (Totnes: Prospect Books, 2009), pp. 146–7. I have conducted a full statistical analysis of all the English cookery collections from the medieval period which exist today in print, and of all the recipes contained in printed cookbooks (as defined in my text) to 1659. This analysis is for cookery recipes only, excluding confectionery. The limited space of this chapter precludes a complete list of works analysed and the principles of selection of recipes. These will appear in the book I am currently writing.

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19 Albala, Banquet, pp. 64–5. 20 Nutmeg is found in the recipe for ‘Charwarden’ in Holkham MS 674, transcribed in A Noble Boke off Cookry, ed. [Robina] Napier (London: Elliot Stock, 1882), pp. 81–2; and in Pynson’s printing of a version of the same recipe collection in 1500. 21 This view is forcefully expressed in Revel, Festin en paroles, p. 172. 22 A. W., A Booke of Cookrye (first pub. 1584; London: Edward Allde, 1591, facs. repr. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1976), fols 4v–5r, 6v; Thomas Dawson, The Good husvvifes Iewell (London: Iohn Wolfe for Edward White, 1587), fols. 5r–v; The Second part of the good Hus-wiues Iewell (first pub. 1585; London: E. Allde for Edward White, 1597, facs. repr. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1977), pp. [2–3]; The good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin (London: Richard Iones, 1594), fols 3r–v, 4v. The last two recipes are copied from A. W. 23 Murrels Two Books of Cookerie and Carving (London: M. F. for Iohn Marriot, 1638), pp. 11, 87–8 (apart from the addition of four jellies to the first book in 1617, the text of these two books did not change from that of the initial publication in 1615 and 1628). 24 The Ladies Companion (London: W. Bentley for W. Shears, 1654), pp. 73–4, has a very simple version; The Compleat Cook (first pub. 1655; London: E. Tyler & R. Holt, 1671, facs. repr. London: Prospect Books, 1984), p. 4, gives a slightly simplified version of Murrell’s 1615 recipe; neither A True Gentlewomans Delight (London: R. Norton, 1653) nor Jos. Cooper’s The Art of Cookery (London: J. G. for R. Lowndes, 1654) has a recipe. 25 See the instructions for setting out a feast in M[arkham], Countrey Contentments, or The English Husvvife (London: I[ohn] B[eale] for R. Iackson, 1623), pp. 126–7; these instructions did not appear before this 1623 edition. For contemporary dramatic representation, see Philip Massinger, The City Madam (1632), ed. Cathy Shrank (London: Nick Hern Books, 2005), II. 1.18–20. 26 For instance, Larkin’s portraits of Mary Radclyffe (c.1610–13, Denver Art Museum, Berger Collection), ?Lady Dorothy Cary (c.1614–18, Kenwood House, London, Suffolk Collection) or Philip Herbert, fourth earl of Pembroke (c.1615, Audley End). 27 The Good Hous-wiues Treasurie (London: Edward Allde, 1588), sig. Bii–iii; the same colours, with the addition of red, reappear in Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook (London: printed by R.W. for Nath. Brooke, 1660), pp. 233–5. For tart patterns, see ibid., pp. 225, 227, 228, 229; in the second edition of 1665, more patterns for cut-laid tarts are given in two inserted folding plates. See also Pennell, this volume. 28 The link between the patterns in gardens and those created during the dance, and the multifarious use of pattern-books, is discussed briefly in Paula Henderson, The Tudor House and Garden (London/New Haven: Yale

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29

30

31

32

33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40

41 42

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University Press, 2005), pp. 113–14. Roy Strong emphasises the close links between embroidery, painting and garden design: see The Renaissance Garden in England (first pub. 1979; London: Thames & Hudson, 1998), p. 70. See M[arkham], English Husvvife (1623 edn), p. 110; this advice was being offered at the same time as Sir Francis Bacon was rejecting garden knots (‘As for the making of knots . . ., they be but toys; you may see as good sights many times in tarts’) in his essay ‘Of Gardens’: The Essayes, or counsels, ciuill and moral (London: Iohn Haviland for Hanna Barret, 1625), p. 272. See, for instance, Hugh Plat, Delightes for Ladies (London: Peter Short, 1602), A12, A18; A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen (London: Arthur Iohnson, 1608), pp. 33–4, 39–40, 24–5; The Ladies Cabinet Opened (London: M. P. for Richard Meighen, 1639), pp. 55–7; John Murrell, A Daily Exercise for Ladies and Gentlewomen (London: widow Helme, 1617), recipe 77; [attrib. Theodore Turquet de Mayerne], Archimagirus Anglo-Gallicus (London: G. Bedell & T. Collins, 1658), pp. 88–9. Examples of this vocabulary are found in Plat, Delightes for Ladies, A10, A18, A66; Murrell, Daily Exercise, section ‘Conceits in Sugar-Workes’, recipes 73–80. For the convergence of art and nature in these collections, and their links to Arcimboldo, see Franz Kirchweger, ‘Entre art et nature: Arcimboldo et le monde des Kunstkammern’, in Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (ed.), Arcimboldo, 1526–1593 (Milan and Paris: Skira/Musée du Luxembourg, 2007), pp. 189– 94. The mentality of the cabinet of curiosities is certainly present in English gardens, galleries and cabinets as places of display. For Evelyn’s reaction, see Giuseppe Olmi’s article in The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner (New York: Grove, 1996), sub Cabinet (i). Albala, Banquet, pp. 14–19. Ibid., pp. 67–8. For the underdeveloped state of gardens and art, see Strong, Renaissance Garden, pp. 70–3. Published as The Court and Country Cook (London: printed by W. Onley, for A. & J. Churchill & M. Gillyflower, 1702). No forename has been confirmed for Massialot, for whose works in English see Lehmann, British Housewife, pp. 437–8. Hannah Wolley [i.e. Woolley], The Queen-like Closet (London: printed for R. Lowndes, 1670), pp. 345–9. Strong, Renaissance Garden, pp. 90–1. Examples of this vocabulary used for houses and gardens are found in John Norden, Speculum Britanniae (London, 1593), quoted in Henderson, Tudor House and Garden, p. 4. Lehmann, British Housewife, pp. 40–53, 173–206. Dorothy Hartley, Food in England (first pub.1954; London: Futura, 1985), pp. 609–10.

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6

The ‘Quintessence of Wit’: poems and recipes in early modern women’s writing JAYNE ELISABETH ARCHER

‫ﱬﱫ‬

In The Female Vertuoso’s (London, 1693), Thomas Wright alludes to the perceived correspondence between the processes of distillation and authorship. Among les femmes savantes satirised in this play is Mrs Lovewitt. Having collected all the dramatic works ever written, she devises ‘a huge Limbeck’ in which to distil the ‘Quintessence of Wit’, ready to sell ‘by drops’ to dried-up poets: Lovewitt: Sir Maggot, I have now a huge Limbeck making; guess for what. Sir M. Jingle: Guess say you? – Faith I can’t, unless it be to dissolve the Philosophers Stone. Lovewitt: No, no, Sir Maggot; ’tis for a more noble Design, I assure you: You must understand, that I have made an exact Collection of all the Plays that ever came out, which I design to put into my Limbeck; and then extract all the Quintessence of Wit that is in them, to sell it by drops to the Poets of this Age.1

‘Quintessence’ is a term derived from alchemy (as suggested by Sir Maggot’s allusion to ‘the Philosophers Stone’), denoting the perfected spirit (or essence) of any substance when subjected to the alchemical opus. In the early modern period, the term had undergone a transformation of its own, and was increasingly used in early modern medicine and cookery to refer to distilled oils and waters.2 In Wright’s scene, the absurdity of the alchemical enterprise

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is transposed onto the character of Mrs Lovewitt, and, by implication, the figure of the woman as scientist and author. In so doing, Wright could be inviting his audience to perceive, in Mrs Lovewitt, a critique of another woman writer and would-be scientist. Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle (1623–73), toying with the relationship between scientific authorship and housewifery in her 1655 Philosophical and Physical Opinions, laments: ‘I cannot for my Life be so good a Huswife, as to quit Writing.’3 Her husband, William Cavendish, in his commendatory poem ‘To the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, On Her Book of Poems’, is characteristically understanding of his wife’s dilemma. He compares the Duchess to an alchemical opus, of which her poetical science and philosophy are the precious result: ‘Your Head the Limbeck, where the Muses sit, / Distilling there the Quintessence of Wit’.4 Here, William compliments his wife and reminds her that she is, despite her protestations to the contrary, a very good housewife: Margaret has transmuted her feminine skill in distillation and has used it to create the ‘Quintessence of Wit’, which has its own unique power to preserve and transform. In fact, as Cavendish’s readers would have recognised, early modern women were indeed able to transmute their worlds because, and not in spite of, their household work. The period 1550–1700 witnessed a burgeoning literature dealing with domestic duties and the philosophy and practice of housewifery. Household manuals, written in response to the changing ideas concerning women’s domestic duties advanced by humanism and Protestantism, often took the form of recipe books. Mapping the mental as well as the physical spaces of women – or their ‘inward and outward vertues’, as Gervase Markham put it – recipe books were intimately concerned with notions of appropriate female conduct, education and behaviour.5 As such, it might be assumed that these books were prescriptive and restricting, and hence inimical to female creativity and authorship. However, although their function was certainly in part regulatory, recipe books also testify to the sophisticated and complex knowledge systems which informed the theory and practice of early modern housewifery – systems such as alchemy, natural philosophy, astrology, natural magic and experimental and craft traditions.6 In fact, as I will argue in this chapter, recipe books

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helped facilitate the process by which housewifery was transformed into women’s literacy and authorship. Examining extant manuscript and printed recipe books owned and compiled by early modern women, we can trace the process through which women could reimagine and re-create their worlds. In this chapter I will explore the relationships – rhetorical, formal and imaginative – between recipes and poetry in the period 1550– 1700, focusing on recipes for quintessences and distilled waters. The ways in which writers played with these correspondences to comment on female creativity and authority will be considered. Whilst acknowledging the important questions regarding ‘authorship’ and the recipe book raised by Sara Pennell and Michelle DiMeo in their Introduction, as well as in the latter’s chapter in the present volume, I will argue that one of the legacies of recipe writing is the woman writer.

Recipe books and the woman writer As Pennell and DiMeo note in their Introduction to this collection, printed recipe books targeted at female readers began to appear from the 1570s onwards. In publications such as John Partridge’s The Treasurie of Commodious Conceits (London, 1573), Thomas Dawson’s The Good husvvifes Iewell (London, 1587), Charles Estienne’s The Countrie Farme (London, 1600) and Gervase Markham’s The English Husvvife (London, 1615), housewifery – incorporating cooking and food preparation; the provision of medical care; washing, cleaning and dyeing; the distillation of perfumes, waters and oils; gardening; needlework and mending; and the production of various items such as cosmetics, poisons and ink – is shown to be an important part of the household and local economy. Allowing the housewife such scope in her activities made sound economic sense: a housewife who is ‘skilfull in natural phisicke’ is, Estienne maintains, good for ‘the profite of the house’.7 The title-page of The Accomplished Ladies Rich Closet of Rarities (second edition: London, 1687), usually attributed to John Shirley, testifies to the comprehensive nature of these guides. Encompassing midwifery, deportment, distillation, conserving and preserving, it promises all the worldly knowledge a housewife will ever need.

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Housewifery is thus presented as a complex and information-rich activity, and that information is transmitted in the form of words and books. Not surprisingly, therefore, in the illustrated frontispiece of Shirley’s publication, the stillroom, positioned at the upper right of the picture, is a space stocked with books (Figure 6.1). The stillroom, as the symbolic centre of housewifery, is thus shown to contain the apparatus – texts, limbecks, receivers and containers – in which women produce and preserve the quintessences with which they will maintain the household in endless cycles of refinement, preservation and transformation.

6.1 Frontispiece [attrib. John Shirley], The Accomplished Ladies Rich Cabinet of Rarities (London, 1687). Shelfmark 1037.e.25. © The British Library Board, All Rights Reserved 24/4/2012

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Surviving manuscript recipe books in English date from the very early seventeenth century. In a memoir of his late wife, Elizabeth (1623–90), Anthony Walker gives an account of the compilation of such a book: She caused her daughters to transcribe her best recipes for things which were curious, but especially for Medicines, with directions how to use them . . . Her first and main stock she acquired from a Brother-in-Law, a very able Doctor of the London College, who Married her Sister, and he was very freely communicative, who wrote her many Receipts, and directed her what methods to proceed in . . . and she was very inquisitive of other Doctors, and had many English Books, Riverius, Culpeper, Bonettus, &c. which she read, not to say studied.8

The account is perhaps reminiscent of the ‘active engagement’ in medical theory and therapeutics described by Anne Stobart as characteristic of the women lay practitioners examined in her contribution to the present collection.9 Herself the daughter of an apothecary, Elizabeth Walker combined literary and medical knowledges in her effort to fulfil her Christian duties as a wife and mother within the household and wider community.10 In pursuing these activities, she was able to give expression to her ‘curiosity’, her ‘inquisitive’ nature and her desire to study: she investigated, Anthony Walker remarked, ‘whatever requires more art or curiosity for the Closet or the parlour, as preserving, drawing spirits in an Alembic, or cold Still’.11 The freedom with which Elizabeth Walker was able to exercise her intellectual and experimental abilities was, of course, circumscribed. As Lauren F. Winner reminds us in her contribution to the present collection, women’s domestic roles and authority were performed within a ‘framework . . . of patriarchal authority’ – in this case, a framework in part determined by Anthony Walker’s own confessional, professional and ideological allegiances as revealed in his exemplary use of the textual remains of his late wife.12 Other contributors to this collection have reflected on the development of the manuscript recipe book as a distinct genre and the processes of compilation and transmission it fostered.13 When considering the relationship between the recipe book and women’s writing, however, the interpenetration of manuscript and printed

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forms and the rhetorical strategies used by publishers and printers in authorising their volumes are of particular importance. The printed recipe book did not supersede a pre-existing manuscript tradition. Instead, the recipe book is an example of what Tessa Watt has termed the ‘complex interweaving of the printed word with existing cultural practices’.14 Printed and manuscript recipe books coexisted and influenced one another. The compilers of printed recipe books often gave authority to their publications by claiming that they were based on the manuscript of a recently deceased noblewoman: John Partridge, for example, claimed that The Widowes Treasure (London, 1586) derived from the text of a manuscript ‘written . . . at the earnest request and sute of a Gentlewoman in the Countrie for her priuate use’; whilst Gervase Markham claimed that the text of The English Huswife came from a ‘Manuscript’ owned by ‘an Honourable Contesse [sic]’.15 Although there is little evidence of wholesale copying, women transcribed material from printed recipe books, sometimes – but not always – acknowledging the source (as suggested in Elizabeth Walker’s use of ‘Riverius, Culpeper, Bonettus, &c.’).16 Recipe books did not simply include recipes. More so than their printed equivalents, and unlike many of the other literary forms deemed acceptable for women writers, manuscript recipe books were permeable, absorbing all aspects of a woman’s life, imagination and intellect. As Margaret J. M. Ezell and Victoria Burke, among others, have shown, women’s manuscript miscellanies served as something of a scrapbook, readily accepting heterogeneous material, added and sometimes corrected and annotated as and when it was collected, often across several generations of owners. Poems, prayers, proverbs, drawings, short biographies, case histories and personal inscriptions punctuate the leaves of women’s recipe books, while manuscripts classified as ‘commonplace books’ or ‘manuscript miscellanies’ sometimes also contain recipes.17 Literary forms deemed less acceptable for women, such as love lyrics, narrative poems and autobiographical writings, could be inserted within the pages of such a manuscript. Thus, for example, Martha Moulsworth’s (1577–1646) ‘Memorandum’, an autobiographical poem dated 10 November 1632, appears towards the end of a commonplace book;18 the manuscript miscellany of Lady Anne

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Southwell (bap. 1574–1636) combines medical recipes, accounts and notes taken from Edward Topsell’s The Historie of Foure-footed Beastes (London, 1607) with poetry and epistolary compositions;19 and Jane Mosley (1669?–1712) of Derbyshire slipped ‘The Spanish Ladies Love to an english gentleman’, a poem which appears to be her own composition, into her manuscript of medicines and culinary recipes.20 Manuscripts such as those compiled by Moulsworth, Southwell and Mosley show that recipes helped perform symbolic, cultural work. Elizabeth Spiller has argued that the discrete cultures of what we now term ‘science’ and ‘literature’ were defined, during the Renaissance, ‘through a shared aesthetics that understands knowledge as an act of making’.21 Early modern women’s recipe books demonstrate the shared origins and interpenetration of these ‘cultures’. In the terminology of the genre, recipe books could engage the ‘fancy’, ‘delight’ and ‘curiosity’ of women; they could be consumed and compiled for ‘pleasure’ as well as ‘profit’; and recreating the household was seen to be an act of ‘recreation’ for the housewife herself.22 In large part pure drudgery, housewifery was also seen to be creative, and it is the recipe as a vehicle for that creativity – with the inevitable combination of anxiety and opportunity that such a potential aroused – to which I will now turn.

Recipes and poems In order to recover the creative potential of the recipe, we need to attend to the process by which poems and recipes came to be defined in opposition to one another. Alexander Pope, in his Essay on Criticism (London, 1711), juxtaposes the recipe with the good poem. Describing examples of bad poetry, Pope denounces those who, like Wright’s Mrs Lovewitt, reduce poetry to mere formulae, comparing them to ‘poticaries’ [apothecaries] who try to usurp the authority of their rightful ‘masters’, the doctors: ‘Some drily plain, without invention’s aid, / Write dull receipts how poems may be made’.23 Pope’s couplet, which assumes a firm distinction between the poems and recipes (‘receipts’), is indicative of a gradual shift in the meaning of ‘recipe’ – and, consequently, of the possibilities of poetry as well – of which we are the (often unwitting) inheritors.

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Though we may still doubt the ability of a recipe to do exactly what it promises, we at least assume that it is intended to fulfil that promise. For us, the recipe is deemed a truthful text insofar as its meaning does not depend upon the symbolic qualities of language, whereas the poem is potent insofar as its allusive dimension lends itself to a variety of interpretations: a poem changes minds, not things, while a recipe changes things, not minds. The late seventeenth century was a crucial period in the complex process by which recipes and poems were reconceived as separate cultures and textual forms. As in Pope’s couplet and the scene from The Female Vertuoso’s with which I began this chapter, this separation often accompanied a distinction between ‘scientific’ and ‘literary’ (or pseudo-scientific) languages. Such a distinction would have been (quite literally) unthinkable in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The recipe and the poem were, to use terminology employed by Susan Frye in a related context, ‘wrought’ texts.24 Operating at the interface between mind and matter, the recipe expressed the human desire to remodel the material world. Thus, early moderns were acutely alert to the symbolic, or ‘poetic’, potential of recipes, and, in particular, the power of verse as an aid to storing knowledge. The second edition of Thomas Tusser’s A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandry (London, 1570), which included A Hundreth Good Poynts of Huswifery, used a variety of verse forms to package its advice, instructions and recipes for housewives, and Patrick Hannay, in A Happy Husband (London, 1619), used rhyming couplets to help women remember their responsibilities as housewives.25 In printed recipe books such as those compiled by Gervase Markham, Hugh Plat and Thomas Dawson, for example, the products of housewifery – sweetmeats, perfumes and cosmetics – are often described using terminology associated with poetry and rhetoric: they are ‘conceits’, ‘colours’ and ‘devices’, used to body forth ideas. Indeed, ‘conceit’ and ‘device’ were used as synonyms for ‘recipe’, the former being drawn from poetic, the latter from heraldic, terminology. One very witty variety of sweetmeat illustrates the close correspondence between poems and recipes at this time. A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen (London, 1608) includes a recipe for ‘a Walnut’ made of sugar paste and cinnamon, made so

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‘that when you cracke it, you shall find . . . a prettie Posey written’.26 Verses were written with food dyes on the reverse of plates made out of sugar; posies were wrapped around sweetmeats; and larger sugar sculptures were tagged with explanatory verses, known as ‘reasons’.27 The concealment of secret wisdom and texts within edible form has obvious esoteric (and Eucharistic) significances. The anonymous male author of A Womans Woorth (London, 1599), a defence of the female sex dedicated to Elizabeth Vernon (1573–1655 or after), countess of Southampton and other women of the Queen’s Privy Chamber, compares the process of writing to the preparation of an alchemical recipe. Of his inability to condense the opinions of writers, ancient and modern, regarding the goodness of women into a single, powerful ‘quintessence’ of wisdom, he writes: ‘Had I a Spencers spirit, a Daniels powers: / Th’extracted quintessence were only yours’, thus implicitly comparing his text, a ‘preservative’ for women against slander, to the life-affirming properties of the Philosopher’s Stone (the ultimate ‘quintessence’).28 The couplet is especially potent because of the coupling of the symbolic power of women to transform the lives of writers such as this anonymous author, through their roles as patrons, and the literal power of women to transform the physical and spiritual worlds through the preparation of quintessences in the stillroom.29 Indeed, women belonging to Elizabeth’s Privy Chamber were charged with the responsibility of carrying selected quintessences and distilled oils and waters wherever their Queen went.30 The idea of the ‘quintessence’ is used in A Womans Woorth to acknowledge the unique power of women simultaneously to shape their imaginative and material worlds. More often, however, the intersection of poetry and recipes was used to register anxieties about women’s creative powers. In ‘An approued Receipt against Melancholy Feminine’, from the eleventh edition of Sir Thomas Overbury His Wife (London, 1622), the author mocks mountebanks – common targets of humour and abuse – for their empty rhetoric and vague promises. Significantly, however, the critique takes the form of a literary recipe that associates mountebanks with femininity: ‘If any Lady be sicke of the Sullens, she knowes not where, let her take a handfull of simples, I know not what, and vse them I know not how, applying them to the place

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grieued, I know not which, and shee shall bee cured I know not when.’31 The empty language of the mountebank is satirised through its association with the credulous women who will pay to have their fashionable melancholy attended to, but not cured.32 The mountebank’s mock-recipe works not because it can cure a ‘Lady . . . of the Sullens’, but because, for all its exaggeration, it is still recognisable as the type of recipe that did indeed fill the recipe books of unlicensed practitioners, including women. Early modern recipes can seem rather vague, promising relief for a number of complaints, requiring a large number of apparently interchangeable simples (in unspecified quantities) to be prepared ‘according to art’ and administered as and when a healer thinks fit. Such flexibility, which allowed healers to respond to factors such as the lunar cycle, the humoral disposition of the patient, the temporal and geographical availability of herbs and simples, and other physical conditions, made good sense. But the allusive, polyvalent and ‘poetic’ language of unlicensed medicine33 was at odds with the fixed methods and meanings of licensed medicine as represented in publications such as the Pharmacopœia Londinensis.34 The contrast allows the author of the above ‘approued Receipt’ to use the recipe form as a vehicle for literary satire, and associates women with rhetorical features that delude and misinform rather than heal and educate. This anxiety concerning the power of women to use recipes in order to deceive and destroy takes sharper form in the ‘briefe Treatise of Urines’ from a printed recipe book, Partridge’s Treasurie of Commodious Conceits. In it, women’s genitalia (their ‘secrete receites’) are described as ‘Chambers ful of euyll humours and of sicknes’.35 ‘Secret’, ‘recipe’ and ‘receipt’ were synonyms in the early modern period, and in their relationship to one another, hidden knowledge was associated with the transgressive potential of female creativity.36 Thus, for example, Ercole and Torquato Tasso describe woman as ‘Nothing, or a thing without substance’, ‘not framed for any other respect or vse, then for a Receptacle of some of our Excrementall humors’.37 And in Thomas Heywood’s play The WiseWoman of Hogsdon (London, 1638), a ‘Countryman’ refers to a urinal as ‘My wife’s limbeck’: a bladder-like vessel into which his wife has ‘distilled’ the contents of her body.38 In each instance, the

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ideal of the female body as a self-enclosed still, which purifies and separates, is inverted, and what instead issues from her ‘secret receits’ is poison – all the more terrible for being offered up under the guise of life-preserving quintessences.39

Women’s poetic recipes Mary Thomas Crane has identified a ‘pattern of anxiety’ in early modern cultural representations of female roles that resulted, in part, from ongoing transformations in women’s domestic duties and which was characterised by an attempt to separate their roles as ‘producers’ (‘of income, goods, children’) and ‘preservers’ (‘as caretakers and preservers of money, goods, and offspring produced by the husband’).40 Despite, and, I would argue, because of these anxieties, a number of women used the recipe form as a poetic device, finding it an appropriate one in which to package wisdom and advice specific to female readers.41 In 1573, the maidservant Isabella Whitney (fl. 1566–73) published A Sweet Nosgay, her adaptation of Hugh Plat’s The Floures of Philosophie (London, 1572), a gathering, or ‘posye’, of Senecan poetical maxims or ‘Phylosophicall Flowers’.42 The ‘nosegay’ was, of course, a popular prophylactic against disease and, in particular, plague; and so Whitney, who was employed to care for the physical wellbeing of the household, is, as a woman, more (rather than less) able to adopt this convention of classical literature.43 In a poem addressed to her ‘Sister Misteris A. B.’, Whitney (anticipating Margaret Cavendish in the passage discussed in the introduction to this chapter) appears to set ‘writing’ in opposition to ‘huswyfery’: ‘Good Sister so I you commend, / to him that made vs all: / I know you huswyfery intend, / though I to writing fall: / Wherfore no lenger shal you stay, / From businesse, that profit may’. She concludes: ‘But til some houshold cares mee tye, / My bookes and Pen I wyll apply’.44 However, the seeming antagonism between ‘houshold cares’ and ‘writing’ is resolved when, towards the end of A Sweet Nosgay, Whitney concludes her ‘Floures’ with the following ‘soueraigne receypt’: ‘The Iuce of all these Flowers take, / and make thee a conserue: / And vse it firste and laste: and it / wyll safely thee preserue’.45 Whitney’s ‘conserue’ is the wisdom she has selected from

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Plat’s much larger garden of wisdom and transformed in the still of her own mind and experience. In A Sweet Nosgay, Whitney takes the conventional motif in which the mind is a garden where flowers – philosophical and moral precepts – grow to create a vigorous, virtuous and public man, and transforms it on behalf of working women, tailoring its wisdom to provide practical advice on such everyday concerns as dealing with friends, lovers and employers, accepting praise, receiving criticism, trusting friends and handling money.46 So also, Whitney adapts the form of these Senecan aphorisms, presenting them to her female readers in a language more familiar to them as a distilled cordial to be taken ‘firste’ thing in the morning and ‘laste’ thing at night to ‘safely . . . preserue’ women throughout their days and lives. In A Sweet Nosgay, then, women’s domestic work and authorship are closely intertwined: the association is suggested in the echo of the word ‘service’ in ‘conserue’ and ‘preserue’ (my emphasis). For, in the kitchen, women such as Whitney could make medicinal cordials and conserves which promised the preservation of life and health. So also, as a published writer, Whitney is able to preserve the knowledge she has won through personal experience and communicate it to other women, so they might keep themselves safe, protecting their reputations, money and freedom. A comparable prescription is offered by the young Katherine Philips (1632–64). In ‘A receipt to cure a Love sick Person who cant obtain the Party desired’, Philips’s narrator offers advice to a teenage female friend: Take two oz: of the spirits of reason three oz: of the Powder of experiance five drams of the Juce of Discretion three oz: of the Powder of good advis & a spoonfull of the Cooling watter of consideration make these all up into Pills & besure to drink a little content affter th[e]m & then the head will be clear of maggotts & whimsies & you restored to y[our] right sences but the persons that wont be ruld must become a sacrifise to cupid & dye for love for all the Doctors in the world cant cure th[e]m

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if this wont do apply the plaister & if that wont do itts out of my power to find out what will[.]47

Philips, like the author of the ‘Approued receipt’ discussed previously, also demonstrates familiarity with the rhetorical and didactic techniques employed in women’s recipe books, in which cures for love melancholy frequently appear. In presenting this prose recipe, she also plays upon the form and imagery of the love sonnet, with the speaker offering advice to a friend who is suffering the mental turmoil and physical symptoms characteristic of unrequited love. The first ten lines follow the form of a typical recipe: we begin with ingredients, before moving on to the method, instructions for use and prognosis. The final two lines, like the concluding couplet of a love sonnet, suddenly reverse our expectations: the seemingly authoritative speaker admits the limits of her knowledge and skill (‘itts out of my power’). Whereas, at the end of a recipe, we expect an efficacy statement (such as Probatum est or ‘approved’), Philips’s narrator causes us to doubt the ability of medicine, or, indeed, the advice of a well-meaning friend, to alter the mind of someone determined to make themselves into ‘a sacrifise to cupid’. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) used a poetic recipe in order to give similar advice, this time to an older woman. In ‘A Receipt to Cure the Vapours. Written to Lady I[rwi]n’, the speaker addresses a woman who is mourning the loss of her young lover (Damon) and of her looks: ‘Why will Delia thus retire, / And idly languish life away? / While the sighing crowd admire, / ’Tis too soon for hartshorn tea’.48 The speaker advises her friend to forego the usual prescription for such maladies, ‘hartshorn tea’, and instead urges her to take pride in her appearance (‘consult your toilette’), stop crying, and take regular ‘doses’ of a new, younger lover: I, like you, was born a woman, Well I know what vapours mean; The disease, alas! is common; Single, we have all the spleen. All the morals that they tell us, Never cur’d the sorrow yet: Chuse, among the pretty fellows, One of honour, youth, and wit.

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Prithee, hear him ev’ry morning, At the least an hour or two; Once again at night returning = [sic] I believe the dose will do.49

For women such as Montagu and her addressee, hartshorn, the horn or antler of a hart, was a familiar ingredient in domestic medicine. It was traditionally used both as a preservative and to ameliorate the symptoms of plague, fevers, greensickness and emotional turmoil.50 Importantly, it is a key ingredient in two of the most popular medicines of the seventeenth century: ‘Gascon Pouder’ and ‘The Countesse of Kents Pouder’, a preparation said to be ‘good against all malignant and pestilent, Diseases, French Pox, Small Pox, Measels, Plague, Pestilence, malignant or scarlet Fevers . . . Melancholy, [and] dejection of Spirits’.51 Among women, then, ‘hartshorn tea’ signified an illness brought about as a result of unspent passion (or ‘fevers’). Potentially, it also marks out the speaker and addressee as members of an intimate circle of elite, educated women, for in the mid-seventeenth century hartshorn was particularly associated with the recipe books of continental noblewomen and the circle of the late Queen Henrietta Maria.52 For Montagu and her female addressee, then, hartshorn had symbolic as well as literal (or material) significance. But the speaker in Montagu’s poem rejects the use of ‘hartshorn tea’, and instead recommends regular measures of her younger lover. The prescription, given by a woman to a woman (‘I, like you, was born a woman’), uses the recipe-form in order to create intimacy and authorise the transmission, in verse form, of advice and experience between women. Whitney, Philips and Montagu used the recipe as a form with particular resonances for women readers in order to engage with issues of particular concern to women – how to preserve one’s sexual reputation; unrequited love and melancholy; and fears of ageing. They were able to do so because of the importance of women as providers of medicines and foodstuffs within the household, family and local community, and as a result of the habits of changing, critiquing and actively engaging with recipes described by Stobart in her examination of women as lay practitioners in south-west England.53 Furthermore, the women discussed here seem to exploit another meaning of the term recipe/‘receipt’ that was current during

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the early modern period: the storage and processing of information. Francis Bacon uses the word in this manner in The Advancement of learning (London, 1605), when he examines ‘the capacitie and receit of the mind of Man’.54 Here, ‘receit’ indicates the ability of the mind to ‘receive’ information; like a still, the mind not only contains that information, but purifies it, transmuting sensory experience or the written work into the intangible realm of idea. For early modern women, therefore, who routinely worked with stills and receivers in their kitchens and stillrooms, recipes were invested with a twofold power to alter the mind: confected into medicinal preparations, such as cordials and aphrodisiacs, they could restore the spirits of the patient; as texts, recipes could amuse, engage, and, as in the poems by Whitney, Philips and Montagu, advise and inform a woman reader.

Conclusion In Thomas Wright’s The Female Vertuoso’s, with which this chapter began, the woman writer, like the woman scientist, is shown to be an absurd figure: a woman such as Margaret Cavendish, it is implied, does not possess the mental and intellectual sophistication (in Pope’s terminology, the ‘invention’) necessary to receive inspiration, process ideas, distil influences, and thus write poetry. In Wright’s play, the languages of housewifery and poetry, combined by Cavendish and her husband, are instead separated and constructed as antithetical to one another. This separation is accomplished through the figure of a vain and laughable – but also potentially transgressive – woman, who threatens to confuse literature and recipes, to cross and re-cross the boundaries between fact and fancy, and to mingle the ‘true’ and the ‘not true’. In this chapter, I have drawn attention to the symbolic and poetic potential of the recipe form. Further, I have suggested that the recipe was deeply embedded in early modern discourses of gender. In particular, the recipe was symbolically identified with the paradigmatic space of femaleness: the womb, or ‘secrets’. Like the womb, the recipe-as-secret could be used to reproduce women as ‘good’ (that is, chaste, discreet and thrifty) housewives, but it could also be used to castigate femininity as vain, duplicitous, irrational and poisonous.

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Using examples of texts that borrow equally from the conventions of recipes and poems, I have argued that a middle way was opened up to women that enabled them to fashion authoritative voices for themselves as poets and women. In calling their poems ‘recipes’, and by deploying the rhetoric and forms characteristic of recipe books, writers such as Whitney, Philips and Montagu drew upon a textual tradition specific to women through which to legitimise their decisions to choose literary careers. In so doing, they demonstrate the importance of housewifery and the recipe in the historical development of the woman writer.

Notes 1 Thomas Wright, The Female Vertuoso’s. A Comedy (London: printed by I. Wilde for R. Vincent, 1693), III.i (p. 23). Wright’s play is based on Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso (London: printed by T. N. for Henry Herringman, 1676), which was in turn adapted from Molière’s Les femmes savantes (1672). The character of Mrs Lovewitt and her design to extract the ‘Quintessence of Wit’ are, however, specific to Wright’s play. 2 On this transition, see Robert P. Multhauf, ‘The significance of distillation in Renaissance medical chemistry’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 30:4 (1956), 329–46. 3 Margaret Cavendish, Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 2nd edn (London: William Wilson, 1663), sig. II2r. 4 Margaret Cavendish, Poems, and Phancies, 2nd edn (London: William Wilson, 1664), sigs A2r–v. 5 M[arkham], English Husvvife, in Countrey Contentments, in Two Bookes (1615), sig. A1r. 6 On the influence of some of these traditions on early modern housewifery and recipe books, see Spiller (ed.), Seventeenth-Century English Recipe Books, pp. ix–xxxi and Spiller, ‘Recipes for knowledge’. 7 Charles Estienne, Maison rustique, or The Countrie Farme, trans. Richard Surflet (London: Edm. Bollifant for Bonham Norton, 1600), pp. 561–2. 8 Anthony Walker, The Holy Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Walker, Late Wife of A.W., D.D., Rector of Fyfield in Essex (London: printed for N. R., 1694), pp. 177–8. The Holy life of Mrs. Elizabeth Walker was first published by John Leake in 1690. 9 Stobart, this volume. 10 Evidence for such a wider community can be found in a manuscript recipe book formerly owned by the duke of Norfolk, which contains a ‘Receipt for the Eyes’ attributed to ‘Mrs. Elizabeth Walker’: Worthing County Museum,

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12 13 14

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Textuality and intertextuality Worthing, MS 3574, recipe book of the household of the duchess of Norfolk, c. seventeenth–c. eighteenth century, p. 56. Elizabeth may have collaborated with Mary Rich, countess of Warwick – whom Anthony Walker served as chaplain – and her sister, Katherine Jones, viscountess Ranelagh, in the stillroom at the Warwicks’ residence, Leighs Priory in Essex. The Holy Life was dedicated to Rich and Jones. For more on Ranelagh, see DiMeo, this volume. Walker, Holy Life, p. 178. Elizabeth Walker (née Sadler) also composed an autobiographical work, ‘Some memorials of God’s providences to my husband, self, and children’, selections from which were printed in Holy Life. Winner, this volume. See, for example, Stobart, this volume. Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 7–8. On the interrelationship of manuscript and printed cultures, see also Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). John Partridge, The Widovves Treasvre (London: G. Robinson for E. White, 1586?), sig. Aiir. Textual comparison reveals that The Widovves treasvre is in fact an expanded reworking of an earlier household recipe book, also compiled by Partridge, The Treasurie of Commodious Conceits, & Hidden Secrets and May Be Called, the Huswiues Closet, of Healthfull Prouision (London: Richarde Iones, 1573). See also M[arkham], Countrey Contentments (1623), sig. A2r. See DiMeo and Withey, this volume, for examples of this. On guidelines for compiling commonplace books, see Pennell and DiMeo, this volume. Robert C. Evans and Anne C. Little (eds), ‘The Muses Females Are’: Martha Moulsworth and Other Women Writers of the English Renaissance (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 1995). This manuscript is currently held in the Beinecke Library, Yale University as Osborn MS fb 150. Anne Southwell, The Southwell–Sibthorpe Commonplace Book: Folger MS V.b.198, ed. Jean Klene (Tempe: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997), p. 105. Jane Mosley, Jane Mosley’s Derbyshire Recipes: [and] Jane Mosley’s Derbyshire Remedies, intr. Joan Sinar ([Matlock]: Derbyshire Museum Service, 1979). This portion of the book is not paginated. Sinar notes that this verse ‘was current as an anonymous verse well into the eighteenth century, and is even quoted by Georgette Heyer, in The Grand Sophy (p. iv). Elizabeth Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: the Art of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. i. For examples of this terminology, see [Hugh Plat], Delightes for Ladies to

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adorne Their Persons, Tables, closets, and distillatories, 2nd edn (London: Peter Short, 1602). Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism, in Collected Poems, ed. Bonamy Dobrée; new intr. Clive T. Probyn (London: Dent, 1983), pp. 108, 111, 114–15. Frye uses ‘wrought’ to compare sewn and written texts: Susan Frye, ‘Maternal textualities’, in Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (eds), Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 224–36 (on p. 226). Tusser’s work was first issued as A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (London: Richard Tottel, 1557), which included a few pages on housewifery. The second edition expanded this into a dedicated section: A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandry Lately Maried vnto a Hundreth Good Poynts of Huswifery (London: [Henry Denham?] for Richardi Tottylli, 1570), fols 29r–35v. Patrick Hannay, A Happy Husband or, Directions for a Maide to Choose her Mate. As also, a Wiues Behauiour Towards her Husband after Marriage . . . To Which is Adioyned the Good Wife (London: [John Beale] for Richard Redmer, 1619). A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen (London: printed [by F. Kingston] for Arthur Johnson, 1608), pp. 33–4. See also BL MS Sloane 556, manuscript recipe book of Lady Anne Clifford, transcribed by Anthony Lewis in 1696, fol. 14r; and Giambattista della Porta, Natural Magick (London: Thomas Young & Samuel Speed, 1658), p. 346. For examples and discussions of these sweetmeats, see Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 111–67; Kim F. Hall, ‘Culinary spaces, colonial spaces: the gendering of sugar in the seventeenth century’, in Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan and Dympna Callaghan (eds), Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 168–90; and the essays collected in Wilson (ed.), ‘Banquetting Stuffe’, esp. C. Anne Wilson, ‘The evolution of the banquet course: some medicinal, culinary and social aspects’ (pp. 9–35) and Lynette Hunter, ‘“Sweet secrets” from occasional receipt to specialised books: the growth of a genre’ (pp. 36–59). A Womans Woorth, Defended Against All the Men in the World (London: John Wolfe, 1599), sig. A7r (from the dedicatory poem ‘To the Honourable Mistresse Margaret Ratcliffe’). A Womans Woorth is a translation of Alexandre de Pont-Aymery’s Paradoxe apologique, où il est fidèlement demonstré que la femme est beaucoup plus parfaicte que l’homme en toute action de vertu (Paris, 1596). The dedicatory epistle is signed by Anthony Gibson (sig. A2v), who is, presumably, the author of the couplet quoted above, and which is only found in the English version. On this association, see Jayne Elisabeth Archer, ‘Women and alchemy in

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Textuality and intertextuality early modern England’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2000), Ch. 5 (‘The Opus mulierum: the housewife as alchemist’); Wendy Wall, ‘Distillation: transformations in and out of the kitchen’, in Fitzpatrick (ed.), Renaissance Food, pp. 89–104; and M. E. Warlick, ‘The domestic alchemist: women as housewives in alchemical emblems’, in Alison Adams and Stanton J. Linden (eds), Emblems and Alchemy (Glasgow: Glasgow Emblem Studies, 1998), pp. 25–47. See Charlotte Isabella Merton, ‘The women who served Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth: ladies, gentlewomen and maids of the Privy Chamber’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1992), p. 82. On Queen Elizabeth’s association with, and interest in, alchemy, see Jayne Elisabeth Archer, ‘“Rudenesse it selfe she doth refine”: Queen Elizabeth I as Lady Alchymia’, in Lisa Hopkins and Annaliese Connolly (eds), Goddesses and Queens: The Iconography of Queen Elizabeth I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), pp. 45–66. Sir Thomas Ouerbury His wife. With Additions of New Characters, and Many Other Wittie Conceits Neuer Before Printed, 11th edn (London: Laurence Lisle, 1622), sig. V5r. This part of the publication, ‘The Mountebankes Receipts’ (sigs V5r–V6v), contains several other mock-recipes directed at women and is followed by ‘The Mountebankes Songe’ (sigs V7r–V8v), in which the mountebank’s concoctions are described in verse form. On the figure of the mountebank, see Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, pp. 234–50; Sarah Knight, ‘“He is indeed a kind of scholler-mountebank”: academic liars in Jacobean satire’, in Mark Crane, Richard Raiswell and Margaret Reeves (eds), Shell Games: Studies in Scams, Frauds, and Deceits (1300–1650) (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies Publications, 2004), pp. 59–80. For the association between poets and mountebanks, see Sir Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie (London: printed [by James Roberts] for Henry Olney, 1595): ‘Poets . . . are almost in as good reputation, as the Mountibancks at Venice’ (sig. I3r). The rhetorical and syntactic characteristics of recipes from unlicensed practitioners such as women might also derive from their roots in oral culture: see Elizabeth Tebeaux and Mary Lay, ‘Images of women in technical books from the English Renaissance’, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 35 (1992), 196–207. On the influence of the Pharmacopœia Londinensis (first pub. as Pharmacopœa [sic] Londinensis, London: Edwardus Griffin, 1618) on printed recipe books in the seventeenth century, see Spiller (ed.), Seventeenth-Century English Recipe Books, pp. xxvii–xxxi. Partridge, Treasurie of Commodious Conceits, sigs Fvv, Fviv. On the gendered associations of the literature of secrets, see Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, p. 72, and Monica Helen Green, ‘From “diseases of women” to “secrets of women”: the transformation of gynecological litera-

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ture in the later Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 30:1 (2000), 5–39. Ercole Tasso and Torquato Tasso, Of Mariage and Wiuing, trans. R. T. (London: Thomas Creede, 1599), sigs C3v, C3r. Thomas Heywood, The Wise Woman of Hoxton, ed. Sonia Massai (London: Nick Hern Books, 2002), II.i.6, 8. Heywood’s play was first printed as The Wise-Woman of Hogsdon in 1638, although Massai (pp. xi–xii) suggests that it was probably written c.1602–3. On this motif, and its inverse, the leaky woman, see Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 23–63. Mary Thomas Crane, ‘“Players in your huswifery, and huswives in your beds”: conflicting identities of early modern English women’, in Miller and Yavneh (eds), Maternal Measures, pp. 212–23 (on pp. 212–13). As Theodora A. Jankowski has pointed out, it was not only women who took poetic inspiration from recipes; see her ‘Good enough to eat: the domestic economy of woman–woman eroticism in Margaret Cavendish and Andrew Marvell’, in Corinne S. Abate and Elizabeth Mazzola (eds), Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 83–109. However, I would suggest that for women writers addressing women readers, the poem-as-recipe was an especially enabling and authoritative form. Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, or Pleasant Posye, Contayning a Hundred and Ten Phylosophicall Flowers &c. (London: R. Iones, 1573). On this point, see Cara Fox, ‘Isabella Whitney’s nosegay and the smell of women’s writing’, The Senses and Society, 5:1 (2010), 131–43. Whitney, Sweet Nosgay, sig. D2r. Ibid., sig. C5r. For Whitney’s use of herbal texts and motifs, see Rebecca Laroche, Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–1650 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 137–66. Regarding Whitney’s intended readership, see Boyd M. Berry, ‘“We are not all alyke nor of complexion one”: truism and Isabella Whitney’s multiple readers’, in T. H. Howard Hill and Philip Robinson (eds), Renaissance Papers (New York/Woodbridge: Camden House, 2000), pp. 13–23; Louise Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 4–14; and Wendy Wall, ‘Isabella Whitney and the female legacy’, English Literary History, 58:1 (1991), 35–62. Schleiner, for example, writes of Whitney’s ‘primary intended readership of [Whitney’s former employer] and women’ (p. 6). Claudia Limbert, ‘Two poems and a prose receipt: the unpublished juvenilia of Katherine Philips’, English Literary Renaissance, 16:2 (1986), 383–90. Letters of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Written During her Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa: to which are added Poems, by

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the Same Author (Paris: P. Didot, [1798?]), pp. 277–8. 49 Ibid. 50 Hartshorn is also a name given to two plants, buck’s-horn plantain and swine’s cress, both of which have leaves branched like a stag’s horn: see ‘hartshorn’, OED Online, and A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen, pp. 110– 11. For the use of hartshorn as a remedy for greensickness, see [Edwards?], A Treatise Concerning the Plague and the Pox (London: Gartrude Dawson, 1652), p. 143. In Edward Strother, An Essay on Sickness and Health, 2nd edn (London: printed for Charles Rivington, 1725), ‘Tea, Sage-Tea, [and] Hartshorn Jelly’ is prescribed for ‘the Symptoms of Fevers’ (p. 43). 51 A Choice Manual of Rare and Select Secrets in Physical and Chirurgery Collected and Practised by the Right Honorable, the Countesse of Kent (London: printed by G. D., 1653), pp. 174–6. In addition to the ‘hartshorn’ contained in the preparation itself, ‘The Countesse of Kents Pouder’ is to be taken ‘in a little warm Sack or Hartshorn jelly’ (p. 175). 52 See, for example, Hannah Woolley, The Queen-like Closet; or, Rich cabinet Stored With All Manner of Rare Receipts for Preserving, Candying & Cookery (London: printed for R. Lowndes, 1670), pp. 12, 19, 78, 100 (recipe for ‘the best sort of Hartshorn Ielly’); and George Hartman, The True Preserver and Restorer of Health (London: printed by T. B., 1682), pp. 12, 13, 116, 128–9 (recipe for ‘The Lady Hewits great Cordial Water . . . Copied from a Receipt in my Ladies Daughters hand; which she gave to the Countess of Monmouth’), 143, 207. 53 Stobart, this volume. 54 Francis Bacon, The Two Bookes of Francis Bacon. Of the Proficience and Aduancement of Learning, Diuine and Humane (London: Thomas Purfoot & Thomas Creede for Henrie Tomes, 1605), fol. 4v.

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7

The Foote sisters’ Compleat Housewife: cookery texts as a source in lived religion

1

LAUREN F. WINNER

‫ﱬﱫ‬

Since the late 1990s, the methodology of ‘lived religion’ has shaped many scholarly inquiries into American religious history. The book that did the most to introduce this methodology to American religionists was David Hall’s 1997 edited volume Lived Religion in America. There, Hall and ten contributors called for increased attention to the religious activities of laypeople (rather than singular attention to the clergy), to religious practices (rather than singular attention to beliefs) and to contest and ambiguity (rather than singular attention to homogeneity, uniformity or consensus). Lived religion, wrote Hall, ‘places “practice” at the center or focus of the Christian life’, and it aims to address glaring lacunae in the historiography of American religion: ‘while we know a great deal about the history of theology and (say) church and state, we know next-tonothing about religion as practiced and precious little about the everyday thinking and doing of lay men and women’.2 As Marie Griffith and Barbara Savage have noted, students of lived religion have also ‘challenged timeworn distinctions between public and private realms’.3 In subsequent research, scholars of religion have heeded Hall’s call: since the publication of Lived Religion in America, we have seen studies of laypeople’s veneration of a crucifix in early modern and modern Totolapan, laypeople’s healing practices in late nineteenth-century America, and twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury television-watching as a religious practice, to name just three.4 The study of lived religion has had an impact on scholars’ use of

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primary sources. First, scholars pursuing lived religion bring new questions to traditional sources, reading sermons, for example, not for their expression of the preacher’s theology but for what they suggest about laypeople’s practices. Dawn Coleman has examined how antebellum American sermons can reveal ‘listening’ as a religious practice. Jacob Blosser and Marie Griffith have identified sermons in which ministers castigate congregations for sleeping or chatting during services; these excoriations reveal something about laypeople’s behaviour during, and experience of, corporate worship.5 Second, in addition to bringing new kinds of questions to oft-used sources, scholars have made central to their studies kinds of sources that would have been, at best, peripheral before the turn to lived religion, such as the aforementioned television shows. Through a close investigation of one cookery text, this chapter suggests that although culinary writing may not classically be thought of as an obvious source for the writing of religious history, culinary texts are in fact a crucial source for the investigation of the religious life of the laity in the early modern era. My own interest in recipe books as sources for religious life was sparked one afternoon when, in a class on religious life in the American South that I was teaching at the University of Virginia, a guest lecturer on Irish-Americans in the South presented several artefacts from the life of an early and mid-twentieth-century IrishAmerican woman. One of the artefacts was a commercially published day-by-day calendar in which the owner had handwritten a series of recipes. The recipes appeared to be in no apparent order, but I was struck that a recipe for overtly meatless fish soup was penned on the page for Ash Wednesday. Whether consciously or not, the keeper of that recipe collection had placed instructions for a meatless meal on the page of the calendar that inaugurated the Catholic Church’s most intense season of fasting. Thus the text not only revealed the woman’s culinary proclivities; it also revealed something about her religious subjectivity and the religious practices (liturgical timekeeping, fasting) that were important to her. Also striking to me was that my guest lecturer had not noticed the location of a fasting recipe on the Ash Wednesday page – she was not principally interested in household religious practice, so the liturgical location of this meatless recipe had not leapt out at her. It

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was a good lesson for my students: different readers, with different interests, ask sources to tell them different things. And it was a good lesson for me, then a doctoral student beginning a dissertation on Anglican religious life in colonial Virginia – I should look beyond overtly ‘religious’ sources to tell me about the contours of religious practice in Virginia households. This chapter will focus on a particular cookery text, one specific copy of E. Smith’s The Compleat Housewife. Smith’s cookery text was originally published in London in 1727, and became the first cookbook published in the American colonies when Williamsburg’s William Parks printed it in 1742.6 The specific copy of Smith that this chapter investigates is now housed at the Library of the state of Virginia, in Richmond. Recipe books as sources for lived religion are useful even when the historian cannot definitively tie a particular recipe or cookery text to an individual cook or eater; but the potential of recipes to shed light on religion increases dramatically when one can place a specific recipe book in the hands of particular religious actors. The Library of Virginia copy of The Compleat Housewife allows us to do just that. Inside the front cover of the Library’s 1752 Parks edition is a note, written in a sure, elegant hand: ‘This book was my sister Stuart’s her daughters gave it to my sister Washington and she left to her Niece Mrs Ann Thompson and I had it new bound because it is an old family book’. The note is signed ‘Eliza Washington Hayfield July 1810’.7 This note tells us two things: first, the book was well used – otherwise it would not have needed rebinding. Second, the book was passed down to female relatives through the generations. In the 1750s the book was first purchased by or given to Sarah Foote Stuart (no dates known). When she died, the book passed to Stuart’s sister, Katherine Foote Washington. When Katherine – who had no daughters – died in 1799, she left the book to her niece Ann Thompson, who, around 1810, gave the book to her aunt, Elizabeth Foote Washington, who lived at Hayfield, the property that adjoined George and Martha Washington’s estate, Mount Vernon. (Elizabeth Washington’s husband, Lund Washington, dead by the time Elizabeth received the book, was George Washington’s first cousin and served as Mount Vernon’s caretaker.)8 We thus know that the recipe book was passed down to women in an elite Anglican family.

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Through use and through inheritance and gifting, the book had acquired status as a treasured family object: it was a beloved ‘old family book’.9 And we may now ask how this book, which at first blush appears to be only a manual in housekeeping, may be read as a manual for domestic religious performance. As early as the preface to Smith’s Compleat Housewife, the reader understands that she holds a book whose aims are not just culinary but religious; Smith’s preface interprets the history of cooking through a biblical lens. Salt, Genesis 14 tells us, was probably the first seasoning people used; the pottage and meat discussed in Genesis 25 and 27 show us that as ‘COOKERY . . . began to become a Science’, people turned to ‘Soops and Savoury Messes’ to provide flavour and nourishment late in life when their ‘digestive Faculty’, along with their taste buds, had grown ‘weak and impotent’. The Bible also testified to the development of culinary skill: Abraham merely dressed a fatted calf, but one generation later, Esau became ‘the first Person mentioned that made any Advances beyond plain Dressing, as boiling, Roasting, &c.’. He likely learned ‘the Skill of making savoury Meat’ from his mother, Rebecca. Eventually, in the time of kings, the Israelites, having grown more sophisticated, trained ‘Cooks, Confectioners, &c.’. From their first pages, recipe books like Smith’s not only anchored women in domestic identity, but overlay culinary labour with religious meaning.10 Indeed, the Foote sisters’ copy of The Compleat Housewife opens up at least three routes of inquiry into the religious lives of the Foote women. First, the book features recipes specifically tied to the Anglican ecclesial calendar. It therefore helps us understand how the church calendar was performed in elite households. Second, the cookbook raises questions of authority: who had the authority to shape laypeople’s domestic religious performances – the laity themselves, or the clergy? And to what extent did women exercise authority over what we might term their families’ alimentary religiosity? Third, the cookbook raises the question of the relationship between the religious practices and the labour practices of elite Virginians: just who was preparing these recipes that brought the Anglican religious calendar to the Footes’ dining-room tables? This chapter will not exhaustively answer these questions, but will suggest how recipe books are a crucial source for the investigation of

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each. My aim here is less to inform about colonial Virginia religion and more to inspire musings about how recipe books can be useful sources in the study of religious history. Throughout, I will also suggest that while recipe books are vital sources for religion, they are able to speak most clearly about religion when read in concert with other sources: diaries, sermons, and so forth (as Sara Pennell also notes in her chapter).

Recipe books and the practice of religious time in laypeople’s households The burden of this chapter is to suggest that in elite households in Virginia – households like that of Elizabeth Foote Washington, and, indeed, George and Martha Washington – seemingly ‘secular’ recipe books in fact carried religious meaning. In colonial Virginia, the Church of England was the established church, and Virginians encountered Anglicanism, of course, when they attended worship on Sundays. They also encountered the church when they ventured into civil society, as it was the responsibility of the church to, inter alia, oversee poor relief, maintain roads and enforce property lines. Finally, elite Virginia Anglicans encountered Christianity in their houses: when they served tea from pots illustrated with biblical verses; when they produced and displayed biblical needlework; when they opened their Books of Common Prayer to recite the Daily Office; when they welcomed new babies with baptisms celebrated not at the parish church, but in their own well-appointed manses. It is in that context – the context of an Anglicanism expressed and encountered not only in church buildings but also in needlepoint baskets and domestic baptismal parties – that recipe books may be heard to speak a religious idiom. Virginia Anglicanism was, for many scholarly generations, invisible: New England Puritanism seemed to take up all the historiographic oxygen, and in contrast to the sober and pious Puritans, Virginia’s gentry did not appear overly religious. This invisibility was over-determined, but one cause of scholars’ neglect of Virginia religiosity was an absence of a particular kind of source. Puritans kept religiously reflective diaries; Anglican theology did not prompt men and women to write self-revealing diaries in which they scruti-

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nised their lives for marks of sin and grace. But the absence of such diaries does not mean that Virginians were irreligious; it means, rather, that their religiosity prompted them towards spiritual practices other than diary-writing, and that scholars interested in the day-to-day texture of their religiosity need to look for other sources. Recipe books turn out to be a critical source for the religious routines of people like the Foote sisters. Recipe books were, of course, not the only books in Anglican households that included information about Anglican holy days. The Church of England’s calendar was spelled out most fully in the Anglican prayer book, the Book of Common Prayer. There, the ‘Table and Rules for the Feasts and Fasts and the Rules for Special Days’ named the holy days that shaped the Anglican year: Christmas and Easter, Whitsunday and Ascension Day, the feasts of Saints Mark and Luke, the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Rogation Days, and so on. This calendar was, essentially, the Roman Catholic calendar, less many Marian festivals and saints’ days. All of these days theoretically shaped Anglican time, but in practice Anglicans in Virginia only celebrated some of the sacred days. Most enthusiastically observed were Christmas, Twelfth Night, Shrove Tuesday and Lent.11 Recipes for these holidays and sacred seasons feature in both the published English cookbooks that Virginia women purchased and the manuscript recipe books that they kept. Indeed, these recipes are a key source for the persistence of holiday celebration in Virginia. For example, only three known diary entries and traveller accounts testify to Virginians’ practising the English custom of eating a Twelfth Night cake and playing games and dancing at Twelfth Night parties.12 But recipes additionally testify to the persistence of the Twelfth Night cake. One extremely lavish recipe for Twelfth Night cake is attributed to Martha Custis Washington, who married George on Twelfth Night; it was taken down by her granddaughter: Take 40 eggs & divide the whites from the yolks & beat them to a froth start work 4 pounds of butter to a cream & put the whites of eggs to it a spoon full at a time till it is well work’d then put 4 pounds of sugar finely powdered to it in the same manner then put in the youlks of eggs and 5 pounds of flour & five pounds of fruit. 2 hrs will bake it add to it a half an ounce of mace 1 nutmeg half a pint of wine & some frensh brandy.13

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Similarly, it is diary entries and pancake recipes that, taken together, suggest the persistence of Shrove Tuesday celebrations in Virginia.14 The culinary-religious practice to which recipe books most eloquently testify is that of fasting during Lent. Both printed and manuscript cookery texts used in Virginia include recipes for Lenten food.15 In their copy of The Compleat Housewife, the Foote sisters would have found recipes for ‘Sauce for Fish in Lent, or at any Time’. Smith also instructed cooks to fry up ‘balls for Lent’ made from white bread, egg and some spices, and she included recipes for Lenten spinach soup, and a currant-and-raisin-filled ‘Bread and Butter Pudding for Fasting-Days’. Recipes for pea soup were the most common Lenten recipes found in Virginia recipe books. An anonymous Virginia cookbook from 1700 included ‘Pease-Soup for Lent or any Fasting day’. The published English cookbooks Virginians used also recommended ‘Pease Soup for Lent’:16 in lieu of the bacon and beef bones that the author of The Experienced English House-keeper (Manchester, 1769), Elizabeth Raffald called for in her ‘Common Pease Soup’ recipe, anchovies and red herring featured in her Lenten version. Cooks were encouraged to garnish the soup with ‘a little dried Mint if you wish it’. Elizabeth Moxon’s recipe for ‘Peas Soop in Lent’ also substituted anchovies for the beef, bacon and mutton called for in her ‘Peas Soop in Winter’ recipe. English cookbooks to which Virginians had access also encouraged eating fish during Lent. Raffald recommends dressing cod rounds ‘as little turkeys’ by stuffing them with a mixture of oysters, butter, nutmeg, pepper, salt and egg yolk. After roasting the cod, it should be dressed in oyster sauce and garnished with barberries: ‘It is a pretty Side Dish for a large Table, for a Dinner in Lent.’ The Lenten cook did have options beyond pea soup and fish. Hannah Glasse offered a ‘Variety of Dishes for Lent’: eel soup, rice soup, barley soup, ‘Rice-Milk’ (a sort of rice pudding), stewed spinach and eggs. Glasse also included a few modest Lenten desserts, including apple fritters, stewed pears, a tansey (made with cream and orange-flower water, dyed green with spinach juice), hasty pudding and a creamy orange fool. Other cookbooks popular in Virginia suggested that ‘Herb Pye’ (made from lettuce, leeks, ‘spinage’, beets and parsley) and potato pie were suitable Lenten dishes. Martha Bradley’s manual The British Housewife (London,

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1758) told cooks how to transform endive, parsley, chervil, onion, butter and egg into ‘White Soup for Lent’. The Virginia cookbook from 1700 and E. Smith’s Compleat Housewife both include recipes for wigs, wedge-shaped buns that people often ate during Lent. Cookbooks also included suggestions for adapting standard recipes for the penitential season: when making oyster soup, the cook ‘may add strong broth or fried gravy if not in Lent’.17 These recipes suggest how the ecclesial imperative to fast was translated, interpreted and put into practice in people’s daily lives. In keeping with lived religion’s interest in questioning the boundaries between public and private, it is worth pointing out that these Lenten recipes represent neither a purely ecclesial observance nor a household piety wholly distinct from the church. The household was an important site of religious practice in eighteenth-century Virginia, but as these recipes suggest, the religious practices that flourished in people’s houses were practices of the church.18 There is a temptation to read household religiosity as in tension with ecclesial religiosity – and, as we shall see in the next section, it often is, to some extent. But recipes for ecclesially framed cuisine indicate that, whatever tension there may have been, household religiosity also connected practitioners to the ‘public’ institution of the church. To frame the question as one of individual practitioners’ religious subjectivities: the Foote sisters were creating religious meals that would connect them and their families to God, and specifically to the life of Christ, whose 40-day fast in the desert is the event that Lent commemorates; but they were doing so in space already delimited by the church.

Recipe books and religious authority Laypeople’s alimentary practices were thus shaped by the church; but laypeople exercised significant authority over their domestic religious performances, and in Anglican Virginia, that authority unsettled clerics. For example, elite Virginians celebrated Christmas with huge parties accompanied by much food and drink. Clergymen looked askance at these great feasts, and encouraged Virginia laypeople to tamp down their rather raucous domestic and gastronomic celebrations of the birth of Christ. As William Dawson

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preached to a congregation in Williamsburg in 1732: ‘Joy is a Passion w[h]ich God himself hath implanted in our Natures: and it cannot be thought therefore that the Design of Religion is entirely to root it out.’ But that joy should not ‘degenerate into Sin and Sensuality’. Practitioners should not ‘express it by Luxury and Intemperance, to the great Scandal of our Saviour’. Christmas joy ‘is not only lawful, but commendable’, but only when it is ‘founded upon a right Principle, directed to its proper Object, kept within its due Compass, and not suffer’d to exceed either in its Measure, or Duration’. Another parson told parishioners that they should certainly celebrate Christmas, but censoriously instructed laypeople to ‘let your Joy be such as becomes Xns [Christians]; is the way to praise God . . . to game, to get Drunk?’ In particular, this parson chastised those who began their Christmas ‘Feast in the morning, & are early enflamed with strong Drink, & never once lift up your hearts to God in Prayer’. Clergy perhaps worried about the excesses of household holidays in part because they sensed in the gentry’s domestic celebrations a displacement of their own ecclesial authority.19 Christmas was not the only moment at which Virginia clergy tried to shape laypeople’s gastronomic observances of church time. If clergymen found Virginians’ Christmas celebrations too bacchanalian, they deemed Virginians’ Lenten observances – leaving the beef out of their pea soup, replacing turkey with cod – insufficiently rigorous. Just as clergymen tried from the pulpit to chasten laypeople at Christmastime, so they tried from the pulpit to inspire them to a more demanding fast at Lent. The Lenten recipes the Foote sisters found in their recipe book are usefully read alongside Virginia parson Robert Paxton’s sermon ‘On Repentance’, which gives some sense of what Anglican laypeople heard from their clerics about the meaning and practices of Lent. On the first Sunday of Lent, a ‘season of devotion & humiliation so solemnly observed in the former & purer ages of the Christian Church’, Paxton took Joel 2:12–13 as his text: Turn ye even to me saith the Lord to all your heart & to fasting & to weeping & to mourning. And rent your heart & not your garments, & turn unto the Lord your God for he is gracious & merciful, slow to anger & of great kindness, & repenteth him of the evil.

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Lent, Paxton explained, was ‘a season of recollect[io]n & repentance to all’, who ‘by examining the state of y[ou]r own Souls, would find occasion more than enough’ for penance. Paxton believed that the practice of private penance was more important than ever, since ‘the decay of publick & judicial chastism[en]t hath left us more in our own hands’. The central ‘help to & instrum[en]t of repentance’ was fasting, a practice, Paxton underscored, that had the imprimatur of both Jews and Christians. Indeed it may even be found in ‘natural religion’, for ‘it is a very natural express[io]n of sorrow . . . for persons in grief to neglect ymselves, to find no relish in, & lose all appetite to the usual refreshm[en]ts & Comforts of life’. The end of fasting was inward change – God desires not wailing, he said, but ‘the grief of our hearts’ – and to fast was no small undertaking. ‘Now by this is not meant meerly a change in the kind of our meals, or in the usual time of taking ym’, exhorted Paxton. Rather, Lent required ‘a denying our selves in the quantity & quality of our refreshm[en]ts in such manner as may be a real punishm[en]t & humiliation to the body & its appetites’.20 Paxton’s sermon illustrates the clergy’s attempts to influence domestic religious practice. He tried to persuade practitioners to embrace a more vigorous domestic engagement with the penitential season. His sermon, with its nostalgia for some bygone era in which people took Lenten fasting and repentance more seriously, was laboured. He strained so to convince his congregants to fast because, quite simply, most elite Virginians were not inclined to observe a fast stringent enough to please Paxton. There seems to be a gap between the sermon and the recipes, and it is a gap our imaginations must fill in. E. Smith’s Lenten wigs do not betoken a severe fast in which practitioners ‘subdue the flesh & its appetites’. Women like Sarah Foote Stuart, Katherine Foote Washington and Elizabeth Foote Washington did not defer to clerics’ authority and accept a rigorous regime of fasting, but, using cookbooks tied to the church calendar, they did oversee the preparation of a modified Lenten diet. In serving foods like Smith’s balls for Lent or Moxon’s Lenten pea soup, elite Anglican women in Virginia were able to maintain the rhetoric of Lenten fasting even as they had freed themselves from the homiletic imperative of a difficult and transforming fast. Of course, this is an old story in the church:

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clerical elites articulating a high standard, and laity modifying clerical instruction, cobbling together a practice that seems manageable, but nonetheless suffices to keep the laity bounded in the church community. Overseeing the preparation and consumption of modified Lenten dishes allowed elite women to imagine that they had performed their Christian duties, without engaging in a ‘real punishm[en]t & humiliation to the body & its appetites’. In addition to illuminating lay/clerical tensions in Virginia, recipe books like the Footes’ Compleat Housewife raise questions about the gendering of religious authority in eighteenth-century Virginia. Perhaps the clergy’s discomfort with domestic holiday celebrations was, in part, discomfort with women’s roles in domestic feasting and fasting. Clergy may have been keen to reshape laity’s holiday table celebrations because in the elite’s alimentary religiosity, women’s challenge to clerical authority was particularly on display. However, the question of gendered religious authority in Virginia is complex, and in inquiring into the gendering of religious work, it is especially important to read recipe books in concert with other sources. Taken in isolation, recipe books full of religiously inflected recipes could be read to imply that women wielded great authority in the realm of domestic religiosity. But other sources qualify that assumption, and suggest that although women had relative authority over their households’ alimentary practices, that authority was checked by their husbands and fathers. Men regularly weighed in on culinary decisions. There is good reason, of course, to think that in colonial Virginia, cooking was associated with women. Cookery texts like the Foote sisters’ copy of E. Smith could be passed down among and between female relatives – sisters, nieces and aunts. Furthermore, exchanging recipes was a form of social intercourse among women. Jane Bolling Randolph’s manuscript cookbook, for example, includes recipes friends gave her, including ‘Mrs Byrds’ Jumbals’ (Mrs Byrd is presumably Maria Taylor Byrd, William Byrd’s second wife, who would have been a social acquaintance of Jane Bolling Randolph) and ‘Mrs. Chiswel’s Receipt for a Cake, very good’ (Jane Bolling Randolph is likely referring to her cousin through marriage, Elizabeth Randolph Chiswell). Cookery texts were currencies in

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women’s social networks, and they suggest that eighteenth-century Virginian gentry understood the kitchen as an arena in which elite women could make judgements, claim ownership and exercise expertise and authority. This association of women with cooking was bolstered by the convention of women’s owning items related to the preparation of food. Jane Jefferson, the mother of future president Thomas Jefferson, for example, owned tea and tea implements, a corkscrew, sugar and coffee, whereas her husband’s inventory did not include foodstuffs.21 But women’s authority over culinary matters was ambiguous. Often, husbands and fathers interfered with women’s food management. For example, Richmond County grandee Landon Carter (1710–78) clashed with his daughter-in-law, Winifred Beale Carter (dates not known), who lived with her husband, Robert, and son on Landon’s sufferance at Sabine Hall. Landon hated Winifred, and Winifred’s control of the kitchen was one of the many topics over which they rowed, with Landon accusing Winifred of slovenly housekeeping. According to Landon’s account of the exchange in his diary, Winifred in turn broke out that until I sent Mrs. Woods to take the keys from her every drop of Milk, Spoonful of butter, of fat, every ounce of sugar plumbs, etc., passed regularly though her hands. I laughed at the care we then experienced in Milk, butter, fat, sugar plumbs, soap, Candles, etc. Not one of these innumerations lasted my family half the year. New soap was obliged to be made in June. Fat gone by July. Sugar continually brought in . . . All gone. No body knows how. Butter merely vanishing.

Landon Carter insisted that Winifred – whom he referred to in his journal as ‘Lady Fat’ – had grown too insolent and ‘heavy to do anything but trust to thievish servants’, so he told Mrs. Woods to take the keys to the kitchen from her.22 Kitchen keys symbolised household authority. There was more at stake here than vanishing butter; ‘carrying the keys’ was a synecdoche for the domestic responsibilities of plantation mistresses, a shorthand among Virginia mistresses for all ‘the hardships of keeping house’.23 Landon blamed Winifred for the diffidence, disrespect and dissolute habits of his son, her husband. By taking the kitchen keys away from Winifred,

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Landon was symbolically stripping her of her identity as an integral member of their family; he was demoting her from her presumptive place as plantation mistress with charge over preparation and service of food. Reading between the lines of Landon Carter’s journal, it is clear that Winifred was outraged and embarrassed by Landon’s usurpation of her authority, with its unavoidable reminder that she was not the mistress of her own house but only the unwelcome daughter-in-law waiting for the master of Sabine Hall to die. Household religious performances, too, underscored that, whatever authority women had over cooking, it was always provisional, subject to the ultimate religious authority of husband or father. Consider how another text about alimentary religiosity frames the question of gender and religious authority in elite Virginia households. This text is a passage from the recollections of John Mason (1766–1849), son of Virginian ‘founding father’ George Mason (1725–92). John Mason recalls that, during his childhood, meals were preceded by prayer: Mason noted that his father ‘was always sent for when meals were served and nobody sat down until he came in. He always had grace said; most generally he performed that office himself, but sometimes [he] desired one [of] his elder sons to do so. That grace was uniformly delivered in the following words: “God bless us and what we are going to receive”.’24 Not only did John Mason’s father say grace, but the entire household waited on his presence before being seated; this communicated the household’s respect for, acquiescence in and submission to Mason’s God-given patriarchal authority. Ann Mason (George’s wife and John’s mother) likely owned a cookery text like the Foote sisters’ Compleat Housewife, and she likely selected meals for her family and oversaw their preparation; but the authority she exercised over her family’s alimentary religiosity was exercised within the framework of the patriarchal authority that was reproduced at each mealtime prayer. It was in this culinary context – men and women both exercising authority over food matters, and sometimes clashing over culinary authority – that male clerics tried to shape laypeople’s fasting. Perhaps the clerics were not simply trying to goad the laity into a more sober Lent. Perhaps clergymen were also husbands and fathers

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playing out in the pulpit their own domestic dramas about who had authority over food and eating.

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Recipe books and culinary labour The Foote sisters’ recipe book invites inquiry into the domestic practice of an ecclesial calendar, and consideration of religious authority (lay and clerical, masculine and feminine). Finally, the Foote sisters’ recipe book speaks to the labour arrangements that underwrote religious practice in the households of elite Anglican Virginians. The Compleat Housewife invites us to ask who was doing the actual work that made such alimentary religiosity possible. In the context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Virginia, such labour was carried out by enslaved men and women. Elite women like the Foote sisters did not prepare food themselves, but directed other people in the preparation of food. Elizabeth Foote Washington provides an especially illuminating example of the complex intersection of housewifery, religiosity and slave labour in the mind of the housewife. Elizabeth and Lund Washington owned 12 slaves, including a man named Daniel and a woman named Felicia. Washington refused to beat her slaves; rather, she took ‘pains to perswaid my servants to do their business through a principal [sic] of religion’. In other words, religion was the metaphorical whip Washington used to (try to) wrest obedience and hard work from the enslaved men and women in her household. Thus at Hayfield, not only were enslaved men and women doing the cooking that made Washington’s religious performances possible; Washington also wielded religiosity as a tool for managing her slaves.25 At the Jeffersons’ Shadwell, where enslaved cooks worked in a building about one hundred feet east of the main house, Jane Randolph Jefferson’s role in getting dinner served was not to wash potatoes or stir a great pot of soup but to oversee ‘the movement of food from storage to kitchen and from kitchen to table’.26 As Kirsten Wood has argued, overseeing culinary preparation without actually dirtying one’s hands was part of what defined elite women: having black slaves to cook for them was a singular indicator of privilege, and well into the nineteenth century, white women who found themselves on

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hard times often clung to kitchen help as proof that, although they might face economic straits, they remained elite.27 The enslaved men and women who were doing the cooking were thus the unfree shadow audience of books like The Compleat Housewife. The recollections of Isaac Jefferson (1775–c.1850), whose mother Ursula was the enslaved pastry cook at Monticello, give us a hint about how cookery books were used in a context in which the people doing the cooking were likely to be illiterate: ‘Mrs. Jefferson would come out there with a cookery book in her hand & read out of it to Isaac’s mother how to make cakes tarts & so on.’28 Of course, we have no way of knowing the extent to which enslaved cooks followed the directions their owners called out to them. It is easy to imagine that cooks, who probably knew more about what went into preparing a decent-tasting meal than their owners, would have acted obedient while ignoring half of what the cookbooks and their owners said. An 1823 letter from Virginia Jefferson Randolph (Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughter) to her future husband, Nicholas P. Trist, provides a second picture of a recipe book being used in kitchens staffed by enslaved cooks. Apologising to her beau for failing to answer his letter sooner, Randolph notes, ‘I received it, seated upon my throne in the kitchen, with a cookery book in my hand.’29 That designation of a ‘throne’ in the kitchen of Monticello was doubtless ironic, but nonetheless revealing: white women remained the queens of the kitchen. The folklorist Charles Camp once noted that it is significant when a meal’s cooks are ‘excluded from its proceedings’:30 that is, when they are barred from participating in the meal whose food they prepared. This observation suggests that we can read the gastronomic feasts gentry celebrated at home not only as coincidentally made possible by slave labour; perhaps the use of slave labour in religious meals that the slaves then did not themselves consume did ritual work for slave-owning Anglican women like the Foote sisters. Specifically, we may read in the Virginia gentry’s alimentary religiosity an undoing of the social meanings inscribed at that other important religious meal, the Eucharist.31 Historians such as Robert Olwell and Nicholas Beasley have noted that Anglican gentry were uncomfortable receiving communion with black slaves.32 They understood that to kneel humbly at all, let alone next to one’s slave,

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was to suggest a social levelling that was fundamentally at odds with the hierarchies of slave society. Domestic feasting inverted – or, from the gentry’s perspective, righted – the Eucharist’s implied erasure of the differences between free people and bondspeople. The proper hierarchy was reinscribed in domestic feasting, where enslaved men and women provided all the labour and were excluded from partaking in the meal. In that context, the recipe book becomes a manual of ritual practice; it helped Anglican slave-owners stage rituals through which they could evade some of the complications of Christian slave-owning that they faced when they went to church on Sundays. In overseeing the preparation of Twelfth Night Cakes and ‘Bread and Butter Pudding for Fasting-Days’, women like the Foote sisters were at once tying their households to the order of the Church and subtly flouting clerical instruction to produce merely moderate Christmas feasts and to embrace punishing Lenten discipline. Through overseeing the production of liturgically timed feasting and fasting, women created gustatory rituals in which members of their families could forge an embodied connection to the Anglican calendar. At the same time, women were also framing social dramas, depending on slave labour to stage domestic Eucharists that inverted the implied egalitarianism of the church Eucharist. How do laypeople transfer ecclesial practices to their houses? How do the laity and clergy, and men and women, negotiate with one another for religious authority? And how are religious practices implicated in labour arrangements? These are three questions whose answers lie in part in cookery texts like the Foote sisters’ copy of The Compleat Housewife. One can imagine countless other religious studies contexts in which an examination of recipe books would prove fruitful. Cookbooks like Simply Southern: With a Dash of Kosher Soul (Memphis, 2010) and the Kosher Southern-Style Cookbook (Gretna, LA, 1993) may reveal how Southern Jewish cooks maintain dietary laws while nonetheless adapting to the foodways of the American South.33 Church cookbooks, produced and sold by women’s guilds to raise funds, suggest the ways women turned their ostensibly private and domestic cooking skills to public, philanthropic, communal purposes.34 As Matthew Bailey-Dick has argued, Mennonite cookbooks encode changes in Mennonite theology.35

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And as Jeremy Stolow explores, recent Lubavitch cookbooks help Hasidic women navigate competing discourses of rabbinic authority, refinement and consumer culture.36 What unites Stolow’s inquiry into twenty-first-century Hasidic cookbooks, Bailey-Dick’s inquiry into twentieth-century Mennonite cookbooks and my own inquiry into the recipe books of eighteenth-and early-nineteenthcentury Virginia Anglicans is this methodological hunch: recipe books contain religious instruction. They guide practitioners in a set of embodied practices that constitute religious meaning and religious memory. Books like the Foote sisters’ Compleat Housewife may be read not only as manuals for cooking but also as manuals for the shaping of religious lives.

Notes 1 Sections of this chapter are adapted from Lauren F. Winner, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia (London/New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 2 David D. Hall, Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. vii. 3 Marie Griffith and Barbara Savage, Women and Religion in the African Diaspora: Knowledge, Power, and Performance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), p. xvii. 4 Jennifer Scheper Hughes, Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Heather D. Curtis, Faith in the Great Physician: Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860–1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Diane Winston, Small Screen, Big Picture: Television and Lived Religion (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009). 5 Dawn Coleman, ‘The Antebellum American sermon as lived religion’, in Robert H. Ellison (ed.), A New History of the Sermon (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 521–54; Jacob M. Blosser, ‘Irreverent empire: Anglican inattention in an Atlantic world’, Church History, 77 (2008), 596–628; Marie Griffith, American Religions: A Documentary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 20. 6 Genevieve Yost, ‘The Compleat Housewife or Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion: a bibliographical study’, William and Mary Quarterly, 18:4 (1938), 419–35 (on p. 421). 7 E. Smith, The Compleat Housewife (Williamsburg [VA]: printed and sold by William Hunter, [1752?]), call no. TX705.S53 1752. This copy of Compleat

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9 10 11

12

13

14

15

Textuality and intertextuality Housewife is a notable exception to Gilly Lehmann’s generally apt lament that most extant eighteenth-century cookbooks inscribed with owners’ names belonged to ‘owners . . . usually unknown to us’; Lehmann, British Housewife, p. 62. To reconstruct this Foote genealogy, see John Frederick Dorman, Adventures of Purse and Person, Virginia, 1602–1624/5 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2004–07), pp. 408–26; George Harrison Sanford King, Register of St. Paul’s Parish, 1715–1798, Stafford County, 1715–1776, King George County, Virginia, 1777–1798 (Fredericksburg, VA: the author, 1960), pp. xxii, xxiii, 50, 51; Fairfax County, Virginia, Will Book K-1, 1812–16, pp. 1–2; Fairfax County, Virginia, Will Book G-1, 1794–99, 213–14; Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, VA, MS 1K5823aFA1, ‘Lund Family’, Lund file, George Harrison Sanford King papers; Library of Virginia, Richmond, VA, Archives and Manuscripts, Prentiss Price, Lund Washington MS, 1950 transcription, accession 28353b; A. Edward Foote, Chotankers: A Family History (Florence, AL: Thornwood, 1982), pp. 70–1, 86–99, 128–9; Gloria Seaman Allen, ‘Equally their due: female education in Antebellum Alexandria’, Historic Alexandria Quarterly, 1:2 (1996), 1–11. See Pennell, this volume, for more on transmission and curation. Smith, Compleat Housewife, n.p., preface. On the Anglican religious calendar, see Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England. Book II: From Watts and Wesley to Martineau, 1690–1900 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), p. 224; Edward L. Bond, Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000), pp. 119–20. Nicholas Cresswell, The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 1774–1777 (New York: Dial Press, 1924), pp. 52–3. Maude H. Woodfin (ed.), Another Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1739–1741 (Richmond, VA: Dietz Press, 1942), p. 28; Marion Tingling and Louis Booker Wright (eds), The London Diary (1717–1721) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 216. Cited in Bridget Ann Henisch, Cakes and Characters: An English Christmas Tradition (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1984), pp. 207–8. This does not appear in Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery, intro. and transcr. Karen Hess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Smith, Compleat Housewife, p. 113; Landon Carter, The Diary of Colonel Landon Carter of Sabine Hall, 1752–1778, ed. Jack P. Greene (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the Virginia Historical Society, 1965), pp. 986, 1075; Rhys Isaac, Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 39. All of these recipes were meatless, yet the cookbook writers did not explain why one might avoid meat during Lent. The silence is suggestive: unlike the proper way to set a table, something many of the cookbooks explained,

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cookbook authors assumed that readers would already know the reasons behind Lenten culinary practices. 16 On Virginians’ ownership of published English cookery texts, see Mary Randolph, The Virginia House-wife, ed. Karen Hess (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1984), pp. xiv–xv; Jane Carson, Colonial Virginia Cookery (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg, 1968); Yost, ‘Compleat Housewife’, 434–5; Mildred K. Abraham, ‘The library of Lady Jean Skipwith: a book collection from the age of Jefferson’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 91:3 (1983), 319. Cf. Katharine E. Harbury, Colonial Virginia’s Cooking Dynasty (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), which traces the correspondences between popular English cookery texts and manuscript cookery texts in Virginia. 17 Smith, Compleat Housewife, pp. 117–18; Harbury, Colonial Virginia’s Cooking Dynasty, pp. 118, 156, 354; Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English House-keeper (Manchester, 1769), pp. 10–11, 18–19, 134; Elizabeth Moxon, English Housewifry, 8th edn (Leeds: for George Copperthwaite, 1758), p. 8; A Lady [Hannah Glasse], The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, ed. Karen Hess (1747: this edn Bedford, MA: Applewood, 1997), pp. 125–31; Bradley, British Housewife, 242. 18 Fasting traversed the public/private divide in another way, too: political fasts brought the prerogative of the state to bear on individuals’ and families’ intimate domestic decisions about eating. It is also worth noting that these seemingly political fasts also had a religious character. In 1729, for example, the colony was afflicted with caterpillars and Governor Gooch called a fast; this action partook of the biblical paradigm of communities or political bodies fasting when they were under siege. After ‘a wicked and horrid Rebellion has been raised against our Sovereign Lord King GEORGE’, Gooch called a fast for 26 February 1746, instructing Virginia to pray for pardon and divine blessing; less than a decade later, because the colony had ‘but too much reason to fear that our Sins have justly provoked the Almighty to send down upon us his heavy Judgments of War and Famine; and as a national Repentance is the only Remedy for national Guilt’, Governor Dinwiddie declared a fast on Wednesday 24 September 1755. These fasts were prompted by the Jacobite Rebellion and Braddock’s Defeat, respectively. Both fasts were obviously political – but there was an ecclesial aspect as well, since victory by the Young Pretender would have meant a Catholic regent, and defeat at Fort Duquesne left the North American English empire open to French Catholicism. Thus even ‘political’ fasting was bound up with the production of specifically Anglican identity: Lambeth Palace Library, Fulham Papers vol. 12, no. 136–7, Governor William Gooch to Bishop Gibson, 29 June 1729; Virginia Gazette (12 September 1755), p. 3; Virginia Gazette (14 January 1746), p. 4; Jonathan Hawkins, ‘Imperial ’45: the Jacobite rebellion in transatlantic context’,

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Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 24:1 (1996), 24–47. 19 Reproduced in ‘Sermon: Christmas 1732’, Colonial Williamsburg Interpreter (Winter 1998), 4–5; Virginia Historical Society, Richmond VA, Charles Clay Papers MSS 1 c5795 a 46–7, Section 2, sermon ‘For Christmas Day’. 20 Harvard University, Houghton Library MS Am.1561, Robert Paxton manuscript sermon book, ‘On Repentance’. 21 Harbury, Colonial Virginia’s Cooking Dynasty, pp. 366, 406. Susan A. Kern, ‘The Jeffersons at Shadwell: the social and material world of a Virginia plantation’ (Ph.D. dissertation, College of William and Mary, 2006), p. 119. 22 Carter, Diary, p. 358; Isaac, Uneasy Kingdom, pp. 271–3. 23 Elizabeth V. Chew, ‘Carrying the keys: women and housekeeping at Monticello’, in Damon Lee Fowler (ed.), Dining at Monticello: In Good Taste and Abundance (Chapel Hill: Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2005), pp. 29–36 (on pp. 31–2). 24 The Recollections of John Mason: George Mason’s Son Remembers his Father and Life at Gunston Hall, ed. Terry K. Dunn (Marshall: EPM Publications, 2004), pp. 67–8. 25 For more on this see Winner, Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, pp. 111–18. 26 Kern, ‘Jeffersons at Shadwell’, p. 49. 27 Kirsten E. Wood, Masterful Women: Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution through the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 171. 28 Memoirs of a Monticello Slave, As Dictated to Charles Campbell in the 1840s by Isaac, one of Thomas Jefferson’s Slaves (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1951), p. 7. 29 Chew, ‘Carrying the keys’, p. 33. 30 Charles Camp, American Foodways: What, When, Why and How We Eat in America (Little Rock: August House, 1989), pp. 70–1. 31 As Daniel Sack has argued, for many American Protestants, communion sets the framework in which other meals are understood. The religious meaning of dinner at home derives at least in part from reference to the Lord’s Supper: Daniel Sack, Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 5. 32 Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 123; Nicholas M. Beasley, Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies, 1650–1780 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), pp. 98–100, 105–8. 33 Margolin Hebrew Academy, Simply Southern: With a Dash of Kosher Soul (Memphis: Margolin Hebrew Academy, 2010); Mildred L. Covert and Sylvia P. Gerson, Kosher Southern-Style Cookbook (Gretna, LA: Pelican, 1993). The definitive investigation of Southern Jewish foodways is Marcie Cohen Ferris, Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South (Chapel Hill:

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University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 34 On church cookbooks, see Anne Romines, ‘Growing up with the Methodist cookbooks’, in Anne S. Bower (ed.), Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), pp. 75–88; Theophano, Eat My Words, pp. 253–5. 35 Matthew Bailey-Dick, ‘The kitchenhood of all believers: a journey into the discourse of Mennonite cookbooks’, Mennonite Quarterly Review, 79:2 (2005), 153–77. 36 Jeremy Stolow, Orthodox by Design: Judaism, Print Politics, and the Artscroll Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), pp. 120–32.

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Part III

Cultures of circulation and transmission

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8

Cooking the books, or, the three faces of Hannah Woolley MARGARET J. M . EZELL

‫ﱬﱫ‬

The study of recipe books as a genre has had a long tradition, especially for those interested in early modern women’s texts. Previous studies of the genre during this period have tended to concentrate primarily on the identity of the writer/cook, the material circumstances of the supposed readers and the cultural work of the contents, both political and domestic.1 But there was, of course, another agency shaping literary culture in 1675, the professional bookmen and women behind the production of these volumes, whose impact on the contents of this type of literary production has only been dealt with from the author’s point of view. By looking at the recipe books printed in a single year – 1675 – in the context of other vernacular ‘profit and delight’ publications, one can see highlighted some of the issues concerning the ways in which ‘authorship’ is understood to function in such texts and see more clearly the interplay of the many different active agents in creating late seventeenth-century texts. One of the most prolific and popular of the commercial recipe and domestic-management book authors in the latter part of the seventeenth century was Hannah Woolley (c. 1622–after 1674). From her first publication in 1661, The Ladies Directory, Woolley was consistently in print with her collections of recipes and household management advice, even having one of her works, The Queen-Like Closet (London, 1670), translated into German.2 The very three different author portraits in works attributed to Hannah Woolley printed in 1675 will serve as a case study for investigating

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the fluid nature of supposedly stable printed texts, as well as raising questions about the image of the author as a feature of the newly emerging culture of ‘celebrity’. One might feel that it would be a fairly straightforward and mechanical exercise to compile a bibliographic list of recipe books appearing in a single year, an effort involving the coordinated use of Wing, A. W. Oxford’s bibliography of cookery books, bibliographies in books of cookery and cuisine history, and EEBO.3 What one finds instead is a bibliographer’s nightmare: texts and images within this particular year shift in a kaleidoscopic fashion, seeming to change depending on the angle from which they are viewed. The works as a group are a set of textual puzzles, all of which force the question of why the seemingly simple task proved to be so difficult, and also the extent to which issues raised by foregrounding such texts might point towards other possible ways of thinking about the period’s literary culture at large. The first and most obvious problem in compiling a simple list of printed cooking recipe texts is that, at this point, there was not yet a uniform title-page vocabulary to signal their contents, although one is clearly in the process of being established. Indeed, as the introduction to this collection explores, one might say that there was no such thing as a ‘recipe book’ in 1675, if we define it as being a volume devoted solely to matters of cuisine: the overwhelming majority of the volumes including recipes for food preparation also include medicinal recipes, and significant portions of their contents are devoted to household management matters.4 The second problem concerns issues revolving around concepts of authorship, only part of which is author attribution. The third is that even when texts that can be identified as being recipe books and which have the same titles and even the same title-pages, when physical copies are actually examined, the precise contents of the books could be significantly different. What the simple task of mechanical compilation revealed is that the physical nature of these volumes is more textually complex than has previously been realised, and that in addition to exploring the relationship of the text to the assigned author and the relationship between author and readers and their material circumstances, one must confront the lively and dynamic nature of printed texts and the forces which affected them.

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The issues involving the instability of the texts and uncertain authorial attribution are typical problems one encounters when working with handwritten materials, what I have elsewhere called social as opposed to scribal manuscript materials.5 These include the blurring of lines between what we now define as different genres, the fluidity of the contents of the text depending on the writer and the copy, and the ways in which a single textual object can involve the work of multiple participants.6 As I have argued concerning the adaptation of social authorship practices by publishers of periodicals such as Peter Motteux’s The Gentleman’s Journal across the latter part of the seventeenth century, during the year 1675, printed commercial recipe books likewise show many features characteristic of traditional handwritten recipe volumes during the same period.7 These printed texts do, of course, also have elements specifically designed for a commercial audience rather than a social community, elements over which an author might have little or no control. Some of the differences include specific types of paratexts not to date found in manuscript recipe books. It is not at all unusual for a manuscript collection to have any of the following: a title-page and/or a separate space for the announcement of whose ‘book’ it is, the date which it was begun, and sometimes lists or indexes to make accessing the materials easier. It is, however, very rare to find in handwritten domestic volumes author portraits, frontispieces, prefaces and advertisements.8 Thus, we have some aspects of the product which are familiar in its household book, handwritten form; some which are an adaptation of handwritten practices into print; and some which are unique to commercial print itself. It will be the physical composition and presentation of the printed object that will be the focus of my attentions, after a very brief overview of what other types of texts were being printed and purchased during 1675. Speaking generally, traditional literary histories describing 1675 have focused on the libertine culture of the court and commercial theatre during that year: the scandalous satires of John Wilmot (1647–70), second earl of Rochester; the rakes of William Wycherley (bap. 1641–1716) in his bawdy comedy The Country Wife (first performed in January 1675); and the spectacular tragedies of Nathaniel Lee (1645x52–92) and Thomas Otway (1652–85), with

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their sensationalist depictions of betrayal and madness in Sophonisba and Alcibiades, both performed for the first time in 1675.9 Not surprisingly, however, after government documents and sermons, it was broadside ballads and small pamphlet treatises that made up the bulk of what was printed in 1675. Many of the most amusing (to us) stress the contemporary anxieties over the King’s lack of an heir and his attention to his many highly visible mistresses, as well as the increasing visibility of Catholicism at his court and that of his brother James.10 There was also no shortage of cheap pamphlets reporting sensational murders and trials, such as The Bloody Innkeeper or Sad and Barbarous News from Gloucestershire (London: ‘printed with allowances’) and Bloud justly Reveng’d: Or, A True Relation of the Confessions and Behaviour of the Two Persons Hang’d in Fleetstreet October 22 1675 . . . Published for a Warning to all other Rash and Unadvised Persons (London: printed for M. B.).11 In addition to this domestic mayhem, also published in the same year were several lurid accounts of the wars in America between English settlers and native residents, as represented, for example, in Edward Wharton’s New-England’s Present Sufferings Under their Cruel Neighbouring Indians (London: n.p.) and the anonymous A Brief and True Narration of the Late Wars Risen in New-England: Occasioned by the Quarrelsom disposition, and Perfidious Carriage of the Barbarous, Savage and Heathenish Natives There (London: printed for J. S.). In terms of the book format, the closest perhaps in type to printed recipe books are those dealing with ‘husbandry’. The appeal of cultivating the wilderness was a feature of a number of publications in 1675. Of the eight works featuring ‘husbandry’ as a title word, the longest title certainly goes to John Worlidge for Systema Agriculturæ, . . . the Whole work being of great Use and Advantage to all that delight in that most Noble Practice (London: printed for J. C. by T. Dring). The oddly but appropriately named Samuel Strangehopes offered A Book of Knowledge in Three Parts: the First, Containing a brief Introduction to Astrology . . . the Second, a Treatise of Physick . . .: the Third, the Countrey-mans Guide to GoodHusbandry (first published 1663; this edition printed by G. P. for T. Passinger). The connection of ‘husbandry’ and recipes as remedies is continued in Joseph Blagrave’s two 1675 titles, The Epitome of the Art

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of Husbandry (London: printed for Benjamin Billingsley) and New Additions to the Art of Husbandry Comprizing a New Way of Enriching Meadows, Destroying of Moles, Making Tulips of any Colour: with an approved way for ordering of Fish and Fish-ponds . . . with directions for Breeding and Ordering all Sorts of Singing-Birds: With Remedies for their several Maladies not before publickly made known (London: printed for Benjamin Billingsley). I will return to the intricacies of these titles shortly. For those who wished not only improvement of their lands but also themselves, 1675 offered a strong selection of what we might cautiously describe as a version of ‘self-help books’. ‘A Person of Honour’ offered The Courtier’s Calling Shewing the ways of making a Fortune and the Art of Living at Court, According to the Maxims of Policy & Morality (London: J. C. for Richard Tonson) addressed to ‘Noblemen’ and ‘Gentlemen’ on the title-page. Appealing to a different category of buyer but cashing in on the allure of the court, a broadside sheet prominently featuring the royal seal advertised the establishment of an ‘Academy’ by John Wells, confirmed by royal letters of patent to protect ‘the most curious and profitable Engine that ever was invented’, where through the use of ‘artificial horses’ and for the price of a shilling, ‘all Persons may learn with great facility to hold themselves steady on Horse-back, to carry the Lance, to run at the Ring, to lace the Javelin, to shoot a Pistol with one Bullet only . . . which are the Noble Employs of a true Gentleman’. In addition, ‘the ladies will receive as great pleasure and satisfaction at the Gentlemen, and may learn the same Exercise as they, which they shall perform either upon Horses or in Chariots drawn by the same Horses’.12 Various dictionaries were also published that year. There were pocket-sized English–Dutch learning dictionaries and Christopher Wase’s Latin–English dictionary Dictionarium Minus, a Compendious Dictionary English-Latin & Latin-English (first published 1662; this edition London: Thomas Newcomb for James Good) in its second edition for the ‘studious and less accomplish’d persons’, which also explained the names of plants and herbs and different proverbs, and identified antiquities also in a convenient small format. Although not technically a dictionary, Stephen Monteage, in The Debtor and Creditor Made Easie, or A Short

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Instruction for the attaining the Right Use of Accounts (London: printed by J. R.), notes, however, that studies are ‘not unworthy of Gentlemen, Noble-men and Princes, who in foreign Countries have not disdained to manage Transactions in this Method’ (sig. A3r). ‘All sorts and conditions, in Court, City or Countrey, from the Supreme Potentate to the meanest cottager,’ he concludes, ‘may make use of [it] with delight and advantage’ (sig. A3v). Books dealing with recipes fit nicely into this company of volumes offering both delight and advantage in a size convenient for carrying about, in contrast to the often lavish and folio-sized books of husbandry. If one was looking to buy a printed recipe book in 1675 rather than create one’s own, it was a good year. While the 1670s did not match the most prolific decade, the 1650s, in terms of numbers of named authors and titles, it nevertheless saw the issue and reprinting of a perhaps surprising array of books offering recipes and advice concerning household management.13 There were six books produced in 1675 that more or less fit our concept of recipe books as texts primarily devoted to preparations for the table and household matters and several more which are specifically presenting medicinal recipes for both humans and animals. These are: the anonymous The Gentlewomans Cabinet Unlocked (London: printed by E. C.); the ‘second’ edition of William Rabisha, The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected (first published 1661: this edition E. C.); Gervase Markham, The English House-wife (eighth edition, London: George Sawbridge); and three texts attributed by Wing and EEBO to Hannah Woolley – the first edition of The Accomplisht Ladys Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying and Cookery (London: Benjamin Harris), The Queen-like Closet or Rich Cabinet . . . with Supplement (third edition, London: Richard Lowndes) and The Gentlewoman’s Companion; Or a Guide to the Female Sex (second edition, London: A. Maxwell for Edward Thomas). On the level of the individual recipes themselves, one of the similarities between handwritten and printed include the attribution of recipes to someone other than the person whose name is on the title-page. Thus, in the 1675 edition of Markham’s The English House-Wife, it is established in the dedication to the Countess Dowager of Exeter that the recipes ‘many years ago belonged to an

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Honorable Countess’ (sig. A2r). As has been noted by Pennell, it was common (although, as DiMeo’s chapter here shows, not inevitable) in handwritten recipe books to name the person from whom the individual might have received the recipe to include in her book, whether cousin, aunt or ‘goodwife’.14 In printed volumes of 1675, the practice of attribution seems to function also as a means for simultaneously accrediting and glamorising the volumes’ contents for a potential purchaser – as demonstrated in the title-page of perhaps the prototype text for those of 1675, ‘W. M.’’s 1655 text The Queen’s Closet Opened. Incomparable Secrets in Physick, Chirurgery, Preserving, Candying and Cookery as they were presented to the Queen (London: printed for Nath: Brook). Clearly, it is the contents of the Queen’s closet and her acquaintances that are being offered, not that of an average English housewife or one’s aunt, which one presumably might have been free for the asking. The author of such texts, or rather the individual associated with the recipes assembled, is thus foregrounded as being one of the significant ways in which this type of book is understood and received by its audience. The name (and face) on the title-page is important. In the same way that handwritten recipe volumes are often family products, printed recipe books viewed as a whole during the year 1675 show a marked kinship with other texts. As we have seen above, the use of the word ‘cabinet’ and ‘closet’ identify the 1675 texts as being part of a larger family of earlier texts; thus both the anonymous Gentlewoman’s Cabinet Unlock’d and Woolley’s The Queen-Like Closet . . . with Supplement, clearly establish their lineage with the 1655 Queen’s Closet Opened, not to mention The King’s Cabinet Opened (London: printed for Robert Bostock, 1645), as read by Michael McKeon.15 This is true with the contents of the individual titles as well. As we have seen in the previous examples of title-pages, many of the recipe books printed in 1675 were new editions, boasting ‘additions’ and supplements, implicitly (but as we will see, not inevitably) made by the author. For example, Rabisha presents himself in the preface to his work to the reader as a master cook among the aristocracy, one who has compiled an extensive range of recipes and culinary techniques from the works of others and his experiences in foreign lands.16 While the ‘mystery’ and ‘art’ of cookery remained constant,

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it would appear that, nevertheless, the recipes required a new edition in 1675 to include ‘the most exquisite and newest manner’ for candying and preserving, as well as more ‘rare’ recipes. The combination of offering ‘true’ and ‘traditional’ proven methods and clearly setting down fixed ‘rules’, or the appropriate practices for dining in gentlemen’s households, while also incorporating ‘new’, ‘modern’ updates and applications of those methods, thus builds on previous versions in interesting ways, appealing to tradition and a lifetime’s mastery, while acknowledging the changing tastes and material culture of the cooking novice. The dynamics of this dual function, of setting down established truth while incorporating the ‘mode’, is well illustrated in the books attributed to Hannah Woolley, whose texts certainly can be described as familial, if not indeed incestuous, in their relation to each other. Her 1662 The Ladies Directory informs readers in its epistle that it contains the ‘true, and most easie way’ for preserving and candying.17 Her 1664 work, The Cook’s Guide, announces as inducements on its title-page that it offers the ‘true way of dressing all sorts of Flesh, Fowles, and Fish’ and that it has ‘never before [been] printed’.18 These two texts appear again in 1672, but with a new title – The Ladies Delight: or A Rich Closet of Choice Experiments and Curiosities – and the addition of a third part, ‘the Ladys physical closet’, offering medicinal recipes. Her afterword to the ‘Ladies’ in the 1672 version does not highlight innovation but convenience; by having all 500 recipes of the various kinds in what she calls a ‘small manual’, and by joining together the three branches of recipes into one compact volume, ‘it may well deserve the title of the Ladies Delight’.19 It is clear when surveying 1675 that it was not only Woolley and her printers who favoured the conglomeration technique of textual production. As Lynette Hunter has noted about vernacular domestic books of the period in general, and as we have seen in some of the earlier examples of vocational texts published in 1675, the practice of the three-item composite volume was also a favourite marketing format for recipe books.20 As DiMeo argues in her chapter in this volume on handwritten compilations, the use of the term ‘author’ as a way to trace and to reconstruct a compiler’s social network of contacts can be misleading, her analysis highlighting the ways in

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which although such volumes contain numerous textual similarities suggesting conventions of transmission, nevertheless each volume must be carefully placed within its archival context. Thus, the aggregate nature of these texts, both handwritten and printed, is complex – not only more than one author behind the recipes, but also in the printed volumes, more than one topic to be covered, often with their own separate title-pages – in repeated editions with additions, perhaps by the author, perhaps not, resulting in a densely layered textual accretion. This practice, I would argue, makes the relationship between the individual author, whose name and picture are on the title-page, and the contents problematic: a recipe is not like a poem, at least not like a printed one.21 Looking at the texts of 1675, one could argue that a late seventeenth-century recipe book is not attempting to market itself primarily on the grounds of being the author’s newest inspiration, but instead as a handy compendium of a long period of accumulated knowledge and skill, and in some cases, involving the use of a recognisable image or images to stand in for those author attributes. For example, Hannah Woolley’s relationship to the text of the little occasional poems printed at the start and end of the third edition of The Queen-Like Closet . . . to which is added a Supplement produced in 1675 is different from that with the recipes she includes. The poem is signed by her: in contrast, the recipe for ‘A very sovereign water’, after listing the ingredients and the preparation, is ascribed as being ‘from Dr. Chambers, which he kept secret till he had done many Cures therewith’, thus establishing both provenance and successful performance in combination with her own skills in acquiring it.22 Printed recipe books produced in 1675 in general proudly draw attention to the labour involved in assembling the recipes, the experience behind them, and where they have already been served with great success, more than they do, I would argue, to the culinary inspirations of the author. Fashion or mode here means ‘new’ as in unknown to one’s mother, not as in never before deliberately ingested by humans. Readers are lured to share the ‘secrets’ and the ‘mysteries’ of the ‘art’ of cooking acquired over time by the author, but not to marvel at the peculiarity of the resulting dishes. The titlepage of The Gentlewoman’s Cabinet Unlocked promises ‘such like fine Knacks and other Delicate Dishes, which are most frequently

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used in Gentlemens Houses’, not the astonishing new taste sensations that are the attraction found in today’s television hit Iron Chef, where competing cooks attempt to find six new ways to incorporate unusual ingredients, such as sea cucumbers, from starters to desserts.23 Thus recipe books in 1675 managed the fine line between providing fixed rules, proven and tested example menus and traditional techniques, along with the practice of continuing textual evolution demonstrating sensitivity to contemporary fashions, balancing the skills of the author/cook with the aspirations and needs of the readers, and all this in a convenient and compact format. Obviously, author and audience were not the only ingredients necessary to produce this type of multi-layered, evolving text. I will conclude my survey of the cookery books of 1675 using those attributed to Hannah Woolley during that year, to consider the issues raised when one looks closely at the physical composition of these books. When viewed only from the perspective of the author issue, the three texts attributed to Hannah Woolley in 1675 do offer distinct challenges. They are the texts which pop up most easily in searches, but of course, as Lynette Hunter has noted, ‘Woolley’s books have never had a completely satisfactory bibliographical treatment and problems of attribution are peculiarly difficult.’24 The question is, why? The most controversial of the three in this way is undoubtedly The Gentlewoman’s Companion. Elaine Hobby aggressively challenged the attribution in 1995, asserting that it was not by Woolley but instead was ‘the product of a male hack writer’, as part of her more general point about the ways in which Woolley has been made to serve as a type of feisty composite figure for the middle-class Restoration woman.25 Woolley’s ODNB biographer John Considine refers to The Gentlewoman’s Companion and The Accomplisht Ladys Delight as ‘unauthorized work based on her books’, in contrast to her ‘authentic works’.26 Caterina Albano’s 2001 edition of the 1675 text of The Gentlewoman’s Companion tackles the problem of the author’s gender by stating that ‘neither of the original parties to the dispute [Woolley and the publisher Dorman Newman] suggested that [the text] had nothing at all to do with the writings of Hannah Woolley’.27 Joan Thirsk takes a more accommodating view in her

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description of Woolley having ‘disclaimed authorship, while not denying her hand in it’, casting the publisher who had ‘evidently altered her text against her will’ as a pirate.28 Gilly Lehmann, on the other hand, argues persuasively from a textual basis for the ‘many similarities’ in the advice found in The Gentlewoman’s Companion, ‘which may be based on Woolley’s original manuscript, by the virtue of the many similarities to The Queen-like Closet’.29 The Accomplisht Ladys Delight published by Benjamin Harris in 1675 is likewise attributed to Woolley in Wing, Halkett and Laing’s Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature and in EEBO, but, as with The Gentlewoman’s Companion, that authorship attribution also has been repeatedly challenged. Uta Schumacher-Voelker, who on the one hand accepts the attribution of The Gentlewoman’s Companion to Woolley, nevertheless wonders why The Accomplisht Ladys Delight had ever been attributed to her in the first place, since the preface ‘To the Ladies and Gentlewomen’ is signed ‘T. P.’ in all the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century editions (of which there were 11 about which we presently know, the last appearing in 1720).30 Indeed, one might wonder why Woolley at all, since in 1674 a group of ‘approved cooks of London and Westminster’, with the initials ‘T. P.’, ‘J. P.’, ‘R. C.’ and ‘N. B.’, had published The English and French Cook: Describing the best and newest ways of ordering and dressing all sort of Flesh, Fish, and Fowl, whether boiled, baked, stewed, roasted, . . . with their proper Sauces and Garnishes (London: printed for Simon Miller), with an epistle ‘to the Lovers of the Art of Cookery’, which might seem a more obvious attribution. But it is not only the author’s name, whether ‘T. P.’ or Woolley, that should be the sole object of our attention. When one actually opens the copies of the two 1675 editions of The Accomplisht Ladys Delight found at the Bodleian, not only is one presented with two different author portraits, but one also finds two slightly different prefaces by ‘T. P.’ and books with significantly different contents.31 To add to the confusion, both the author portraits are different from the contested one found in The Gentlewoman’s Companion. This latter text was also published in 1675, with Woolley’s name prominently on the title-page, although as early as the eighteenth century George Vertue identified the ‘better versions’ of it as being an

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engraving of a merchant’s daughter, Sarah Gilly (d. 1659), by William Faithorne (c.1621–91). The presence of this false face serves as a key point in Hobby’s repudiation of the text as being by Woolley.32 Do faces really matter, however? Or are they only one element in a larger textual mosaic? One Bodleian version of The Accomplisht Ladys Delight (shelfmark Douce P 412) is housed in a thick, leatherbound octavo with the initials ‘NL’ stamped in gold on front and back covers, with a dated and signed flyleaf. The owner of this first edition was a young Cambridge student, who grew up to become a member of Parliament and noted book collector, Narcissus Luttrell (1657–1732).33 The portrait in this features an elegantly dressed, serious young woman in an oval frame, seated in front of drapery and a distant landscape, wearing a formal puff-sleeved gown, looking very much like an engraving by Peter Williamson of the young Catherine of Braganza.34 On the page opposite is a title-page with a series of domestic scenes, each illustrating one aspect of the title: a woman seated and working with pots over a fire, a woman standing distilling medicine, a woman standing admiring herself in a mirror for the beautifying lotions and two women cooking in the kitchen. Inside is a narrative title-page which identifies the publisher, B. Harris, and the three parts, each with its own title-page, which make up the book: I) ‘The Art of Preserving and Candying’; II) ‘The Physical Cabinet or Excellent Recipts in Physick and Chirurgery, together with some rare Beautifying Waters to adorn and add loveliness to the face and Body’, oddly combined with ‘some New and Excellent Secrets and Experiments in the Art of Angling’; and III) ‘The Compleat Cooks Guide, Or, Directions for Dressing all sort of Flesh, Fowl, and Fish, both in the English and French Mode, with all Sauces and Sallets’, which also includes line drawings of patterns for pastries. The complete text has 382 numbered pages with the separate tables of content at the end unnumbered. The other version held by the Bodleian (shelfmark Antiu.f.E.30 (3)) is the third item in a collection of octavo items bound together at a later time in a volume whose spine reads ‘PROVERBS’. Its opening title-page shows a younger, smiling woman with loose curls, a much more casual pose, and comfortable-looking 1670sstyle dress. Opposite her is the same panel-scene title-page as in the

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Luttrell copy. There is no separate narrative title-page, but instead an abbreviated preface by ‘T. P.’ with a slightly different salutation to the ladies. This, although it identifies the same three divisions within the book, in the second section omits any reference to the art of angling, subdivides the third section into two sections (one dealing with English and French modes of cookery with their sauces, and one dealing with pastries and bills of fare) and adds a new fifth section, ‘The Lady’s Diversion in her Garden’, by Thomas Harris, ‘Gardner at Stockwel, in Surrey’.35 In spite of the increased number of sections, this version has only 176 numbered pages, almost half of the first version, and yet it retains their shared content and adds another section by using much smaller fonts and tighter margins, thus requiring the resetting of all the title-pages and headings: placing, for example, all the terms of carving in double columns on half a page, while the other copy takes two pages to list them. Notably, while the body of the preface by ‘T. P.’ is different in each volume to reflect the contents, the final sentences of the prefaces are identical in both versions. When one turns to the ends of the two 1675 volumes, the indexes to both include overlapping recipes in the cookery sections, but the contents are not identical. Both are called ‘The Table to the Compleat Cooks Guide’, but in the version with the formal portrait, for example, there are six recipes under ‘A’ starting with ‘Almond Cream’ and finishing with ‘Artichoake Pye’; while in the informal portrait version there are seven, starting with ‘Artichoake fry’d’, ending with ‘Almond-tart’ and also providing for ‘Asparagus to keep’. When one attempts to track the volumes through later editions, it appears that there were more versions of the royal portrait text produced. It and its contents appear in editions published by Benjamin Harris in 1677 (no portrait), 1684 and 1685 (with portrait) and 1686 by Sarah Harris, with angling still included but no portrait. Lest one decide that the version with the smaller font and informal portrait was simply the product of a pirated version of Harris’s 1675 edition, one finds that same informal portrait and decorative title-page is used in the 1696 edition also printed by Harris, who was now located in Great Eastcheap, to be sold by Henry Nelme in Cornhill and William Hunt. If this isn’t confusing enough, according to A. W. Oxford’s bibliography, there are also editions

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printed in 1686 which drop the angling content but add directions for washing and starching.36 The 1719 edition, by John Boddington, does not use any of the previous illustrations and has been enlarged to five sections, keeping the ‘female angler’ and ‘The Ladies Diversion in her Garden’ but updating ‘The Complete Cook’ from featuring simply English and French modes to ‘the newest fashion now in use in the British Court’ and offering a new dedication to the ‘Countess of S———’, firmly attaching the volume to a former maid of honour to Queen Anne. In this final example, the various publishers have continued over a 40year span the practice seen in 1675 of this type of literary text being the product of both the continuation of an established, recognisable, iconic set of images along with an evolving sense of audience, changes which are not driven by an individual author. In addition to the overt associations with royalty and elite culture being made cheaply and conveniently available to the studious aspiring reader, recipe volumes printed in 1675 are also revealing of the printer’s hand as much as the readers’ desires. How closely the content and presentation of the printed version agreed with the manuscript text provided to the publisher by the named author (whoever they might be), even in its initial incarnations, is interesting to try to track down. Hannah Woolley, of course, denounced the printer Dorman Newman’s use of her previous writings, in The Gentlewoman’s Companion, charging that he ‘so transformed the Book, that it is nothing like what I had written’, and that his actions were ‘scandalous, ridiculous, and impertinent’.37 One also has this impression of authorial exasperation on a lesser level in Rabisha’s preface ‘To the Reader’ in the 1675 edition of The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected. At the end of his address explaining his motives for publication and the logic behind its methods of presentation suitable for the ‘instruction of young Practioners [sic]’, Rabisha urges that ‘the Reader would take notice, that the second part, called Receipts, was intended to be place in the first part, in order and form, every sort by itself, as the first part is compos’d’. Unfortunately, ‘the Author being absent in the Countrey, that and many things more intended were neglected’. Therefore, the author asserts, the reader must assist him in recomposing the volume: ‘I desire the Reader to correct it in his own thoughts, and enlarge it by

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what is done, until the Author gets further opportunity to add thereto.’38 Leaving aside the biography of Hannah Woolley, the gender of the speaking voice in the text, the excellence or lack thereof in the recipes, what is highlighted in these authors’ complaints and which has received far less attention from critics are the people who actually made these books and set them out to sell, manipulating and fine-tuning these resonant terms and images: the printers and booksellers. Regardless of who the lady in the portraits might be, the physical nature of the recipe texts of 1675 clearly demonstrates several problematic areas for author-centred criticism. Up to this point, we have been talking about the printer and publisher in terms of the damage they inflicted on the individual author’s text, from the author’s point of view, with overtones of the publisher as the exploiter of the individual talents (and image) of the author. In contemporary textual and editorial theory, of course, the concept of the text as being in part the product of a multiple set of forces at a particular moment in time is fairly well accepted, in particular with the work of critics such as Jerome McGann looking at the production of printed volumes of verse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the context of the tangles found in the descriptions of whether The Gentlewoman’s Companion was or was not ‘really’ by Woolley, ‘the result’, as McGann might say, is that ‘the dynamic social relations which always exist in literary production – the dialectic between the historically located individual author and the historically developing institutions of literary production – tends to become obscured in criticism’.39 Benjamin Harris, Edward Thomas, Richard Lowndes, ‘E. C.’ and Elizabeth Calvert (who may of course be one and the same) are the printers and stationers involved in the 1675 recipe books. Space does not permit an expanded account of their lives and careers, even where such knowledge is currently available, but it becomes clear that in understanding the nature of recipe books in 1675, in addition to thinking as we have been accustomed to do about the authors and the recipes inside, it is also necessary to consider the individuals who took the raw ingredients of the text and literally cooked the books to suit the tastes of the times. Elizabeth Calvert has already attracted interest because she and

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her husband Giles Calvert, at their shop the Black Spread Eagle, were among the most famous of the radical religious and political publishers of the period. After the Restoration, they printed Republican, nonconformist and politically sensitive texts, but also William Rabisha’s highly royalist cookbook. Was it, as her ODNB biographer suggests, merely a respectable cover for their other activities, a suitable ‘face’ for their list, or does Rabisha’s book work with others in ways we do not yet see?40 Benjamin Harris likewise had a career publishing highly inflammatory political materials, especially in the later 1670s when he produced anti-Catholic texts fueling Titus Oates’s ‘Popish Plot’. In fact, the publisher of The Accomplisht Ladys Delight was repeatedly in trouble with authorities for his practices and the texts he produced, ultimately fleeing to America for publishing materials in support of James, duke of Monmouth. Amazingly, he ended his days back in England, ‘a quack seller of Angelical Pills and other patent medicines’.41 Did his use of the two portraits, one with similarities to the Catholic Queen Catherine of Braganza and the other of a ‘modern’ Restoration belle, fit within some as-of-yet-undeciphered network of significance? Or were they just pretty pictures and profitable texts? The exercise of placing culinary recipe books published in 1675 back into the general literary matrix of textual production that year highlights a very simple and obvious point, one so obvious it is easy not to see it: like most handwritten texts, printed books are not made by a single author, regardless of whose face and name appear there. The fluid and dynamic nature of culinary recipes and handwritten recipe books themselves, always open to expansion, annotation and updating, is continued in the style of these multifunction, multi-source aggregate volumes we find in 1675. Whose face is it in the book, who puts the face on the book, and whose book therefore is it? In accounts of Woolley’s works, printers and booksellers are typically cast (by Woolley herself, too) as villains, literary ‘pirates’ who steal, maim and sell into bondage the individual author’s words and works and manufacture images to suit the needs of the volume, not the author. In contrast, among Woolley’s contemporaries, other images of the bookseller are also available for the period. For example, Roger North (1651–1734), writing about the changes to

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the practice of bookselling over his own life spanning the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, concluded that bookshops during the period were a plentiful and perpetual emporium of learned authors, and men went thither as to a market. They drew to the place a mighty trade; the rather because the shops were spacious and the learned gladly resorted to them where they seldom failed to meet with agreeable conversation. And the booksellers themselves were knowing and conversible men, with whom for the sake of bookish knowledge, the greatest wits were pleased to converse. Any we may judge the time there as well spent there as (in later days) either in tavern or coffeehouse.42

If we reconceptualise the 1675 bookshop as a space, an ‘emporium’ and place of cultural circulation which coincides with the coffee house rather than a pirates’ lair, we have a new way of thinking about literary culture that is not centred on the author’s personality alone, but draws us back into the complexity of the whole network of people involved in making and marketing a book. As we have seen in the complicated critical responses to Hannah Woolley and to the establishment of her ‘real’ works, literary historians often tend to look first at the named individual, then at the content of the texts, and then at the imagined audience for both. This renders the other agents involved in the production of these fascinating multi-layered chameleon texts largely invisible, except as they annoyed either the author or us by their treatment of the materials. Questions concerning audience and author take on further dimensions when printer, publisher and stationer are included as being active participants in the textual mix, and such attention places the books back into a dynamic system of textual creation, transmission and signification. As the Introduction to this volume points out, printed recipe books of the late seventeenth century, as well as their earlier counterparts, highlight the formal intricacies of textual connections between texts, readers and makers. There is still a need for studies considering printers and booksellers as active agents both shaping and creating the contents and, indeed, in the ways in which celebrity authorship is created, where the author’s name and face help to sell the contents, whether that be recipes, secrets or fictions.43

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Notes 1 See, for example, Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writings, 1649–1688 (London: Virago, 1988); Elizabeth Tebeaux, ‘Women and technical writing, 1475–1700’, in Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (eds), Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700 (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1997), pp. 29– 62; Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England; Sara Pennell, ‘The material culture of food in early modern England, c. 1650–1750’ (D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1997), and ‘Perfecting practice?’; Madeline Bassnett, ‘Recipe books and the politics of food in early modern English women’s writings’ (Ph.D. Dissertation, Dalhousie University, 2008); Lehmann, British Housewife; Theophano, Eat My Words; Field, ‘“Many hands hands”’; Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 18–56. 2 ODNB, ‘Wolley [sic], Hannah (b. 1622?–d. in or after 1674)’. 3 A. W. Oxford, Notes from a Collector’s Catalogue with a Bibliography of English Cookery Books (London: John & Edward Bumpus, 1909). 4 Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). See also Lynette Hunter, ‘Books for daily life: household, husbandry, behaviour’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds), with the assistance of Maureen Bell, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Vol. IV 1557–1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 514–32. See also Archer, this volume. 5 Margaret J. M. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 6 See also Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘Invisible books’, in Pat Rogers and Laura Runge (eds), Producing the Eighteenth-Century Book: Writers and Publishers in England, 1650–1800 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009), pp. 53–69. 7 Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘The Gentleman’s Journal and the commercialization of Restoration coterie literary practices’, Modern Philology, 89 (1992), 323–40. 8 Such manuscript volumes do exist, for example King’s College Library, Cambridge, ‘The Works of Albius Tibullus Englished by R.W. 1685’, Richard Waller, no shelf mark. This has an elaborate engraved frontispiece by Waller dated 1679, an explanation of the frontispiece, and the same formal layout, including the use of catchwords at the bottom of the page, as a printed text, but such volumes are comparatively uncommon. 9 For Wilmot, Wycherley, Lee and Otway, see ODNB. See also the treatment of this decade in popular teaching anthologies and the authors included, for example M. H. Abrams (gen. ed.) and Stephen Greenblatt (assoc. ed.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume I, 7th edn (New York: W. W.

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Norton, 2000), pp. 2045–298. 10 See, for example, Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘1675–6’, in Margaret J. M. Ezell (ed.), The Oxford English Literary History. Volume 5: 1645–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 11 Throughout this chapter, the year of publication is 1675 unless otherwise noted. 12 The copy reproduced on EEBO is in the Bodleian (shelfmark J Floor Wood 276a (123)). 13 See Lehmann, this volume, Figure 5.1. 14 Pennell, ‘Perfecting practice?’. 15 McKeon, Secret History of Domesticity, p. 487. 16 Rabisha, Whole Body (1675 edn), sig. A3r. There is no concrete evidence of him having done such service, however: see ODNB, ‘Rabisha, William (fl. 1621–61)’. 17 ‘Hanna Wolley’ [Hannah Woolley], The Ladies Directory in Choice Experiments & Curiosities, of Preserving in Jellies and Candying Both Fruits and Flowers (London: printed by T. M. for Peter Dring, 1662), sig. A2r. 18 Hannah Wolley [Woolley], The Cooks Guide: Or, Rare Receipts for Cookery (London: printed for Peter Dring, 1664), title-page. 19 Hannah Woolley, The Ladies Delight: or A Rich Closet of Choice Experiments and Curiosities (London: T. Milbourn for N. Crouch, 1672), n.p. (afterword appearing after index). 20 Hunter, ‘Books for daily life’. 21 Although see Archer, this volume for a discussion of the recipe as poetic form. 22 Woolley, The Queen-Like Closet, 3rd edn (1675), p. 3. 23 Currently on the American satellite station The Food Network as Iron Chef America (broadcast since 2005). 24 Hunter, ‘Books for daily life’, p. 530. 25 Hobby, ‘A woman’s best setting out’, p. 181. 26 See ODNB, ‘Wolley, Hannah’. 27 Hannah Woolley, The Gentlewoman’s Companion Or a Guide to the Female Sex, ed. Caterina Albano (Totnes: Prospect Books, 2001), p. 16. 28 Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, p. 143. 29 Lehmann, British Housewife, p. 50. 30 Uta Schumacher-Voelker, ‘Authorship of The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight, 1675’ PPC, 9 (1981), 66–7; Oxford, Notes from a Collector’s Catalogue, pp. 84–5. 31 Bodleian Library, Douce P 412 and Antiu.f.E. (30) 3. 32 Hobby, ‘A woman’s best setting out’, p. 183. For a copy of the Faithorne engraving, see the National Portrait Gallery, D29198. On EEBO the 1673 and 1682 editions shown carry the Faithorne engraving, but the 1675 copy from the Bodleian does not.

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33 ODNB, ‘Luttrell, Narcissus (1657–1732)’. 34 I am indebted to Ericka Ingraham at the National Portrait Gallery for this attribution. See National Portrait Gallery, D17861. 35 This is the copy digitally available on EEBO. 36 Oxford, Notes from a Collector’s Catalogue, p. 85. 37 Woolley, Gentlewoman’s Companion, pp. 131, 132. 38 Rabisha, Whole Body of Cookery Dissected, sig. A4r. 39 Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), p. 81. 40 ODNB, ‘Calvert, Elizabeth (d. 1675?)’. 41 ODNB, ‘Harris, Benjamin (c.1647–1720)’. 42 Quoted in Charles A Rivington, Pepys and the Booksellers (York: Sessions Book Trust, 1992), p. 5. For an example of the attention the booksellers and printers are now receiving as active agents in the creation and circulation of texts, see James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade (London/New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 43 See Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘Late seventeenth-century female author portraits, or, the company she keeps’, ZAA: Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1:1 (2012), 31–46.

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9

Crossing the boundaries: domestic recipe collections in early modern Wales 1

ALUN WITHEY

‫ﱬﱫ‬ Medical recipe collections can be understood in a variety of ways, from aides-mémoires to ‘trophy’ or gift collections within the context of domestic relations. They shed light on questions of disease taxonomy and nosology, but also exemplify the early modern knowledge economy. Early modern Britons experienced a dynamic culture of knowledge exchange; oral and literate cultures interwove in complex ways as information shifted between the spoken, written and printed word, and up and down the social scale. The capacity to memorise information and recycle verbatim was key, especially given the relatively low levels of literacy. Medical recipes were a central part of this process. As Elaine Leong and Sara Pennell suggest, people shared their medical knowledge freely and, crucially, this sharing transcended boundaries of status, literacy, geography and even acquaintance.2 Recipe collections were organic documents, changing and developing in a broader continuum of knowledge. In fact, recipe collections were a point of conjunction between oral and literate medical cultures. Historians such as Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf see this as a dynamic relationship where information shifted back and forth from verbal to manuscript to print through a process of many ‘removes’.3 In this sense, recipe collections could become repositories of family and community knowledge and lore, as well as a congeries of inherited and imported knowledge derived from literate sources. This process has been well documented in England, and in the English language. But how was the economy of knowledge affected by the presence of a language barrier, as was the case in Wales, where

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over 90 per cent of people spoke only Welsh? How did shifting linguistic boundaries affect the transmission of medical knowledge? Here Wales makes a useful test case since examples survive in both the English and Welsh languages. Although much work has concentrated upon English recipe collections, little attention has been paid to Welsh examples, reflecting a wider (and somewhat puzzling) lack of academic interest in Welsh medical history in general. Seemingly, part of the problem is how to approach Wales; is it a separate country or a distinct region? Or is it implicitly subsumed within wider studies of England? My approach lies somewhere in between. Wales had unique social, linguistic and geographical elements, but was also part of a nexus of medical knowledge reaching far beyond its borders. As I have suggested elsewhere, the predominance of themes of folklore and industrialisation have skewed the narrative of Welsh medicine, making fresh studies and approaches all the more necessary.4 This chapter explores the nature and spread of medical information, and the importance of manuscript recipe collections as a vehicle in this process. Using Welsh sources, it argues that medical recipes were neither physically nor linguistically static, but instead moved across geographical, social and cultural spaces with ease. Central to this process was the increasing importance of the printed word, and here we reach a dichotomy in terms of Wales. Literacy levels in early modern Wales were comparatively low in comparison with England. Around 1650, perhaps only 15–20 per cent of the Welsh population could read, compared with an estimated 30 per cent in England.5 A century later, this had risen to an estimated 30– 45 per cent, but still trailed the English average of between 40 and 60 per cent.6 But, even in such a sparse literate environment, and an overwhelmingly Welsh-language oral culture, the English printed word was having an increasing impact, both upon the types of recipes to which ‘ordinary’ Welsh people had access, and also the ways that they described their symptoms. Such a study will therefore serve a dual purpose. First, it will add much to our understanding of the availability of literate medical information in rural areas, and to the illiterate. Secondly, it contributes not only to the relatively sparse historiography of early modern Wales, but to our wider understanding of the early modern medical knowledge economy.

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Cymru7 collections Like Ireland and Scotland, Wales was a geographically, culturally and linguistically distinct region of the British Isles. A country of geographical contrasts, Wales is dominated by its mountainous uplands, but also has over 740 miles of coastline with corresponding lowlands and pastoral agriculture. Unlike Scotland and Ireland, early modern Wales had no cities and few large towns of more than 2,000 inhabitants. Nevertheless, many Welsh market towns, and even those located well within the hinterlands, maintained strong links with English centres and were important urban environments for surrounding rural areas. Perhaps the most significant characteristic of Wales was its language, accompanied by a strong oral knowledge culture. As late as the 1890s, Welsh was still spoken by around 60 per cent of the inhabitants of Wales (compared to around 15 per cent of Gaelic speakers in Scotland). In the seventeenth century the figure was closer to 90 per cent, the majority of whom spoke little or no English in addition.8 The spoken language of medicine and sickness in Wales, then, was Welsh. As was the case in agrarian societies across Europe, there was a rich Welsh vernacular tradition of stories and legends that were continually reinforced and recycled through public recitals as well as fireside gatherings and gossip.9 Much medical knowledge – where to find herbs, healing waters, and so on – was already in the public domain and part of a wider consciousness of medicinal practices and herb lore. Medical references could be articulated through a range of verbal channels, and people were used to committing surprisingly large amounts of information to memory. Medical recipes fitted into this continuum of medical knowledge and were exactly the sort of information which could be readily transacted in the early modern economy of knowledge. Given the close proximity between England and Wales, did the accumulation and recording of recipes in Wales mirror the form and function of English examples? As elsewhere, collections of recipes took a wide variety of forms. People accumulated recipes which, in literate households, were often committed to paper. This ‘fixing’ of recipes created a useful personal store of medical knowledge, but also endowed the information with a measure of permanence. As

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Anne Stobart has noted in her contribution to this collection, medical recipes could be recorded almost anywhere, but the very fact that they were recorded suggests some intrinsic value. Paper was expensive – in effect a luxury item – and was not something to be wasted, perhaps especially in Wales, where income levels were comparatively lower than in England. Many recipe collections were often little more than scraps of paper gathered together ad hoc. These might comprise large numbers of recipes, or equally be no more than a few scribbled notes.10 These were extremely portable, facilitating the easy transmission and recording of medical ideas. Such examples are perhaps the purest form of recipe collation, suggesting hurried, even verbatim, recording as opposed to regimented and deliberate transcriptions. The spontaneity of transmission is also suggested by their presence in non-medical sources, suggesting a scribbled note in the nearest available space, although such additions were not necessarily random. Including recipes within religious passages was perhaps a conscious attempt to ally physical and spiritual healing. The commonplace books and copybooks of prosperous elites often found space for recipes, fully in keeping with a desire to retain potentially useful information. Businessmen, too, sometimes placed recipes within larger collections of accounts, again perhaps a deliberate act for ease of later referral. The farming tithe book of the parish of Llangynyw, for example, contains medical recipes alongside agricultural notes and accounts, written by the parish rector Thomas Lloyd.11 The anonymous author of the so-called ‘Llywnwermod MS’ included medical recipes in a volume of legal precedents, somewhat enigmatically writing them at the bottom corner of alternate pages.12 We can do little more than speculate about the motives – if indeed there were any – for this. There is some regularity in the inclusion of recipes over a number of pages, but insufficient to identify a deliberate system. Perhaps the book was simply nearest at hand when the author needed page space for newly acquired recipes, and the compilation is essentially random. But such examples still highlight that medical recipes and information were important enough to warrant fixing onto paper, whether formally or otherwise. For compilers, where to record the information depended partly upon practical matters of paper and space, but

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also on the ability to locate it easily when needed. Thus, situating recipes within religious or commercial documents might hint at the occupation of the compilers, or at least suggest that these were documents to which they might most usually refer. It is worth briefly pausing to consider questions of situational hierarchies raised by the committal of recipes to manuscript. Put simply, was a recipe scribbled on a rough note somehow less intrinsically valuable than one in a more deliberate collection? This is difficult to address. An ad hoc recipe could be viewed as a pragmatic response to one individual’s sickness, a compiler quickly scrawling down something to use for the sufferer. In this sense it related to a particular sickness event. But it is also plausible that entering a medical recipe into a book somehow invested it with a greater degree of permanence. Once entered, it could not so easily be removed as the single note, which could easily be ripped up and thrown away. Books had a physical and temporal longevity; they were often expensive, but also had cultural and intellectual value, as gifts and bequests. Recipe collections could become intergenerational, extending their lifespan and potential audience significantly beyond their original compiler(s). Such questions are certainly worthy of further consideration, unfortunately beyond the scope of this chapter, but it is easy to over-analyse what may be no more than the simple, utilitarian need to record information. Having acknowledged that almost any assemblage of recipes constitutes a collection, some measure of filtering must be introduced. For the moment, this discussion will concentrate upon formal, deliberate and bound volumes of recipes. Unlike some large, and well-catalogued, collections such as those of the Wellcome Library in London, there is no major single archival body of Welsh recipe collections. Drawing a somewhat arbitrary distinction of ‘formal’ collections as documents solely created for recipe recording, then, assuming a rough time period of 1580–1770, there are 31 examples extant in Welsh archives and major London repositories.13 (See Appendix 9.1.) As Michelle DiMeo has already noted in this volume, the issue of authorship/compilership is problematic, with relatively few sources firmly attributable to either single compilers or families. Those whose collections can be identified were often members of gentry families, such as Elizabeth Salusbury (d. 1760?)

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and Catherine Nanney (1692–1756), both part of the well-to-do Nanney/Nannau dynasty of Merionethshire in north Wales.14 Henry, Baron Herbert of Cherbury (1654–1709?), appears to have owned (if not also written) a collection held in the National Library of Wales.15 Others, such as one bearing the signature of a ‘Mrs Lloyd of Penpedust’, a small Cardiganshire village, have only a name on a page, signature or attribution to provide a tenuous link to individuals.16 The issue of language is salient. The majority of the recipe collections are written in English, five in Welsh, and one uses both languages interchangeably. This disparity raises questions about literacy and Welsh medical language. As a spoken form, the Welsh language was ubiquitous. Spoken English was restricted to pockets, largely around towns and borders, so the predominance of Welsh sources in English seems surprising. However, written English was often used by aspirational middling sorts and elites, keen to adopt, and promote, a more cosmopolitan outlook. Moreover, those who could write had often received a formal education which generally focused upon English and Latin. Since many surviving recipe collections appear to be linked to those of middle or upper status, the predominance of English-language sources may reflect this trend. The issue of language also raises questions of the structure and function of Welsh-language recipe collections. It is first clear that Welsh recipe collections in both Welsh and English follow the receptaria format of a disease heading or statement (for example, ‘for the canker’), followed by a didactic set of instructions on preparation and usage, and sometimes a statement of provenance.17 While in one sense it is logical that the apparent conventions of such sources should be followed, and in fact may also reflect the patterns found in published texts, it is noteworthy that Welsh-language collections follow the form identically. It demonstrates the general consistency of recipe collation in England, Wales and parts of Europe. Thus, in English, ‘A receipt for the Bite of a mad dog’ taken from the eighteenth-century recipe book of Catherine Nanney is represented by the Welsh equivalent Brath ki klaf (literally, ‘bite of a sick dog’), in the anonymous Welsh ‘Lhyfr o Fedhiginiaeth a Physigwriaeth’ (book of remedies and medicine).18 Both Welsh and English sources often contain detailed indices with the Welsh word ‘rhag’, indicating ‘for’

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(so, rhag y kangker [for the canker]), and haint, meaning sickness (for example, Haint Brenhinoedd [King’s sickness/King’s evil]).19 Figure 9.1 shows a typical index taken from the seventeenth-century ‘Llyfr o Feddiginiaeth a Physigwriaeth’. The index lists disease names – and also some remedies, such as henbane – alphabetically with a corresponding page number. There are, however, some divergences in Welsh-language collections relating particularly to the attributions of recipes. Recipe collections are generally viewed as organic documents, growing over time with new acquisitions that are often tagged with the donor’s name. This added some measure of value-assessment in terms of the provenance of the recipe through the compiler’s social and geographical networks. Also, if the recipe’s supplier was distinguished by rank or profession, its inclusion might bestow extra

9.1 Index from a Welsh-language recipe book, Wellcome MS 417, ‘Lhyfr o fedhiginiaeth a Physigwriaeth’, seventeenth century

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cachet upon the collection. In Welsh-language collections, however, it is striking that the number of direct attributions is significantly lower than in English-language compilations of the same period. In the anonymous Bodleian Library Welsh MS E.9, for example, there appear to be no attributions in over 80 pages of recipes.20 Another collection held in Cardiff Central Library contains no direct attributions in over 150 separate recipes, a pattern repeated in several other Welsh-language sources.21 Why? With such a relatively small number of Welsh-language collections it is difficult to generalise, but a difference both in the motives for, and style of, compiling recipes in Welsh is possible. It is clear that the recipes within these books were certainly used and tested. Conventions of marginalia such as the pointing hand (or manicule) indicating favoured examples are much in evidence, while the striking-out of others also suggests factors such as the deletion of rejected remedies, repeated recipes or temporary insertions.22 One possible explanation relates to Welsh traditions of manuscript copying. Acquiring books and extensive libraries was one means through which the Welsh gentry could demonstrate their new-found cosmopolitanism in the face of pejorative portrayals of the Welsh in English satirical pamphlets. Demonstrating lineage and knowledge of the past was the coming thing, and part of this process was the commission of copies of Welsh manuscripts for private collectors, including recipe collections. Welsh literati like William Salesbury (c.1520–84, author of the first English–Welsh dictionary), Humffrey Llwyd (1527–68) and Thomas ap Ifan of Hendreforfydd (dates unknown), sought to acquire medical texts and also translated English and Latin medical texts into Welsh.23 Amongst the Welsh gentry and well-to-do, there was a ready market for such documents, used by their new owners to evidence erudition and perspicacity. Men such as John Jones of Gellilyfdy (1585–1657) made a virtual profession of copying old documents, and it was ‘traditional’ Welsh manuscripts such as the medieval texts of the Physicians of Myddfai which most often found their way into copyists’ hands.24 Many surviving Welsh-language collections are potentially direct copies of earlier documents, effectively assembled in a single action rather than evolving organically over time. It may be that they were originally not intended as

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working documents, but rather as objects of antiquarian interest in their own right, copied either bespoke or as gifts. The relatively small sample invites caution, however. Given that there is clear evidence of usage, it is entirely possible that the books were gifted and still had utility over time as domestic recipe collections once they passed into new hands. Their very survival is indeed apparent evidence of this process. Likewise, we cannot assume that the lack of attributions necessarily denotes a static collection. Nonetheless, this difference is still puzzling, and only a systematic and full translation of these sources will likely shed further light upon the questions raised here. The gendering of recipe collection authors/compilers in Wales also requires comment. Of those collections definitely attributable to individuals, most compilers were elite women. Nevertheless, it is also clear that men took an active interest in recipe collection and collation, as the editors note in their Introduction to this volume. Definite attribution of collections is often difficult, but several examples can be at least circumstantially linked to men.25 Beyond formal recipe collections, medical references exist across a wide range of sources by Welsh men, from notebooks to diaries and commonplace books. The male role in domestic medicine is often downplayed, and more work is needed to explore gender in the practice of domestic medicine.26

Networks of knowledge Tracking the pathways of transmission is difficult, but much early modern medical culture existed in the public domain in the form of a cognitive ‘knowledge bank’.27 As they travelled from person to person, certain recipes were augmented, added to and altered. Even amongst the literate, medical recipes probably travelled verbally first and foremost, their committal to paper being a secondary result of this initial knowledge transaction. Compiling medical information was an obvious and logical means of accumulating sufficient knowledge to tackle a range of conditions within the home. But it might also be seen as a means of achieving social status or notoriety, since the ownership of medical knowledge was indeed a powerful tool. A single volume of medical recipes was almost a proxy healer;

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it could include information drawn from a wide range of sources, both within a community and outside. It could include recipes from publications which many in a rural parish could not read for themselves. The owner of the collection thereby effectively also owned the information within it, automatically positioning them as a source of medical authority. Leong and Pennell see recipes as ‘part of the social capital’ of their possessors, able to be gifted or exchanged as transactions of knowledge.28 Moreover, in exploring recipe attributions, they have shown how it is possible to reconstruct the social networks through which people acquired medical recipes, and the implications for social relations.29 For Wales, analysis of recipe collections is largely limited to narrative examples of the contents, concentrating more upon their ‘weirdness’ than any wider uses.30 The discussion will now broaden to include recorded recipes in other Welsh texts, including notebooks and more ad hoc collections. As already noted, the spoken medical language of Wales was Welsh, and recipes shifted back and forth between Welsh and English, oral and literate. But the act of transferring an acquired recipe onto paper in Wales often involved an extra ‘remove’ – that of its translation from vernacular Welsh to English. Likewise, given that recipes from manuscripts were equally likely to be shared out into the owner’s social network, this could also happen in reverse, with the recipe translated verbally back into Welsh. This process is signally important; it explains how illiterate Welsh people could have access to information from English-language medical texts, and also how medical recipes shifted back and forth not only between oral and manuscript, but also across linguistic boundaries. Some evidence suggests that this process actually began to affect vernacular Welsh medical terminology. That recipes were shared is certain, and domestic and local social networks were always the most ready source of medical knowledge. But in wider terms, the economy of medical knowledge went both up and down the social scale. The notebook of John Morgan of Palleg (dates unknown), part of an affluent Glamorganshire family, includes recipes gleaned from a typical network of family members, neighbours and friends and also doctors.31 The commonplace book of the Monmouthshire yeoman-farmer John Gwin (c.1620–80?) displays a similar pattern and also shows clear evidence of his

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sharing recipes with servants and employees – in this case Helmontian chemical preparations.32 Gentry collections often contained recipes from fellow elites, while their wives also utilised their range of contacts to share favoured recipes or advice. As a surviving letter from Valitina Malyn of Flintshire (dates unknown) to another, unfortunately unidentified, woman in 1697 also shows, there was not even a necessity for the parties to be personally acquainted. Learning of the other lady’s sickness from her maid, Valitina dispatched the note of a recipe, entreating her to ‘pray think not the worse of my plaister because it comes from a strainger’.33 Elites also clearly considered remedies from social inferiors, including irregular practitioners such as cunning folk, to be valid. The receipt book of Amy Rowlands (1661–1732) of Plas Gwyn, Anglesey, contains a remedy for curing ‘meigrims in the head’ attributed to one ‘Pembrockshir Bess’, while John Morgan also consulted a mysterious ‘woman of the Kengkod’, near Carmarthen.34 In 1628, Sir Peter Mytton (1550–1637) of Llanerch Park, Caernarfonshire, hearing of an old man nearby who had ‘by the meanes of the powder of eyebright . . . recovered his long lost sight’, dispatched a servant to track down the man and his recipe.35 Elite collections also demonstrate networks outside Wales, providing direct and tangible links to external contacts, both Welsh and English. Amy Rowlands’s recipe book highlights well the contacts of a middle-ranking woman. Amongst the attributions are locals from Llyn, Caernarvon and Chester, including ‘madam Wynne’, probably part of the wealthy and influential Wynne family of north Wales. Also, however, there is a reference to a recipe for sore eyes obtained in London by a local acquaintance and passed on.36 Social networks yielded many opportunities to acquire knowledge. English towns were also magnets for Welsh travellers who were able to pick up medical goods, as well as recipes, from contacts there. John Gwin was a regular traveller to Bristol, from where he purchased medical ingredients, while the Mold practitioner, Thomas Griffiths, visited London to buy medicaments on several occasions.37 But it is clear that printed medical texts were, alongside individuals, beginning to play an increasingly prominent role in the currency of medical recipes in Wales. For most of this period, no medical books were available in Welsh. The first printing press was not

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established in Wales until 1718 and the numbers of books available in Welsh, although increasing, was not high.38 There are many reasons for this, but the lack of a large audience for Welsh publications generally made the high production costs unviable. The first solely Welsh-language medical publication was William Bevan’s 1733 Llyfr Meddiginiaeth, ir anafys ar chlwfus (Book of medicine for the wounded and sick).39 For the whole of the seventeenth century, therefore, those desiring printed medical texts were effectively forced into buying English, Latin or otherwise ‘foreign’ books. But buy them they did. English books were sold across Wales, with publishers’ agents located in many Welsh towns.40 Also, proximity to regional English centres such as Bristol, Chester and Shrewsbury afforded much opportunity for prospective Welsh readers to make purchases, while books could also be found in the packs of travelling pedlars who crisscrossed the country in increasing numbers throughout the early modern period.41 Although elite domestic libraries often contained medical volumes as part of their intellectual aspirations, and sometimes in large numbers, possession of medical publications was by no means limited to the upper orders.42 Books such as George Hartman’s The Family Physitian: A Collection of Choice Approved and Experienced Remedies (London, 1696) were owned by Pryce Hughes, a land agent for Lord Powis in Montgomeryshire.43 Possibly Hughes was the second owner of the book, as he entered his own date of 1707. A copy of Nicholas Culpeper’s The English Physician passed through a number of hands in the early eighteenth century in Carmarthenshire.44 John Gwin of Llangwm also owned a number of medical texts, including George Starkey’s Natuer’s [sic] Explication and Helmont’s Vindication (London, 1657), and William Mathew’s The Unlearned Alchymist (London, 1660), as well as a probable copy of Culpeper’s herbal.45 Welsh apothecaries also collected books, with some, such as Henry Williams (d. 1690) of Clynnog, Caernarvonshire, owning a complex variety of books ranging from popular herbals to esoteric tracts such as Thomas Walkington’s Optick Glasse of Humours (London, 1607), which required a detailed understanding of philosophy and mythology to decipher.46 How did this burgeoning print market affect vernacular recipe culture in Wales? The impact of recipes gleaned from English books

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is readily apparent in Welsh recipe collections, at least in the English-language examples. In one sense, this complicates the argument since, logically, those who could write in English could also read English. For these people there was no linguistic barrier; they simply bought and read texts in the usual way, and copied the recipes into manuscript. But given that the weight of evidence suggests that recipe collection owners were not proprietorial with their information, these English published texts could swiftly be assimilated into Welsh-language recipe culture. There is much evidence of recipes seemingly taken directly from published medical texts. Several recipes in one anonymous collection in both English and Welsh, for example, are markedly similar to those in the 1596 book, Practitioner in Physick.47 Many in the book of Thomas Wynn of Bodfaen (d. 1673) are identical to examples in the 1659 edition of The Queen’s Closet Opened by ‘W. M.’48 A comprehensive and systematic quantitative analysis of these sources and their derivations would doubtless reveal many more but is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this chapter. Some examples, however, show slight differences in form, which seem to indicate either a mistranscription or alteration caused in the actual process of sharing, a process also explored in this volume by DiMeo. A good example of this is ‘Dr Batten’s Preservation against the plague’, which occurs almost identically in two Welsh sources, one from Merionethshire, the other Cardiganshire.49 Searches of published works reveal no recipes appearing under this doctor’s name. But an identical recipe is found under the heading of ‘Dr Butler’s Preservative against the Plague’ in the 1659 edition of The Queens Closet Opened, which in turn is similar to ‘Dr Butler’s Cordiall’ in the work diary of the philosopher, Robert Boyle, for 1652.50 This suggests that the recipe may at some stage have been misheard or wrongly copied, with the ‘new’ version being disseminated. Others show similar deviations from the published form, suggesting changes made in translation or transmission. A recipe for ‘ye liver that is corrupt and wasted’ appears to be précised from Thomas Moulton’s Mirror or Glasse of Health (London, 1580).51 Here, again, the précis, rather than a direct copy, suggests that the recipe may have come to the compiler from a verbal, rather than the original printed source.

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Book borrowing also ensured the steady dissemination of medical recipes. John Morgan of Palleg kept detailed notes of the books he lent to friends and colleagues, and this doubtless reciprocal arrangement ensured that the printed word could have an impact beyond the purchaser alone.52 A book of 1698 receipts in English from the Carmarthenshire area is more or less a copy of Hartman’s Family Physitian, but with several extra additions.53 Given that there seems little point copying a book of recipes you already own, a more likely explanation is that the book was lent and copied from print into a manuscript collection, a possibility made more likely by the survival of the two sources within the same area. Similarly, the book of a blacksmith, John Morgan, contains recipes under the heading ‘Severall secrets of Great Excellency in Physick Surgery’, with an extra note: ‘’tis a book in folio of some hundreds of the best Philosophers’.54 These can be found in print in Johann Jacob Wecker’s Eighteen Books of the Secrets of Art and Nature (1660), but here again the variation in title and deliberate comment on the form of the book suggests that Morgan had copied from an original, but not one he owned himself.55 Passages about the medical uses of opium, in a small notebook belonging to the Nannau family, are also précised from The Mysteries of Opium revealed (London, 1700) by John Jones, a Welsh licensed physician and ‘Chancellor of Llandaff ’. This is the only example so far known by this author of a Welsh manuscript which includes passages from the published medical work of a Welsh author.56 It could certainly be countered, however, that such examples do not provide direct evidence of the actual transmission of these recipes. By their nature, transactions of medical knowledge were fleeting; they involved a chance encounter, a conversation which might leave no record until the recipe finally appeared in a manuscript collection. It is therefore extremely difficult to find concrete evidence of the process of transmission and translation in the sources, so much must be assumed. Yet one way of charting the increasing impact of the printed word may be through changes to the medical terminology of the Welsh language itself during this period. It is clear that there was an increasing tension between the use of English and Welsh medical terminology, and also a corresponding degree of overlap. This can be explained as a result both of

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the increasing impact of print, but also of the lack of a Welsh medical faculty which could contribute to wider medical debates in the native tongue. Early modern Wales, unlike England, Scotland and Ireland, had no universities, no hospitals and no medical training facilities. Aspiring medical students were effectively forced to leave Wales and the possibilities of making a decent living in London or other large towns made them reluctant to return. This left a dearth of licensed Welsh practitioners in Wales which, together with the lack of publishing facilities, meant little opportunity for the development of a Welsh-language medical print culture. As such, Welsh authors largely published in English. With no vibrant Welsh medical faculty, there was perhaps little impetus to invent new Welsh terms as medical ontologies and nomenclature changed and developed. Recipe collections sometimes betray a tension between the Welsh and English terms, with some authors continuing to note the Welsh words for herbs. John Gwin’s book includes the Welsh herb name (lloy perthy) as well as the English ‘cleavers’.57 John Morgan of Palleg included ‘ground ivy’ in one remedy, noting that it was ‘Llsyiau’r Gorwm called in Welch’. Welsh and English could also be used interchangeably. Sometimes, recipes in Welsh manuscripts could be headed in English and continue afterwards in Welsh, and vice versa. The Welsh language certainly had its own lexicon of medical terminology and nomenclature, in many cases quite possibly derived from original Latin texts that began to arrive in numbers in Wales around the tenth century. But Welsh terminology also tended to mirror the form of English, as well as the original Latin, terms. The Welsh-language terms surrounding humours, for example, are clearly derived from Latin. Fleuma is the Welsh term for phlegm, malencolia for melancholy, colera for choler, and so on.58 Others correspond quite literally to English in translation. The Welsh word for fever is cryd, so a high temperature, or ague, might be classified in Welsh-language collections as a cryd poeth (poeth means hot). Welsh-language disease terms are often descriptive, including conditions such as pla gwyn (the white plague), which refers to the emaciated appearance of tuberculosis victims, while y frech wen is the Welsh term for smallpox, literally the white pox or rash. There are also a few instances of diseases which appear to have no

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linguistic equivalent in English. These include liveranartegro, a wasting condition referred to only in south Pembrokeshire, and clwyf yr edau wlan (the woollen yarn disease), although these are likely to be linguistic rather than physiological variations.59 But Welsh-language recipe collections also reveal the increasing use of English ‘loan’ words, and also for what might be termed ‘Cymrucised’ English terms. Around the fifteenth century, many medical terms began to appear in Welsh sources which closely resembled English terms: examples include balsam, cut, doctr and physig. A century later, William Salesbury’s Welsh–English dictionary included further words such as medsyn and meigryn, suggesting that they were already in common usage.60 By the seventeenth century, recipe collections contain a wide range of similar words from pwygation (purge or purgation), pisso and gonsympsion (consumption).61 The 1712 book of preacher Ellis Owen contains a range of similar and apparently borrowed terms such as dropsi, gowt, ddissig (tissick) and blastr (plaster).62 It is noticeable that, in many cases, only a single letter has been altered. This process was not unique to medical terminology and actually reflected broader changes in Welsh through advances in education and literacy during the period. But other factors may be at play, such as an increase in the use and assimilation of English medical terms phonetically. There are two possibilities for this. Either English was increasingly becoming the spoken form of medicine in Wales, which seems unlikely given the ubiquity of monoglot Welsh speakers or, instead, English terms were entering the Welsh oral vernacular and finding their way onto manuscript through repeated usage. This seems more plausible, especially since the Welsh language was not generating or regenerating its own medical terminology. The most probable sources for these terms are English medical books, which were disseminated beyond the literate through the strong oral traditions of Wales, and the culture of recipe-sharing noted elsewhere.

Conclusion What, then, do Welsh recipe collections add to our knowledge both of the genre, and of the spread of medical information in the early modern British Isles more generally? They certainly reinforce a lively

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culture of recipe exchange, and confirm that practices of the recording of recipes were consistent in areas of linguistic difference. Welsh compilers used approximately the same format and structure in their books, drawing upon networks of sources to obtain their recipes. As in England, recipe collections might be formal volumes or ad hoc assemblages of medical knowledge in non-medical documents. Both men and women compiled recipe collections, and many show evidence of usage and development over long periods of time. But differences in Welsh-language examples suggest that some further exploration of both the processes and the motives of recipe compilation is warranted. The lack of attributions in Welshlanguage sources, in particular, suggests a divergence of purpose, with some recipe collections perhaps being effectively ornamental as well as utilitarian. Although usage is apparent, evidence suggests that the primary reason for the creation of at least some Welshlanguage recipe collections may not have been functional. Welsh recipe collections occupy a liminal space not only between oral and literate cultures, but also between the Welsh and English languages, and here their study can be most revealing. The early modern period was crucial in the history of the Welsh language, and especially in terms of the growing impact of print. As a nexus of oral and literate contributions, recipe collections are well placed to chart this process, showing many transactions and translations including print, verbal and manuscript. They demonstrate that a gap left by a lack of Welsh-language medical publications was increasingly filled by English-language books which, in turn, affected the ways in which even illiterate people referred to diseases and their symptoms. Through the verbal sharing of recipes, even the rural poor might have access in the Welsh language to medical recipes which had originated in the publication of a licensed London practitioner. For Welsh history this has import enough, but it also foregrounds a much bigger issue: the spread of medical recipes transcended barriers of class, geography, literacy and also, crucially, language. Recipes did not necessarily need to be formally translated, but instead moved organically through networks, regions and peoples. The shifts between verbal and print cultures, and print and manuscript, foreground the dynamism of knowledge exchange, with

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early modern people assimilating, recording and recycling medical information. But this chapter has also highlighted the potential of language to augment our understanding of the processes of the early modern knowledge economy. When recipes shifted across linguistic boundaries, both their form and sense could change. Understanding these changes brings us closer to the lived experience of recipe culture, by unpacking the sometimes divergent (as well as corresponding) terminologies that were employed. This approach can add a new, perhaps interdisciplinary, dimension to the study of recipe collections. It would be revealing, for example, to understand how recipe collections fit with broader literary trends, inviting collaborative projects with scholars of linguistics, not only in English but beyond. Is the Welsh language unique in this respect, or can similar patterns, perhaps between neighbouring countries, be discerned? Recipe collections reveal much about the medical mores of their compilers, their social networks and of the medical world they inhabited. Assessing them within the context of individual regions, such as Wales, allows a more nuanced view by exploring the ways in which local variations were an important influence upon early modern medical thought, knowledge and culture.

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Appendix 9.1 Welsh recipe collections in public collections in Britain ‫ﱬﱫ‬

Bangor University Library MS Henblas A5, recipe collection of Amy Rowlands of Plas Gwyn, c.1706. MS Nannau 457, anonymous, recipe collection and herbal, c.1700. MS Bangor 37861, recipe collection of Elizabeth Salusbury, c.1711.

Bodleian Library, Oxford MS Eng. Misc.c.266–7, anonymous, medical recipe books, Cheshire, c.1753–56. MS Welsh e.7–9, medical recipes in English and Welsh, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

British Library Add. MS 14913, anonymous/various, Welsh-language medical recipe collection, c. sixteenth–seventeenth centuries. Add. MS 15045, anonymous, ‘Caer Rhun’, medical recipes attributed to the Physicians of Myddfai. Add. MS 15049, anonymous/various, Welsh-language medical recipe collection, c. seventeenth century. Sloane MS 398, medical recipe book of Hugo Glynne, MD, of Chester, c.1555.

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Cardiff Central Library Phillipps MS 25367, anonymous, medical recipe book, c.1600. MS 2.126, medical recipe book attributed to Sansom Jones of Bettws, c.1600. MS 2.281, medical recipe collection attributed to David Jones of Llangan. MS 2.622, anonymous, medical recipe book, c.1700. MS 2.632, anonymous, medical recipe collection c.1600. MS 2.655, anonymous, household, medical and culinary recipes, late eighteenth century. MS 2.973, Meddygyniaeth (medical recipes in Welsh), attributed to Thomas ap Ifan, c. seventeenth century. MS 2.998, anonymous, culinary and medical recipes, c.1725.

Carmarthenshire Record Office MS Castell Gorfod Add. 96, medical recipes attributed to Anne Skinner.

Flintshire Record Office MS Erddig D/E/1203, anonymous, culinary and medical recipe book. MS Erddig D/E/2547, medical recipe collection of John Meller.

Glamorgan County Record Office MS D/D/Xla, anonymous, seventeenth-century medical recipes. MS D/DF V/206, medical recipes attributed to the Seys family of Glamorgan, c. late seventeenth century.

National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth MS 182–D, recipe collection of ‘Mrs Lloyd’ of Penpedust, undated, but c. eighteenth century. MS 5309B, recipe collection attributed to Henry, fifth baron Herbert of Cherbury, undated, but c. seventeenth century.

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MS Peniarth 517D, recipe collection of Catherine Nanney, undated, but c.1730. Cwrtmawr (2) MS 491B, medical recipes of Thomas Lewis/Evan Thomas, c. eighteenth century.

Pembrokeshire Record Office MS HDX/88/1, anonymous, seventeenth-century recipe collection. MS HDX/175/1, anonymous, seventeenth-century recipe collection. MS HDX/214, anonymous, seventeenth-century recipe collection.

Wellcome Library, London MS 417, ‘Llyfr o fedheginiaeth a physygwriaeth’ (book of remedies and medicine) c.1600.

Notes 1 Parts of this chapter are adapted from Alun Withey, Physick and the Family: Health, Medicine and Care in Early Modern Wales (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). 2 Leong and Pennell, ‘Recipe collections’, pp. 133–4, 138–41. 3 Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf, ‘Introduction’, in Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf (eds), The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 21. 4 For a detailed critique of Welsh medical historiography, see Alun Withey, ‘Unhealthy neglect? The medicine and medical historiography of early modern Wales’, Social History of Medicine, 21:1 (2008), 163–74. 5 Rheinallt Llywd, ‘Printing and publishing in the seventeenth century’, in Philip Henry Jones and Eiluned Rees (eds), A Nation and its Books: A History of the Book in Wales (Aberystwyth: NLW, 1998), p. 93; J. A. Sharpe, Early Modern England: A Social History 1550–1760 (London: Arnold, 2006), p. 278. 6 David Howell, The Rural Poor in Eighteenth-Century Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), p. 138. 7 The Welsh term for Wales. 8 Philip Jenkins, A History of Modern Wales, 1536–1990 (London: Longman, 1992), pp. 2, 59. 9 Howell, Rural Poor, p. 138. 10 See Appendix 9.1 for the full details of the recipe MSS cited hereafter. NLW MS 182–D; Glamorgan RO MS D/DF V/206.

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11 NLW MS Cwrtmawr (2) 254A, tithe book of Llangynyw, 1646–76. 12 NLW MS 4492D, anonymous, ‘Llwynwermod MS’, legal precedents & miscellany, Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire, n.d., c. seventeenth century. 13 This number does not include the various copies of the texts of the Meddygon Myddfai, or the writings of the Welsh medieval practitioner Bened Feddyg, none of which are domestic collections. 14 NLW MS Peniarth 517D; Bangor University Library MS Bangor 37861. 15 NLW MS 5309B. 16 NLW MS 182–D. 17 Lisa Smith, ‘Women’s health care in England and France (1650–1775)’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Essex, 2001), p. 52. 18 NLW MS Peniarth 517D, p. 87; Wellcome MS 417, ‘Llyfr o fedhiginiaeth a physigwriaeth’, c.1600, p. 3. 19 CCL MS 2.973, p. 163. 20 Bodleian Library MS Welsh e.9 (32975), medical recipes in English and Welsh, Llandeilo, c. seventeenth century. 21 CCL MS 2.622; see also BL MS 15021, miscellaneous Welsh-language notes & remedies, c.1700, signature of John Jones; BL Add. MS 15049; NLW MS 1023B, ‘Llyfr Cynghorion’, sermons and recipes of Ellis Owen, c.1712. 22 See the manicule used in CCL MS 2.622, fols 20, 22. 23 For more on Welsh traditions of manuscript copying see Alun Withey, ‘Health, medicine and the family in Wales, c.1600–c.1750’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Swansea University, 2009), pp. 69–71. 24 See Sir William Llewelyn Davies, ‘Jones, John (c.1578-83–1658)’, in Welsh Biography Online, available at http://wbo.llgc.org.uk/en/s–JONE-JOH1578.html (accessed 1 July 2011). 25 See, for examples, BL MS 10521; NLW MS 1023B; CCL MS 2.973; Flintshire RO MS Erdigg D/E/1203; NLW MS 5309B. 26 For a notable exception see Lisa Smith, ‘The relative duties of a man: domestic medicine in England and France, c.1670–1740’, Journal of Family History, 31:3 (2006), 237–56. 27 Leong and Pennell, ‘Recipe collections’, p. 134. 28 Ibid., pp. 133–4. 29 Ibid., pp. 138–41. 30 See Ida B. Jones, ‘Hafod 16: A Mediaeval Welsh Medical Treatise’, Études Celtiques, 8 (1958–59), 346–93; Mary Vaughan, ‘An old receipt book’, Journal of the Merioneth Historical and Record Society, 4 (1964), 318–23; E. Owen Morfydd, ‘The medical books of medieval Wales and the Physicians of Myddfai’, Carmarthenshire Antiquary, 31 (1995), 34–45. 31 West Glamorgan Archives MS D/DZ/123/1, notebook of John Morgan of Palleg, c.1728–68, pp. 8, 9, 10, 18, 21, 32, 38. 32 Gwent RO MS D:43:4216, commonplace book of John Gwin of Llangwm,

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34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42

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45 46 47

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49 50

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c.1630–70; See also Alun Withey, ‘Medicine and mortality in early modern Monmouthshire: the commonplace book of John Gwin of Llangwm’, Welsh History Review, 23:1 (2006), 48–73. Flintshire RO MS D/E/1147, letter from Valitina Malyn to unidentified recipient, 13 April 1697. Bangor University Library MS Henblas A5, p. 176; West Glamorgan Archives MS D/DZ/123/1, p. 21. Flintshire RO MS D/GW/2115, letter to Sir Peter Mytton from ‘S. Glynne’ [n.d. other than year], 1628. Bangor University Library MS Henblas A5, pp. 1, 15, 17, 46, 111. Withey, ‘Medicine and mortality’, p. 66; Flintshire RO MS D/HE/432, diary of Thomas Griffiths of Mold, 1726, pp. 72, 110. Geraint H. Jenkins, Literature, Religion and Society in Wales, 1660–1730 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1978), p. 35. William Bevan, Llyfr Meddiginiaeth, ir anafys ar chlwfus (Chester: printed by Roger Adams, 1733). Jenkins, Literature, Religion and Society, p. 38; Richard Suggett, ‘Pedlars and mercers as distributors of print in early modern Wales’, in Peter Isaac and Barry McKay (eds), The Mighty Engine: The Printing Press and its Impact (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 2000), pp. 28–9. Ibid., p. 30. See, for example, Owen Morris, The ‘CHYMICK BOOKES’ of Sir Owen Wynne of Gwydir: An Annotated Catalogue (Cambridge: LP Publications, 1997), p. 3. Haverfordwest RO MS HDX/382/1, a copy of George Hartman, The Family Physitian: A Collection of Choice Approved and Experienced Remedies (London: printed for Richard Wellington, 1696) with signature of Pryce Hughes, 1707. NLW MS 454A, copy of Nicholas Culpeper, The English Physician Enlarged (edn not known), owned and annotated by William Bona of Llanpumsaint, c.1730. Gwent RO MS D43:4216, John Gwin commonplace book, p. 123. NLW MS B/1690/49 Henry Williams, probate inventory of Henry Williams of Clynnog, 1690. CCL MS 2.622, p. 20; See A. T., Practitioner in Physick: A Rich Storehouse and Treasury for the Diseased (London: printed for Thomas Purfoot & Ralph Blower, 1596), pp. 102, 104. Flintshire RO MS Erdigg D/E/1203, pp. 29, 35; [W. M.], The Queen’s Closet Opened: Incomparable Secrets in Physick, Chyrurgery, Preserving and Candying, &c (London: printed for Nath: Brooke, 1659), pp. 11, 40. NLW MS Peniarth 517D, p. 97; CCL MS 2.655, anonymous medical recipe collection, dated 1781, p. 15. [W. M.], Queen’s Closet Opened, p. 1; Royal Society, Boyle Papers 25, manu-

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51

52 53

54 55

56

57 58 59 60

61 62

Cultures of circulation and transmission script work diary Vol. VIII, 1651/2, p. 345: available at www.bbk.ac.uk/ boyle/workdiaries (accessed 15 June 2011). BL Add. MS 14900, ‘Lyfr Byr Llangadwaladr’, miscellaneous sermons and remedies, eighteenth century, p. 85; Thomas Moulton, The Mirror or Glasse of Health, Necessary and Needefull for Every Person to Looke In (London: Hugh Jackson, 1580), p. liii. West Glamorgan Archives MS D/DZ/123/1, John Morgan notebook, pp. 66–71. Haverfordwest RO MS HDX/382/1, Hartman, Choice Approved and Experienced Remedies; cf. Haverfordwest RO MS HDX 88/1, anonymous recipe collection, 1698. NLW MS 788B, ‘Barddoniaeth Humphrey Owen’, n.d. See Johannes Wecker, Eighteen Books of the Secrets of Art and Nature Being the Sum and Substance of Naturall Philosophy (London: printed for Simon Millar, 1660), p. 49. Bangor University Library MS Nannau 457; John Jones, THE MYSTERIES OF OPIUM Reveald, BY Dr. JOHN JONES, Chancellor of Landaff, a Member of the College of Physicians in LONDON: And formerly Fellow of Jesus-College in OXFORD (London: printed for Richard Smith, 1700), pp. 175–85. Gwent RO MS D43:4216, John Gwin commonplace book, p. 43. Jones, ‘Hafod 16’, pp. 367–8. Richard Suggett, A History of Magic and Witchcraft in Wales (Stroud: History Press, 2008), p. 105. T. H. Parry-Williams, The English Element in Welsh: A Study of English LoanWords in Welsh (London: Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1923), pp. 5, 129. See, for example, CCL MS 2.973, pp. 192, 201. NLW MS 1023B, ‘Llyfr Cynghorion’.

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‘Lett her refrain from all hott spices’: medicinal recipes and advice in the treatment of the King’s Evil in seventeenth-century south-west England ANNE STOBART

‫ﱬﱫ‬ Scholars interested in the social history of medicine have used family collections of medicinal recipes to provide a window onto the self-help aspects of healthcare and domestic medicine.1 The nature of recording and changing recipes suggests active engagement with them, and Mary Fissell has argued that this can provide evidence of how people both thought about healthcare and practised it.2 Yet, as Michelle DiMeo and Sara Pennell point out in their Introduction to this collection, there is a problematic gap between recipe texts and actual practice. The example in this chapter title gives advice to ‘let her refrain from all hott spices’, a somewhat unexpected dietary suggestion (as we shall see) accompanying a recipe for the King’s Evil.3 Since this advice may not have been incorporated into a recipe book, we should ask to what extent manuscript recipe books, or compilations of recipes, provide us with a complete picture of healthcare knowledge and practice in the early modern household. In this chapter I explore a selection of medicinal advice and recipes gathered initially by the Boscawen family of Cornwall in the seventeenth century, to argue that the advice and recipes gathered together reveal a complex, and sometimes surprising, story of how individuals endeavoured to determine treatment approaches. These

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archival sources, now within the Fortescue family papers on deposit at the Devon Record Office, comprise letters, notebooks and loose paper scraps, and include over fifty recipes for the treatment of the King’s Evil. This advice was largely collected by Margaret Boscawen (d. 1688), wife of Hugh Boscawen (d. 1701), as she sought to help her daughter Bridget (1666–1708), who suffered from the condition from a young age.4 The collection reveals how Margaret, and in turn her daughter, alongside advisers and well-wishers, sought to influence the nature of Bridget’s treatment. Reading these recipes in context reveals that there were varied understandings of how the King’s Evil should be approached and managed, exposing the role of the sufferer and others in determining the therapeutic programme. The advice and recipes, alongside letters, illustrate ‘therapeutic determination’, a phrase which I have developed elsewhere in considering seventeenth-century domestic medicine, and intended to describe the ability of individuals to influence the nature of healthcare for themselves or others.5 The majority of these recipes for the King’s Evil were not tidily compiled into a recipe book, but have instead been preserved as paper scraps and letters. Such a rare archive might exemplify a stage in Elaine Leong’s rigorously detailed description of how a recipe book was compiled: that of the transformation from a pile of scraps or a ‘wastebook’ into a neat presentation copy, often organised and indexed.6 That recipes were subject to evaluation before inclusion in a compilation has been discussed by Elaine Leong and Sara Pennell.7 However, the loose scraps here also include dietary advice and evidence of medical conflicts that are not usually found in a recipe book. In this volume Michelle DiMeo shows how the reading of a recipe book cannot straightforwardly reveal social networks. Here I consider how these recipes contrast varied medical understandings and, in some cases, evidence medical conflicts. I consider possible reasons for the Boscawen and Fortescue families’ lack of inclusion of the King’s Evil advice and recipes in their recipe books; and argue that caution is needed in basing discussion of self-help medical activities solely on manuscript recipe books.

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The King’s Evil: definitions, diagnoses and treatment options The King’s Evil was widely understood to be a chronic condition involving swellings and sores on the neck. In the sixteenth century, Thomas Elyot described ‘swellinges in the necke ful of matter, called the kinges evyll’ in his Castel of Helthe.8 During the seventeenth century, the terms ‘King’s Evil’ and ‘scrofula’ appear to have been synonymous. For example, A Physical Dictionary (London, 1657) defined ‘Scrophula, the Kings-evil so called because it comes in the Scrophulous parts of the neck and throat’.9 Since the condition was somewhat variable, alternating between painless swellings and discharging sores with periods of remission, this may have led to many claims of ‘cures’. There is no ready comparison with today’s medical understanding, although scrofula is associated with tubercular disease of the neck glands, most likely due to Mycobacterium bovis ingested with milk, causing the appearance of a chronic, painless, firm mass in the neck which can become ulcerated.10 The King’s Evil was also a politically significant ailment as it had long been regarded as requiring ritual cure by the touch of a king. Marc Bloch has explained how the healing rite, a hallmark of royalty, was used to bolster the position of monarchs as well as claimants to their thrones.11 More recently Mary Fissell has described how the Royal Touch became a ‘target of abuse’ because of its links with Catholic claims to the monarchy, and that it was further undermined by eighteenth-century disparagement of popular medicine.12 Andrew Wear notes the context of early modern ideas of disease as being caused by putrefaction or corruption in the body. He points out the symptomatic nature of diagnosis in the early modern period for many diseases, including the King’s Evil, which allowed both lay and learned people to be involved in the diagnosis and discussion of illness.13 In the seventeenth century there were various treatment approaches for the King’s Evil drawing upon both learned and lay sources, with surgery another recourse apart from the use of the Royal Touch.14 In 1679, Richard Wiseman (?1620–76), royal surgeon, published Several Chirurgical Treatises, which included a treatise on the King’s Evil. This substantial book was dedicated to Charles II, and provided detailed advice to newer practitioners on

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dealing with tumours, wounds and other surgical problems.15 Some lay healers were recognised for treating the King’s Evil and were supported in their applications for medical licences.16 For example, William Sprague of Silverton in Devon was given a licence in 1703 to practise medicine and surgery, having ‘exercis’d his art with good successe especially upon the poorer sorte of people’ and ‘particularly upon the daughter of one Edward Singleton of Bradninch . . . whom he has cured of the Kings evill without fee or reward’.17

The Boscawen recipe collection for the King’s Evil In the seventeenth century the Boscawen family were based at Tregothnan in Cornwall. Hugh Boscawen was an active parliamentarian, ‘one of the leading magnates in Cornwall’ and, as a Member of Parliament, consistently outspoken against Catholics.18 His wife Margaret was active in estate management, particularly as Hugh was away frequently on political or business matters, and her involvement was noted in both the mining and marketing of tin.19 She was also reputed to be active in the healthcare of local people as well as her family; a letter from her sister in 1683 noted that Margaret was ‘much imployed about the sick’.20 Margaret had at least nine children before 1664, though none survived childhood, and her daughter Bridget, born in 1666, became the family heiress.21 Bridget married Hugh Fortescue (d. 1714) in October 1692, and together they had nine children, while living at Filleigh, North Devon.22 The manuscript papers considered here form part of a larger collection of 186 medicinal items in the Fortescue family papers, including loose recipes, letters and notebooks, apparently gathered from the 1650s onwards. Many medicinal recipes were collated by Margaret Boscawen in her ‘large boke’, comprising 48 pages of closewritten recipes in four columns, with the remaining pages blank. This compilation of recipes was known to Bridget Fortescue, as she wrote of her ‘mothers large boke’ on a loose recipe for rickets.23 At least four other smaller notebooks in rather dilapidated condition are extant and may have been compiled by Margaret or subsequently by Bridget. There are also 42 loose papers with recipes for the King’s Evil in the collection, comprising a total of 54 recipes. A further five recipes for the condition can be found in the smaller notebooks.24

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Several remedies are included in letters from medical practitioners, but otherwise suggestions appear to have come from family, friends and acquaintances; some items were included in letters addressed directly to Lady Margaret Boscawen and others were forwarded to her by family and acquaintances. The papers record 17 named sources, and these include family members (aunt, sister, cousin) and acquaintances (Lord, Lady, Mrs, Mr). The range of contributors included both men and women of varied status, as Alun Withey and Michelle DiMeo have observed in their studies in this collection. However, named sources or donors of the King’s Evil recipes were predominantly female (12 female, 4 male and one cousin of indeterminate gender). The Boscawen recipe archive presumably included so many remedies for the King’s Evil because Bridget, the Boscawens’ daughter, suffered from the condition from at least the age of 11. A number of medical practitioners were involved in advising her treatment, from when Bridget was young to much later in her life. Dr Simon Welman wrote to Margaret Boscawen in 1677, noting ‘as to our littel patients disliking her pills, I wonder not much at it, because she hath taken them so longe’.25 He asked, in a further letter, ‘Pray Lady bee pleased to give mee about a fortnight hence an account how the swelling is, whither it abates any thinge in bigness, or in hardness.’26 As an adult, Bridget continued to be troubled by the condition. She wrote to her husband Hugh in London in February 1707/8: Mr Jenkonson was so kind as to send when heard of my illnes and . . . is satisfied about the sore in my neck I got him this morning to sarch it and he asuars [assures] me its in very good order and the bone very safe but he thinkes it will hardly heall without being opened the holl being small . . . but he promised me this night to writ and sattesfey you about it.27

Jenkinson did write to Hugh, reporting that ‘upon opening the sore of her neck [I] do find it exactly as I writt you in my last, free from all suspicion of danger or hazard’.28 Bridget complained about the lack of success of various treatments; she had ‘been trying all my Life long and have gone to 10 or 12 seferel sortes of methodes by so many seferel pepels . . . besides treying many medsons [medicines] my selfe

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and so did my mother by me to have thost [thought] my selfe cuard [cured]’.29 As I will show here, Bridget also expressed some criticisms of her physicians, and was frustrated in her limited power to determine therapeutics in her own case. Bridget’s mother had also suffered with a breast condition over a long period and had consulted several physicians. Margaret received directions from various medical practitioners, including Robert Vilvain (1575?–1663) in 1654, who noted that ‘she hath bin long pained in her left brest’.30 But she may have become dissatisfied with doctors, as her sister wrote in a letter to Hugh Boscawen in 1686: ‘I also here [hear] shee is averse to Drs but if you see cause for it I hope you will provide in that matter.’31 Margaret recorded self-help suggestions for the breast complaint in her notebooks. She noted in one recipe in her ‘large boke’ that ‘Mrs Shearbrooke saith that is very good for the paine In my Breast to Take the Round Mint that growes in the Fealde a good handfull.’32 In the same book she recorded a suggestion from ‘Mr Touchin for a cansurous humour in the breast’.33 Both Margaret and Bridget may thus have purposefully sought other remedies and advice as alternatives to the advice of doctors, as they managed worrying and debilitating illnesses.

Recipes for the King’s Evil Amongst the loose papers are preparations for both internal consumption and external application, in roughly equal numbers. The cycle of swelling and bursting of sores on the neck is evident in the suggestions made in recipes, requiring frequent dressings and applications. An unattributed recipe for ‘An Excelent medicine for the Kings Evill’, one of many given on paper scraps, assumed some knowledge of dressings for scalds, describing an infusion of foxglove in butter which was then used to ‘anoynt the place . . . as is usuall in a Scald’.34 The frequency with which such sores would need attention was apparent. Another recipe, on a paper endorsed as having been received from ‘Lady Hollis’, described how walnut leaves should be made into a thick ointment as ‘you must make plaisters to put both upon the running sores and dry swellings. You must apply new plaisters evening and morning.’35 Some of the advice sent for the King’s Evil was more detailed with

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regard to recipe usage. A lengthy letter from Eleanor White of London, dated 15 March (1675?), explained that she had prepared a plaster and an ointment to send alongside other suggestions for her ‘young cousin’.36 She described how the ointment should be applied: ‘lett some friend take both her hands, standing behind her and stroke up her throat both sides at once, a quarter of an hour together; lett them well strike it up from her throat or windepipe to her ears . . . sevrall tymes, night and morning’.37 Furthermore a plaster had to be applied for which detailed instructions were also given: then take a Linnen cloth, and dip it in a little of the oyntment; warme it, and pin it up under her throat, then take a peice of fine flannel, and warme it and put a top of the white Linnen cloth, thus does as often as you anoint it then the playster spread it on cloth or lockeram, neither too fine nor too course; and when you take of the clothes from her throat, clap on two peices of playster handsomely spread, larg enough to cover above and below the swellings; warme it when you lay it on and lett it lye on soe long as twill stick, and when the playster comes of, anoynt it againe with the same oyntm[en]t.38

A gargle was also suggested, as well as several herbs to be boiled in broth or water gruel and another drink to be made and taken with meals. Internal remedies for the King’s Evil given in advice to the family included both Galenic and chemical items, reflecting a mixture of classical preparations, as well as more recently introduced Paracelsian remedies based on distillation and purification of animal and plant matter and minerals. Amongst the many suggestions of herbal simples, one printed sheet offered an example of a commercial chemical preparation. This handbill for ‘Spirits of scurvygrass’, available to purchase from Charles Blagrave in London in the 1680s, claimed the preparation could cure many complaints, including the King’s Evil.39 Letters in the archive demonstrate that lay advisers were also familiar with chemical preparations, such as Paracelsian salts. A letter from Ann Nevile to Margaret, dated 1679, described how the Paracelsian purging remedy ‘Salt of Moles’ had previously been prepared by her mother:

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I have sent you here above written the purge my Mother gave many but this is the method she took her diett on first she tooke the lyme drink then this purge then a thing they call the salt of Moles that is made in this manner take your moles alive three or fower and give them a knock only to kill them from being too cruell to burn them alive . . . and burne them to a coale that they will beat to a powder and of this in fine powder or as much as will lye upon a shilling mix with some Syrup of clove gilliflowers as will make it like a thick conserve and soe give it every morning for a Month together.40

The English translation of Johann Hartmann’s Praxis Chymiatricæ (London, 1670) included the use of mole for the King’s Evil in a section dealing with ‘external affects’ such as scabs, scurvy, tumours and gangrene.41 The use of animal remedies, such as moles and earthworms, may have been favoured due to a sympathetic notion of making passages for the escape of corrupt humours. The family’s collection of advice for the King’s Evil also includes some external preparations using minerals, such as lapis calaminaris, rock alum and tutty; these were generally considered as astringent or drying remedies.42

Comparing herbal remedies in the manuscript recipe collection with printed advice Medicinal recipes in manuscript form have been related to those in print, both as a source exploited by publishers of medical recipes, and as copies from the print sources available.43 However, the recipes and dietary recommendations for the King’s Evil found in this collection do not readily match those in printed sources of the period. A large proportion of the manuscript recipes, 22 altogether, were based on simples or one main herb. The herb most commonly recommended as a simple was elder (mentioned at least 14 times) whilst aniseed, archangel, borage, fennel, figwort, fumitory, liquorice and white dead-nettle were all mentioned more than five times. Analysis of print sources reveals a very different range of recommended herbs. For example, remedies for the King’s Evil listed in the Pharmacopœia Londinensis of 1653 included five herbs (lesser celandine, eringo, stinking gladwin, bawm and figwort) and a resin called burgundy pitch. All of these were to be used in external appli-

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cations, such as poultices or ointments, according to the Pharmacopœia.44 All of the herbs in the Pharmacopœia were regarded as heating in quality, which was consistent with a humoral view of the complaint as an accumulation of cold and moist phlegm. Only one of the Pharmacopœia recommendations, figwort, appeared in the Boscawen recipes. In a sample of seven other printed sources available across the seventeenth century, a total of ten recipes for the King’s Evil were located.45 Of the 80 ingredients listed in these printed recipes, only 21 were found to match with the 105 different ingredients in the family recipes for the condition.46 However, while some of the most frequently recommended simples in the family recipes were not specifically advised for treatment of the King’s Evil in printed sources, they could be found in remedies advised for more general use with ulcers and sores, as in the advice from Lady Hollis to use an ointment made with walnut leaves. Culpeper recommended this simple as hot and dry in quality, and the distilled water of the young green leaves ‘performeth a singular cure on foul running ulcers and sores, to be bathed . . . every morning’.47 Although no specific recommendation was found in printed sources for the use of walnut leaves in the King’s Evil, this manuscript recipe was headed ‘An excellent and approved receit for the Kings Evill’.48 In this case, the nature of the walnut leaf being hot and dry, it was perhaps considered by Lady Hollis as appropriate for any discharging sore, including that of the King’s Evil. Similarly, the most frequently mentioned simple, elder, was a general herb for sores, being considered ‘opening and purging’ by Culpeper, who recommended a distilled water of the leaves or flowers which ‘taketh away sores and ulcers’ of the legs, and the juice of the green leaves for ‘hot inflammations of the eyes’.49 Some of the other family recipes had titles that referred to sores, such as ‘for the Kings evill and any swelling or running Greif ’.50 These findings suggest that the advice gathered by, and sent to the family perceived the King’s Evil to be much like any other condition involving swellings or sores, rather than requiring specific special treatment, such as the Royal Touch. No reference has been found in the family archive to the Royal Touch; it is possible that the Boscawen family, having strong Protestant leanings like many of their acquaintances, would have eschewed cures related to Catholic

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claims to the throne.51 Closer examination of the recipes indicates that the men and women collecting and circulating recipes actively adapted available sources, retitling and repurposing remedies for sores and swellings as cures specifically effective for the King’s Evil.

Dietary advice for the King’s Evil In his 1679 publication, Richard Wiseman, Charles II’s surgeon, included specific recommendations regarding dietary practices for sufferers of the King’s Evil. The dietary alterations to be made would depend on the constitutional nature of the individual, but in most cases, ‘if the Body be cold and moist . . . the ready road is by fasting from Meat and Drink . . . or at least great Moderation’ and ‘avoiding all Meats which yield a gross Nourishment, as Water-foul, Fish and Herbage’. Hence the focus was on moderately heating and drying foods such as mutton, kid, rabbit, chicken and ‘Bread . . . Wheat and well-baked’, with ale or beer to drink; water was ‘utterly forbidden’. Wiseman noted that in the less likely case of a ‘hot and dry Constitution the Case is more difficult’.52 In general, however, dietary recommendations appear to have been relatively infrequent in both manuscript and printed recipe compilations in the seventeenth century. In a survey of selected manuscript and print recipe sources from the late sixteenth century to the late seventeenth century, dietary advice for any complaint was included in less than 2 per cent of medicinally related entries, and several publications contained no recognisable dietary advice at all.53 Dietary advice was given in only one of the medicinal recipes specific to the King’s Evil in the printed sources considered above.54 However, the Fortescue family archive contains much more dietary advice for the King’s Evil, amounting to almost 12 per cent of recipes, providing a varied picture of how early moderns understood the relationship between diet and illness.55 Eleanor White’s letter emphasised that the broth and drink she advised would ‘disturb neither stomack, belly, nor the Gutts’, adding ‘lett her eat her constant dyett as the disease or to drink upon occasion wyne with’ but ‘lett her refraine from all hott spices’.56 In a letter accompanying a purge recipe, Anne Nevile advised: ‘eate no milke nor cheese nor swines flesh but Eat light meats and no fish’.57 A recipe from Mrs

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Groses required herbs to be taken every morning ‘fasting’ whilst ‘they of this desease must keepe good diet’.58 Other advice from an unidentified source, given with a diet drink recipe, suggested ‘for your constant diet while you take it, eat nothing mornings and evenings but dry bisket and raisins of the Sun and at Dinner nothing but mutton roasted Dry’.59 A loose recipe for a herb drink detailed how the remaining pressed herbs should be applied to the sores, whilst the patient’s diet should involve ‘abstayning from all sort of salt flesh and salt things and other sort of stronger meat’.60 Overall a variety of approaches to diet were conveyed. Some said no change was needed; others suggested avoidance of hot foods, cold and moist foods, dry foods or salty foods; and still others offered the vague advice to select ‘good’ foods. There thus appeared to be less agreement on the nature of an appropriate diet than on the qualities of herbs, which were predominantly healing in nature. Ken Albala has written of how dietary measures greatly depended on an individual’s constitution.61 Yet, in this case, therapeutic understanding of diet was not entirely straightforward, despite all of the remedies being framed for the same patient. The variation in dietary advice might have reflected changing views of the nature of illness and role of diet in the later seventeenth century.62 Both lay and professional medical advisers mentioned dietary management in relation to the King’s Evil, although it is not known to what extent lay advisers may have sourced their dietary advice from physicians. Advice to avoid ‘hot spices’ is particularly inconsistent in a condition largely viewed as cold and moist. However, this advice may have had another purpose. The Fortescue family papers include some undated loose notes endorsed as taken by Sir Francis Godolphin from his apothecary in London.63 This dietary advice concerned appropriate foods, instructing that there should be ‘noe hote spices . . . for they may by too much hete hinder the worck of the phiseck’.64 Thus the instruction to ‘refrain from hot spices’ may have been based on an understanding that when physic was given, foods should not be taken which could interfere by their excessive heat. Here diet may have been considered subordinate to physic, rather than thought of as a complement to assuage the condition. It is questionable whether these dietary suggestions would have been incorporated if a manuscript recipe book had been produced,

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as extant examples of the genre suggest this was uncommon. This is an important consideration for historians of medicine, since a focus on the medicinal advice in recipe books may underplay the extent that dietary suggestions were included in advice; dietary recommendations may have been more frequently included in letters or noted on paper scraps but then excluded when compiling a recipe book. The inclusion of dietary suggestions in advice prior to recipe-book compilation suggests an understanding that diet was considered relevant, at least for the King’s Evil. The reason for exclusion may be related to the conventional format of the medicinal recipe, and it is not necessarily the case that the effects of diet were considered inferior to the remedies. There may also have been awareness on the part of lay recipe-compilers that dietary advice for health, being linked to regimen, formed part of the province of professional medical advisers. As DiMeo also notes in this collection, where social networks are found to differ in letters and recipes, we see a more complete picture of the processes of recipe-book compilation; and further questions are raised by considering the recipes in their original context.

Physicians’ advice and Bridget’s concerns about purging The titles of many of the Fortescue recipes, including diet drinks and purges, advocate the removal, usually via purging, of offending ‘evil’ and ‘moist’ humours. Purging was key within the recommendations of both physicians and lay advisers. Thus in 1678 Margaret Boscawen received instructions for an internal remedy for Bridget from Dr Simon Welman, who advised on ‘keeping close to her diett drinke and to the purging mixture’.65 In another letter, Welman explained how to make an ale drink that would give the patient ‘som stooles every day’ and be ‘excellent to quallify the blood’.66 External treatments could also be used to draw out humours, such as ‘Black Soape as much as a pigeons Egg, binde it by the nape of the neck. Renew it every Morning. This will draw abundance of Rheume.’67 One loose paper headed ‘The Doctors orders for me’ suggested removal of humours once sores were discharging, instructing ‘Forbear the purging pill till after the breaking of the humor.’68 The aim of purging was expressed by women advisers too; Elizabeth

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Penhallow noted that a herb to be boiled in stale beer ‘doth moderatly purge’, while the broth and drink given by Eleanor White ‘purgeth the disease in the water or the urine, cleanseth and cleareth the bloud, and causeth much urine’.69 Yet Bridget expressed concerns about the manner of purging recommended by her physicians in later life. Whilst in favour of the need to ensure removal of the offending humours from the body, she was critical of some methods, noting that ‘sometimes the cuar [cure] of it is more dangrus then the dises [disease]’.70 Her view was that if the disease ‘dos not get tent agane it turns to some other more desprat dises [desperate disease] or falls on the inward parts and so dos more mischefe’.71 She felt that purging had caused her problems in the past: ‘I veryly beleve that my takening so much purgen fiseke [purging physic] at Eberton did me much wrong and lead [to] the fonasion [foundation] of what has folowed sines.’72 There were others in the seventeenth century who questioned the overuse of purges. In recommendations for dealing with plague in a 1652 publication attributed to the renowned physician Alexander Read (c.1570–1641), readers were advised not to tamper too soon ‘with the Botches and Blains, before they be well come forth, and nature well cleared and relieved’, as they could ‘drive back and scatter the Venom into the inward parts . . . and carrieth away the Patient’.73 Bridget thought purging could be very dangerous, and wrote to her husband, ‘I have so many times been brast [brought] even to dethes dore by purgen.’74 However, she was also worried about appearing ‘backward’ if she was unwilling to take advice and treatment: I shall be very Loth to trey any new medson espessly purgen with out very good profe of its being effectuall . . . after all this is sead I wold not have you think me backward for I am ver[y] willing to advies and do my outmost for a cuar if god think fit to direk me to a likely one and for your comfort I wold not have you fright your selfe for I have been many times worse than now.75

Her own favourite treatment involved ‘snakeroot’, which provided great relief. As she explained, she was ‘most wonderfuly recovered sines I had the shefer [shiver] and toke the swet on snackroote that evening I can truly say I was never so free of pean [pain] sines I was taken as I am now am abel to walke about the rome’.76

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Bridget was well aware of the reluctant acceptance of her own methods by her physicians. She noted that Doctor Barber was ‘for the Barke but I told him that must be the last thing and that I had cured many Agues by snakerote my selfe’.77 Later Bridget jubilantly wrote to Hugh, ‘pray give my servis to Doctor How and tell him that our favowritte did the worke with out the helpe of the nasty Barke’, and added for emphasis that ‘thare are many pepel have Agues hear about and I cuur [cure] many as infalibel as the Barke’.78 Bridget had considerable belief in her own skills and knowledge, possibly based on her own experience with treating ague and other complaints, as well as using her mother’s remedies. Her family wealth and status strengthened her position in contradicting the medical practitioners. Indeed, it seems that Bridget had such a very strong sense of what was right for her case that she incorporated some of her frustrations into a recipe, preserved on loose paper in the family archive (Figure 10.1).

10.1 Loose recipe for a glister for the King’s Evil, taken from the Fortescue Papers, Castle Hill, Devon Record Office. Reproduced with kind permission of the Countess of Arran

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In an undated recipe for a ‘glister’, she set out her critical view of the medical advice given to her by doctors.79 The recipe started briefly with the usual list of ingredients, but then changed dramatically in tone: The glister: Take of mallowes, pellitory of the wall, violet and mercury leaves of each one handfull . . . this Glister as it is heare set downe the things that I appoint my selfe but onely the manner and time and measures for my owne good . . . tho the Docters heare thinke it best for mee to beleeve them against my owne sence and fealeing [feeling] there sight and smell there reason for they [k]now that I complaine of onely of there preprosporous [preposterous] order of things and concluding of my disses [disease] and cures according to there own concaites [conceits] and prescriptions unto which I shuld never yeald[.]80

Bridget railed against ‘conceits’, and her ‘sense and feeling’ contrasted with the ‘reason’ of the medical practitioners. She continued: they granted the thing In generall and to denye the thing In every perticular that I have any powre to command: for that which I have a sence and fealeing and understanding doth mee Good or hurt . . . and yet I must not say so nor desire to have it don but Answeard onely my delayings and put offs with childish foolish Answears nay which is worse Answears which carry in them nothing but falsehoods which was so very displeasing to God.81

We can see, in this unusual recipe, how Bridget struggled to reconcile the ways in which she believed her complaint should be dealt with, based on her bodily experience of treatments over many years, and her particular understanding of the humoral basis of her condition. Bridget and the medical practitioners were in direct conflict, and she was very aware of her lack of ‘power to command’ her treatment, reducing her ability to exercise therapeutic determination in her own case. The recipe encapsulating this conflict survives on a scrap of paper and, as such, would have been an unlikely element to be placed in a medicinal recipe compilation. A medicinal recipe compilation often functioned as a long-term repository of information to be passed on within the family, and might be viewed by other relatives and acquaintances, making it a

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quasi-public text. This recipe and its complaints did not fit the usual instructional format; this was not a recipe for wider dissemination, but rather one for registering Bridget’s disagreements with her medical practitioners.

Conclusion This consideration of a collection of scraps of advice for the King’s Evil has provided an opportunity not only to review early modern approaches to the condition, but also the methods of compiling a domestic medical recipe collection. Contributors eagerly passed on advice, sometimes actively adapting it from a broader pool of remedies and treatments, reminding us of the ‘elusiveness’ of authorship and evidencing their ‘reading, writing minds’ in action.82 Since most of the recipes for the King’s Evil remain as loose items in the Fortescue family papers, and do not appear in any of the family recipe compilations, we have to speculate as to why this might be. It is possible that the loose recipes were intended to form a compilation, and we cannot discount the possibility that a compilation was made but has not survived. That the King’s Evil recipes were not collated into a more organised format may also have been a practical issue of chronology, given Margaret’s death in 1688; however, much of the King’s Evil advice was received in the 1670s when many other recipes were added to her ‘large boke’, and there remained space in this volume for more to be added.83 Margaret may have wished to include only tried and tested remedies in her compiled books, which might explain the exclusion of these remedies, yet she had already compiled hundreds of medicinal recipes for other complaints in her ‘large boke’ without distinguishing between ones that she may or may not have used. We also have to take into account the negative connotations of the King’s Evil, or scrofula. A later writer, John Morley, noted in 1770, ‘I have observed the better Sort are very averse from being told their Disorders are Scrophulous, but are contented to have them called Scorbutick, and their Apothecaries humour them.’84 Such social connotations, as well as the Catholic overtones carried by the royal cure, may have discouraged long-term recording of the recipes.

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The dietary advice and evidence of medical conflicts found in these King’s Evil recipes do not readily fit the format and tenor traditionally found in recipe compilations. Moreover, the dissonant tone of the recipe for the ‘glister’ dramatically reveals the struggle Bridget pursued for therapeutic determination, and her own sense of her lack of ‘power to command’. This controversial and impassioned recipe would have sat uncomfortably in a medicinal recipe compilation where most individual recipes followed a relatively standard technical format for efficacy statements.85 Bridget fought against the too easy acceptance of probatum est from her medical advisers, a struggle to which these recipes and their accompanying archive give rare voice.

Notes 1 Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Cambridge History of Europe: Early Modern Europe, 1450–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 273; Leong, ‘Making medicines’. 2 Mary E. Fissell, ‘Making meaning from the margins: the new cultural history of medicine,’ in F. Huisman and J. Warner (eds), Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meaning (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), pp. 364–89. 3 DRO Fortescue 1262M/FC/7, Eleanor White to Harry Greegor, 15 March [1675?]. 4 The Boscawen family papers were incorporated with the Fortescue family papers on deposit in the DRO, Fortescue of Castle Hill (hereafter Fortescue), 1262M/FC/7, 40 recipes for healing king’s evil, Bridget Fortescue, bundle of bills for medicaments, 1655–1702. I am grateful to Sara Pennell for drawing my attention to this archive; and to the current Countess of Arran for granting permission to cite from them in this chapter. 5 Anne Stobart, ‘The making of domestic medicine: gender, self-help and therapeutic determination in household healthcare in south-west England in the late seventeenth century’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Middlesex University, 2008), p. 1. 6 Leong, ‘Medical recipe collections’, pp. 149–63. 7 Leong and Pennell, ‘Recipe collections’, pp. 138–9. 8 Thomas Elyot, The Castel of Helth (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1539), fol. 86r. 9 A Physical Dictionary, or, an Interpretation of Such Crabbed Words and Terms of Arts, as Are Deriv’d from the Greek or Latin, and Used in Physick, Anatomy, Chirurgery, and Chymistry with a Definition of Most Diseases Incident to the

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Body of Man (London: printed by G. D. for John Garfield, 1657). 10 R. Berkow and A. J. Fletcher (eds), The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy (Rahway, NJ: Merck Research Laboratories, 1992), pp. 134–7. 11 Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 20–3; Frank Barlow, ‘The King’s Evil’, English Historical Review, 95:374 (1980), 3–27; Anna Keay, Magnificent Monarch: Charles II and the Ceremonies of Power (London: Continuum, 2008). 12 Mary E. Fissell, Patients, Power and the Poor in Eighteenth Century Bristol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 178–80. 13 Wear, Knowledge and Practice, pp. 90, 108. 14 Roger French, ‘Surgery and scrophula’, in Christopher Lawrence (ed.), Medical Theory, Surgical Practice: Studies in the History of Surgery (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 85–100. 15 Richard Wiseman, Severall Chirurgicall Treatises (London: E. Flesher & J. Macock for R. Royston & B. Tonk, 1676), pp. 245–312. 16 Emanuel Green, ‘On the cure by touch: with notes on some cases in Somerset’, Proceedings of the Bath Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club, 5:2 (1883), 82–4. 17 Melanie Barber, Directory of Medical Licences Issued by the Archbishop of Canterbury 1536–1775 in Lambeth Palace Library: Part 1: Vicar General Series Licences, 1576–1775 (London: Lambeth Palace Library, 1997), Licence no. 774. 18 J. T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry Besieged, 1650–1700 (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 45; Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660– 1685 (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 150–2. 19 J. T. Cliffe, The World of the Country House in Seventeenth-Century England (London/New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 72. 20 DRO Fortescue 1262M/ FC/1, 54 Boscawen family letters, 1664–1701, ‘Sister Clinton’ to Lady Margaret Boscawen (hereafter MB), 28 April 1683. This was either her sister-in-law, Lady Anne Clinton (d. 1707), or her sister, Lady Arabella Clinton (dates unknown). 21 J. L. Vivian, The Visitations of Cornwall, Comprising the Heralds’ Visitations of 1530, 1573, & 1620 with Additions (Exeter: Pollard, 1887), pp. 46–7. 22 J. L. Vivian, The Visitations of the County of Devon Comprising the Heralds’ Visitations of 1531, 1564 and 1620 (Exeter: Henry S. Eland, 1895), p. 355. 23 DRO Fortescue 1262M/FC/8, 200 recipes (mainly for ague, plague, rickets, gout and worms), Boscawen papers 1668–87, ‘Diet Drinke for the children that hath the ricketts this reset I find [in] my mothers Large boke’. The recipe in the ‘Large boke’ is at DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/6, three recipe books of cures for various illnesses, c.1650, [Large book], fol. 21r. 24 Margaret’s 14-page notebook of recipes contains four remedies relating to the King’s Evil based on alder, aloes, fluellen and white archangel: DRO,

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28

29 30

31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39

40 41

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Fortescue 1262M/FC/6, [14-page notebook], fols 3v, 4r, 14r. There is also a single entry in another, 12-page notebook listing the ‘feet of a great living toad’ for the King’s Evil, although the form of preparation or mechanism for use is not given: DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/7 [12-page notebook], fol. 7v. For the use of toad by physicians see W. A. Jackson, ‘The role of toads and frogs in medicine’, Pharmaceutical Historian, 36:2 (2006), 31–6. DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/7, Simon Welman to MB, 9 October 1677. DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/7, Simon Welman to MB, 12 April 1678. DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/9, Letters from Bridget Fortescue (hereafter BF) to her husband in London, and one from him to her, 1701, 1705–08, BF to Hugh Fortescue, 24 Feb. 1707/8. DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/10, two letters to Hugh Fortescue from T. Jenkinson about his wife’s health, 1707–08, T. Jenkinson to Hugh Fortescue, 7 March 1707/8. DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/9, BF to Hugh Fortescue, 6 February 1707/8. DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/7, Thomas Waterhouse to MB, n.d.; Fortescue 1262M/FC/8, ‘Directions for the Honorable Lady Margaret Buscoin [sic]’, 4 December 1654. DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/1, Lady Clinton to Hugh Boscawen, 10 January 1686. DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/6, [Large book], fol. 21r. Ibid., fol. 2v. DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/7, ‘An excelent medicine for the kings evill’. DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/7, ‘This receite from my Lady Hollis for the kings evill’. This recipe may have been obtained through family connections since Lady Anne Clinton, who married Margaret’s brother Edward (d. before 1657), was the daughter of John Holles, second earl of Clare (1595–1666). Although she writes of her ‘young cousin’, I have not been able to clearly establish the relationship of Eleanor White to the family. DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/7, Eleanor White to Harry Greegor, 15 March [1675?]. Ibid. DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/8, advertisement by Charles Blagrave, Directions for the Golden Purging Spirit of Scurvey-Grass, Etc ([London: n.p., 1680?]). DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/7, Anne Nevile to MB, 24 May 1679. If not ulcerated, the appropriate treatment for the ‘Evils Latent’ was for ‘coles of a Mole [to] be daily exhibited in wine or other appropriate decoction’. Once ulcerated, the cure further involved the ‘ashes of Salamande’ being sprinkled on the affected area, as well as taking the ‘coles of a mole’ internally: [Johann Hartmann], Praxis Chymiatricæ: Or the Practise of Chymistry Written in Latine by John Hartman, M.D. (London:

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printed for John Starkey & Thomas Passinger, 1670), pp. 175–6. 42 John Quincy, Pharmacopœia Officinalis et Extemporanea, Or, a Complete English Dispensatory, in Four Parts, 8th edn (London: J. Osborn & T. Longman, 1730), pp. 111, 114. 43 Stine, ‘Opening closets’; Wear, Knowledge and Practice, pp. 51–2. 44 Nich[olas] Culpeper, Pharmacopœia Londinensis: Or the London Dispensatory. Further Adorned by the Studies and Collections of the Fellowes, Now Living of the Said Colledg (London: printed for Peter Cole, 1653), pp. 5, 6, 10, 24, 49. 45 The sample included G[ervase] M[arkham], The English Hovse-VVife (London: printed by Nicholas Okes for John Harison, 1631); Natura Exenterata, or Nature Unbowelled by the Most Exquisite Anatomizers of Her (London: printed for H. Twiford, G. Bedell & N. Ekins, 1655); Lancelot Coelson, The Poor-Mans Physician and Chyrurgion, Containing Above Three hundred rare and Choice Receipts, for the Cure of all Distempers both Inward and Outward (London: printed by A. M. for S. Miller, 1656): [W. M.], The Queens Closet Opened (London: Noth: Brooke, 1659); The Accomplish’d Ladies Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery (London: printed for Benjamin Harris, 1685), R[obert] Boyle, Medicinal Experiments, or, a Collection of Choice Remedies, for the Most Part Simple, and Easily Prepared (London: printed for Sam. Smith, 1692), Dr. Lowers, and Several Other Eminent Physicians, Receipts Containing the Best and Safest Method for Curing Most Diseases in Humane Bodies (London: printed for John Nutt, 1700). 46 The 21 constituents in common were agrimony, aniseed, barley, beer, betony, butter, earthworm, elder, fennel, germander, hart’s-tongue, honey, liquorice, milk, mugwort, plantain, rosemary, toad, urine, violet and wine. 47 Nich[olas] Culpeper, The English Physitian Or, an Astrologo-Physical Discourse of the Vulgar Herbs of This Nation (London: Peter Cole, 1652), p. 235. 48 DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/7, ‘This receite from my Lady Hollis for the kings evill’. 49 Culpeper, English Physitian, p. 47. 50 DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/7, ‘Diet drink for the kings evill and any swelling or running greif ’. 51 Fissell, Patients, Power and the Poor, p. 179. 52 Wiseman, Severall Chirurgicall Treatises, p. 400. 53 This analysis is based on a database of 6513 medicinal recipes in manuscript and printed recipe collections with dates falling between 1587 and 1752: Stobart, ‘Making of domestic medicine’, pp. 35–6, 154. 54 Robert Boyle recommended limewater as an ordinary drink for those with the King’s Evil: Medicinal Experiments, p. 82. 55 This is based on seven instances of dietary advice, two appearing with

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letters, amongst a total of 59 recipes for the King’s Evil. 56 DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/7, Eleanor White to Harry Greegor, 15 March [1675?]. 57 DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/7, Anne Nevile to MB, 24 May 1679. 58 DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/7, item endorsed ‘Mrs J Groses she is now Mrs Manly recipe for the kings evil’. 59 DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/7, ‘Diet drink for the kings evill and and any swelling or running greif ’. 60 DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/7, ‘A recipe to cure the kings evill’. 61 Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2002), p. 86. 62 Ibid., p. 245; Wear, Knowledge and Practice, pp. 353–7. 63 These notes are undated and it is difficult to ascertain exactly which Francis Godolphin was the writer. The Boscawens had a family connection with the Godolphins as Jael Godolphin married Hugh Boscawen’s brother, Edward, in 1665. Her father was Sir Francis Godolphin (1605–67), but she had both a brother (d. 1675) and nephew called Francis: see G. E. Cokayne with Vicary Gibbs, H. A. Doubleday et al. (eds), The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant, Extinct or Dormant (first pub. 1910–59: this edn 6 vols, Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 2000), V, p. 246. 64 DRO, Fortescue 1262M/ FC/8, notes taken by Sir Francis Godolphin from his apothecary in London. 65 DRO, Fortescue 1262M/ FC/7, Simon Welman to MB, 12 April 1678. 66 DRO, Fortescue 1262M/ FC/7, Simon Welman to MB, 9 October 1677. 67 DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/7, Charles Morton to Joseph Allen, 17 February 1679. 68 DRO, Fortescue 1262M/ FC7, Item endorsed ‘The Doc[to]rs orders for me’. 69 DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/7, Elizabeth Penhallow to Elizabeth Harvey, 25 October 1679; Fortescue 1262M/FC/7, Eleanor White to Harry Greegor, 15 March [1675?]. 70 DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/9, BF to Hugh Fortescue, 6 February 1707/8. 71 Ibid. By ‘tent’ Bridget may have meant a soft medicinal roll to keep a wound open; see OED Online. 72 DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/9, BF to Hugh Fortescue, 6 February 1707/8. 73 A[lexander] R[ead], Most Excellent and Approved Medicines & Remedies for Most Diseases and Maladies Incident to Man’s Lately Compiled and Extracted out of the Originals of the Most Famous and Best Experienced Physicians Both in England and Other Countries (London: J. C. for George Latham Junior, 1652), p. 144. 74 DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/9, BF to Hugh Fortescue, 6 February 1707/8. 75 Ibid. 76 The nature of snakeroot is uncertain, as it may have referred to imported

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77 78 79 80 81 82 83

84

85

Cultures of circulation and transmission Virginian snakeroot, or been used as a generic term for a herbal remedy. DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/9, BF to Hugh Fortescue, 24 February 1707/8. DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/9, BF to Hugh Fortescue, 29 February 1707/8. Ibid. A glister or ‘clyster’ was an enema or suppository: see OED Online. DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/8, ‘The glister’. Ibid. See Introduction, this volume. Margaret Boscawen’s ‘large boke’ included some recipes with dates, the earliest recorded being 1671 (two recipes) and the latest 1681 (five recipes): DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/6, [Large book], fols 4v, 12r, 13r, 14r, 15r, 37r, 44r. John Morley, An Essay on the Nature and Cure of Scrophulous Disorders Vulgarly Called the King’s Evil, Deduced from Observation and Practice, 6th edn (London: printed for James Buckland, 1770), Preface (p. v). DRO, Fortescue 1262M/FC/8, ‘The glister’. See also Alonso-Almeida, this volume.

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11

Making livings, lives and archives: tales of four eighteenth-century recipe books SARA PENNELL

‫ﱬﱫ‬ This is a tale of four recipe books, much like other recipe books the reader will encounter in the chapters of this volume. But just as this collection as a whole is intended to represent the possibilities of research into recipe collections for the period 1550–1800, so this chapter is intended to think about these four collections as possessing (at least) four different histories (and thus historiographies). It will consider how the contemporary archival situations in which they are located, the routes by which they arrived there and even the developing, non-physical means of accessing them work to complicate the contexts in which they were produced, and our means of comprehending them. The (at least) four different histories of these late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century recipe books ask that in developing our scholarship of recipe cultures, we also pay attention to the lineages and meanings of authorship/compilation/ownership of recipe texts; and to their current materiality, that can reveal histories of preservation which complicate their identification as purely ‘domestic papers’.1 As a historian interested in forms of domestic knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also in the material cultures of the early modern kitchen, I have long wrestled with the recipe book as a thoroughly exasperating object and text. Surviving recipe collections, both print and manuscript, are so frequently unsullied by the grease, food deposits and burn-marks of fireside proximity that it makes one wonder whether men and women ever actually wrote or even read these books in the early modern kitchen.2

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The texts that come down to us, then, are often those used in ways which took them away from the hearthside and into closets, chests and libraries. They are ‘treasure[s] of hereditary knowledge . . . the oracle’ for multiple female generations,3 a bibliophile’s collecting category,4 a pharmaceutical magnate’s idea of the myriad forms of medical knowledge5 and a celebrity cook’s prized possessions he would rescue from a burning house.6 It is through their multiple – and often overlapping – constructions as potential and actual heirlooms, as objects of monetary value, as collectible/curated artefacts, that we have the recipe collections we have. Yet, as with all such survivals, questions of atypicality arise. Perhaps the best illustration of this is ‘Martha Washington’s cookbook’, preserved in the library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania as a relic of the first American presidential household. But it tells us very little about that household, since as its editor states, at the time of ownership by Mrs Washington, ‘it had long since become a family heirloom’ with recipes to match; it is Martha Washington’s possession, but not her creation.7 The very materiality of recipe books, at both the period of compilation or publication and during the subsequent lives of texts, should alert us to purposes and the likelihood of survival. Print recipe books come in all shapes and sizes, from the sixpenny chapbooks to be found in Pepys’s collection (Magdalene College Library, Cambridge), to the grand folio of Charles Carter’s The Complete Practical Cook: or, a New System of the Whole Art and Mystery of Cookery (London, 1730), which retailed at 16s.8 Similarly, manuscript recipe compilers, who jotted down recipes in flimsy paper notebooks, were not necessarily recording for posterity, but for immediacy (with the possible intent that they would create a more permanent volume when time permitted).9 By contrast, the two calf-bound, folio volumes with a partially remaining gilded lettering panel on the spine of the volume devoted to cookery, denoting it as ‘Receipts in cookery’, compiled by Anne Lisle (d. 1752) in 1748, in one hand throughout, with indices for each volume and with no later insertions, suggest a much more formal, focused and performed endeavour.10 The four examples discussed below survive in four different libraries (for the manuscripts: several more for the printed book),

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on two different continents, and additional material used here to explore them resides in other public and private locations. As for many other manuscript and even print texts of this era, recipe collections no longer sit in the physical locations for which they were originally intended, created or purchased; nor are they retained with archival or bibliographic material which would help make sense of their usage by and value to original and subsequent owners. While collectors such as John Hodgkin and Henry Wellcome (the Wellcome Library) or Blanche Leigh and John F. Preston (whose collections of historic cookery and household manuals form the backbone of Leeds University Library’s exceptional ‘special collection’ in cookery)11 enabled recipe texts to enter the hallowed realms of rare books and manuscripts collections through their acquisitions, donations and bequests, their collecting also removed and uprooted the same books and manuscripts from earlier libraries and households. Now it is almost impossible to know where such texts came from, who owned them (the odd inscription and bookplate aside), or indeed what other texts they sat alongside. Indeed, even the formats of these collections as they arrived in the libraries where they now reside have been almost obliterated; the Leigh and Preston collections at Leeds, although arriving at different times (1939 and 1962 onwards) from very different collectors, are now ‘regarded and administered as a single collection’.12 Manuscript recipe books in particular have suffered multiple deracinations. First, there might be deracination by the process of reassignment of use of the text itself, so memorably recorded in Maria Edgeworth’s 1809 Almeria, in which a dead farmer’s last will and testament is finally discovered at ‘the beginning of . . . the first leaf of his cookery book, and the end in the last leaf of his prayerbook’.13 There is deracination by physical dispersal. Three of the manuscript collections discussed here entered the libraries they now reside in via auction or dealer sale or acquisition of a specialist collection; none are with surviving papers of the households, families or individuals which created and/or used them.14 Of course, environmental, financial and other constraints often mean it is impossible to keep all family papers together in the places for which they were originally intended, but it is signalled in at least one of my case studies that the descendants of its rather well-known compiler

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did not know of its current whereabouts, nor the library the identity of that compiler. Part of the excitement of scholarship derives from finding out and reuniting these far-flung archival ‘orphans’, but in some cases the obstacle is not merely orphaning, but complete anonymisation. This is very much the case with ‘domestic’ papers, and manuscript recipe collections, where original compilers and keepers, and the subsequent biographies of these texts, are lost. Only occasionally does an owner (or an interested descendant) inscribe within a text who may have made it, contributed to it, and how it might have come to be in his or her hands.15 In the cases here, the identities of the (main) compilers/makers/authors were either known or recoverable (and the manuscripts not collective productions); yet their biographies between what might be called their first ‘life’, in the hands of their compilers/makers/authors, and their current lives as archival deposits, are all unclear and difficult to trace fully. This may be a function of both their ‘domestic’ nature, and their common association with early modern female writing, the academic study of which is a relatively recent phenomenon.16 As scholars, we now live and operate in an age of digital humanities and virtual research, which will certainly help simplify consultation of physically dispersed domestic papers and libraries in intercontinental locations. The first case study is available to readers of this chapter, wherever they sit, thanks to the Wellcome Library’s recipe book digitisation project. Yet at the same time, the digitisation and e-transcription of such texts subject them to another deracination; this time they are disconnected from their material being. Until you have turned the fragile (but very well-conserved) pages of Hannah Bisaker’s exquisite manuscript, which we will now discuss, you are not able to experience the text in the material ways its users did.

Hannah Bisaker’s recipe book The beautiful but damaged calligraphic folio manuscript volume signed in several places by ‘Hannah Bisaker’/‘Hannah Buchanan’, and dated in several places for July/August/September 1692, survives in the Wellcome Library (and has been digitised). Thanks to the

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(later) inclusion in the manuscript of a genealogical list of children born to ‘Micael [sic] Buchanan and Hannah’, we can identify Hannah as possibly the Hannah Bisaker born to Edward and Hanna Bisaker of St Mary Whitechapel, Stepney in August 1670 (and baptised there on the 14 August), but almost certainly the Hannah Bisaker who married Michael Buchanan at Tottenhoe, Bedfordshire on 22 April 1701; their six children, two girls and four boys, were baptised in Dunstable between June 1702 and January 1711.17 The manuscript comprises mainly recipes for pastryworks (almost entirely raised pies), with also a small number of recipes for other baked and non-baked goods. It is also all in one hand, which may not be Hannah’s, but rather that of an unknown scribe.18 So far, so conventional for a late seventeenth-century recipe manuscript. What makes this manuscript less so is that, apart from being an entirely culinary manuscript, with no medicinal or miscellaneous recipe content whatsoever, all the pastrywork recipes are accompanied by a plan drawing of the form that the pastry case could take (Figure 11.1). It is the only one this author has consulted in 15 years of work on culinary manuscripts that includes such drawings. Other, later manuscripts in the Wellcome Library collection contain sketches of table layouts, and Lady Ann Fanshawe tipped into her manuscript a sketch of a molenillo (the stick used to froth chocolate) and chocolate pot alongside her recipe for drinking chocolate.19 But the Bisaker images of pastry crusts are extremely rare. The dating of the manuscript does help in sorting out what it might represent. Between 1660 and 1700, the first English-language cookery publications to include illustrations were published. Those that incorporated illustrations concerned with food (rather than simply engraved portrait and pictorial frontispieces) included Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook (London, 1660),20 The Accomplisht Ladys Delight in Preserving, Physick and Cookery (London, 1675)21 and John Shirley’s The Accomplished Ladies Rich Closet of Rarities (London, 1683).22 What these books illustrate is, however, very specific: without exception, it is pastryworks – pies, tarts, florentines, custards and puddings baked in a pastry case of some sort. The first edition of May’s text contained 119 woodcut illustra-

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11.1 ‘To make a Venson Pastey’, opening from Wellcome MS 1176, recipe collection of Hannah Bisaker, compiled 1692

tions accompanying particular recipes and comprising both plans and elevations.23 The second edition (1665) went further, inserting two folded double sheets of further templates into the main body of the text.24 May’s book has long been regarded as ‘innovative . . . a domestic prototype of the modern cookery book’, published at a transitional moment in English culinary history.25 His was indeed a publishing endeavour unlike almost all preceding cookery texts, in which the ‘author’ had seldom been a practitioner earning his or her living by the arts communicated in the text.26 Perhaps because of May’s book, by the end of the seventeenth century a new type of cookery author had entered the field: the teacher-cook. Amongst the first of these was Hannah Woolley (1622?–c.1674 or after), whose presence in this volume in more than one chapter is testament to her importance to the history of recipe books in English culture and beyond. Her experience of being a schoolmaster’s wife, and undoubtedly involved in teaching herself, makes her publications in cookery less about display, and more about didacticism.27 The last publication that can be securely attributed to Woolley during her lifetime, A Supplement to the ‘Queen-like Closet’, or A Little of Everything (London, 1674), made this explicit; in it she offers at-home tuition in a range of domestic arts, from preserving to needlework, at variable rates.28

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A further connection between face-to-face instruction, and cookery books as handbooks to accompany such instruction (as opposed to replacing such instruction) is embodied in two rare texts: Mary Tillinghast’s Rare and Excellent Receipts, Experienc’d and Taught by Mrs Mary Tillinghast and now Printed for the Use of her Scholars Only (London, 1678); and The Young Cook’s Monitor [. . .] by M. H. (London, 1683). Very little is known about Mary Tillinghast, and nothing is known in any of the existing specialist bibliographies of cookery literature about ‘M. H.’, but it is clear that both were either actually practising as cookery instructors (in M. H.’s case, at a house in the comfortable mercantile environs of Lime Street in 1690), or their publishers were creating such personae for a market willing to buy such works.29 Perhaps the best-known teacher-cook is Edward Kidder (c.1665/6–1739), whose published Receipts of Pastry and Cookery survives in variant engraved and type-printed formats, datable to the first two quarters of the eighteenth century. Celebrated in his obituary for teaching ‘near 6000 Ladies the Art of Pastry’, Kidder was quite the culinary entrepreneur, running schools in several central London locations from at least the early 1700s.30 Although the published works date to no earlier than the 1720s, a number of what might be called scribal versions of Kidder’s recipes (where a blank book with an engraved or printed title-page has been filled with manuscript recipes identical to the printed ones from 1720 and after) probably date to an earlier period, indeed possibly as early as 1702.31 There was, then, a market for didactic materials that can be explicitly linked to the London-centred teaching of pastrymaking and cookery skills, around 1700. The decision to incorporate pastrywork plans (rather than, say, diagrams for carving and trussing) into May’s Accomplisht Cook also conceivably bears witness to such tuition being available in the 1660s. May’s publisher, Nathaniel Brooke, ever the salesman for his own list, may have alighted on the inclusion of pastry forms as just the ‘USP’ May’s book needed to set it apart from others in an increasingly populated market.32 With such illustrations, one did not necessarily need to pay for tuition, but rather follow the diagrams and recipes. Until the discovery of Bisaker’s manuscript, the evidence for

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experience of such tuition has, however, been limited to analysis of Kidder’s ‘scribal’ texts.33 Bisaker’s manuscript is almost certainly a presentation or record copy, rather than a set of working notes, given the calligraphic presentation. Nevertheless, the recipe for ‘cold butter paist’ (similar to a rough puff pastry), the second recipe in the manuscript, suggests a face-to-face lesson lay behind the text that we see. After having directed the maker to ingredients, the recipe instructs: ‘let not your paist be to stiff but very lith [sic: light?] then lay yor Bottom in First Fill Close and Garnish as I have taught you always Putting Liquor into your Pye Before you bake it’.34 The recipes for pies in the Bisaker manuscript are similar to those that appear in contemporary publications, but they are not identical, nor are they presented in an order that suggests they were lifted directly from any of the published texts featuring pastry recipes. While the overlap is greatest with Kidder (in terms of titles, but not content, of recipes), at least three (‘Stump pie’, ‘Steak pie’ and ‘Veal pie sweet’) do not appear in any of his printed/engraved versions. Nor do the pastry designs copy any in the illustrated publications. We can speculate then that Bisaker (or perhaps someone in her acquaintance) attended another pastrymaking and cookery school with a curriculum different to those of Kidder, Tillinghast or ‘M. H.’ So what is this manuscript? It belongs to Bisaker’s pre-marital years but she did not continue and expand the manuscript for hundreds of pages, making it into a culinary repository for the rest of her married life. Indeed the only later addition to the text concerns what did probably preoccupy her later life – children and their raising. So, rather than being a piece of life-writing or family heirloom, it seems to be a very specific textbook, confirming pastrymaking as a particular body of knowledge that was still desirable for unmarried women of a certain status to possess by the end of the seventeenth century. While Ivan Day has argued that the inclusion of designs for elaborate pastry confections in May and Kidder signalled the descent of pastrymaking from being a pursuit of aristocratic and noble women, to being merely a fashionable ‘accomplishment’ of the daughters of the up-and-coming metropolitan mercantile ranks, I would suggest that the manuscript’s quality and the care that has gone into its production denotes this as an

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important body of knowledge for Bisaker, and not merely a discarded aristocratic ‘fad’ percolating down the social spectrum.35 What making pastry possibly meant for Bisaker was multilayered; tuition in pastrymaking added marriageable value to her domestic skills, but also provided another avenue of creativity and knowledge acquisition. Collecting, inscribing and collating domestic information – from recipes, to designs for pies and embroideries – was a form of self-identification for the early modern woman, and the material forms through which that identity was expressed – from decorative pies to cushion covers to gardens – a means of registering and recording that identity.36 Bisaker’s manuscript is a testament to such skills, as well as a window into a world of commercial tuition that stood alongside household-learnt cookery.

Dorothy Wake Pennyman’s and Grisell Baillie’s recipe books The second and third case studies share features with Bisaker’s text. Compiled in the main by one person, each one has also been separated from other documents and indeed, material culture that has the potential both to enrich and contextualise them; both are in the Folger Shakespeare Library. But they also differ from the preceding text, and from each other, in the circumstances and duration of production, and indeed in the survival of, and access to, those other materials that enable us to locate their place more distinctively in the lives of their makers and users. MS W.a.318 is attributed in the Folger catalogue to Dorothy Wake, later Pennyman (1699–1754).37 As a much later (twentiethcentury?) genealogy tipped into the manuscript records, she was the fourth of eight daughters born to William Wake (1657–1737), archbishop of Canterbury, and his wife Etheldreda (née Howell: d.1731). In July 1722 Dorothy married James Pennyman (c.1694–1743), eldest son of Sir James Pennyman, of Ormesby, North Yorkshire. The marriage, although lasting more than 21 years, produced no children. Wake’s collection was probably begun as an adolescent and certainly continued after her marriage to Pennyman. Culinary entries early in the manuscript refer to her sisters’ married names:

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Magdalen Wake was ‘Sister Churchill’, having married William Churchill in 1719, while ‘Sister Lynch’, Dorothy’s younger sister Mary, who married Dr John Lynch in 1728, is the indirect donor of two savoury recipes, via her cook (fols 40v–41r). There are also many recipes both culinary and medicinal from Dorothy’s paternal Aunt Folkes (d. c.1724), and entries which allude to her marital connections with the Pennyman family, notably ‘a Bitter to be drunk with wine’ from Sir James Pennyman, her father-in-law (fol. 34v). This collection thus maps ‘family’ in its multiple contemporaneous meanings. Recipes are drawn from servants within the Wake and other households and the section of culinary recipes entered from folio 35r onwards, under the heading ‘the following receipts are out of Gills book, & what I have known her use, with great credit in our family’, may refer to a housekeeper’s own recipe collection being mined. The ‘family’ of the Anglican church is also embraced, with medicinal recipes attributed to John Sharp (1645?–1714), archbishop of York; John Williams (d. 1709), bishop of Chichester; and the bishop of Norwich (although which one is unclear from the entry).38 Dorothy’s compilation also provides a route into her family’s recent history, and as such, takes on the character of a memorial to both her parents. The greater part of the medicinal recipes, inscribed from the back page of the volume, are derived from her mother’s book, as a note recommends: ‘the following Receits are taken out of my mothers book, & are certainly very good’.39 Through this selection, Dorothy recalled her father’s many illnesses, as well as her own and her sisters’ early deliverance from sickness at her mother’s hands. A preparation of ‘a glister for a loosness Dr Lydalls’ is further identified as one which ‘cured one of her [that is, Elthedreda Wake’s] Children of 3 year old when no other medicine would take place’.40 This entry, with its nuance of merciful providence at work echoing contemporary spiritual diarists, takes the recipe’s authorisation beyond mere confirmation of utility; for Dorothy this 3-year-old may well have been herself. The fact that Dorothy herself had no children recorded as born to her may also shape the predominantly retrospective character of the collection. On occasion, it is difficult to judge whose ‘voice’ is approving particular cures, since Dorothy interpolates her own and

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her mother’s words about her and her sisters’ childhood illnesses and treatment: For an intermitting Feavour Sir Tho: Millingtons most excellent receipt . . . This cured my Papa of a great feavour, & my Mama remarks yt is a good way if ye feavour is attended with a looseness, but otherways ye extract of ye bark alone doth very well, & cured a child of mine at 7 year old.41

In this recipe, the mention of ‘a child of mine at 7 year old’ is, on one level, simply Dorothy copying out her mother’s annotations; but, when read alongside the several entries for recipes concerning complications of menstruation and pregnancy – ‘to prevent Misscariage’, ‘For to stop a flooding and for Bloody Urine. This I have reason to think an extraordinary receipt’, ‘to stop a loosness in a lying Inn. Mrs Deans the nurs Keeper’42 – one might also suspect Dorothy of vicariously imagining care for the children she and Pennyman did not succeed in having. Dorothy Wake Pennyman’s recipe collection stands as one artefactual record of her life. Yet, unlike Hannah Bisaker, for whom no further archive beyond parochial register entries has been found, Pennyman left other traces, one of which is quite significant and still materially present. Her will, first dated 4 August 1753 (two codicils were added in April 1754 and March 1755), contains copious detail about Dorothy’s domestic creativity.43 To her niece Ethelred[a] Lynch, daughter of Mary and John Lynch, she not only bequeathed a marriage present of £40, but also ‘all my Japan’d dressing Table furniture with the piece of work designed for the same it being all my own work’, while to niece Catherine Lynch went ‘a White japan’d work box of my own doing’, alongside pieces of silverware and inherited jewellery. Another Lynch niece, Hester Elizabeth, was left silver cutlery, as well as ‘my father and Mothers pictures what I have drawn in cryon [sic: crayon, that is, pastels]’. Her nephews and godsons received sums of money only. There is no mention of the recipe book in the will or codicils, however.44 Was the recipe book, which does survive, thus considered by Dorothy to be less important, less materially and emotionally valuable, than her japanning and pastels? Pennyman’s domestic creativity did not stop at recipes and

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interior elements, however. The very house she lived in, Ormesby Hall (now in the care of the National Trust), was commissioned by Pennyman herself, after her husband’s death. Little is known about the construction of the house, except that it was only completed in the year of Dorothy’s death, and then lay vacant for 16 years until being occupied by her descendant by marriage, Sir James Pennyman, the sixth baronet (c.1737–1808).45 Until the Pennyman archive is more closely investigated, the motivations for building the house cannot be known. Yet Dorothy’s testamentary directions and her recipe book speak of her investment in family, so perhaps she saw in the building of Ormesby Hall a means by which she could make ‘family’ manifest, in place of the children she lacked. Furnished with objects of her own making, choice and taste, the ‘classic Georgian mansion’ as it is described by the National Trust,46 could well have been Dorothy’s memorial to herself, her late husband and the children they could not have. Bringing together the house with the documentation that gives expression to this investment helps to achieve a greater meaning for each part of this ‘life’ viewed in isolation. Indeed, it is arguable that these material remains – house, recipe book, will – are Dorothy Wake Pennyman’s life as we can now know it.47 The other Folger manuscript was the object of a personal ‘Eureka!’ library moment. Identified only as ‘Cookbook [manuscript], ca. 1706’ on both the library’s card and electronic catalogues, MS W.a.111 is a substantial, contemporary leather-bound quarto volume in several hands, although the bulk is in a single, albeit variable hand.48 One clue to its compiler is given in the dated bookplate for ‘George Baillie 1724’ on the inside front cover, while there are others scattered through the text, notably references to Edinburgh, ‘Mellerstain’ and London. These all pointed to it being connected with the family of Lady Grisell Baillie (1665–1746), if not with herself. Grisell Baillie (née Hume) was no ordinary woman. ‘Heroine and businesswoman’, the opening words of her ODNB entry, are not terms often bestowed on eighteenth-century women; but, having rescued her covenanter-supporting father from execution in the 1680s, and effectively run the Hume’s exiled household in Utrecht until the family’s return to Scotland in 1688, Grisell was clearly no

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submissive creature.49 Marrying her childhood friend, George Baillie (1664–1738), in September 1691, she became more than just a helpmeet to her husband in his long political career in London and Edinburgh. As the published excerpts from her ‘household book’ and surviving manuscript letters in the Scottish National Archives show, she was an inveterate and untiring manager – of people, property and things.50 A typical letter to her younger brother, Alexander Hume, second earl of Marchmont (d. 1740), is full of sisterly bossiness: Mr Baillie is better in health than he has been for two winters past excepting low spirits, which I’m afraid will rather grow upon him, since he will not be prevail’d on to use the only remadys for it, which is exarcise and devertion, & I can tell you that you will go the same way, if you sitt, muss [sic] museing upon books all the day, do you think now to improve by it, not a bitt, only deverts your mind for that moment, to the destruction of your body, & when that is quite enfabled all our sense will follow . . . I know you will say how can my sister spend her time in writing such nonsence, but you will find to your cost, if you go on in your way, Altho I have nather Greek nor Latine, I’m above 10 year older & has [sic] more experience.51

Baillie’s multi-tasking, including ‘law & all sort of Bussines’, was prodigious; she oversaw construction of a new house at the Baillie estate in the Borders, Mellerstain, alongside managing the servantry of her own and her brother’s households. The extracts from her voluminous domestic papers (still in her descendants’ hands), published in 1911, include details from only the first of her three daybooks (which deal with the entire period from her marriage in 1692 to her death), a ‘Book of bills of fare’, inventories, travel accounts, and so on. It would only seem natural that, along with all these, there would be a recipe collection; it may indeed be the ‘book of Receipts’ that R. Scott-Moncrieff mentions in his Introduction, although the term is ambiguous.52 If this was what Scott-Moncrieff meant, the ‘book of receipts’ was nevertheless gone from Mellerstain by June 1959, when it was sold to the Folger Library by Francis Edwards Ltd. The manuscript recipe book now at the Folger covers much the same chronology as the daybooks, extending from the early eighteenth century (if not before), beyond Lady Grisell’s death (later

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additions are made by her daughter, Lady Grisell Murray, into the 1750s). With recipes attributed to family members, local gentry and nobility in Scotland and in London, as well as instructions for preparations culled from visits to Bath, and specifically, during an extended trip to southern Italy between 1731 and 1733 for the health of her son-in-law, Lord Binning, the recipe collection is above all a practical volume. Grisell Baillie certainly had servants, but, in a record that links her back to Bisaker, it seems she could also cook herself; in April 1696 a payment of £1 6s was made to a Mr Addison in Edinburgh, for cooking lessons for herself.53 Her book of bills of fare demonstrates a keen interest in not only how her hosts’ and hostesses’ tables looked, but what was served forth at the meals she attended, as well as the ones she hosted.54 Baillie’s recipe book is thus yet another component of a formidable record of more than 40 years’ domestic management. And yet, in its current location, it is forlornly separated from the other archival materials that make sense of it, as well as the physical location, in which some of its contents were indubitably prepared and eaten. The National Register of Archives (NRA) typescript listing for the Mellerstain archive, dated January 1969, lists further manuscript ‘receipt’ and recipe books, for example ‘Two receipt books. Brown leather. 18th century. Contain some medical and cookery receipts. Apparently kept by Lady Grisel Baillie’.55 These are clearly related to the Folger volume, but in what way? Just what a recipe collection meant for its compilers/users, what forms it took and the actual methods of compilation, are lost when the assembly of materials it belongs to is dismantled. For Baillie, the recipe collection appears to have been simply that – a collection of recipes as aide-mémoire for the management of her own and her daughters’ households, a repository for culinary (and some medicinal) knowledge gleaned from her extensive English and Scottish networks. It was not aspirational, or memorialising. Yet, with much of Baillie’s vast domestic archive not currently available for public consultation, and only ScottMoncrieff ’s small volume as a publicly accessible companion piece,56 it is one of the few documents available to historians interested in reframing Baillie’s life as a counterpoint to the stereotypes of public notoriety and/or domestic isolation so familiar in accounts of upper-class Georgian women.57

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Mary Eales’s recipe book The final manuscript is not actually just a manuscript; in fact, it isn’t even just one manuscript, or one printed volume.58 Mary Eales is, like so many female cookery writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, rather elusive. Although both of her published works, Mrs Mary Eales’s Receipts (London, 1718) and the modified, retitled later version, The Complete Confectioner, or, the Art of Candying and Preserving in its Utmost Perfection (London, 1733), record her as having undertaken royal service to both William III and Queen Anne, Eales is not visible in the requisite Lord Stewards’ accounts. However, this is not to say that she did not exist: she was possibly the Mary Eales who was buried at St Paul’s, Covent Garden on 11 January 1718, and for whose estate administration was granted to one Elizabeth Eales on 21 November of the same year.59 This date of death ties in very well with the date of first publication of her Receipts; if this was a post-mortem event, it signals the recipes freed from the grips of their author, who, as we shall see, saw them during her lifetime as valuable commodities. The pre-history of these printed recipes was much hinted at in the preface to the 1733 edition. In declaring Eales an ‘exquisite artist’ in confectionery, her publishers proceeded to describe how the limited run of the first, 1718 edition sold out swiftly, and at very high prices; this may explain why the publishers were sufficiently confident to order a print-run of 2,000 copies of this second edition, as recorded in the ledgers of the printer Charles Ackers. They also noted that manuscript copies of the recipes circulated at the eyepopping rate of five guineas each.60 This could certainly be publishers’ puffing, but the fact that at least two surviving manuscript recipe collections, both of which pre-date the publication of the 1718 edition, replicate many of Eales’s recipes verbatim, suggests that, in this instance, the puffery was warranted. One of the manuscripts is attributed to Elizabeth Sloane, later Cadogan (d. 1768), daughter of Sir Hans Sloane, and is dated internally to 1711.61 It contains in its entirety 126 confectionery recipes matching those from the 1733 edition, and are explicitly noted as being ‘a copy from Mrs Eales book’ (fol. 61r). The second manuscript, unearthed by David Potter in the Bodleian

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Library (shelfmark MS Eng.Misc.e.38), may indeed be one of the five-guinea copies circulating before 1718. It appears to be a fair copy, possibly in Eales’s own hand, entitled ‘The original book of Mrs Eells Receytes in Sweetmeats and Confectionary Things delivered in consideration of five Guineys and Warrented to be right and perfect by her’.62 Here is concrete evidence of a process oft-hinted at in prefatorial statements to early modern English printed cookery books: the circulation of recipes in manuscript amongst a few, which are then disseminated more widely in print. It also explicitly counters the idea that what appears in manuscript recipe books is often nostalgic and even old-fashioned in character.63 Elizabeth Sloane and the anonymous owner of Bodleian manuscript were exposed to confectionery recipes very much in fashion in the first decades of the eighteenth century, just as Baillie’s recipe collection was a repository for dishes eaten by her at the likes of the earl of Carlisle’s table. In this case, Eales’s recipes were as valued out of print as in it, acknowledging that the recipe still retained possible cachet as a ‘secret’, ownership of which was both costly and exclusive.64 This has been discussed in terms of recipes for proprietary medicines in the late seventeenth century, but the idea that culinary recipes should also attract a premium as ‘original’ and rare, has not.65 The conjunction of Eales in print, and Eales in manuscript – the relative ubiquity of the former, and the rarity of the latter – tells a story different to that of Hannah Woolley, or indeed of Bisaker, Pennyman or Baillie, as well as complicating the story of recipes in their print manifestations.66 It is also a story that complicates the authorship/compilership/ ownership relationship, with regard to manuscripts. Copiers (and I think we can imagine there may have been such people) of Elizabeth Sloane’s manuscript may or may not have taken careful note of the origination of her Eales recipes; in not doing so but identifying Sloane as the donor of a recipe, ‘authorship’ could be elided with ownership, and Eales erased from the further iteration of her recipe. The idea of ‘many hands hands’ at work on a recipe compilation and the differing registers of early modern authorship, discussed by Field and in this volume by DiMeo, does not mean we should not take account of original authorship at all, and all that may have been represented by that term.67

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Conclusion Four (indeed more) recipe collections: four (and indeed more) stories. What has been the point? There is the matter of these collections’ matter and how that materiality is accessed and experienced. There is what they bring to light about lives otherwise unknown (in the case of Bisaker, Pennyman, and also materialising what might otherwise be dismissed as publishers’ puffing, with Eales). There is the meaning brought by interleaving the object of the recipe book with other survivals (Pennyman, Baillie, Eales), to complicate the narratives of these women’s lives and livelihoods; and the meaning accessed through close reading of both text and object. There is also greater meaning brought to our choices of terminology in describing the making of these texts. Thus, while Hannah Bisaker may have made her manuscript volume (and there may be a third party involved here, in the form of an unheralded scribe), in terms of intellectual property she it was not its author; Dorothy Wake Pennyman is a compiler, but again, perhaps not so much an author as an editor of a family memorial through recipes; Grisell Baillie, likewise, collated and compiled, but was she an author? Only Mary Eales arguably fits the conventional view of being an author of her own recipes, and even then, that authorship was not initially intended to be a broadly public act, but rather more closely allied to seventeenth-century models of coterie publication. One final point to these stories – the moral of all the tales, if you will – is that these are of necessity short stories, only glimpses of lives and livelihoods rather than more comprehensive biographies, thanks to past assessments that these domestic papers did not matter very much at all. It is marvellous, indeed miraculous, that these objects have survived, against the odds of historical and literary scholarship and archival practices that previously consigned such material to the margins. While the work of understanding what the contents of these books and collections is in fact about continues we need also to undertake the work of textual and material reinsertion, reconnecting these objects with the lives which made them, in order to comprehend more fully what they meant to the people who authored, compiled, owned, bequeathed and, indeed on occasion, discarded them.

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Notes 1 Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘Domestic papers: manuscript culture and early modern women’s life writing’, in Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle (eds), Genre and Life Writing in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) pp. 33–48. 2 Cf. Laura Lunger Knoppers, ‘Introduction: critical framework and issues’, in Knoppers (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, pp. 1–17 (on p. 11). In the same volume see also Wall, ‘Women in the household’. For a recipe book imagined in a kitchen, see Henderson, Housekeeper’s Instructor, frontispiece. 3 [Samuel Johnson], The Rambler, 51 (10 September 1750), in The Works of Samuel Johnson. Volume III: The Rambler, eds W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (London/New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 273–9 (on p. 277). 4 For example, Narcissus Luttrell’s copy of Hannah Woolley’s The Accomplisht Ladys Delight discussed in Ezell, this volume. For Luttrell’s bibliographic habits, see J. M. Osborn, ‘Reflections on Narcissus Luttrell (1657–1732)’, Book Collector, 6 (1957), 15–27. See also the culinary texts that came to the Wellcome Library in 1931 as part of the John Hodgkin (1857–1930) Cookery Book collection; for further details see Wellcome MSS 2845–50. 5 The manuscript and published recipe books in the Wellcome Library collection were initially collected because of Sir Henry Wellcome’s interest in medicine in all its knowledge forms. 6 The question asked for a Channel 4 ‘ident’ first broadcast in 2007, to which the celebrity cook Jamie Oliver answered ‘200-year-old cookbooks’: see http://idents.org/videos/c4burninghouse.html (accessed 12 February 2011). 7 See Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery, intro. and transcr. Karen Hess, pbk edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 7. 8 For example, The Compleat Cook, or Accomplished Servant-Maids Necessary Companion (London: printed for J. Deacon, n.d.), Magdalene College, Cambridge, Pepys Library, Penny Merriments vol. I/39. 9 For example, the small octavo volume with paper cover tied on that is East Sussex RO FRE/712, recipe book compiled by the Revd Thomas Frewen [Turner] (1708–91) and his daughter Mary Frewen (1753–1811), c.1750–1800. 10 Wellcome MSS 7294, 7295; for an interpretation of these MSS, see Sara Pennell, ‘Mundane materiality? Or should small things still be forgotten?’, in Karen Harvey (ed.), History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 173–91 (on pp. 183–6). The books are not listed in Lisle’s will: National Archives, PROB 11/796/0/39, will of Anne Lisle of Walthamstow, 8 July 1751.

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11 C. Anne Wilson, ‘An introduction to the cookery book collections in the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds’, in Eileen White (ed.), The English Cookery Book: Historical Essays (Totnes: Prospect Books, 2004), pp. 19–27. 12 The quotation is taken from the webpage details of the Brotherton Library’s ‘cookery collection’: www.leeds.ac.uk/library/spcoll/cookery.htm (accessed 15 June 2011). 13 Miss [Maria] Edgeworth, Tales of Fashionable Life. Vol. II: Almeria (London: printed for J. Johnson, 1809), pp. 109–10. 14 Wellcome MS 1176 arrived in 1931 as part of the bequest of the John Hodgkin Cookery Collection; Folger MS W.a.111 arrived via dealer sale (see below). 15 For example, see Folger MS W.a.303, manuscript recipe book of the Malet family, c.1700–40, which has a late nineteenth-century inscription by Octavius Mallet (1811–91) noting that the MS was previously owned by his forebear, the Revd Alexander Malet (1704–75) of Somerset. 16 Knoppers, ‘Introduction’, pp. 5–10. 17 Wellcome MS 1176, recipe book attributed to Hannah Bisaker, c.1692; internal genealogical evidence on title-page, fols 11v, 15v. Other information from www.ancestry.co.uk (accessed 24 February 2011). 18 There is no evidence to ascertain who produced the manuscript. 19 Wellcome MS 7113, MS sketch attached to fol. 154v. 20 May, Accomplisht Cook. Subsequent editions published in 1665, 1671, 1678 and 1685. 21 The Accomplisht Ladys Delight in Preserving, Physick and Cookery (London: printed for Benjamin Harris, 1675). Subsequent editions in 1684, 1685, 1686, 1696 and onwards. See also Ezell, this volume. 22 [John Shirley], The Accomplished Ladies Rich Closet of Rarities, or, the Ingenious Gentlewoman and Servant-Maids Delightful Companion (London: printed by W. W. for Nicholas Boddington & Josiah Blare, 1683). Subsequent editions in 1687, 1690. 1691, 1696, 1706 and 1715). 23 Ivan Day, ‘From Murrell to Jarrin: illustrations in British cookery books, 1621–1820’, in White (ed.) English Cookery Book, pp. 98–150 (on p. 129). 24 Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook, 2nd edn (London: R. Wood for Nath. Brooke, 1665), between pp. 224–5 and 240–1. 25 Marcus Bell (with Tom Jaine), ‘Introduction’, in Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook, ed. Marcus Bell with Tom Jaine (Totnes: Prospect Books, 1994), pp. 10–20 (on p. 10). 26 The exception is John Murrell, whom Day describes (without supporting references) as ‘an entrepreneurial teacher of cookery and comfit-making based in London’: Day, ‘From Murrell to Jarrin’, p. 105. 27 Woolley’s publications date from her periods of widowhood, 1661–66, and again, 1669 to her probable death in 1674: Hobby, ‘A woman’s best setting

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30

31 32 33 34 35 36

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38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Cultures of circulation and transmission out’; see also ODNB, ‘Woolley, Hannah, (b. 1622?–d. in or after 1674)’; and Ezell, this volume. ‘Hanna’ Woolley, A Supplement to the ‘Queen-Like Closet’, or A Little of Everything (London: T. R. for Richard Lownds, 1674), pp. 82–3. For Tillinghast, see Elizabeth Spiller (ed.), Seventeenth Century English Recipe Books: Cooking, Physic and Chirurgery in the Works of Queen Henrietta Maria and Mary Tillinghast (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. xli– xlii. Details of M. H.’s location are given on the title-page as ‘Printed for the author at her House in Lime Street, 1690’: The Young Cook’s Monitor; or Directions for Cookery and Distilling Being a Choice Compendium of Excellent Receipts. Made Public for the Use and Benefit of My Schollars . . . by M. H. (London, 1690), BL shelfmark C. 189.aa.10(1), title-page. Cited in ODNB, ‘Kidder, Edward (1665/6–1739)’; Peter Targett, ‘Edward Kidder: his book and his schools’, PPC, 32 (1989), 35–44; Simon Varey, ‘New light on Edward Kidder’s Receipts’, PPC, 39 (1991), 46–51; and David Potter, ‘Some notes on Edward Kidder’, PPC, 65 (2000), 9–27. Brotherton Library, Leeds University MS 75, manuscript copy of Edward Kidder’s Receipts, c.1702, title-page; see also Varey, ‘New light’, p. 48. Ezell and Lehmann, this volume. Varey, ‘New light’, p. 47; Targett, ‘Edward Kidder’, p. 44. My emphasis: Wellcome MS 1176, fol. 2v. Day, ‘From Murrell to Jarrin’, pp. 138–9. Katherine Sharp, ‘Women’s creativity and display in the eighteenth-century British interior’, in Susie McKellar and Penny Sparke (eds), Interior Design and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 10–26; and Wall, ‘Women in the household’, pp. 105–7. Before being sold by Edward G. Allen & Son, Ltd in March 1966, MS W.a.318 was owned by a noted antiquary of north Yorkshire, Gillyat Sumner (1793–1875), whose collection was sold at auction in October 1877. I thank Dr Heather Wolfe, Curator of Manuscripts, Folger Shakespeare Library, for communicating the details of this and other Folger acquisitions to me. Ibid., fols 9r, 19r inverted, 29v inverted. Ibid., fol. 2v inverted. Ibid., fol. 12r inverted. Ibid., fol. 19v inverted. Sir Thomas Millington (1628–1704) was a fashionable London and court physician. Folger MS W.a.318, fols 25r–26v. National Archives, PROB 11/814, fols 270v–274r, will and codicils of Dorothy Pennyman. Cf. Lady Frances Catchmay’s MS recipe book, containing directions as to how it should be copied and those copies distributed amongst Catchmay’s children: Wellcome MS 184a, ‘a booke of medicens’, early seventeenth

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century, [inserted pagination p. 2]. 45 The Pennyman family archive is at the Teesside Archives (reference U/PEN). 46 See www.nationaltrust.org.uk/ormesby-hall/ (accessed 1 February 2012). 47 Pennell, ‘Mundane materiality?’, p. 183. 48 http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=218293 (accessed 1 February 2011). 49 ODNB, ‘Baillie, Lady Grisell (1665–1746)’. 50 R. Scott-Moncrieff (ed.), The Household Book of Lady Grisell Baillie, 1692–1733, Scottish History Society, new series 1 (1911); National Archives of Scotland, various MSS, including: GD206/2/565 (letters between Baillie and William Hall); GD 158/1257/ 1–27 (letters to Alexander Hume, second earl of Marchmont (d. 1740)); GD206/6/197/1–24 (letters to Sir John Hall of Dunglass). 51 National Archives of Scotland GD158/1257/11, letter from Grisell Baillie to Alexander Hume, dated at Oxford, 4 February 1737/8. 52 Scott-Moncrieff (ed.), Household Book, p. xxxv. 53 Ibid., p. 5. 54 Ibid., pp. 281–304. 55 NRA 10114, Hamilton papers, listing under Mellerstain Muniments, Library Cupboard 3 shelf 4 (as of January 1969). 56 To date, three letters have been sent by this author seeking an opportunity to consult the Baillie papers at Mellerstain, with no replies forthcoming. 57 Hannah Greig, ‘Sirens and scandals’, History Today, 58:10 (2008), 32–3; cf. Ingrid H. Tague, Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690–1760 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2002), pp. 97–132. 58 In this last section, I am heavily dependent on the careful detective work of David Potter, whose research into the publications of Mary Eales supersedes the ODNB entry I wrote: ‘Eales, Mary (d.1717/18?)’; D. Potter, ‘Mrs Ells “Unique Receipts”’, PPC, 61 (1999), 16–19. 59 ODNB, ‘Eales’. 60 A Ledger of Charles Ackers, Printer of the London Magazine, eds D. F. McKenzie and J. C. Ross, Oxford Bibliographical Society 15 (1968), p. 254; Mary Eales, The Compleat Confectioner, or, the Art of Candying and Preserving in its Utmost Perfection (London: printed for J. Brindley & R. Mountagu, 1733), sigs A1r, A1v. This is a rare copy (ESTC N27767), and does not appear in ECCO. The text also appears, with the same publishers, in the same year under original title, but without the preface: Mrs Mary Eales’s Receipts (see BL shelfmark 1608/2418). 61 BL Add. MS 29739, manuscript recipe book attributed to Elizabeth Sloane, c.1711. Presented to the British Library by George Henry Cadogan, Earl Cadogan in 1875, the MS presumably descended within the Cadogan family

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(Sloane married Charles, second Lord Cadogan, in July 1717). 62 Bodleian Library MS Eng. Misc.e.38, anonymous MS recipe collection, cited by Potter, ‘Mrs Ells’. This MS was presented to the Bodleian Library in April 1902 by Spencer Perceval (1838–1922), an amateur antiquary and collector. 63 Lehmann, British Housewife, pp. 52–3, 99–100. 64 For recent work on the intersection of recipes and the concept of the secret in early modern Europe, see Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin (eds), Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science 1500–1800 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 65 David Boyd Haycock and Patrick Wallis (eds), Quackery and Commerce in Seventeenth-Century London, Medical History, special supplement 25 (2005). 66 Another example of a MS verbatim transcription of a published cookery book is University of Chicago Library Special Collections, Crerar MS 115, ‘The Modern Cook’, a large undated but mid-eighteenth century folio in stiff paper covers, identical to (or perhaps original manuscript of?) volume 1 of Vincent La Chapelle, The Modern Cook, 3 vols (London: printed for the author, 1733). 67 Field, ‘“Many hands hands”’.

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The following bibliography provides details of some of the key printed primary and secondary sources, and unpublished dissertations, mentioned in the foregoing chapters; however, we have taken the decision not to include details of all the MS sources mentioned; and refer those interested to the endnotes. Major repositories of manuscript recipe books and collections can be found at the British Library, the Wellcome Library (both London); the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales; the Folger Shakespeare Library (Washington, DC); and many other repositories and regional record offices in Great Britain and North America. Key microfilm and digital collections based on these deposits are noted in the Introduction. For the selected printed primary texts, we have provided details of the first edition published (where known), and any facsimile or modern edition available. For other editions and variants, readers are directed to the following bibliographic works, in addition to the ESTC and Wing: Maclean, Virginia. A Short-Title Catalogue of Household and Cookery Books Published in the English Tongue 1701–1800. London: Prospect Books, 1983. Notaker, Henry. Printed Cookbooks in Europe, 1470–1700: A Bibliography of Early Modern Culinary Literature. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press/Houten: Hes & de Graaf, 2010.

Printed primary sources Anon. Natura Exenterata, or Nature Unbowelled by the Most Exquisite Anatomizers of Her. London: printed for H. Twiford, G. Bedell & N. Ekins, 1655.

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Anon. A Physical Dictionary, or, an Interpretation of Such Crabbed Words and Terms of Arts, as Are Deriv’d from the Greek or Latin, and Used in Physick, Anatomy, Chirurgery, and Chymistry with a Definition of Most Diseases Incident to the Body of Man, and a Description of the Marks and Characters Used by Doctors in Their Receipts. London: printed by G. D. for John Garfield, 1657. Anon. Dr. Lowers, and Several Other Eminent Physicians, Receipts Containing the Best and Safest Method for Curing Most Diseases in Humane Bodies. London: John Nutt, 1700. Baillie, Grisell. The Household Book of Lady Grisell Baillie, 1692–1733, ed. R. Scott-Moncrieff, Scottish History Society, new series 1 (1911). Boyle, R[obert]. Medicinal Experiments, or, a Collection of Choice Remedies, for the Most Part Simple, and Easily Prepared. London: printed for Sam Smith, 1692. Bradley, Martha. The British Housewife: or, the Cook, Housekeeper’s and Gardiner’s Companion. London: For S. Crowder & H. Woodgate, [1758]. Facsimile of 1758 edition printed as The British Housewife, intro. Gilly Lehmann, 6 vols. London: Prospect Books, 1996–98. Bradley, R[ichard]. The Country Housewife and Lady’s Director. London: printed for Woodman & Lyon, 1728. Facsimile of 1736 edition printed as The Country Housewife and Lady’s Director, ed. and intro. Caroline Davidson. London: Prospect Books, 1983. Carter, Charles. The Complete Practical Cook: Or A New System of the Whole Art and Mystery of Cookery. London: printed for W. Meadows, C. Rivington & R. Hett, 1730. Facsmile of 1730 edition published London: Prospect Books, 1984. Coelson, Lancelot. The Poor-Mans Physician and Chyrurgion, Containing Above Three hundred rare and Choice Receipts, for the Cure of all Distempers both Inward and Outward. London: A. M. for S. Miller, 1656. Culpeper, Nich[olas]. The English Physitian, or, an Astrologo-Physical Discourse of the Vulgar Herbs of This Nation. London: printed for Peter Cole, 1652. Culpeper, Nich[olas]. Pharmacopœia Londinensis: Or the London Dispensatory. Further Adorned by the Studies and Collections of the Fellowes, Now Living of the Said Colledg. London: printed for Peter Cole, 1653. [Digby, Kenelm]. The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt. Opened. London: E. C. for H. Brome, 1669. Facsimile edition ed.

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Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson. Totnes: Prospect Books, 1997. Eales, Mary. Mrs Mary Eales’s Receipts. Confectioner to her late Majesty Queen Anne. London: H. Meere, 1718. Eales, Mary. Mrs Mary Eales’s Receipts. London: printed for J. Brindley & F. Montagu, 1733. Facsimile edition London: Prospect Books, 1985. Elyot, Thomas. The Castel of Helth. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1539. ‘A Lady’ [Glasse, Hannah]. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy; Which far exceeds any Thing of the Kind ever yet Published. London: printed for the author, 1747. Facsimile edition published as First Catch Your Hare, intro. Jennifer Stead and Priscilla Bain. London: Prospect Books, 1995. [Grey, Elizabeth, Countess of Kent]. A Choice Manual of Rare and Select Secrets in Physick and Chyrurgery: collected and practised by the Right Honourable, the Countess of Kent, late deceased. London: G[artrude] D[awson], 1653. A facsimile edition is available in SeventeenthCentury English Recipe Books: Cooking, Physic and Chirurgery in the Works of Elizabeth Talbot Grey and Aletheia Talbot Howard, sel. and intro. Elizabeth Spiller. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Hartman, George. The True Preserver and Restorer of Health. London: T. B., 1682. [Hartmann, Johann]. Praxis Chymiatricæ: Or the Practise of Chymistry Written in Latine by John Hartman, M.D. London: printed for John Starkey & Thomas Passinger, 1670. Haywood, Mrs [Eliza Fowler]. A New Present for a Servant Maid. London: printed for G. Pearce & H. Gardner, 1771. Henderson, W[illiam] A[ugustus]. The Housekeeper’s Instructor, or Universal Family Cook. London: W. & J. Stratford, [1790?]. [M. W.] The Queens Closet Opened. Incomparable Secrets in Physick, Chyrurgery, Preserving, Candying and Cookery. [London]: printed for Nathaniel Brook, 1655. A facsimile edition is available in Seventeenth-Century English Recipe Books: Cooking, Physic and Chirurgery in the Works of W. M. and Queen Henrietta Maria, and of Mary Tillinghast, sel. and intro. Elizabeth Spiller. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. M[arkham], G[ervase]. The English Husvvife, in G[ervase] M[arkham], Countrey Contentments, in Two Bookes. London: J. Beale for R. Jackson, 1615. A modern edition is available as The English Housewife, ed. and intro. Michael K. Best. Kingston, ON: McGill-

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Queens University Press, 1986. May, Robert. The Accomplisht Cook, or, The art and mystery of cookery. London: printed by R. W. for Nath: Brooke, 1660. Facsimile of 1685 edition available as The Accomplisht Cook, ed. Marcus Bell with Tom Jaine. Totnes: Prospect Books, 1994. Pharmacopœa [sic] Londinensis. London: Edwardus Griffin, 1618. Quincy, John. Pharmacopœia officinalis & extemporanea: Or, a Compleat English Dispensatory, in Four Parts. London: printed for A. Bell, T. Varnam. J. Osborn & W. Taylor, 1718. [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: printed for Giles Calvert, 1661. The 1682 edition is available in facsimile: Totnes: Prospect Books, 2003. Raffald, Eliz[abeth]. The Experienced English House-keeper, For the Use and Ease of Ladies, Housekeepers, Cooks &c. Manchester: J. Harrop for the author, 1769. Available in a modern reprint as The Experienced English Housekeeper, ed. Roy Shipperbottom. Lewes: Southover Press, 1997. Randolph, Mary. The Virginia House-wife, or Methodical Cook, ed. Karen Hess. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1984. Read, Alexander. Most Excellent and Approved Medicines & Remedies for Most Diseases and Maladies Incident to Man’s Body, Lately Compiled and Extracted out of the Originals of the Most Famous and Best Experienced Physicians Both in England and Other Countries. London: J. C. for George Latham, 1652. ‘A Lady’ [Rundell, Maria]. A New System of Domestic Cookery: formed upon Principles of Economy. London: John Murray, 1806. [Shirley, John]. The Accomplished Ladies Rich Closet of Rarities, or, the Ingenious Gentlewoman and Servant-Maids Delightful Companion. London: W. W. for Nicholas Boddington & Josiah Blare, 1683. [Smith, E.]. The Compleat Housewife: or, Accomplished Gentlewoman’s Companion. London: printed for J. Pemberton, 1727. Smith, E. The Compleat Housewife: or Accomplish’d gentlewoman’s companion. Williamsburg: William Parks, 1742. Thacker, John. The Art of Cookery Containing Above Six Hundred and Fifty of the most approv’d Receipts heretofore published. Newcastleupon-Tyne: I. Thompson & Co., 1758. Verral, William. A Complete System of Cookery. In which is set forth. A

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Variety of genuine Receipts. London: printed for and sold by the author, 1759. Available in a modern reprint as William Verrall’s Cookery Book, 1759. Master of the White Hart Inn. Lewes: Southover Press, 1988. Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery, intro. and transcr. Karen Hess. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Wolley, Hannah [Woolley]. The Ladies Directory in choice Experiments & Curiosities of preserving and candying both fruits and flowers. London: T. Milbourn, 1661. Wolley, Hannah [Woolley]. The Cooks Guide: or Rare receipts for cookery. London: printed for Peter Dring, 1664. Woolley, Hannah. The Queen-like Closet; or, Rich cabinet Stored With All Manner of Rare Receipts for Preserving, Candying & Cookery. London: printed for R. Lowndes, 1670. Woolley, Hannah. The gentlewomans companion: or, A Guide to the female sex. London: A. Maxwell for Dorman Newman, 1673. Facsimile edition available as The Gentlewoman’s Companion Or a Guide to the Female Sex, ed. Caterina Albano. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2001. Woolley, Hannah. A Supplement to the Queen-like Closet. London: T. R. for R. Lownds, 1674. [Woolley, Hannah?]. The Accomplisht Ladys Delight in Preserving, Physick and Cookery. London: printed for Benjamin Harris, 1675.

Secondary sources Albala, Ken. Eating Right in the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Albala, Ken. The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Alonso-Almeida, Francisco. ‘“Gyf hyr this medycyn’: analysing the Middle English medical recipe discourse’. Revista de Lengua para Fines Específicos, 5/6 (1998–9), 15–46. Alonso-Almeida, Francisco. ‘All gathered together: on the construction of scientific and technical books in 15th-century England’. International Journal of English Studies, 5:2 (2005), 1–25. Alonso-Almeida, Francisco and Mercedes Cabrera-Abreu. ‘The formulation of promise in Medieval English medical recipes: a relevance-theoretic approach’. Neophilologus, 86 (2002), 137–54.

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Archer, Jayne Elisabeth. ‘The Queen’s arcanum: authority and authorship in The Queen’s Closet Opened (1655)’. Renaissance Journal, 1:6 (2002), 14–26. Archer, Jayne Elisabeth. ‘Women and chymistry in early modern England: the manuscript receipt book (c.1616) of Sarah Wigges’. In Kathleen P. Long (ed.), Gender and Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Pp. 191–216. Bailey-Dick, Matthew. ‘The kitchenhood of all believers: a journey into the discourse of Mennonite cookbooks’. Mennonite Quarterly Review, 79:2 (2005), 153–77. Bober, Phyllis Pray, Art, Culture, and Cuisine: Ancient and Medieval Gastronomy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Bower, Anne S. (ed.) Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. Brears, Peter. Jellies and their Moulds. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2010. Camp, Charles. American Foodways: What, When, Why and How We Eat in America. Little Rock, AR: August House, 1989. Carroll, Ruth. ‘The Middle English recipe as a text-type’. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 100:1 (1999), 27–42. Carroll, Ruth. ‘Recipes for laces: an example of a Middle English discourse colony’. In Risto Hiltunen and Janne Skaffari (eds), Discourse Perspectives on English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. 137–65. Clarke, Danielle. The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing. Harlow: Longman, 2001. Crane, Mary Thomas. ‘“Players in your huswifery, and huswives in your beds”: Conflicting identities of early modern English women’. In Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (eds), Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. Pp. 212–23. Crawford, Patricia, and Laura Gowing (eds). Women’s Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England. London: Routledge, 2000. Davidson, Alan, et al. The Oxford Companion to Food. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Day, Ivan. ‘From Murrell to Jarrin: illustrations in British cookery books, 1621–1820’. In White (ed.), English Cookery Book. Pp. 98–150. Deetz, James. In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life. First pub. 1977. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1996. DiMeo, Michelle, and Rebecca Laroche. ‘On Elizabeth Isham’s “Oil of

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Swallows”: Animal Slaughter and Early Modern Women’s Medical Recipes’. In Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche (eds), Ecofeminst Approaches to Early Modernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. 87–104. Dowd, Michelle M. and Julie A. Eckerle (eds). Genre and Life Writing in Early Modern England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Eamon, William. Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Ezell, Margaret J. M. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Ezell, Margaret J. M. ‘Domestic papers: manuscript culture and early modern women’s life writing’. In Dowd and Eckerle (eds), Genre and Life Writing. Pp. 33–48. Ezell, Margaret J. M. ‘Invisible books’. In Rogers and Runge (eds), Producing the Eighteenth-Century Book. Pp. 53–69. Ferris, Marcie Cohen. Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Field, Catherine. “‘Many hands hands”: writing the self in early modern women’s recipe books’. In Dowd and Eckerle (eds), Genre and Life Writing. Pp. 49–63. Field, Catherine. ‘“Sweet practicer, thy physic will I try”: Helena and her “good receipt”’. In Gary Waller (ed.), All’s Well That Ends Well: New Critical Essays. New York: Routledge, 2007. Pp. 194–208. Fischler, Claude, Estelle Masson et al. Manger: Français, Européens et Américains face à l’alimentation. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2008. Fissell, Mary E. Patients, Power and the Poor in Eighteenth Century Bristol. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Fissell, Mary E. ‘Making meaning from the margins: the new cultural history of medicine.’ In F. Huisman and J. Warner (eds), Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meaning. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Pp. 364–89. Fitzpatrick, Joan (ed.) Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Flandrin, Jean-Louis, Massimo Montanari et al. (eds). Histoire de l’alimentation. Paris: Fayard, 1996. The English-language edition of this work is abridged: see Flandrin, Jean-Louis, Massimo Montanari et al. (eds), Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, trans. Albert Sonnenfeld. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

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1500–1760. London. Hambledon Continuum, 2007. Thompson, Phyllis. ‘Uncovering the traces left behind: manuscript recipes, middle-class readers and reading practices’. In Rogers and Runge (eds), Producing the Eighteenth-Century Book. Pp. 70–94. Wall, D. D. The Archaeology of Gender: Separating the Spheres in Urban America. New York: Plenum, 1994. Wall, Wendy. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Wall, Wendy. Staging Domesticity: Household Work in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Wall, Wendy. ‘Women in the household’. In Knoppers (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing. Pp. 97–109. Wall, Wendy. ‘Reading the home: the case of The English House-wife’. In Helen Smith and Louise Wilson (eds), Renaissance Paratexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. 165–84. Warlick, M. E. ‘The domestic alchemist: women as housewives in alchemical emblems’. In Alison Adams and Stanton J. Linden (eds), Emblems and Alchemy. Glasgow: Glasgow Emblem Studies, 1998. Pp. 25–47. Wear, Andrew. Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham. Savouring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789. London: Chatto & Windus/University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. White, Eileen. ‘Domestic English cookery and cookery books, 1575– 1675’. In White (ed.), The English Cookery Book. Pp. 72–97. White, Eileen (ed.). The English Cookery Book: Historical Essays. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2004. Withey, Alun. Physick and the Family: Health, Medicine and Care in Wales, 1600–1750. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. Wilson, C. Anne. Food and Drink in Britain from the Stone Age to Recent Times. London: Constable, 1973. Wilson, C. Anne (ed.). ‘Banquetting Stuffe’: The Fare and Social Background of the Tudor and Stuart Banquet. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991. Winner, Lauren F. A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia. London/New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Yost, Genevieve. ‘The Compleat Housewife or Accomplish’d

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Dissertations Bassnett, Madeline. ‘Recipe books and the politics of food in early modern English women’s writings.’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Dalhousie University, 2008.) DiMeo, Michelle. ‘Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh (1615–91): science and medicine in a seventeenth-century Englishwoman’s writing.’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Warwick, 2009.) Gray, Annie. ‘“Man is a dining animal”: the archaeology of the English at table, c.1750–1900.’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Liverpool, 2009.) Leong, Elaine. ‘Medical recipe collections in seventeenth-century England: knowledge, text and gender.’ (D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 2005.) Smith, Lisa. ‘Women’s health care in England and France (1650–1775).’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Essex, 2001.) Stine, Jennifer. ‘Opening closets: the discovery of household medicine in early modern England.’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1996.) Stobart, Anne. ‘The making of domestic medicine: gender, self-help and therapeutic determination in household healthcare in south-west England in the late seventeenth century.’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Middlesex University, 2008.) Withey, Alun. ‘Health, medicine and the family in Wales, c.1600–c.1750.’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Swansea University, 2009.)

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Index Note: Where biographical details are not given, no certain information available

‫ﱬﱫ‬

account books, household 49, 56, 95 advice, reliability of 49–50 aide-mémoire 7, 179, 238 alchemy 9, 28, 114–15, 122 analysis of recipes qualitative 102–7 quantitative 99–102 Anglican church calendar 139–42 Anglicanism, in Virginia 139–40 application section, of recipe 77–8 archaeology experimental 48, 59–61, 62 food 47 historical 47–67 aspiration 50, 51, 57, 60–1, 62, 238 astrology 115 attribution of recipe collections 160, 168–9, 228 of recipes 10, 14, 25–6, 27, 29, 34, 36, 38–9, 40–1, 42, 160, 172, 185–6, 189, 195 Audley End (Essex) 54–5 authority 28, 31, 35, 40, 50, 119, 129

patriarchal 118 relationship to authorship 42–3 women’s 145–7 authorship 4–5, 26–7, 69, 159, 183, 228 collaborative 5, 27, 161 differing registers of 240–1 gendering of 114–15, 187 ideologies of 28, 39, 41, 225 Baillie, Lady Grisell (1665–1746) 236–8, 240, 241 Barrington, Lady Joan (c.1558–1641) 32, 41 bills of fare 58, 62, 171, 237, 238 Bisaker, Hannah 228–33, 240, 241 ‘bite of a mad dog’, recipes for 14, 184 Blundell, Nicholas (1669–1737) 12 Boate, Dr Gerard (1604–50) 32 book borrowing 192 booksellers 174–5 Boscawen family 14, 203–24 Boscawen, Bridget, later Fortescue (1666–1708)

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204, 206, 207–8, 214–18, 219 Boscawen, Hugh (d. 1701) 204, 206, 208 Boscawen, Margaret (d. 1688) 204, 206, 207, 208, 209, 214 see also Fortescue family; Fortescue, Hugh Boyle family 42 Boyle, Jenny 31–2 Boyle, Margaret (née Howard), countess of Orrery (1623–89) 32 Boyle, Richard, 2nd earl of Cork and later 1st earl of Burlington (1612–98) 31, 32 Boyle, Robert (1627–91) 6, 28, 29, 32, 191 Bradley, Martha (fl. 1740s–1755) 55, 57, 141 Bradley, Richard (1688?–1732) 58 Brockman family 28, 34–8, 39, 40 Brockman, Ann (1616–60) 34–8, 40, 41 Brockman, Elizabeth (d. 1687) 34–8, 39, 40 Brockman, William 36 Brün, Johann alias Unmussig (fl. 1649) 31 Burlington, Lord see Boyle, Richard butter 101, 140, 146 cakes 54 calf ’s-foot jelly 59, 61 Calvert, Elizabeth (d. 1675?) 173–4

Calvert, Giles (1612–63) 174 Carter, Charles (fl. 1730) 49, 226 Carter, Landon (1710–78) 146–7 Carter, Winifred Beale 146–7 Cavendish, Margaret, duchess of Newcastle (1623–73) 115, 124, 128 celebrity, culture of 160, 175 cheesecakes 10 chocolate, drinking 2 Christmas, food and drink at 142–3 cinnamon 101, 121 class 47, 48 colds, recipes for 25 collaborative authorship 5, 27, 161 commonplace books 9, 119, 182 community knowledge 179 compilation of recipe collections 11, 182–3, 204, 218 cookery see bills of fare; cookery writing; culinary history; culinary preparation; culinary styles; ingredients; menus; preparation of food; pastrywork; recipe collections; roasting Mannerist 105–8 teaching of 231–3, 238 technology of 52–4, 60–1, 62, 108 women and 145–6 see also individual dishes; individual ingredients cookery writing see authorship; recipes; recipe books; recipe collections English 94–108, 109–10 French 93, 97, 98, 100, 109–10

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Index copyright 39 corns, recipes for 30 Corpus of Early English Recipes (CoER) 69–71, 73, 75, 79, 85 countess of Kent’s powder 14, 27, 127 see also Grey, Elizabeth, countess of Kent (1582–1651) Coxe, Dr Daniel (1640–1730) 31 cross-referencing 84–5 culinary history 93–5 culinary labour 148–50 culinary preparation, mentalities of 56–7 culinary recipe collections 6, 7, 8, 35, 36, 49–67, 74, 77, 94–108, 228–33 culinary styles 95–6, 98, 103–4, 105–6 Culpeper, Nicholas (1616–54) 190, 211 cupcakes 54 Dacre, Anne, later Howard, countess of Arundel (1557–1630) 40 Daffy’s Elixir 10 Dawson, Thomas (fl. 1585–97) 102, 105, 116, 121 decoration of food 103–7 didactic literature 48, 49, 126, 230–1 dietary advice 56, 204, 210, 212–14, 219 Digby, Sir Kenelm (1603–65) 2, 30, 32, 79 discourse colony 68–9 recipe book as 5, 82–5

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distillation 116–17, 123, 124, 128 see also medicinal waters; individual waters domestic medicine 187, 203–24 domestic practice 11–12, 15, 33, 39, 115–17, 120, 125, 127, 148–50, 225, 233, 238 donors of recipes 10, 14, 25, 27, 29–31, 165 apothecaries 29 aristocracy 14, 29–30, 36 family 36, 42, 118, 188, 233–4 irregular practitioners 189 lower gentry 29 physicians 14, 29–30, 33–4, 207 royalty 14, 27, 41, 163, 172 servants 29, 33, 189, 234 social status of 188–9 upper gentry 29–30, 36 see also attribution of recipes; exchange of knowledge; networks dosage 2, 77 Dr Stephens’ Cordial Water 27 see also medicinal waters duplicated recipes 40, 85 Eales, Mary (d. 1717/18?) 239–40, 241 education of women 13 efficacy of medical recipes 78–80, 219 eggs, use of 60–1 English cookery writing 94–108, 109–10 esoterica 122 Estienne, Charles (c. 1505–64) 116 evaluation of recipes 74, 78–80, 185, 204

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exchange of knowledge 5, 10, 25–6, 39, 179, 181, 187–94, 195–6 experimental archaeology 48, 59–61, 62 expiry date, of recipe 72, 80–1, 86 family exchange of recipes 36, 42, 118, 179, 188, 217, 233–4 Fanshawe, Lady Ann (1625–80) 1–2, 11 Fanshawe, Sir Richard (1606–66) 1 fish recipes for, at Lent 141 food archaeology of 47 decoration of 103–7 history of 3, 47–8 moulds for 52–3, 58 preparation of 57–8, 62, 86 presentation of 57–9, 62, 86 food history 3, 47–8 foodways 49 Foote family 137–8 format of recipes 6–8, 9, 68 Fortescue family 14, 211–14 Fortescue, Hugh (d. 1714) 206, 207 see also Boscawen, Bridget (1666–1708) French cookery writing 93, 97, 98, 100, 109–10 fruit citrus 102 dried 101, 140 fresh 102 see also ingredients; vegetables functional grammar, of recipes 70

Gascon powder 127 gender 47, 48, 187, 195 of authorship 114–15, 187 genre as a cultural construct 70 conventions in recipes 68–90 recipe collections as 33, 118, 159 gifts, recipe collections as 40, 138, 179, 187 ginger 101 Glasse, Hannah (1708–70) 50, 51, 52, 141 Grey, Elizabeth, countess of Kent (1582–1651) her powder 14, 27, 127 recipe book of 38 Gwin, John (c.1620–80?) 188–9, 190, 193 Hannay, Patrick (fl. 1616–30) 121 Harris, Benjamin (c. 1647–1720) 171, 174 Hartlib Circle 28, 30, 32 Hartlib, Samuel (c.1600–62) 29, 32 Hartman, George (fl. 1696) 190, 192 hartshorn, use of 76, 127 Harvey, William (1578–1657) 30 Haywood, Eliza (1693?–1756) 50 heirlooms, recipe collections as 40, 138, 226, 232 see also gifts, recipe collections as Henderson, William Augustus 50, 55 Herbert, Henry, Baron Herbert of Cherbury (1654–1709?) 184

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Index Heywood, Thomas (c. 1573–1641) 123 historical archaeology 47–67 household manuals, recipe collections as 9, 115 Howard, Aletheia, countess of Arundel (1585–1644) 40 husbandry 162–3 ice boxes 61 ice cream 2, 97 ice houses 61 ideologies of authorship 28, 39, 41, 225 illustrations, in recipe collections 8, 57–8, 104, 229–30 indexes to recipe collections 9, 161, 185 ingredients 37, 51, 56, 60, 71–2, 100–1, 102–3, 104 animal 210 as stage in recipe texts, 71–2, 75–6 dairy fats as 101, 140 fruit as 101–2, 140 herbs as 141, 210–11 mineral 210 spices and aromatics as 100–1 see also butter; fish; fruit; sugar, use of; vegetables intertextuality 13, 16 inventories 49, 237 Jefferson, Isaac (1775–c.1850) 149 Jefferson, Jane Randolph (1721–76) 146, 148 Jones, John (1585–1657) 186, 192 Jones, Katherine (née Boyle),

265 viscountess Ranelagh (1615–91) 28–34, 38–9, 41

Kidder, Edward (c.1665/6–1739) 231, 232 King, Sir Edmund (c.1630–1709) 31 King’s Evil 205–6 recipes for 14, 203–24 Kircher, Athanasius (1602–80) 30 kitchens 54–5, 225 Audley End 54 equipment in 60–1 illustrations of 55 labour in 148–9 knowledge community 179 exchange 5, 10, 25–6, 39, 179, 181, 187–94, 195–6 medical, transmission of 31, 42, 179, 180, 181 transmission of 16, 167 Lady Allen’s Water 2, 75 see also medicinal waters language in recipes 68, 121 of recipes 184–5 Larkin, William (c.1580–1619) 103 Latin, use of 79–80, 86 Lent 141, 143–4 recipes for use at 140, 141–2, 143–5 life-writing 11, 48, 232, 241 linguistic analysis 5, 68–90, 196 Lisle, Anne (d. 1752) 14, 226 literacy 179, 180 lived religion 135–7

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Llwyd, Humffrey (1527–68) 186 love melancholy, cures for 126 magic 69, 79–80, 115 Malyn, Valitina 189 Mannerist cookery 105–8 manuscript recipe collections 9–10, 28–38, 42, 83–5, 118, 179–99, 204, 218, 226–7, 228–9, 233–8, 239–40 found in other documents 119, 182–3, 227 relationship to printed recipe books 41, 48, 118–19, 191, 239–40 marginalia 69, 186 marketing of printed recipe books 164–8, 231 Markham, Gervase (1568?–1637) 8, 100, 116, 119, 121, 164–5 Mason, John (1766–1849) 147 material culture 47, 48, 51, 52–4, 62, 94 materiality of recipe collections 225–6, 241 May, Robert (1588?–d. in or after 1664) 104, 106, 229–30 meat, consumption of 56–7 medical conflicts 204 medical knowledge, transmission of 31, 42, 179, 180, 181 medical networks 5, 26, 28, 31, 32–3, 34, 38 medical recipe collections 6, 8, 35, 36, 74, 77–81, 179, 187–96, 234 medical recipes 26, 203, 206, 210 efficacy of 78–80, 219 format of 184

recording of 181–2 transmission of 187–8 see also individual preparations; medicinal waters; physicians medical terminology, in Welsh 192–4 medicinal waters 36–8, 74, 75, 77, 81–2, 114, 116, 125, 128, 181 see also distillation memorialisation 14, 234, 238, 241 menus 51, 57, 168 Michell, Andrew (d. before 1689) 32 monetary value of recipe collections 226 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley (1689–1762) 126–7, 128, 129 Moore, Dorothy (1612–64) 32 Morgan, John 188, 189, 192, 193 Mosley, Jane (1669?–1712) 120 Moulsworth, Martha (1577–1646) 119–20 Moxon, Elizabeth (fl. 1740–54) 141 Murrell, John (fl. 1614–30) 100, 101, 103 Mytton, Peter (1550–1637) 189 Nanney, Catherine (1692–1756) 184 natural philosophy 115 networks medical 5, 26, 28, 31, 32–3, 34, 38 social 146, 166, 185, 188, 189, 196, 204

Index

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see also donors; family exchange; transmission of recipes North, Roger (1651–1734) 174–5 nutmeg 101, 140 œconomy 12 oil of swallows 37 oral transmission of recipes 5, 33, 97, 179, 181, 195 originality 96–7 orthography 10 Partridge, John (fl. 1566–82) 73, 116, 119 pastrywork 104, 229–33 Paxton, Robert 143–4 pea[se] soup 141, 144 Pennyman, Dorothy Wake (1699–1754) 233–5, 240, 241 Pennyman, James (c.1694–1743) 233 pepper 101 perfumes, recipes for 8, 121 Philips, Katherine (1632–64) 125, 127, 128, 129 physicians 30, 36, 208, 214, 215–18 correspondence with 31, 33–4 see also individual physicians; medical conflicts; medical knowledge; medical networks Physicians of Myddfai 186 plagiarism 51, 60 plague, remedies for 2, 14, 30, 78, 191, 215 Plat, Hugh Sir (1552–1608) 121 poems 116, 119, 120–4

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in recipe books 167 poetic recipes 124–7 poetry relationship to recipes 114–34 Pope, Alexander (1688–1744) 120–1 preparation of food 57–8, 62, 86, 105 preparation section, of recipe 76–7 prescriptions 6, 8 see also medical recipes; therapeutic regime presentation copies, of recipe collections 10, 232 presentation of food 57–9, 62, 86 printed recipe books 8, 27, 48, 50–2, 97–8, 109–10, 118–19, 197, 226 cost of 50–1 marketing of 164–8, 231 relationship to manuscript recipe books 41, 48, 118–19, 191, 239–40 printers of recipe books 5, 172–4, 239 probatum est 79–80, 86, 126, 219 provenance 69, 74, 185–6 purging 214–16 quintessence 114, 115, 117 Rabisha, William (fl. 1625–61) 49, 101, 102, 164, 165, 174 Raffald, Elizabeth (1733–81) 52, 57, 141 Ranelagh, Lady Katherine see Jones, Katherine, viscountess Ranelagh

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re-creation of recipes 60 Read, Alexander (c.1570–1641) 215 reading habits 49–50 ‘receipt’ 10 see recipes recipe books manuscript see recipe collections, manuscript printed 8, 27, 48, 50–2, 97–8, 109–10 cost of 50–1, 226 marketing of 164–8, 231 printers of 5, 172–4 relationship to manuscript recipe collections 41, 48, 118–19, 191, 239–40 see also authorship; cookery writing; culinary history; recipes; recipe collections recipe collections as family heirlooms 40, 138, 226, 232 as genre 33, 118, 159 as gifts 40, 179, 187 as household manuals 9, 115 compilation of 11, 182–3, 204, 218 culinary 6, 7, 8, 35, 36, 49–67, 74, 77, 94–108 fluidity of 5, 174, 179, 180 format of 6, 9–10, 56, 85, 119–20, 182 functions of 39–40, 48, 49, 51, 226 indexes to 161 manuscript 9–10, 28–38, 42, 83–5, 118, 179–99, 204, 218, 226–9, 233–40 medical 6, 8, 35, 36, 74, 77–81, 179, 187–96, 234

monetary value of 226 presentation copies of 10, 232 preservation of 226–7, 238 printed see recipe books, printed relationship to women’s writing 118–19 representation of practice 52 specialisation of 8 title page of 160, 161, 165 recipe compilation, male participation in 13 recipes application section of 77–8 attribution of 10, 25–6, 27, 29, 36, 38–9, 40–1, 42, 160, 164, 186, 189, 195 cosmetics 6, 121 culinary 228–33 culinary, as source for religious practices 135–55 dialogic structure of 71 donors of 10, 14, 25, 27, 29–31, 165 duplicated 40, 85 efficacy of 78–80, 219 evaluation of 74, 78–80, 185, 204 expiry date of 72, 80–1, 86 family exchange of 36, 42, 179, 183, 188, 217, 233–4 flexibility of 123 format of 6–8, 9, 68, 184 functional grammar of 70 genre conventions in 68–90 illustrations in 8, 57–8, 104, 229–30 language in 68, 121 preparation section of 76–7

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Index provenance of 69, 74, 185–6 re-creation of 60 storage stage of 80–1 symbolic potential of 14, 121, 128–9 titles of 72–4 transmission of 16, 32, 33, 187–8 oral 5, 33, 97, 179, 181, 195 regimen, advice on 33, 214 religion, lived 135–55 religious practice and recipe books 135–55 remedies see individual medical recipes; medical recipes; medicinal waters rhetoric 68, 123, 126 in recipe texts 14–15 Rich, Mary (née Boyle), countess of Warwick (1625–78) 32 roasting, as method of cooking 56, 60, 138 Rowlands, Amy (1661–1732) 189 royalty, attribution to 14, 27, 41, 163, 172 see also donors of recipes, royalty Rundell, Maria (1745–1828) 61 saffron 101 Salesbury, William, (c.1520–84) 186 ‘salt of moles’, recipe for 209-10 Salusbury, Elizabeth (d. 1760?) 183–4 secret wisdom 122 secrets, recipes as 7, 123, 128–9, 175, 240 Shirley, John (fl. 1685–88) 116,

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117, 229 Sloane, Elizabeth, later Cadogan (d. 1768) 239, 240 smallpox, recipes for 2 Smith, E. (fl. 1727) 52, 137, 142, 144, 145 social capital 188 social currency, recipes as 145–6 social networks 146, 166, 185, 188, 189, 196, 204 social status of donors 29–30, 34, 36, 188–9 sore eyes, remedies for 29 Southwell, Lady Anne (bap. 1574–1636) 119–20 spices and aromatics, use of 100–1 see also individual spices starter collection 35 storage stage, of recipe 80–1 Stuart, Sarah Foote 137, 144 styles, culinary 95–6, 98, 103–4, 105–6 sugar, use of 101–2, 103–4, 105, 121–2, 140 sweetmeats 106–7, 121, 122 symbolic potential of recipes 14, 121, 128–9 table plans 48, 51, 59 tea 53–4 tea cups 53–4 technology of cookery 52–4, 60–1, 62, 108 text register of 71 stages of 70, 71–2 utility of 47 text-types 70–1 therapeutic determination 204

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therapeutic regime 14, 85, 204 Tillinghast, Mary 231, 232 title page 160, 161, 165 author portraits with 169–70 titles, of recipes 72–4 Topsell, Edward (1572–1625) 120 transmission of recipes 16, 167 in correspondence 32, 33 oral 97, 179, 181, 195 treatment, duration of 77 trust 10, 35 Tusser, Thomas (c. 1524–80) 121 vegetables, use of 102 vernacular tradition 181 Vernon, Elizabeth, countess of Southampton (1573–1655 or after) 122 Verral, William (1715–61) 52 Virginia Anglicanism in 139–40, 142–3 religious authority in 145 virtues 72, 81–2 Wales, recipe collections in 179–202 Walker, Anthony (1622–92) 118 Walker, Elizabeth (1623–90) 119 Warwick, countess of see Rich, Mary (née Boyle)

washing balls 10 Washington, Elizabeth Foote (fl. 1779–96) 137, 139, 144, 148–9 Washington, George (1732–99) 137, 139 Washington, Katherine Foote (d. 1799) 137, 144 Washington, Martha Custis (1731–1802) 137, 139, 140, 226 Whitney, Isabella (fl. 1566–73) 124–5, 127, 128, 129 Willis, Thomas (1621–75) 28, 30, 31, 32 women and cookery 145–6 and recipe exchange 11–13, 146 authority of 145–7 as providers 127 education of 13 see also gender; women’s writing women’s writing, relationship to recipe collections 13, 118–19 Woolley, Hannah (1622?–d. in or after 1674) 6, 11, 52, 99, 106–7, 159–78, 230, 240 Wright, Thomas 114–15, 128