Culinary Texts in Context, 1500-1800: My Five Cents

By Thomas Gloning, University of Gießen, Germany

Leonhardt Thurneysser: Historia Vnnd Beschreibung Influentischer/ Elementischer vnd Natürlicher Wirckungen/ Aller fremden vnnd Heimischen Erdgewechssen (…). 1578; extract from page 76. BSB Munich, URN: urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10147818-8

Reading Culinary Texts in Context, 1500-1800 was immensely enriching for me. Coming from linguistics with a focus on Medieval and Early Modern culinary and medical texts, the volume has reminded and shown me how much research perspectives have evolved during the last two decades and how much research has been done both on food texts and on medical literature in Latin and in the vernaculars. Here, I want to highlight five aspects of the edited volume or of some of its contributions.

Firstly, the temporal range (16th to early 19th centuries), the broad geographical range, the spectrum on culinary, medical, cosmetic, confectionary recipes, the analysis of both private and professional manuscripts and the richness of research questions provide a complex and inspiring matrix of the research field. While reading, I often said to myself: “Now, this is something that you did not yet encounter in your own previous research.” Which made me wonder: Was it not there? Or could I just not see it? In the future, I will look at German culinary and medical manuscripts differently.

Secondly, the contributions are a treasure trove in respect of bibliographic documentation. Earlier in this century, I tried to provide a “Bibliography on the history of cookery, food, wine etc., mainly 1350-1800” on the web , a project I gave up around 2013. The bibliographic sections of our volume show how much the body of research has grown recently and that a multi-faceted (languages, fields of practice, regions, gender, digitized sources, …) bibliographical data-base would be a valuable research tool. Or does such a multi-faceted bibliographical tool already exist?

Thirdly, in several contributions, one or more manuscripts are under scrutiny. E.g., Isabel Braga gives a systematically structured account of Franciso Borges Henriques‘ Portuguese Cookbook from 1715. In other contributions, several manuscripts are characterised (e.g. Barbara Denicolò) or a specific aspect of a cookery text is highlighted (e.g. in “Sir Martin Westcombe’s Iberian Recipes”). Which made me think about the relation of “broad and systematically structured accounts” of culinary or medical manuscripts vs. strategies of highlighting specific aspects of manuscripts for certain purposes. In respect to a “broad and systematically structured account,” one might ask: What are obligatory and optional topics of such a “portrait” of a culinary (medical, confectionary) manuscript? This question is essential for everybody writing a praefatio to an edition of a culinary manuscript. But the question is: What has to be dealt with in an editorial praefatio, what can be outsourced to special investigations? Anyway: It is good to have an overview about the aspects to deal or not to deal with in a portrait of a culinary or medical text. The contributions in our volume provide good examples for different strategies.

Fourthly, the chapter on “How to Be a Perfect Confectioner?” by Marta Manzanares Mileo contributes to an intersection field of professional/private and culinary/medical interests. It is highly interesting to see how the guilds of Barcelona used knowledge texts, or “repertoires of artisanal knowledge” (p. 177) to organize both training in and access to their craft. In this chapter and in other places in the volume we find very useful references to the vernacular tradition on confectionary making (e.g. Hannah Wooley, Serrano Larráyoz), which would deserve a more in-depth comparative study in the future. German language sources on this topic include Walter Ryff’s Confect Buch und Hauß Apoteck of 1544 (mentioned on p. 80, later editions), the German translation of Michel Nostradamus of 1572, and the translation of Nicolas Bonnefons with the title Der Frantzösische Confitirer, Welcher handelt: Von der Manier/ die Früchte in ihrer natürlichen Art zu erhalten of 1665.

Fifthly, in an edited volume with nine contributions on such a wide temporal, geographical and textual (culinary, medical) scope, it is clear that there must be lacunae relative to one’s own interests. From my point of view, the question of linguistic and multimodal organization of the manuscripts in question is not prominent (see the image from Thurneysser’s printed herbal, 1578, above, including a recipe for the medical use of fennel). And there are – of course – a few minor points of criticism related to some passages in the book. Quibbles aside, the volume’s contributions were immensely enriching for me.

Thomas Gloning is Professor of German Linguistics at Gießen University, Germany. His research includes text linguistics, multimodality, semantics, theory of meaning, lexicography, historical linguistics, the history of forms of communication, and the history of specialized texts in German (e.g. culinary texts, medical texts, herbals, balneological texts) among others. He tries to keep up with and now and then contributes to research on old culinary texts.

Images: coin icon is taken from Elizabeth I gold pound, 1594-1596, Coin Env. 100, Folger Shakespeare Library.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Amanda Herbert (February 23, 2025). Culinary Texts in Context, 1500-1800: My Five Cents. The Recipes Project. Retrieved March 17, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13cy9


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.