All posts by Elaine Leong

Christmas Cookies in Series: Recipe Booklets and the Annual Reinvention of a Tradition

By Reinhild Kreis

One of the early indicators that Christmas is just around the corner in Germany is the publication of Christmas cookies recipe booklets. Once it gets cold outside, readers are invited to heat up their ovens and ring in the holiday season by baking sweets. Many families have established traditions around annual Christmas baking – starting baking on a certain day, insisting on particular kinds of cookies, and even on the strict adherence to tried and tested recipes. The annual publication of special recipe booklets has become a tradition itself.

Many of these recipe booklets, whether distributed as advertising brochures of a particular brand or as removable special issues of a magazine, are designed as collectibles. Some are numbered and thereby marked as a part of a larger series, such as the Rezept-Sammlung of Dr. Oetker, a German brand for baking ingredients. The first issue of that series, which includes Christmas specials as well as brochures with recipes for other occasions, came out in the late 1980s. Other recipe booklets are promoted as annual special issues that readers can expect to be enclosed with the annual Christmas edition of a particular magazine. For example Brigitte, one of the leading women’s magazines in Germany offers just such a booklet every December.

The recipe booklets combine tradition and innovation. They are based on the long-standing practice of Christmas baking with its traditional specialties such as Vanillekipferl, Lebkuchen, or Zimtsterne, and familiar ingredients such as cloves, cinnamon, and gingerbread seasoning. Many booklets seek to continue and inscribe themselves into these traditions, not least by using headlines that looked as if they were written by hand or that quoted famous Christmas stories and poems. At the same time, in order to attract a large readership and be collectible item, each booklet of recipes have to be innovative and different from the previous years.

The booklets are intended to provide readers with much more than just recipes. They are designed to advertise lifestyles and products. Whether complimentary or attached to a commercial magazine, recipe booklets for Christmas cookies are aimed at selling. The free booklets from Dr. Oetker advertise the company’s products such as baking powder, chopped hazelnuts, and vanilla sugar by naming the brand product and by displaying images of the respective sachets on the same page as the recipe. Additionally, the booklets serve as advertising material for the company’s Back-Club (Baking Club). For a fee of then 18 DM, members of the club (est. 1989) received free samples of new Dr. Oetker products and the magazine Gugelhupf which was filled with recipes and other helpful information on cooking and baking.

The special issues attached to Brigitte, on the other hand, are designed to sell the magazine itself. Removable booklets are a relatively new phenomenon in the history of Brigitte. Still in the 1970s, it was rare for the magazine to include any recipes for Christmas cookies, not to mention an entire booklet. At that point, recipes for Christmas cookies were perhaps too common and well-known to be used as a purchasing incentive. Such recipes became a regular feature and a removable collectible only in the 1990s. The first booklets had traditional titles such as “Baking from A-Z” and pictures of familiar cookies such as the Vanillekipferl on the cover (1994).

While initial issues stuck with established recipes and offered few surprises, the Brigitte booklets soon started to present a peculiar mixture of old and new types of cookies, often variations of old and well-known recipes. The issue from 2003, for example, juxtaposed each “classic”, for example Vanillekipferl or Bethmännchen, with a new variation such as “Orangen-Anis-Brezeln” (pretzel-shaped cookies with orange and anise) or “Gefüllte Marzipanmonde” (filled marzipan crescents). International recipes also made their way into the booklets. Furthermore, the booklets of both Dr. Oetker and Brigitte increasingly began to include recipes that required little time and experience, accompanied with additional how-to information for those new to baking.

These different sales strategies explain why advertising brochures in the form of recipe booklets such as Dr. Oetker’s have a longer history than special issues attached to magazines. Brands like Dr. Oetker want to sell their baking products each year anew, regardless of current baking trends, and therefore used brochures as a marketing strategy early on (the company started selling baking powder in 1893). For a magazine like Brigitte, however, special issues on baking only made sense after women were no longer expected to be (only) housewives. The “modern woman” often took on multiple roles and might only bake infrequently. Some did not possess a large collection of traditional recipes and others looked for new inspirations. This explains why it was only in the 1990s that the removable booklets have become an annual feature.

In many ways, the serialized recipe booklets are a substitute for family recipes once passing from generation to generation. It is no longer the mother or grandmother whose experience guarantees success but rather the long-established brand and its test kitchens. The Brigitte booklets, which do not promote ingredients of particular brands, prominently introduce their test kitchen personnel and emphasize that the recipes are well-tried and tested before inclusion in the booklet.[1] Every year, just when it starts to get cold outside, they tap into the longing for tradition and remind their readers that it is finally time to roll up their sleeves and to get ready for the Christmas season.

[1] The same holds true for the internet presences of both Dr. Oetker and Brigitte which usually mention the test kitchens. See here for Dr Oetker and here for Birgitte, (last accessed on Dec 18, 2018).

All booklets and magazines featured in the photos here are in the collection of Reinhild and her mother. Photos are author’s own.

 

Cold Wombs and Cold Semen: Explaining Sonlessness in Sixteenth-century China

By Yi-Li Wu

Figure 1. Depictions of boys at play were a popular Chinese decorative motif during the sixteenth century, imbued with auspicious meaning and conveying hopes for male offspring. This porcelain bowl was made in Jindezhen during the Jiajing reign period (1522–66). From the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Gift of Denise and Andrew Saul, 2001. Accession number 2001.738. On-line at https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/64484

Throughout imperial China, a family’s well-being and longevity required the birth of sons. [Fig. 1]  Sons performed the ancestral rites, inherited land, and were responsible for supporting aged parents. And only men could take the examinations for government office which conferred elite socio-economic status. But at age 40, Liu Xiaoting was still sonless (wu zi). He appealed to the physician Gong Tingxian (15`38-1635), promising him rich recompense if he could help. As Gong recorded in his influential treatise, Curing the Myriad Diseases (Wanbing huichun, preface dated 1587), Liu’s “male member was weak, and his semen was icy cold.” Furthermore, his pulses were flooding when felt at the first position (cun) at the wrist, but deep and faint at the third position (chi). Gong’s diagnosis: a profound deficiency of primordial qi (yuan qi), the source of all the body’s vitalities and material manifestations. This was caused, he explained, by excessive drinking and sexual indulgence.

Depletion from debauchery was a common diagnosis for upper-class men of the time, those who had the means to own concubines and patronize courtesans. Doctors agreed that such carousing exhausted the body’s vitalities, not least because male semen was produced from “essence” (jing), the vitality that enabled growth, generation, and reproduction. Besides depleting the body, excessive outflows of semen harmed the kidneys, the organs that produced, stored, and transformed essence.  To cure Liu, Gong prescribed a 16-ingredient formula called “Elixir to Solidify the Root and Strengthen Yang” (Guben jianyang dan) (see below).  After taking one recipe’s worth, Liu felt that his nether parts were warm again.  After an additional half-recipe, he felt recovered. To his great joy, he then begat a son. Liu subsequently shared the formula with a Liu Boting and a Liu Min’an (probably kinsmen) who also used it successfully. [Figs. 2 and 3]

Figs. 2 and 3: The recto and verso of a page from a seventeenth-century edition of Gong Tingxian’s Curing the Myriad Diseases, showing his recipe for Elixir to Solidify the Root and Strengthen Yang (Fig. 2, recto) and explaining how he used it to cure Liu Xiaoting (Fig. 3, verso). Note that Chinese books were read from right to left. From Expanded edition of “A Collection on Curing the Myriad Diseases” by Mr. Gong Yunlin, Confucian doctor (Zengbu ruyi Gong Yunlin xianshen Wanbing huichun ji), Renren shushe woodblock edition, 1641. Yulin was Gong Tingxian’s sobriquet (hao). In the collection of the Berlin State Library, Germany. Digitized and on-line at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-PK digitalisierte Sammlungen, permanent URL: http://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/SBB000160F000000000.

Gong Tingxian placed Liu Xiaoting’s case in his discussion of “seeking descendants” (qiu si), which was part of a larger section on “women’s diseases” (fu ke).  “Descendants” here referred specifically to sons.  Although Chinese medical writings on childbearing focused primarily on the female body, people had also long recognized that male ailments could impede conception. These concerns were especially salient in Gong and Liu’s time, when population pressure, urbanization, and commercialization were creating new forms of socio-economic mobility and instability.  As Charlotte Furth has shown, this inspired a proliferation of writings on male self-cultivation and producing sons. Such material appeared in various textual genres, and it was not uncommon to find the reproductive illnesses of men discussed in chapters on women. These discussions assumed, furthermore, that a deficient man might still be able to father daughters, but that only a properly regulated male body would create sons. The question was how best to achieve that regulation.

In medical discussions of infertility, cold could refer to somatic sensations of chillness, as well as to a sense of deficiency and absence of vitality.  Writings on women were primarily concerned with ensuring the ample and free flow of female blood, which constituted the female seed, nourished the fetus, and later transformed into breast milk.  But doctors also worried about coldness in the womb, whether from an invading wind, or arising from internal depletion. Cold would cause female blood to stagnate and become corrupt.  But concerns about female cold were also expressed in terms of agricultural metaphors which portrayed the womb as a field that needed to be warm and nurturing to receive the male seed.

Women with cold wombs would simply not produce children. But when couples produced only girls, this suggested deficiencies in the man, who played a key role in determining the child’s sex. The various theories of sex selection might differ as to details, but they agreed that a man could produce boys by shooting (she) his seed into the woman on certain days, in a certain manner, at a certain point in the copulatory act.  Particularly important was the belief that both men and women released reproductive seed during orgasm, and that the fetus’ sex was determined by the seed that came last.  A man who wanted sons thus needed to bring his female partner to climax before releasing his own seminal essence. His semen also needed to be sufficiently “dense” (mi), lest it dribble uselessly out of the womb.

Coldness in men was thus associated with impaired copulatory function, manifesting as cold and watery seed and as a weak penis unable to control its emissions. Gong Tingxian’s fertility formula echoed this understanding, relying heavily on substances that were classified as “principal drugs for treating spermatorrhea” and/or as “principal drugs for treating impotence” in Li Shizhen’s authoritative  and encyclopedic Compendium of Materia Medica (Bencao gangmu,preface dated 1590).  At the same time, Gong’s formula implicitly rebuked those who would treat male coldness with heating drugs.  This objection was rooted in a particular understanding of how cosmological yin and yang forces expressed themselves in the male body.

To simplify enormously: yang referred to things that were external, active, and hot, while yin was internal, receptive, and cool. Men were the yang of humankind, and male potency and fertility were understood as expressions of bodily yang. As a result, people routinely tried to treat sonlessness with heating drugs. But some doctors warned that too much heat would damage and consume yin, harming the kidneys (yin) and consuming its essence (yin). Excessive heat would sicken the man, and even if he managed to conceive a son, the heat would remain as a latent poison in the fetal body and the boy would die young. Instead, they argued that the proper way to regulate yang was to address the underlying deficiency of yin.  Gong Tingxian shared this viewpoint, and the key drugs in his prescription acted by nourishing bodily yin and the kidneys.  As Liu Xiaoting swallowed the dozens of pills that Gong prescribed, he may have had initial doubts about their efficacy. But the birth of his son would have convinced him that, at least in this instance, Gong’s approach to male coldness was the correct one.

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Elixir to Solidify the Root and Build Yang (Guben jianyang dan)
Dodder seed (tu si zi) cooked in wine, one and a half taels[1]

White poria, root end (bai fu shen), skin and woody bits removed
Dioscorea (shan yao), steamed with wine
Achyranthes root (niu xi), stems removed, washed in wine
Eucommia bark (du zhong), washed in wine, skin removed, roasted until crisp
Angelica root, main body (dang gui shen), washed in wine
Cistanche (rou cong rong), soaked in wine
Schisandra fruit (wu wei zi), washed in wine
Black cardamom (yi zhi ren), stir-fried in salt water
Tender deer antler (nen lu rong), roasted until crisp
One tael each of the above

Prepared rehmannia (shu di), steamed in wine
Dogwood fruit (shan zhu yu), steamed in wine, the pit removed
Three taels each of the above

Sichuanese morinda (chuan ba ji), soaked in wine, the heart removed, two taels

Teasel (xu duan), soaked in wine
Milkwort (yuan zhi), processed
Cnidium seeds (she chuang zi), stir fried, the husks removed
One and a half taels each of the above

Add:
Ginseng (ren shen), two taels
Goji berries (go ji zi), two taels

Grind the above into a fine powder, and mix with honey to form pills as large as the seeds of the parasol tree. For each dose, take 50 to 70 pills on an empty stomach, washed down with salt water. With wine is also fine. Before bedtime, take another dose. If the woman’s monthly affair is already concluded, then this is the time for planting sons, and if one takes three doses a day, that is no problem.  If essence is not stable, then add dragon bone (long gu) and oyster shell (mu li), heated in fire and quenched in salted wine three to five times. Use one tael, three mace of each. Moreover, add five taels of tender deer horn.

[1] The weight of the tael (Ch. liang) has varied over time, but during Gong Tingxian’s lifetime would have been equivalent to approximately 37 grams.  A mace (Ch. qian) is one-tenth of a tael.

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Yi-Li Wu is a Center Associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (US).  She earned a Ph.D. in history from Yale University and was previously a history professor at Albion College (USA) for 13 years.  Her publications include Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 2010) and articles on gender and the body; medical illustration; forensic medicine, and Chinese views of Western anatomical science.  She is currently completing a book manuscript on the history of wound medicine in China.

True Colors, or the Revelatory Nature of Cold

By Thijs Hagendijk

Heat is transformative, brings about change, separates substances or bring them together. Every student of chemistry knows how to enable or enhance a chemical reaction by applying energy to a system, usually in the form of heat. Early modern practitioners did not think otherwise. Fire was the transformative element and key to the production of all kinds of different materials, ranging from the philosopher’s stone to artisanal products such as glass, porcelain or pigments. Applying heat to bring about change is publicly ingrained thermodynamics, but one thing is even more obvious. Once heated, things have to cool down again.

Figure 1: Eikelenberg’s notes on the art of painting, comprising five different manuscripts. Photograph: Regionaal Archief Alkmaar.

When the request came to write a blogpost on cold and recipes, I was somewhat hesitant. Heat seems to elicit the most interesting stories and anecdotes, but interesting cases with respect to cold failed to come to mind immediately. Hence, I tried a different approach and looked at how cold featured in a collection of overtly practical notes on the preparation of paint materials collected by the Dutch polymath and painter Simon Eikelenberg (1663-1738). Intended for publication, he promised his readers an “accurate descriptions of the origin of making, preparation and general use of paint materials, oils, mix-fluids and varnishes.”[1]  It was within the confines of this manuscript that I began to discern two themes with respect to cold in practices of making.

Figure 2: Reconstruction of one of Eikelenberg’s varnish recipes. The varnish was prepared in a glazed pot, placed in a sand bath and heated on fire. Photograph: Thijs Hagendijk.

It is only when things have cooled down that the transformative work of heat can really be judged. Eikelenberg describes for instance how he experimented with minium, a red lead-based pigment, which he heated in a crucible and placed in a fire. “The more it glowed, the more the minium turned yellow near the sides of the crucible, the lowest parts alike; which, when it was cold, appeared to be nothing else but yellow massicot.” [2] Eikelenberg also describes the preparation of various varnishes. Here too, quality and properties of substances are explicitly observed after the varnishes have cooled down. “When the varnish was cold I found that it was rather thin and that it did not cover well.” [3]  Another varnish was prepared on a hot sand bath, after which Eikelenberg “filtered it through a cloth and let it cool: it appeared then as a thickish and yellowish varnish.” [4]  Pay attention to the word “then”: there is a clear order of things that speaks through Eikelenberg’s notes. Being cold is a condition that precedes testing and Eikelenberg makes that rather explicit.

Figure 3: It is hard to achieve a homogeneous mixture when preparing varnishes. A whitish sediment is developing in this varnish, which is in coherence with Eikelenberg’s notes. Photograph: Thijs Hagendijk.

Whereas heat is transformative, it is only in the absence of heat that things can be trusted to stay the same. Continuing with the varnishes, Eikelenberg was well aware that their preparation does not stop after the ingredients have been heated and combined. As long as it is still hot, the apparently homogeneous concoction can easily coagulate and fall apart. Eikelenberg wrote in his notes: “We can conclude that to prevent curdling it is necessary not to stop stirring before the mixture is cold.” [5] Indeed, each time he made varnishes, Eikelenberg made sure to keep stirring until everything was cooled down: “stirring steadily until all was cold” or “having stirred until it became cold”.[6]

Figure 4: Eikelenberg mentions that: “[w]e can conclude that to prevent curdling it is necessary not to stop stirring before the mixture is cold.” Passage marked in red. Photograph: Regionaal Archief Alkmaar.

For Eikelenberg, heat was both friend and foe and until his varnishes reached firm, cool ground, they required careful guidance and attention. Cooling down was thus as arduous a process as heating the mixture was in the first place. Yet, once cooled down, true colors are revealed – deprived from heat and stabilized by the cold.

[1] Simon Eikelenberg, “Aantekeningen betreffende schilderen,” MS 391, Collectie Aanwinsten, Regionaal Archief Alkmaar: fol. 1. “Naukeurige beschrijving van de oorsprong of making, bereiding en ’t algemeen gebruik der verfstoffen, olijen, mengvogten en vernissen.”
[2] Simon Eikelenberg, “Aantekeningen betreffende schilderen,” MS 390, Collectie Aanwinsten, Regionaal Archief Alkmaar, fol. 806. Original: “na mate dat het gloejend wierd, veranderde de menij die naast tegen de zijden van de kroes aan-zat en wierd geel, gelyk ook ’t onderdtste; ‘t welk doe ‘t kout was niet anders dan gele masticot geleek”.
[3] Eikelenberg, “Aantekeningen betreffende schilderen,” MS 390, fol. 827. Original: “Doe de vernis koud was bevond ik ze wat dun en datze niet genoeg dekte.” Translation from: A. van Schendel, “Simon Eikelenberg’s Experiments on the Preparation of Varnishes,” Studies in Conservation 3 (1958), 130.
[4] Eikelenberg, “Aantekeningen betreffende schilderen,” MS 390, fol. 802. Original: “Doe ‘t wel vermengt was, kleijnsde ik ‘t door een doek en liet het kout worden, wanneer ‘tzelve een dikagtige en geelagtige vernis vertoonde” Translation from: Schendel, “Simon Eikelenberg’s Experiments,” 128.
[5] Eikelenberg, “Aantekeningen betreffende schilderen,” MS 390, fol. 824. Original: “Hieruijt kan men afnemen dat om ’t schiften voor te komen, men niet moet op-houden met roeren voordat se kout is.” Translation from: Schendel, “Simon Eikelenberg’s Experiments,” 129.
[6] Eikelenberg, “Aantekeningen betreffende schilderen,” MS 390, fol. 827. Original: “gestadig omroerende totdat het gantschelijk koud was.” Translation from: Schendel, “Simon Eikelenberg’s Experiments,” 130. Eikelenberg, “Aantekeningen betreffende schilderen,” MS 390, fol. 832. Original: “tot koutwordens toe geroert te hebben”.

 

Cold! A Recipe Project Thematic Series

Hiroshige, Two men by a gate in the mountains. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

– it’s cold! A dreary chill and rain have just descended across Europe and perhaps most of you are also cranking up the heat and bringing out winter scarves and hats. December has arrived and it seems apt for us to follow our fun and successful series on “Heat!” with a thematic series on “Cold!”. Within medical conceptions of the human body across a number of cultures, notions of hot and cold are hardly be separated. Within kitchens, craft and artisanal workshops, although heat played a crucial role in production processes, cold was also essential occasionally – especially if ingredients had to be preserved for a period of time, or if heat had to be tempered in some way.

To get ready for the long winter, our contributors have explored the notion of “Cold!” in a number of areas. Thijs Hagendijk returns to the RP with a post on the Dutch polymath and painter Simon Eikelenberg (1663-1738), detailing how cold features in the practices of his paint making with surprising insights.  Jean-Olivier Richard, a historian with interests in early modern natural philosophy, alchemy and environmental history, invites us reflect upon mankind’s impact on our planet by offering a reading of “divine recipes for a cooling earth”.

Having written about how to “treat the heat in 1793 Beijing”, Marta Hanson returns to the RP this month with a post titled “Treating the Deadly Cold in 1918 China”, co-authored with Michael Shiyung Liu. Returning to another theme explored in the Heat! Series – fertility recipes – Yi-Li Wu will tell us about Chinese formulas dealing with cold genitals, the standard historical explanation for male and female infertility.

Finally, as we move closer to the holidays, we offer a few posts to “warm” you up. Marieke Hendriksen and Ruben Verwaal return with more adventures with Boerhaave’s “little furnace” (go here for part 1 of their explorations). New contributor historian Reinhild Kreis will tell us about Christmas Cookies in 20th century Germany and our Tales from the Archives will feature the wonderful post on “snowballs” by Rachel Snell.

“Christmas Dessert of layers of fruit, arranged for color effect. ‘Snowball’ is one of the most attractive Christmas Desserts” from American Homes and Gardens, 1911.

We can’t do much about the chilly weather outside but we hope that this wide-ranging edition of the Recipes Project might distract you from the weather and inspire you to think about the cold and chills in different ways.

Enjoy and happy holidays!

Marieke Hendriksen and Elaine Leong

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Ps. This is my last edition for a little while as I’m taking a tiny break from editing the Recipes Project in 2019. Things have been all-go at the RP headquarters over the past few months, and we have some really exciting news to share with you after the holidays. So, watch this space and see you all soon, Elaine.