All posts by Jess Clark

Jess Clark is an associate professor of history at Brock University. Her first book, The Business of Beauty: Gender and the Body in Modern London (Bloomsbury, 2020), analyzes the role of London-based entrepreneurs in developing a national beauty culture. She’s now writing a book on the history of smell and identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Fertility in the Early Modern Household

Leah Astbury

Domestic recipe books in early modern England abound with remedies to promote conception and prevent miscarriage. Frances Springatt’s recipe book, for example, contained a remedy ‘To help conception and strengthen Nature’, taken morning and night.[i] Notably, the vast majority of these receipts were explicitly for women, and in particular, intended to cleanse the womb. The Boyle family book contained a remedy for ‘Barrenness’ that opened up the womb when ‘shutt up, cleanseth the Same, Cherisheth the Seminal Vessels, Comforteth and Enliveneth the Womb & maketh it fit for Conception.’[ii]

Fig. 2. A woman seated on a obstetrical chair giving birth aided by a midwife who works beneath her skirts. Woodcut. Courtesy of Wellcome Collection CC BY.
Fig. 1. A woman seated on a obstetrical chair giving birth aided by a midwife who works beneath her skirts. Woodcut. Courtesy of Wellcome Collection CC BY.

The historical consensus has been, in Olwen Hufton’s words, that ‘under most conditions’ childlessness was attributed to female incapacity in early modern England. Aside from ‘brewer’s droop’ and impotence from bewitching, early modern people would have failed to consider the possibility of male impediment.[iii] Jennifer Evans’ work on fertility and aphrodisiacs has shown, however, that printed medical guides and advertisements understood problems with husbands, wives, or the couple together as causes of childlessness.[iv] So why then in domestic receipt books are remedies that target the causes of male sterility – weak seed, frail erection and lacklustre desire – so hard to find? This tension between the possibility of male infertility in printed material and absence in personal collections points to a complex system in which women were positioned as the caretakers of fertility, even if their bodies were not at ‘fault’. To revise Hufton’s claim, early modern people did know that men were responsible for childlessness but worked to minimise evidence of this. In this post I’m going to offer a few hints in domestic recipe books of the ways in which wives might labour to improve their own, and their husband’s, fertility without making male impediment or failure known. This is part of a larger book project examining the experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and afterbirth care in early modern England.

Fig. 1. Frances Springatt (& others), Collection of cookery and medical receipts: with later additions by several hands, Wellcome Library, MS 4683. Courtesy of Wellcome Collection CC BY.
Fig. 2. Frances Springatt (& others), Collection of cookery and medical receipts: with later additions by several hands, Wellcome Library, MS 4683. Courtesy of Wellcome Collection CC BY.

The first clue is in the prevalence of recipes that promised to reveal which party was responsible for childlessness. Such tests normally involved husband and wife each urinating on a seed or grain and observing their growth; the seed that failed to thrive indicated sterility. The inclusion of these diagnostic tests in domestic collections indicates at least a willingness to consider male impediment, even if evidence of their use is lacking.[v]

Second, the gender of the intended recipient of fertility recipes was often left unspecified or vague. Two remedies in the Jerningham family recipe book, one to ‘stir up’ lust and another to ‘causeth conception’, did not specify whether they were for a man or woman.[vi] Others were explicit that they could be useful for men and women. Frances Springatt’s remedy to help conception (Fig. 2) included the instructions that ‘man should take of it as well as the woman.’

More evidence can be found in recipes that were designed to be administered before or through the act of sex. Jane Jackson’s book instructed the user to anoint the man’s ‘yard’ with a concoction before sex in order to further chances of conceiving.[vii] Another suggested that both the ‘yard’ and the ‘womans private alsoe’ should be anointed. Then, the husband should simply ‘deale with her; and shee shall conceaue.’[viii] Such remedies configured men as the agent of cure, even if they were actually the intended recipients.

Recipe books did contain remedies to strengthen the yard, but importantly never mentioned sexual function. James Shrowl’s recipe book contained a remedy ‘To heale any Lame Member’ in which the ‘member’ was bathed for half an hour, ‘chaft’ with an ointment and then wrapped in lambskin before bed.[ix] Generation or even the ability to have sex was not mentioned. Many of these remedies were concerned with curing venereal disease and one might imagine rich fodder for the historian of fertility. And yet genital problems in men, in this context, were rarely linked to sexual performance or generative ability, further evidence to suggest that male sexual impediment was more embarrassing than childlessness understood to come from problems with the womb.

A final example from the almanac of Sarah Jinner suggests the ways in which male fertility was expected to be discretely managed by wives. The recipe section in Jinner’s almanac, which she advertised, ‘might be kept in good case and serve to the mutual comfort of man and woman’, included ‘A Confection to cause fruitfulness in Man or Woman.’ This powder, she noted, could be surreptitiously sprinkled ‘upon the parties meat’.[x]

The remedies found in domestic books skirt around the topics of weak male seed and impotence, but reading against the grain reveals the ways in which domestic practice, and in particular wives, might be able to manage male impediment without naming and shaming.

 

[i] Frances Springatt (& others) 1686-1824, Wellcome Library, MS 4683, fol. 92r.

[ii] Boyle Family, ‘Receipt Book’, Wellcome Library, MS 1340, recipe 312 fol. 86r.

[iii] Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her. A History of Women in Western Europe, vol. 1 (London: Fontana Press, 1997), p. 174. Randolph Trumbach makes a similar argument in The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England(London: Academic Press Inc., 1978), p. 167.

[iv] Jennifer Evans, Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Medicine in Early Modern England (Boydell & Brewer, 2014).

[v] As Catherine Rider has shown on this blog, these tests were not new to the early modern period and can be found as early as the twelfth century. https://recipes.hypotheses.org/2017

[vi] Jerningham family recipe book, Staffordshire Record Office D641/3/H/1, p. 63 and p. 67.

[vii] Jane Jackson, ‘Her Booke’, 1642, Wellcome Library, MS 373, fol. 82v.

[viii] Jane Jackson, ‘Her Booke’, 1642, Wellcome Library, MS 373, fol. 83r.

[ix] James Shrowl, 1625-c.1750, Wellcome Library, MS749, unfoliated.

[x] Sarah Jinner, An Almanack and Prognostication for the Year of Our Lord 1659 (London: 1659), sig.B8r.

Teaching Resource Round-Up!

Jess Clark

In 2017, the academic journal Global Food History published a roundtable on “Teaching Food History.” Participants, including one of this month’s contributors Jeffrey Pilcher, described the exciting outcomes and periodic challenges of developing food history courses. This includes the use of recipes in the classrooms as a means to consider silences in the archives; grapple with questions of material history; and to think about (and experience) issues around labor, production, and supply.[1]

"Food Administration - Education - Teaching food conservation in canning in Western Nebraska," 1917-1918, National Archives at College Park, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
“Food Administration – Education – Teaching food conservation in canning in Western Nebraska,” 1917-1918, National Archives at College Park, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

All through the month, we’ve had the pleasure of extending these conversations, featuring different approaches to teaching with recipes. As our contributors have shown, recipes represent an exciting and accessible form that encourages students to think in new ways about reading practices, but also histories of class, gender, and global exchange.

This month’s Series means that we now have some 24 posts on teaching available on the site. In this final post of September 2018, we’ve listed these resources for our readers, categorized by approach and topic. Some of them date to 2014, when Amanda Herbert first launched the Series. We hope this makes our teaching resources even more accessible for educators and will encourage the use of recipes in the classroom. And, as always, we want to hear from you about how you use recipes in the classroom! Please join us in the Comments section to continue the conversation.

Foods and Cookery laboratory, School of Household Art, Teachers' College, Columbia University, 1910-20. From Collection #23-2-749, item M-OS-08. Cornell University Library. Courtesy of WikiMedia Commons.
Foods and Cookery laboratory, School of Household Art, Teachers’ College, Columbia University, 1910-20. From Collection #23-2-749, item M-OS-08. Cornell University Library. Courtesy of WikiMedia Commons.

 

Recreating Recipes

Understanding Recipes

 National Approaches

Online Approaches

Recipes in the Public: Exhibits, Objects, and Living History

Transcribing

 

[1] Beth Forrest et al, “Teaching Food History: a Discussion Among Practitioners,” Global Food History 3.2 (2017): 194-208.

 

 

Scarborough Fare: Recipes at the Culinaria Research Centre

In this post, Jeffrey Pilcher explains the development of a dynamic research initiative, the University of Toronto Scarborough‘s Culinaria Research Centre, an interdisciplinary program in food studies, history, and culture.

Jeffrey M. Pilcher

Recipes provide an endless source of discovery. Although I began my research more than twenty-five years ago, poring over the cookbook collection at the Condumex Archive in Mexico City, I continue to be amazed by the diversity and historical change in Mexican cuisine that are documented in recipe collections. In re-reading the first Mexican cookbook signed by a woman, Vicenta Torres de Rubio, I noticed that for the nineteenth-century elite, guacamole was not a dip of mashed avocado with chile but rather a European-style salad, carefully diced and garnished with oil and vinegar. Likewise, mole poblano, which is now considered Mexico’s national dish because of its mixture of New World chiles and chocolate with Old World spices, was once a colonial concoction made primarily with European ingredients such as lamb, pork, almonds, and sesame seeds, but seldom with the Indigenous turkey, and never, in the eighteenth century at least, with chocolate. Only after the Revolution of 1910 did Mexican elites embrace the Indigenous culinary heritage and its ingredients.

University of Toronto Scarborough by Loozrboy. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons via Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0.
University of Toronto Scarborough by Loozrboy. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons via Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0.

 

Students in the Food Studies program at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, actively participate in the discovery of historical food and culture. Daniel Bender began teaching a course called “Edible History” a decade ago using a portable heating unit to provide cooking demonstrations. The class came into its own with the construction of the Culinaria Kitchen Laboratory, funded through an Ontario provincial infrastructure grant, which allowed students in lab sections to prepare recipes at their own cooking stations, thereby gaining an experiential understanding of culinary labor. Homework assignments reinforce this process of discovery by asking students to independently reconstruct historical recipes and reflect on what their successes — and failures — in the kitchen reveal about foods from the past. As the highpoint of the class, students run a pop-up curry kitchen in place of a midterm exam, preparing a range of historical recipes for people across the campus, thereby exploring the genealogies of a globe-trotting dish.

Other colleagues at UTSC have used recipes and cooking for community-engaged education. Donna Gabaccia first taught a women’s studies class called “Gender in the Kitchen” while the Culinaria Kitchen Lab was still under construction. Unable to do lab exercises with the students, she sent them out to create a community cookbook called “Scarborough Fare,” named for the suburb of Toronto in which our campus is located. Many collected recipes from their mothers and grandmothers. The cookbook reflects the rich diversity of Scarborough’s immigrant communities and helps to build ties between these groups as people sample their neighbors’ dishes. The innovations that result from these exchanges are creating the future of Canada’s multicultural cuisine. Jayeeta Sharma added yet another dimension to this community engagement in a class called “Cuisine and Culture Across Global Asia” by taking students to the UTSC campus garden together with members of the Access Alliance Rooftop Garden. Students interviewed the community gardeners to learn about the global recipes they prepared from their Toronto garden plants, thereby gaining cross-cultural competencies not only by learning about the foods of other lands but also by interacting in the garden and kitchen with the bearers of these traditions.

Lanzhou Beef Noodle Soup. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons via CC by 3.0
Lanzhou Beef Noodle Soup. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons via CC by 3.0

The capstone of the Food Studies program is an intensive research seminar such as the “Culinary Ethnography” class that I teach. Each week, we spend the first half of the seminar discussing a reading about some aspect of food and culture, for example, Sidney Mintz’s essay “Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom,” which offers a concise history of Caribbean cuisine while reflecting on the meaning of food choices for enslaved Africans. Afterwards, we prepared a dish of callaloo with plantains to experience and reflect on the tastes of early modern globalization. For their major project, students had to research and write about some element of Toronto’s food system or culinary cultures such as a dish, restaurant, or cook. One student reconstructed the origins of Lanzhou Beef Noodles, a hugely popular hand-pulled noodle dish that originated in the provincial capital of Gansu in northwestern China and has now spread across the country and throughout the Chinese diaspora. Beginning with a legendary recipe attributed to an eighteenth-century scholar, the student looked critically at how the noodles evolved over time and were spread — not by the inhabitants of Lanzhou but rather by migrant cooks from an impoverished nearby town. For the final seminar meeting, students prepared their chosen dish and shared it with the class. Thus, students in UTSC’s Food Studies program not only learn about food through reading recipes but through the embodied, experiential processes of preparing and tasting food from them.

Recipes: Reading Between the Lines

In today’s post, Lisa Myers describes the possibilities in using recipes as a teaching tool to explore ideas about power, social relationships, and connection.

Lisa Myers

During breakfast at the gas station/restaurant in Shawanaga, the reserve where my mother was born, my family’s conversation revolved around food memories. The soup and skaan special roused a discussion of how our Granny made the best skaan (pronounced “skawn,” also known as bannock or fry bread). That skaan was so good, I almost convinced myself that I would never be able to make it that well. My sister explained that her own skaan always came out hard as a rock. Uncle Sonny piped up, “I know how to make scone,” and started listing off measurements: “three cups of flour, three heaping teaspoons of baking powder, some salt, then you add some water, and don’t mix it too much.” My sister turned to me and responded by asking me to show her how to make it because she needs to do it with someone to get the feel of it.[1] Confirming food’s capacity to connect people with places, history, and a sense of cultural identity, the common understanding of this simple food was enriching.

There is a tension in recipes that written instructions are not enough or that somehow the maker will miss something or not do something integral but omitted from the text. Seeing someone make it carries more nuance and offers reassurance. This simple recipe represents ingredients from mere rations, and the preparation of such ingredients show the resilience of Indigenous people across North America, but also as traces of colonization since there are simple breads like these across the globe.

Beyond personal likes and dislikes, food symbolizes visceral connections to the past and stands in as a cultural affirmation that people need to reclaim as their own.  Embedded in even the most simplistic recipes are the tensions between land, food, and culture. Taking a recipe and doing an analysis of one of the ingredients or the context in which it was made reveals so much about power relations and social conditions. This is the assignment I give to a graduate class I teach called Food, Land and Culture in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. As a writing response to the weekly readings I ask students to use the convention of a written recipe as a literary device to respond to the week’s readings. The following are two examples of these brief recipe/responses:

Tzazna Miranda Leal, Masters of Environmental Studies Student in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University:

"Pipian Recipe." Courtesy of the author.
“Pipian Recipe.” Courtesy of the author.

Rabia Ahmed, Masters of Environmental Studies Student in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University:

(PDF version here).

"Recipe for Resistance." Courtesy of the author.
“Recipe for Resistance.” Courtesy of the author.

[1] A section of this text is from: Lisa Myers, “Serving it Up,” The Senses and Society 7:2 (2012): 173-195.