Category Archives: 18th Century

18th Century, Food and Drink, Posts, Series: Japanese Studies, Spring 2026

The “Silent Summary of Cooking” in Feudal Japan

22/04/2026 Jess Clark Leave a comment

In eighteenth-century feudal Japan, some of the most impressive culinary work was also the least visible. Court chefs prepared elaborate banquets for lords and shoguns, yet their names appear only in private records. Their expertise lived not in bustling restaurants or published books but in personal notes, oral instruction, and years of accumulated practice. The story of Funaki Den’nai (1685–1759) offers a rare window into that hidden world of personal recipes and the extensive research it entails.

Den’nai was the head chef of the Kaga Domain, a wealthy regional court on the Sea of Japan governed by the powerful Maeda clan. He came from modest origins, the son of a handyman in a vassal household, with only three years of cooking experience as a commis, appointed official cook at just twenty-two, apparently through direct recognition of his talent. He was recruited after an unsuccessful call for skilled chefs, the strict selection process having weeded out all other candidates. The importance the Maeda placed on their head chef stemmed from the clan using cooking as a tool to win over the central government, and from their lords having a special personal interest in the culinary arts and local food culture. The Maeda supported Dennai’s career over the following decades, working between the domains of Kanazawa Castle in Kaga and the Edo villa (modern Tokyo). He rose to become the principal administrator of the Maeda kitchens, a position prestigious enough to earn him a samurai title, making him one of the domain’s celebrated hōchō samurai, or “knife samurai.”

Fig. 1. Asano River in Kaga, near Kanazawa Castle. In Tabimiyage (Travel Souvenirs) by Kawase Hasui (1920). Image courtesy of Japan National Diet Library Digital Collections

What made Den’nai exceptional was not just his cooking but his compulsion to write everything down. He began keeping personal notebooks at thirty-four with a treatise on banquet cuisine and continued for the rest of his life: food taboos, medical combinations, Japanese and foreign recipes, current affairs, and opinions on the declining state of Japanese cooking. His masterwork was the nine-volume Ryōri Mugonshō (Silent Summary of Cooking), begun in 1727 and completed after his death by his son Yasunobu. It is the most comprehensive culinary encyclopedia of the Edo period (1600-1868).

The Silence of Ryōri Mugonshō meant that it was never meant for the public eye. It was a working document, a private archive compiled for the chefs who would succeed him, so that the knowledge that sustained Kaga’s reputation would live on. What Den’nai thought his successors needed to know about cooking went far beyond recipes. The work reads less like a cookbook and more like a natural history of food. Each entry on an ingredient records its regional names, sourcing locations, quality grades, preservation methods, seasonal variations, and medicinal uses. Sketches help identify easily confused plants and mushrooms. Historical notes trace an ingredient’s origins and regional food customs. That breadth reflects how Den’nai developed his expertise. He had three main sources: written texts (Chinese herbology, Japanese cookbooks, classical literature), informants (from farmers and fishermen to leading herbalists and doctors), and his own direct observation. The three years he spent as a chef in rural Kaga left traces throughout the encyclopedia: entries on acorns and horse chestnuts—foods too astringent and humble for any court menu— describe how mountain communities processed them, steeped and dried, then ground and mixed into rice cakes. Similar practices were recorded by ethnologists in remote Japanese villages in the early twentieth century, echoing the methods Den’nai had documented two hundred years earlier.

His attention to Kaga’s regional specialties is particularly remarkable, and in line with his lords’ gastro-political interests. He documents the famous winter sardines of Himi Bay in Kaga with the precision of someone who has sourced and cooked them. He notes with pride that Edo sardines are oilier and plainly inferior. Because Kaga’s fresh produce could not be easily brought elsewhere due to spoilage, Den’nai also records how his lords cultivated local plants at their Edo residence. For example, he talks about them growing a wild sweet-and-sour fruit vine called mube (Stauntonia hexaphylla), which was traditionally offered back in Kaga as tribute from a remote village on the Nōto peninsula. Food was crucial to regional diplomacy and to fending off nostalgia when away from home.

Fig. 2. Sardine Fishing Hut in Himi Bay, Etchu Province, Kaga Domain. In Tabimiyage (Travel Souvenirs) by Kawase Hasui (1920). Image courtesy of Japan National Diet Library Digital Collections

What the Ryōri Mugonshō preserves, in the end, is the full texture of how culinary knowledge moved in premodern Japan: through conversations with producers and merchants, through fieldwork and reading, through sourcing and experimentation. Den’nai’s personal collection was a working archive of messy and encyclopedic (yet professional) learning. Yet it only received public recognition 250 years after his death, when local historians unearthed and published some of his writings. Scholars today praise Ryōri Mugonshō for offering a nuanced, everyday view of premodern Japanese food, and Den’nai’s life even inspired the 2012 period drama Bushi no Kondate (A Samurai’s Menu). Ryōri Mugonshō is a reminder of how much knowledge can live in the unofficial record; that is what makes it feel genuinely alive.

Sources and Recommended Literature

National Diet Library. “Ryōri Mugonshō [2].” Tokyo: National Diet Library Digital Collections, accessed December 21, 2025.

Nishimura, Shintarō. Kyūchū no Shefu, Tsuru o Sabaku: Edo Jidai no Chōtei to Hōchōdō. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2012.

Osawa, Yoshimi. “Ethnobotanical Review of Traditional Use of Wild Food Plants in Japan.” Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 20, no. 1 (2024): 100.

Pilcher, Jeffrey M. “Banquets Against Boredom: Towards Understanding (Samurai) Cuisine in Early Modern Japan.” In Food History: Critical and Primary Sources: Global Contact and Early Industrialization, edited by Jeffrey M. Pilcher and Eric C. Rath. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.

Rath, Eric C. Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.

Tō, Tomoko, and Watanuki, Toyoaki. Hōchō-zamurai Funaki Dennai: Kaga Hyakumangoku no Okakae Ryōrinin. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2013.

Watanuki, Toyoaki, ed. Kaga-han Ryōrinin Funaki Dennai Hensanchoshū. Toyama: Katsura Shobō, 2006.

Yoneda, Naofumi. Ryōri Mugonshō: Kaga-han Okakae Ryōrinin Funaki Dennai no Shokuzai Hyakka. Kanazawa: Noto Insatsu Shuppanbu, 2016.

Miguel Ángel Pelayo Prieto, a native of Zamora, Spain, is a PhD candidate in the Graduate School of Agriculture at Kyoto University. Miguel’s research focuses on the historical evolution of vanishing wild ingredients in Japanese cuisine from the Edo period to the present, as documented in recipes. He views cuisine as an expression of the relationship between humans and nature (ethnobiological knowledge), integrating historical and ethnological methodologies and emphasizing the reconstruction of the materiality of Japanese culinary culture. This approach aims not only to deepen our understanding of food history but also to revive lost culinary knowledge for use in contemporary cooking. As a former line cook and sous chef, Miguel puts that knowledge into practice through pop-up events.

Mail: mappfgh@gmail.com

Instagram: miguelap8 (personal)/ remapped.recipes (pop-ups)

18th Century, 19th Century History, British Studies, Posts, Recipes and Recipe Books, Spring 2026

Culinary Literacy in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Personal Recipe Collections

22/04/2026 Jess Clark Leave a comment

By Elizabeth M. Schmidt

When I graduated from college in 2011, my cousin Aurora gave me a cookbook she had compiled. Titled “Everything but the Kitchen Sink,” it was a binder filled with her favorite recipes: some she wrote herself and others she collected from friends online. Over the years, I added to the binder, slipping magazine cutouts between the pages and taping in small pieces of note paper on which I had scribbled instructions. The cookbook Aurora gave me is part of a long tradition of personal recipe collections created by, and for, women. These collections can be found in kitchens, attics, drawers, libraries, and archives around the world. As readers of The Recipes Project will know, historians have found recipes useful for thinking about how and what households ate, and they are often prized for their access to women’s voices and perspectives.

The varied nature of these collections make them tricky to catalog, and the lack of information on the compilers is often perplexing. An eighteenth-century recipe collection by Elizabeth Michel, currently housed at the Wellcome Library, was initially catalogued by someone around 1931 who referred to Michel as “illiterate,” even though the book was clearly written by someone familiar with the written word and educated to some degree. In 2010, literary historian Wendy Wall used this cookbook and catalog entry as the impetus for an essay that confronted the question of literacy in relation to what she called “the domestic arts,” specifically pointing out the ways that literacy is often unfairly gendered.^[1]

What I want to make clear is that the people building these recipe collections were both compilers and authors. Women like Michel were acting as compilers by collecting recipes from various sources, but also as writers by modifying the recipes they collected and creating the books themselves. This became evident when I initially began researching personal recipe collections and wanted to find evidence of real-world use of published cookbooks from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Like many, I have shelves of cookbooks that I have collected but rarely cooked from. I wanted to know if this was the case centuries earlier: if eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts were also collector pieces rather than used on a regular basis. In two nineteenth-century manuscripts I found explicit evidence of engagement with a published book. In the cookbook collection at Texas Woman’s University’s Blagg-Huey Library was a recipe book by Mrs. E. A. Foord, an author who copied out a “Claret Cup” recipe from Isabella Beeton’s 1865 book The Dictionary of Every-Day Cookery. Then, at the Huntington Library, I found a recipe collection written by Susannah Judith Blencowe which included the following note: “For Oyster Sauce refer to Miss Rundell page 320 Calves foot jelly Mrs. Glasse page 295 Carrot Soup Cobbet’s 131,” referencing Maria Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery (1842), Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1784), and Anne Cobbett’s The English Housekeeper: or, Manual of Domestic Management (1840).

These were certainly classic examples of literacy, but what I found in the rest of the pages of Foord and Blencowe’s collections, as well as in countless other manuscripts I examined, were examples of a larger “culinary literacy.” Culinary literacy includes the ability to read published cookbooks and competently write out recipes, but it also entails engagement with information networks, friends and family sharing recipes amongst themselves, as well as the ability to modify recipes based on experience, knowledge of how to find appropriate ingredients, and practical skills.

For example, in addition to Beeton’s “Claret Cup,” Mrs. Foord’s recipe collection had attributions to at least forty-nine different people, including a recipe for “Curry” attributed to Abraham Cook, one for “Mango Pickle” she received from Mrs. Norfor while Foord was living in Cuddalore, and a recipe for “Little Cakes” from a butler working for a family named Caldwell. Michel’s book, which instigated Wall’s initial inquiry into literacy, also includes attributions, such as “To Make Plum Cakes My Lady Nowell’s Way,” “My Lady Lucas’s Receipt to Pickle Wallnuts,” and “Sugar Cakes Mrs. Carter’s Way.” The networks accessed by Foord and Michel, evidenced by these examples, crossed international boundaries within the British empire, as well as class boundaries. Michel’s distinction between Lady Nowell and Mrs. Carter indicates that she was sharing recipes with women in the nobility as well as the middling classes.

Fig. 1. Page from Elizabeth Michel’s recipe book. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

Beyond published cookbooks and acquaintances, culinary literacy includes engagement with other sources. Foord included clippings from newspapers in her recipe collection, such as three recipes for marmalades and five “tea-time” recipes for using marrow (a squash similar to a zucchini), and recipes cut from an advertising pamphlet created by a commercial flour company, Paisley.

Fig. 2. Page from Mrs. E. A. Foord’s recipe book. Photo taken by author, permission from TWU

Beyond just incorporating the recipes into their collections, our compilers also often made changes to them. Michel felt it necessary to include the caveat “my own way” on a recipe for cakes, implying that while this particular recipe was something she had invented, any other unattributed recipes in her collection were likely copied from books; by writing “my own way” she claimed authorship and exhibited pride in that fact. On a clipping for “A Breakfast Preserve,” an M. J. Foord added notes modifying the recipe to utilize the natural pectin in the orange seeds but avoid leaving them in the finished product. This example of “kitchen literacy” is key in understanding how these personal recipe collections are products of a larger culinary literacy that encompassed engagement with published texts, exchange of information within social networks, and a body of knowledge gained through experience. Incidentally, Elizabeth Michel’s entry at the Wellcome Library still describes the recipe book as being written in an “illiterate hand,” which showcases the need for resources to re-evaluate catalog descriptions across all archives and adjust them to reflect this idea of culinary literacy.

Fig. 3. Page from Mrs. E. A. Foord’s recipe book. Photo taken by author, permission from TWU

^[1] Wendy Wall, “Literacy and the Domestic Arts,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 73:3 (September 2010), 384. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1525/hlq.2010.73.3.383.pdf

Elizabeth M. Schmidt is a recent PhD from the University of California Santa Barbara specializing in British Atlantic foodways of the eighteenth century. From roast beef to turtle soup, she researches the intersection of eating and identity during the Age of Revolutions and imperial turmoil. Using microhistories of figures like sailors, military generals, merchants, and housewives, she explores the impact of foodways on discussions of identity, belonging, inclusion, and exclusions. Elizabeth also enjoys cooking historical manuscript recipes, translating eighteenth and nineteenth century instructions, measurements, and tools into their modern equivalent to learn what she can about culinary knowledge and labor.

18th Century, Culinary History, Manuscripts, Posts, Recipes and Recipe Books, Spring 2026

Folding and Pinning: Organization in Two Eighteenth-Century Swedish Recipe Collections

15/04/2026 Jess Clark Leave a comment

By Isabelle Fredborg

4 äggegulor 1 jungfru grädda 6 lod såcker ett hön ägg smör

What called for 4 egg yolks, 8 centiliters of cream, 80 grams of sugar and butter the size of a hen’s egg? With both the title and method missing, I assumed it to be some type of pastry, based on its surrounding recipes. Even after having studied some forty Swedish recipe collections from the eighteenth century, I was not used to this type of guesswork. I had seen both manuscript cookbooks carefully written as prestigious gifts as well as those assembled for personal use and filled with furious scribbles. But opening this archival folder, I was surprised by a thick bunch of sheets of various sizes and colors. Carefully picking up a small sheet, I was struck by not just its dark ink, but also the traces of how it had been folded and the clusters of small holes.

The two collections of the Esplunda archive (Riksarkivet Marieberg, Sweden) are attributed to the Swedish countesses Lovisa Ulrika Horn and her daughter-in-law Catharina Ulrika Heijkenskjöld, both of whom married into the Mörner family. They enjoyed a life close to the power of the Royal court, with a strong social network and considerable financial means. Both Horn’s and Heijkenskjöld’s collections survive as bunches of loose recipe sheets and a few sewn booklets – very different from the leather-bound volumes I had previously examined.

The collections show signs of having grown over time, through many hands and on whatever paper was available. Numerous hands had contributed to both collections, in penmanship styles ranging from the second half of the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Some recipes carried attribution from other countesses. The variety of paper sizes, colors and qualities suggested not just that recipes came from outside the household, but that they were sometimes written on whatever paper was at hand, including one sheet with a black border, revealing the paper’s past as a condolence letter. Most sheets showed clear signs of having been folded, sometimes to the point of tearing. The folded size is slightly larger than a modern business card.

Most small and mid-sized sheets were perforated with small holes. In the Horn collection, a few remaining pins suggested two reasons for the pin holes. One pin keeps two separate recipe sheets pinned together, binding a recipe for butter pretzels with brewing instructions. Another recipe, on clarifying tallow, shows how notes could be extended with an additional sheet when more space was needed for the instructions.

Fig. 1. Pins keeping two recipes together (left) and extending a recipe (right). Lovisa Ulrika Horn’s recipe collection, Esplunda vol I:117, Riksarkivet Marieberg. Photo credit: Isabelle Fredborg

Some papers had been sewn into booklets with needle and thread, often organised around a theme, such as compotes and puddings or flavoured spirits. In Heijkenskjöld’s collection, one such booklet stood out by mostly featuring lists of ingredients with measurements, sometimes with a title – Mandeltorta, “Almond torte”, Bakelse, “Pastry”, and Buding, “Pudding” – but no instructions.

A few pages featured small, folded notes pinned to them, revealing additional ingredient lists and measurements but no instructions, title or method. The unknown pastry from the beginning of this article was one of them. Based on the many holes, these notes had been pinned, removed, and re-pinned repeatedly, suggesting active use or perhaps a favorite recipe. Instead of providing clear instructions, this type of note functioned as a prompt for someone who had the necessary skill and experience to make the recipe and only needed to be reminded of the proportions. What was worth writing down was only what could not be remembered.

Fig. 2. Two recipe notes without title or method, pinned onto a booklet page with many holes. Catharina Ulrika Heijkenskjöld’s recipe collection, Esplunda vol I:191, Riksarkivet Marieberg. Photo credit: Isabelle Fredborg

In both collections, the pin functioned as a tool encouraging flexibility and mobility, a mobility hinted at by the folded size of the sheets. Small enough to fit into one of the pockets commonly used in eighteenth-century women’s dress, recipes could be transported between rooms, tucked away mid-task, or sent by post between friends and acquaintances. The pinning allowed its owner to organize groupings, with certain recipes clustered together for a season, a dinner, or a particular task, then detached and returned to the collection. The pin was the system’s adjustable element, making the collection physically editable in a way a bound book never could be. The folding and pinning suggested not a collection assembled for show or instruction, but one in constant, practical use by women who already knew what they were doing.

Isabelle Fredborg is a master’s student in ethnology at Umeå University, with a focus on eighteenth-century Swedish recipe manuscripts. She runs Project Henrika, which digitizes, transcribes, and publishes these manuscripts to make them accessible for research.

18th Century, British Studies, Culinary History, Early Modern, Food and Drink, Posts, Series: Alcohol, Spring 2023

Outside Issues: Tea Gardens in Early Modern London

18/05/2023 Melissa Reynolds 2 Comments

By James Brown

The HERA-funded research project Intoxicating Spaces (2019–22), on which I was fortunate enough to work and which explored material environments for the production, trafficking, and consumption of new intoxicants in Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, and Stockholm 1600–1850, coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant lockdowns. An avid user of bars, cafes, and restaurants in Sheffield in the UK, where I live and where the project was headquartered, I admired and became fascinated by the creative ways in which these hospitality businesses adapted and repurposed outdoor spaces – gardens, pavements, patios, roads, and yards – in response to bans and restrictions on indoor socialising (measures which have a long historical precedent in plague time). These present-day crisis developments inspired me to take my own research on early modern London outside into the open air.

Photo of two shoppers at ordering at the outdoor window of a bar. — Gatsby on Sheffield’s Division Street with its new outdoor serving window – ‘The Great Hatchby’ – in April 2021. Photo: Author.

There were various kinds of al fresco food and drink retailing in the early modern capital, from the street-sellers recently investigated by Charlie Taverner and Freya Purcell, to the temporary (or, in modern parlance, ‘pop-up’) booths that sprouted in the royal parks and during fairs. However, one of the most common was the tea garden, a distinctive species of space that flourished in the metropolis – as in other cities across the continent – between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. The significance of these environments, especially for the enjoyment and assimilation of new intoxicating substances, has yet to receive the historiographical attention it deserves. Environmental and garden historians have tended to focus their energies on large-scale, well-documented pleasure gardens such as Marylebone, Ranelagh, and Vauxhall. Most historians of intoxicants and intoxication, meanwhile, have generally ignored tea gardens in favour of the more familiar indoor locales of alehouse, coffeehouse, household, inn, and tavern; they get only a single passing reference, for example, in this excellent recent monograph on tea. This is possibly because, faced with London’s spiralling population and growing pressure from property developers, most of them disappeared from the urban landscape over the course of the nineteenth century.

Watercolor painting of white building with several people standing in the lawn in front of the building. — An 1853 watercolour by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd depicting Copenhagen House tea garden in Islington. British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The heyday of the metropolitan tea garden was the eighteenth century into the early decades of the 1800s. Estimates of their numbers vary, from c.200 at the top end to the more conservative figure of 65 proposed by Penelope Corfield. I’ve identified around 90, the locations of 81 of which I’ve been able to pinpoint with some accuracy using the visualisation software Tableau. As the interactive map shows, tea gardens were broadly dispersed across the capital and its rural hinterland, although in the terminology of human geography five broad ‘clusters’ can be identified: there was a particularly concentrated central group around Clerkenwell; a Marylebone group; a Chelsea group; a south of the river group; and two outlying Islington and Hampstead groups scattered along the leafy roads and arteries leading out of the city to the north. Within the overarching rubric of tea garden, however, surviving visual evidence indicates there was a huge amount of spatial variety; compare Copenhagen House in Islington, a huge semi-rural tavern with extensive grounds, to the much more bounded setting of the Yorkshire Stingo public house and tea gardens in Paddington.

Water color painting of a two-story pub with fenced front yard where several patrons are sitting. — A mid nineteenth-century watercolour by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd showing the Yorkshire Stingo pub and tea garden in Lisson Grove. British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Food and drink was central to the offering, and – as their name denotes – tea gardens were most closely associated with a new generation of New World intoxicants, especially caffeinated beverages, and particularly tea. There were three main ways in which they fostered the incorporation of these novel substances into the diets and habits of Londoners. First, they were highly visual environments, dedicated to spectacle, the gaze, and the pleasures of the eye. Perhaps more so than any other kind of space, this made them ideal viewing platforms for the conspicuous consumption of fashionable new commodities like coffee, sugar, tea, and tobacco, and the cultivation of polite rituals surrounding them (the tea arbour or trellis is a recurring motif within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century century artistic discourses). Second, the availability of new intoxicants at the handful of spa gardens formed around natural springs – like Bermondsey Spa tea gardens, here described by the printer George Smeeton – would have strengthened existing conceptual associations between coffee, tea, tobacco, and good health. Third, while not wishing to labour the obvious, tea gardens were botanical. Their lawns, shrubberies, and trees offered a carefully curated, sometimes exotic rusticity, while those in outlying locations to points north, east, west, and south offered vantage points from which the sprawl of the global imperial city could be appreciated and admired. They were therefore almost archetypal settings for the enjoyment of agricultural derivatives from tropical climes.

Black-and-white water color painting of many patrons enjoying tea in the gardens abutting a large house. — An 1830 watercolour by George Scharf depicting Jack Straw’s Castle in Hampstead, featuring customers taking tea in distinctive arbours or alcoves. British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

However, in characteristic fashion, tea gardens were also hybridised consumption spaces that retained close associations with traditional stimulants and intoxicating spaces. They were not standalone or sui generis ventures emerging from nowhere, but were generally opened by enterprising publicans on sites contiguous with inns, taverns, and alehouses; as well as the example of the Yorkshire Stingo above, see this drawing of the Chalk Farm tea gardens in Camden, where the outdoor space is adjacent to the colonnaded public house. As such, ‘old’ intoxicants in the form of alcohols (beer, wine, and spirits) were just as likely to be served and consumed within them as caffeinated drinks. This satirical etching, for example, depicts Bagnigge Wells, a fashionable spa and resort in Clerkenwell; while a kettle sits abandoned in the distance, a grinning waiter uncorks a bottle of wine or spirits for the three fashionably dressed male customers. This chimes with our findings elsewhere in the project; coffee’s percolation throughout provincial England, for example, was facilitated not by freestanding coffeehouses but by the creation of ‘coffee rooms’ within long-established drinking houses.

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