Category Archives: Autumn 2025

‘All Manner of Fluxes:’ Plants and the Natalist Conquest of British Colonial America

Virginian Rock Polypody Fern. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Virginian Rock Polypody Fern. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

By Fiona O’Brien

The flows and fluxes of bodily fluids that determined an early modern woman’s embodied existence would need to be, if not controlled, understood by her. If we focus on the fluidity of the early modern reproductive body, we can begin to better understand the materia medica used to treat it; once we do so, we can begin to compare worldviews more aptly, and examine, for example, the continuities and breaks between the reproductive pharmacopeias used by Indigenous Americans and English colonists. If we accept population expansion and settlement to be a key aspect of the building of the early paternalistic American state, these materia medica used for regulating the female body become pertinent to histories of colonization, law, and politics. How was the natalist conquest of early Northeast America fueled by this piecemeal process of filling a pharmacopeia full of the familiar, and stuffing the unfamiliar into known molds? How do we investigate this process as historians, when both parties of women concerned, Indigenous and English, left few records behind?

European Polypody Fern. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
European Polypody Fern. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.


English colonists uniformly observed that Indigenous women gave birth in total isolation, did not feel pain while doing so, and recovered almost immediately: in 1634, William Wood tells English readers that for Indigenous women in New England, “a bigge bellie hinders no business, nor a childebirthe takes much time.” [1] Clearly, there was a lack of interest in recording the birthing practices of Indigenous women. But maybe we begin to get answers if we flow between sources, thus crafting an amorphous middle-ground. Early modern recipes encourage us to engage with sources collectively; those sources themselves cannot be understood in isolation, but require that the historian temporarily inhabit the phenomenal, the experiential, the habitual body.

According to Western medicine, peak health was believed to be reached when humoral balance was suited to the condition, climate, and individual. It was therefore believed that when early modern Europeans left their homelands, they risked moral, customary, and physiological degeneration; a hot climatic change would cool the man’s body and heat the woman’s.[2] The overheated female body could overmenstruate, expel fetuses, and fail to purify blood into seed or breastmilk.[3] This risked the colonial project: women were required to establish a successful colony, but their reproductivity was in danger within this humoral cosmology.

In order for a medication to be successful, it must purge: the healing patient should be vomiting, bleeding, urinating, sweating, or crying. This meant the body’s proper flow was restored, needless stoppages and loose fluids ushered back into their rightful places.[4] The humoral chilly moistness of the female body rendered the woman passive and kind, but also meant that her body was dangerously subject to disease due to its porosity and permeability.[5] Much of the female body’s organization and survival was linked to her heat, blood flow, womb, and seed, and thus to her menstrual capabilities.

But how did the English understand new ingredients that may have been visually identical to their own cures contained within their recipe books back in the metropole? ‘Flow’ provides a useful starting point. As Laurence Totelin puts it, “a woman’s life is marked by fluxes, healthy or otherwise,”[6] so historians must broadly consider the use of abortifacients or emmenagogues– agents which increase blood circulation to the pelvic area and stimulate menstruation[7]–without being clouded by our modern understanding of abortion.

Perhaps ‘flow’ was on the minds of colonists when they spotted the ubiquitous and familiar fern crawling up New England stumps and rocks. Maidenhair and polypody ferns were repeated throughout their recipe books’ entries, specifically when related to flow and heat: in 1719, Mary Kettilby recommended a mixture of herbs sweetened with “Syrup of Maiden-hair” as “a cooling drink in a Fever or Pleurisie.” Midwife Jane Sharp recommended that the polypody ferns be “bruised and boyl[ed]” then drunk, as a remedy “Against the Piles or Hemorrhoids” in postpartum women, and in 1674, Susanna Packe recommended “six ounces Polipedy” to “cleans the body of sharp humor or Mullinchollly.”

The Haudenosaunee use(d) lamb’s quarters to prevent milk flow when the child is stillborn,[8] and black snakeroot to promote it when the child is healthy.[9] Kettilby recommended “Virginia snake-weed” for use “in any malignant distemper,”[10] and in 1798 Benjamin Barton called it “a valuable medicine…sometimes called Squaw-root…from its having been used as a medicine by our Indians.”[11] “Squaw-root” points to its omnipresence in Indigenous midwifery pharmacopeia for its promotion of slow labor.[12]  Jane Staveley’s 1693 recipe book recommended “A very strengthening Medicine,” including “1 Oz. of Snake root put into a Bottle of Port Wine,” while a century later and an ocean apart, Martha Ballard recalled the inclusion of Virginia snakeroot in a water used to deliver a woman of a dead child.[13]

We can turn back to the fern here, too: maidenhair is recommended by the Haudenosaunee for excessive menstruation and abortal pains. Biologist Lenore May notes that maidenhair fronds were distilled into syrups to mitigate “female disorders” by Indigenous Americans.[14] The American Adiantum pedatum variety of maidenhair was interpreted by colonists as interchangeable with the English variety, Adiantum capillus-veneris. “Maiden Hair, or Cappellus veneris verus” was recommended by John Josselyn in 1672  “For all manner of Fluxes.” In 1653, Nicholas Culpeper remarked that fern can “purge the belly” and “cause abortion.”[15] Sharp, on cures for womb ulcers that have degenerated into fistulas, recommended a “vulnerary decoction”–used to aid in the healing of wounds– of, among other ingredients, the “roots of male fern.”

Purgation and reinstatement of proper flow are central, so the removal of a deceased fetus was also relevant. Postpartum hemorrhage, or “bloody flux” after delivery, was certainly a death sentence, to say nothing of resulting childbed fevers and infections. The Seneca practiced some form of herbal family limitation for centuries preconquest,[16] but the conflation of abortifacients used for non-abortive reproductive health purposes has led to confusion: overall, both Indigenous and English women placed emphasis on bodily flow. This emphasis in Indigenous communities is compounded by their use of sweat lodges and herb-smoking,[17] mirrored in European reproductive healthcare back to the medieval period.[18]

When we privilege “flow” as a search term, we begin to understand more about the history of colonization, and health writ large. Flow is inherent in the medium of the recipe book, too: as Wendy Wall argues, recipes represent a transitional space, the movement from “raw to cooked…nature to art, from shapeless materia to cultural product.”[19] The epistemology of the recipe book is then one predicated on flow, just as was the success of an early modern reproductive remedy.
*****
Fiona O’Brien is a second year PhD student in history at Fordham University, where she is a Loyola Distinguished Fellow and works as a writing tutor to undergraduate students. She recently completed a funded Scholarly Programs Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, during which she presented work on early modern abortion. She presented papers focused on early modern reproductive history at several conferences over the course of her first year of the PhD, including one which analyzed the medical character of late medieval fertility and birth rituals and compared them to early modern remedy. She completed her BA and MA at the University of Toronto. During this latter degree, she was supervised by Dr. Nicholas Terpstra in the completion of her thesis, entitled “Our Groans to God: The Synching of Sensory and Emotional Experience During the Early Modern Birth Process,” and worked as a graduate promotions fellow at the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies.

Works Cited
Primary Sources

Barton, Benjamin Smith. Collections for an Essay towards a Materia Medica of the United States. Philadelphia, 1798. The National Library of Medicine. http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/2542050R

Culpeper, Nicholas. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal: Over 400 Herbs and their Uses. Edited by Diana Vowles. Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2009.

Herrick, James W., and Dean R. Snow. Iroquois Medical Botany. 1st ed. The Iroquois and Their Neighbors. Syracuse University Press, 1995.

Kettilby, Mary. A collection of above three hundred recipes in cookery, physick and surgery: for the use of all good wives, tender mothers, and careful nurses. The second edition. London: Printed for Mary Kettilby, 1719. National Library of Medicine. http://resource.nlm.nih.gov

Packe, Susanna. Cookbook of Susanna Packe [manuscript].1 674. Folger Shakespeare Library, V.a.215. https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Recipe_books_at_the_Folger_Shakespeare_Library

Plant Atlas 2020. Botanical Society of Britain & Ireland and UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. Biological Records Center, UK. https://plantatlas2020.org/atlas/.

PLANTS Database. Natural Resources Conservation Service. U.S. Department of Agriculture, https://plants.usda.gov/

Sharp, Jane. The midwives book, or, The whole art of midwifry discovered.: Directing childbearing women how to behave themselves in their conception, breeding, bearing, and nursing of children in six books. London: Printed for Simon Miller, at the Star at the West End of St. Pauls, 1671. Ann Arbor: Text Creation Partnership and digital collection Early English Books Online 2. https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A93039.0001.001. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections.

Wood, William. New England’s Prospect. London, 1634. In O’Brien, Jean M. “‘Divorced’ from the Land: Resistance and Survival of Indian Women in Eighteenth-Century New England”  In Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing. Eds. Kugel, Rebecca and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, eds., University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Secondary Sources

Chaplin, Joyce E. Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500 – 1676. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Cooper, Alix. Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Kugel, Rebecca and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, eds. Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing. University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Kumar, Dinesh, Ajay Kumar, and Om Prakash. “Potential Antifertility Agents from Plants: A Comprehensive Review.” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 140, no. 1 (2012): 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jep.2011.12.039.

May, Lenore Wile. “The Economic Uses and Associated Folklore of Ferns and Fern Allies.” Botanical Review 44, No. 4 (Oct.-Dec., 1978), pp. 491-528. Springer, New York Botanical Garden Press.

Mendelson, Sara Heller, and Patricia Crawford. Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720. Clarendon Press, 1998.

Rublack, Ulinka, and Pamela Selwyn. “Fluxes: The Early Modern Body and the Emotions.” History Workshop Journal, no. 53 (2002): 1–16. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4289771.

Shoemaker, Nancy.  “The Rise or Fall of Iroquois Women.”  In Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing. Eds. Kugel, Rebecca and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, eds., University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Tannenbaum, Rebecca J. Health and Wellness in Colonial America. Health and Wellness in Daily Life. Greenwood, 2012.

Totelin, Laurence M.V. “A Woman in Flux: Fluidity in Hippocratic Gynaecology.”  Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception, ed. Thumiger, Chiara. Studies in Ancient Medicine: 53. Brill, 2021.

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, and Martha Ballard. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. 1st Vintage Books ed. Vintage Books, 1991.

Volo, James and Dorothy. Family Life in Native America. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2007.

Wall, Wendy. Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Weisser, Olivia. Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England. Yale University Press, 2015.

[1] William Wood, New England’s Prospect (London, 1634), in Jean M. O’Brien, “‘Divorced’ from the Land: Resistance and Survival of Indian Women in Eighteenth-Century New England,” Rebecca Kugel and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, eds., Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing, (University of Nebraska Press, 2007): 353. Colonizing men made similar observations toward Black women in the Caribbean; for more information, see Jennifer L. Morgan, “‘Some could suckle over their shoulder’: male travelers, female bodies, and the gendering of racial ideology, 1500-1770,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 167-192.

[2] Alix Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007),  44.

[3] Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500 – 1676, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 133-134.

[4] Ulinka Rublack and Pamela Selwyn, “Fluxes: The Early Modern Body and the Emotions,” History Workshop Journal, no. 53 (2002), 1-2.

[5] Sara Heller Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 20.

[6] Laurence M.V. Totelin, “A Woman in Flux: Fluidity in Hippocratic Gynaecology,” Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception, ed. Chiara Thumiger, Studies in Ancient Medicine: 53. Brill (2021) 220.

[7] Dinesh Kumar, Ajay Kumar, and Om Prakash, “Potential Antifertility Agents from Plants: A Comprehensive Review,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 140, no. 1 (2012): 1–32.

[8]James W. Herrick and Dean R. Snow, Iroquois Medical Botany, 1st ed, The Iroquois and Their Neighbors, Syracuse University Press, 1995, 142

[9]  James W. Herric, Iroquois Medical Botany, 1st ed, (Syracuse University Press, 1995), 119.

[10] Kettilby. A collection, 133-134

[11] Benjamin Smith Barton, Collections for an Essay towards a Materia Medica of the United States, (Philadelphia, 1798, The National Library of Medicine), 9.

[12] Rebecca J. Tannenbaum, Health and Wellness in Colonial America, Health and Wellness in Daily Life, (Greenwood, 2012),  60-61.

[13] Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Martha Ballard, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, 1st Vintage Books ed. Vintage Books, 1991, 407.

[14] Lenore Wile May, “The Economic Uses and Associated Folklore of Ferns and Fern Allies,” Botanical Review 44, No. 4 (Oct.-Dec., 1978), Springer, New York Botanical Garden Press, 508.

[15]  Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s Complete Herbal: Over 400 Herbs and their Uses, edited by Diana Vowles, (Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2009), 158.

[16] Nancy Shoemaker, “The Rise or Fall of Iroquois Women,” in Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900, eds. Rebecca Kugel and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 318.

[17] James and Dorothy Volo, Family Life in Native America, (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2007), 95.

[18] Monica Helen Green, The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine.

[19] Wendy Wall, Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016),  5.

The King of Fruits: Pineapples and Class Culture in British Cookbooks from 1661-1850

By Elizabeth Schmidt

In 1789, John Taylor sent a pineapple to his mother Jean in Scotland; the pineapple was from his cousin’s plantation in Jamaica, where John lived and worked as a merchant. Not having seen the fruit before, Jean turned to friends for guidance. On November 20, she wrote to John: “I have not looked in to the Pine Apple yet as they tell me its only to show out a Grand Table & not to be eat.” Four months later she added, “I do not intend to open the Pin Apple till you Come.” Laying on maternal guilt to convince him to return for a visit, she promised John a party in his honor where the pineapple could sit center stage.

Native to South America, the pineapple was cultivated by Indigenous peoples across the Caribbean. The plant was called hoyriri or anona by the Tupi, and iaiama by the Taino. Columbus and his crew were probably the first Europeans to taste the fruit in Guadalupe, and they brought back a case of pineapples for King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Only one survived unspoiled enough to eat, but King Ferdinand declared it his favorite fruit after just one taste. In England, the first pineapple was presented to the king somewhere around 1661, a “queen-pine” from Barbados.[1] The fruit is quite beautiful: the hexagonal eyes around the body grow in a spiral sequence that are often cited as a three-dimensional representation of the Golden Ratio, and the leaves on the top of the pineapple are commonly referred to as its “crown.”[2]

In a painting by Hendrick Danckerts, ca. 1675-1680, King Charles II is presented with a pineapple. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
In a painting by Hendrick Danckerts, ca. 1675-1680, King Charles II is presented with a pineapple. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Why did Jean’s friends tell her it was not to be eaten, and only “to show”? Even today, producers harvest and ship pineapples before they are perfectly ripe to ensure that the fruit reaches its destination while still attractive, since ripe fruit bruises easily and rots quickly. Unfortunately, once a pineapple is harvested, it does not continue to ripen.[3]

In eighteenth-century Scotland, Jean’s pineapple would have looked attractive but tasted terrible. Cookbook authors capitalized on this, offering instructions to preserve pineapples whole for repeated display. First seen in Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English House-keeper (1769), preservation recipes were offered for readers who desired pineapple centerpieces. The fruit was brined for five days in saltwater, then boiled in a saucepan with the brining liquid. Then, the sugaring process began: the cook would submerge the pineapple in a thin sugar syrup for a week, remove it, re-boil the syrup, and then submerge again. This process was replicated over eight to ten weeks, with the syrup re-boiled two or three times in that period to prevent molding. Francis Collingwood refined these instructions in The Universal Cook and Country Housekeeper (1792): the pineapple was left in the jar for six to eight weeks, re-boiling the syrup every week. The final instruction was to remove the pineapple from the jar and cover it with a thick, cool, sugar syrup that had been boiled with slices of ginger, a natural preservative. According to Raffald and Collingwood, a pineapple preserved in this way would “keep several years, if tied down close with a bladder.” This preservation process had been used on fruit in Europe since the fourteenth century. Preservation played a key role in both cuisine and medicine through the eighteenth century, especially as diet remained a key element in managing health.[4]. In fact, Collingwood’s 1792 cookbook had similar instructions to preserve cherries with their stalks and leaves to “make a very pretty appearance in a desert [sic] by candle-light.”

By the mid-eighteenth century, aristocrats could buy pineapples grown in “pine-houses” rather than imported from the Caribbean. Dutch horticulturist Agnes Block experimented with propagating new pineapple plants from the crown of the fruit and successfully produced the first European-grown specimen in 1687. Later, horticulturists realized they could import whole plants from the West Indies: the plant is drought-resistant and capable of storing water in its leaves to keep it alive.[5] Soon elite estates across Britain built their own pine-houses. Cookbooks aimed at the upper classes introduced recipes for pineapple desserts as early as 1732, when Richard Bradley included a pineapple tart in The Country Housewife and Lady’s Director. In 1770, Borella’s The Court and Country Confectioner, a book clearly aimed at either royal or aristocratic houses, included two recipes for “Anana, or Pine Apple Cream Ices.” By the mid-nineteenth century, pineapple recipes were much more numerous yet still aimed at the upper classes. Charles Francatelli’s The Modern Cook (1846) had ten recipes with pineapple, including fritters, souffles, and brioche. Yet Francatelli was the chef to Queen Victoria, and his cookbook did not purport to be written for the average English housewife.

The practice of displaying pineapples continued long after recipes were developed for baking them into sweet treats. In P. Masters’s Young Cook’s Assistant, and Housekeeper’s Guide (1841), the recipe for “Pine Apple Cream” tells readers that “the pine must be quite ripe – one too ripe for the table will do for this purpose.” Cookbooks authored for the “middling classes” kept including the preservation recipe first written by Raffald, as pineapples remained quite expensive. A 1787 memoir of a London actress tells the story of finding pineapples for sale for one pound per fruit. The author remarks of the actress that “for the first time since I knew her, she declined to gratify her inclination at such an expence.”[6] At the coronation of King George IV in 1821, hundreds of hothouse pineapples were purchased for the banquet.[7] Some were certainly eaten, but others were displayed on tables as exotic centerpieces, as showcased in a painting of the event by Denis Dighton (1821)

The Third and Last Challenge by the Champion during King George IV's Coronation Banquet in Westminster Hall (1821). At intervals along the table, you can see the yellow pineapples with their green crowns. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
The Third and Last Challenge by the Champion during King George IV’s Coronation Banquet in Westminster Hall (1821). At intervals along the table, you can see the yellow pineapples with their green crowns. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

So, while John probably thought he was sending his mother an exotic, expensive, and exciting gift, he actually sent her a project: a fruit that required significant labor to transform it into a centerpiece she could showcase.
*****
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.

[1] Kaori O’Connor, Pineapple: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), 17-20.

[2] Judithlynne Carson, “Fibonacci Numbers and Pineapple Phyllotaxy,” The Two-Year College Mathematics Journal 9:3 (June 1978): 132.

[3] Fran Beauman, The Pineapple: King of Fruits (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005), 6.

[4] Anne Stobart, Household Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).

[5] Bauman, The Pineapple, 31; O’Connor, Pineapple, 24.

[6] Elizabeth Steele, The Memoirs of Mrs. Sophia Baddeley. Late of Drury-Lane Theatre (Dublin, 1787), 90.

[7] Sir Roy Strong, Coronation: A History of Kingship and the British Monarchy (London: Harper Collins, 2005), 33; James Jennings, Two Thousand Five Hundred Practical Recipes in Family Cookery (London, 1837), lv.

Ropa Vieja: A Colonial Stew of Global Threads

For my brother, Manuel Pino, who keeps our family’s best memories alive through his cooking.

Ropa Vieja. Image credit: Manuel Pino
Ropa Vieja. Image credit: Manuel Pino
By Alessandra Pino

Recipe: Ropa Vieja (Serves 6)

Legend has it that a poor man once cooked his old clothes because he had nothing else to feed his family. His love and care transformed the rags into a rich and comforting stew known as Ropa Vieja.

Although today it is considered a symbol of Cuban cuisine, both the story and the dish originated in the Canary Islands. The first known mention of the recipe appears in Nuevo Manual del Cocinero Cubano y Español (1857).[1]

First known printed recipe for “Ropa vieja” from Nuevo Manual del Cocinero Cubano y Español (Havana: Imprenta y Librería La Cubana, 1857), by J. P. Legran. University of Miami Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.library.miami.edu/digital/collection/chc9999/id/16111
First known printed recipe for “Ropa vieja” from Nuevo Manual del Cocinero Cubano y Español (Havana: Imprenta y Librería La Cubana, 1857), by J. P. Legran. University of Miami Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.library.miami.edu/digital/collection/chc9999/id/16111


In my Venezuelan family, this recipe has been passed down through generations. We call it
carne mechada and serve it inside arepas, a corn-based flatbread. I am recording it for the first time as I cook it for this piece.

Ingredients:

  • 900g flank steak, cut into bite-sized pieces
  • 1 onion, peeled and quartered
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 1 tablespoon of olive oil
  • 1 medium onion, sliced lengthwise into strips
  • 1 small red bell pepper, deseeded and sliced
  • 120g tinned chopped tomatoes
  • Salt and pepper, to taste

Method:

  1. Place the beef, quartered onion, garlic, and bay leaf in a pot and add enough water to cover. Bring to a slow boil over medium heat, then reduce to low and simmer for 2–3 hours.
  2. Strain the beef and broth through a fine-mesh strainer, reserving the liquid. When the beef is cool enough to handle, shred it with your fingers or two forks.
  3. In a skillet, warm the olive oil over medium heat. Add the sliced onion and green pepper and cook for 3–4 minutes, until softened. Stir in 360 ml of the remaining broth, tomatoes, shredded beef, and salt and pepper to taste. Simmer for 30 minutes to combine the flavours.

A Stew of Empire and displacement

Few dishes embody the entangled histories of empire, trade, and transcultural adaptation as vividly as ropa vieja, the “old clothes” stew that today stands as a culinary emblem of Cuba and the Canary Islands. Its name conjures up rags and scraps, yet its history is anything but threadbare: Jewish Sabbath traditions, Iberian colonial expansion, African slavery, and Indigenous ingredients of the Americas are stitched together in this deeply resilient dish.

Because cooking was prohibited on the Sabbath, Sephardi Jews often prepared a hearty stew the night before, allowing it to cook slowly until the following day. Ropa vieja is often understood as echoing these Iberian Jewish culinary traditions of the late medieval and early modern period. Sabbath dishes such as adafina or cholent — slow-cooked blends of legumes, vegetables, and meat — sometimes left behind strands of beef once the broth was consumed. These remnants could be reheated with onions, garlic, and chickpeas, producing a dish that resembled tattered rags, perhaps inspiring the evocative name ropa vieja. Following the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and the forced conversions that followed, such recipes circulated into new cultural contexts. Adapted and reinterpreted over generations, they persisted within Iberian domestic cooking, carrying traces of memory and identity even as Jewish ritual and language were suppressed. As Gitlitz and Davidson explain, Spanish and Portuguese mariners began exploring the off-shore African islands — the Canaries, Azores, and Madeira — in the early fifteenth century. By its end, farming colonies and trading posts had been established, turning the islands into key “stopover points” for Atlantic galleons engaged in the South Atlantic and American trade.[2]

Crossing Oceans: From Canary Islands to the Caribbean

The dish entered global circulation with Spanish colonization of the Canary Islands and subsequently the Caribbean. In Cuba, ropa vieja adapted to locally available ingredients. Cattle introduced by Columbus’s second voyage in 1493 thrived on the island, becoming central to ranching economies and local diets. African enslaved cooks contributed slow-braising techniques and sofrito — a base of onions, garlic, and other vegetables gently cooked in olive oil —  while Indigenous crops such as tomatoes and peppers transformed the dish’s flavour. Ropa vieja thus became a product of empire, blending Iberian culinary traditions with African labour and American ingredients in colonial households. Each component reflects a history of circulation and encounter: beef reshaped Caribbean landscapes, supplying hides for European markets and meat for colonial stews; chickpeas, central in Iberian and Canarian versions, sustained sailors and settlers but were less prominent in Cuban adaptations; and tomatoes and peppers, native to the Americas, were cultivated in the Caribbean alongside Iberian staples like onions and garlic, exemplifying the transatlantic movement and exchange of crops.

As Fernando Ortiz observes in his discussion of plantation life in Cuba in his essay Los factores humanos de la cubanided (1939), “In Cuba’s pot there is always a constant renewal of roots, fruits, and exotic meats, an unceasing bubbling of heterogeneous substances.”[3] The plantation system that shaped the Caribbean landscape violently brought together people from diverse origins who, despite profound inequalities, interacted socially and culturally. Anthropologist Sidney Mintz’s perspective was that the Caribbean could not be considered a single cultural area, since the mix of different colonial powers made it too heterogeneous to fit that definition. Instead, he proposed the term “societal area,” describing the region as a socio-cultural space structured by the plantation system. (Mintz, 1966).[4] Mintz’s concept captures the fragmentary nature of Caribbean cultures, stitched together by a language of colonial dominance until they fused into something new. I argue that this dynamic extends to food itself: the region’s culinary cultures reflect a constant process of interaction and adaptation, where ingredients and techniques from Africa, Europe, and the Americas combined to create shared expressions. In this way, a common language of flavour emerged from displacement, survival, and creativity. The dish becomes, in effect, a ragged form of globalization, stitched together from uneven power, movement, and culinary ingenuity. In my chapter on “Dark Food” (Palgrave, 2025), I explore how violence is integral to this process, showing how food can carry and transmit memories that continually reconstruct narratives of oppression and suffering.

Invisible Hands: Women and Enslaved Cooks

Although colonial records often privilege governors, merchants, and planters, the making of ropa vieja depended on domestic cooks — many women, many enslaved or otherwise marginalized. African-descended cooks in Cuban households brought Indigenous crops and African cooking techniques into Iberian stews, layering them with flavour and complexity. Women have long been central to the transmission and transformation of Caribbean traditions, even if historical documentation has largely obscured their contributions. As Keja L. Valens observes,

“Ropa vieja” inscribes a mixing of ­ European (flour, beef, wine), Indigenous (tomatoes and peppers), and African (plantains) ingredients, doing so ­ under a recognizably Spanish-­ language title. As much as they declare its ­ independence from Spain, ­ these White Criollo authors claim the dish. “Ropa vieja” serves settlers who occupy, incorporate, and claim as their own the ­ tables and kitchens of Cuba. As they break from the colonial center, the settlement remains. (Valens 2024, p.62)

Valens further notes that cookbooks rarely include detailed biographical information, meaning that the labour and expertise of women — often exercised in domestic or informal spaces — is transmitted primarily through recipes rather than through explicit authorial self-representation.

Recipes as Memory and Metaphor

The name “old clothes” resonates powerfully in this colonial context. Just as the dish turned scraps into nourishment, displaced peoples — Sephardic Jews, conversos (converted Iberian Jews), enslaved Africans, and Canarians — wove fragments of memory, ritual, and foodways into continuity. The preparation of traditional dishes like ropa vieja involves more than following a recipe; it encompasses embodied knowledge passed down through generations. This tacit knowledge includes techniques, timing, and sensory cues that are often not documented but are crucial for authentic preparation. The act of cooking such dishes serves as a living archive, preserving cultural practices and memories; as Francisca Sinjae has argued, “across the world, food is not just sustenance; it is a living archive, a record of migration, survival, identity, and belonging.”[5] Food preparation is a form of cultural expression and memory, where each dish tells a story of migration, adaptation, and survival. The recipe’s adaptability made it a form of culinary survival: to simmer shredded beef with onions and tomatoes was to claim a taste of familiarity while fashioning something distinctly of the Americas. In this sense, ropa vieja embodied the patchwork realities of colonial life.[6]

From Stew to Symbol

By the eighteenth century, ropa vieja was firmly recognised as part of Cuban cuisine.[7] Today, it is celebrated both as Cuba’s national dish and as a heritage food of the Canary Islands. Its survival illustrates how recipes forged in colonial entanglements persist as markers of identity, memory, and resilience.

Centuries later, in Miami, Cuban exiles revived and popularised the dish, transforming it into a symbol of home and memory within the American landscape. In Cuba itself, it acquired poignant resonance during the 1990s Período Especial, when meat shortages forced cooks to adapt. On television, culinary icon Nitza Villapol famously demonstrated a version suggesting the use of plantain skins in place of beef, a modern echo of the “old rags” metaphor and a reminder of the creativity born from scarcity.[8]

A Global Ragout

Ropa vieja is a culinary palimpsest, its flavours carrying the traces of Jewish exile, Iberian colonisation, African labour, and Indigenous ingredients. To taste it is to encounter the fragments of empire itself, scraps reassembled into sustenance like old clothes patched into new garments, carrying traces of resilience and creative adaptation that give the dish new life with each preparation. In her review of Carla Cevasco’s Violent Appetites: Hunger in the Early Northeast for The Recipes Project, Peggy Brunache emphasizes how Indigenous communities have long used food as a form of resistance and cultural assertion, noting that “Indigenous communities performed culinary resistance through a politics of food and stood culturally resilient against colonial manipulation and assimilation.”  As a platform, The Recipes Project itself sustains this ongoing conversation between food, history, and identity, revealing how culinary practices can serve as both archives and acts of meaning-making. This perspective illuminates how cooking, including the preparation of ropa vieja, transcends mere sustenance. It becomes a deliberate act of cultural preservation and identity maintenance, an embodied form of resistance through which displaced or marginalized communities uphold heritage, reinforce communal bonds, and assert belonging in the face of colonial and postcolonial pressures. In this sense, ropa vieja not only preserves the past but also speaks to the present: a dish refashioned across generations, carrying in each bite the intertwined histories of memory, survival, and identity.

*****
Alessandra Pino is an expert on the intersections of the Gothic, food, and cultural memory. Born in Hampstead, London, to an Italian mother and Venezuelan diplomat father, Alessandra grew up in different countries and across cultures and languages. She holds degrees from ‘L’Orientale’ University, Naples (Italy), and from the University of Westminster (UK, MA in Translation Studies); she was awarded a PhD in Food, Cultural Memory, and the Gothic in 2022. Alessandra worked with a Michelin-starred chef for nearly ten years before moving to academia, researching and publishing on food, cultural memory, the supernatural and the Gothic.

Alessandra is the co-author of A Gothic Cookbook, which digs into food themes and motifs in a series of classic and contemporary novels from the 19th century to the present day and the co-host of “Fear Feasts,” a podcast which analyses the horror genre- films and books- through the lens of food. She publishes and speaks/lectures on the history of food, cultural memory, the supernatural, horror and the Gothic in journals, anthologies, TV and podcasts.

FURTHER READING

Barthes, Roland. 1975. “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption.” In European Diet from Pre-Industrial to Modern Times, edited by E. Forster and R. Forster, 47–59. New York: Harper and Row.

Brunache, Peggy. “New Work Forum: On Food and Identity in Cevasco’s Violent Appetites.” The Recipes Project, July 7. Accessed October 24, 2024.

Cabrisas, Juan. 1858. Nuevo manual de la cocinera catalana y cubana.

Douglas, Mary. 1972. “Deciphering a Meal.” 

Gitlitz, David M., and Linda Kay Davidson. 1999. A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Jawhara Piñer, Hélène. 2021. Sephardi: Cooking the History. Boston: Academic Studies Press.

Langarika, Enrique. 1862. El cocinero de los enfermos, convalecientes. Havana: Imprenta y Librería La Cubana. Biblioteca Nacional de España; UTSA Digital Collections, Texas.

Legran, J. P. 1857. Nuevo manual del cocinero cubano y español: con un tratado escojido de dulcería, pastelería y botellería, al estilo de Cuba; indispensable para aprender a componer de comer con la mayor perfección y economía, y necesario a todas las clases de la sociedad y en particular a los gastrónomos, madres de familia, fondistas. Havana: [s.n.]. 

Mintz, S.W. 1966. “The Caribbean as a socio-cultural area,” Journal of World History, 9 (4), 912-937.

Noviatur, J. F. 1891. Novísimo manual del cocinero pastelero dulcero y licorista cubano. Havana: Imprenta La Idea.

Ortiz, Fernando. 1939. “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad.” In Ensayos etnosociológicos, 10–31. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.

Pelaéz, Ana Sofía, and Ellen Silverman. 2014. The Cuban Table: A Celebration of Food, Flavors, and History. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Pino, Alessandra. 2025. “Dark Food.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Literary Memory Studies, edited by Lucy Bond, Susannah Radstone, and Jessica Rapson, 263–283. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Pino, Alessandra. 2020. Hunger and Meaning in the Novels of Cristina García. 

RWI Magazine. The Taste of Memory: Food as Cultural Archive.

The Atlantic. 2016. “Cuba’s Julia Child.” The Atlantic, August 2016. 

Valens, Keja L. 2024. Culinary Colonialism. Rutgers University Press.

Villapol, Nitza. 2022. Cocina al Minuto YouTube video. Posted 7 July 2022.

NOTES

[1] There is a reference to this being the first known mention in Pelaéz and Silverman, The Cuban Table (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014) p.162. See also the ‘ropa vieja’ recipe in Nuevo Manual del Cocinero Cubano y Español (1857) by J.P. Legran. The complete title is: Nuevo manual del cocinero cubano y español : con un tratado escojido de dulcería, pastelería y botellería, al estilo de Cuba; indispensable para aprender a componer de comer con la mayor perfección y economía, y necesario a todas las clases de la la sociedad y en particular a los gastrónomos, madres de familia, fondistas.

[2] For the link between Sephardic Sabbath stews and later Iberian/Atlantic shredded-meat dishes, see David M. Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson, A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), p. 207; and Hélène Jawhara Piñer, Sephardi: Cooking the History (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021). Both discuss adafina/dafina/hamín as a slow-cooked Jewish stew in medieval and early modern Iberia.

[3] F. Ortiz, “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad,” in Ensayos etnosociologicos (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1939), 10-31. “Siempre en la olla de Cuba es un renovado entrar de raíces, frutos y carnes exógenas, un incesante borbotar de heterogéneas sustancias.” Quote is on p. 6. My translation.

[4] “It would probably be more accurate to refer to the Caribbean as a ‘societal area’ based on the plantation system.” Sidney W. Mintz, “The Caribbean as a socio-cultural area,” Journal of World History, 9 (4) (1966), pp. 912–937.

[5] Francisca Sinjae, “The Taste of Memory: Food as Cultural Archive,” Raising Women Magazine, September 15, 2025

[6] My work on comparison between the culinary process and the process of memory formation in relation to constructions of identity and nation is available here. Going beyond the idea of food as being purely nutritional, Barthes’ use of semiotics allows for a contextualisation of food in its role as a signifier. Roland Barthes, “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption,” in European Diet from Pre-Industrial to Modern Times, edited by E. Forster and R. Forster (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 47–59. Mary Douglas’ work in “Deciphering a Meal” establishes the importance of memory in creating food patterns. Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” Daedalus Vol. 101, No. 1, Myth, Symbol, and Culture (Winter, 1972), pp. 61-81. Douglas’ work is available here.  

[7] Valens points out that this is evident in the cookbooks of the time: the Manual del cocinero cubano includes just one recipe for “Ropa vieja andaluza,” alongside recipes for both “Ropa vieja cubana” and “Ropa vieja habanera.” In contrast, Legran’s cookbook presents only “Ropa vieja á la Americana,” Cabrisas includes only “Ropa vieja cubana,” El cocinero de los enfermos contains only “Ropa vieja cubana,” and the Novísimo edition of Noviatur features only “Ropa vieja habanera.”

[8] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/08/cuba-castro-villapol-julia-child/494342/

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

 

 

Lacquer Fantasies: Japanning as a Colonial Global Recipe

By Nur’Ain Taha

Two images frame this story of lacquer and imaginaries. The first, from Print of Sixteen Crafts and Trades (Ambachten en Beroepen) by Hendrik Numan (1788-1796), shows a Dutch lacquer craftsman (lakwerker) bent over a pot of varnish in a quiet workshop. The second, from Draken in Oost-Indie, Lakwerk en Papier uit China by Romeyn de Highe (published by Pieter van der Aa, Leiden, 1682-1733), depicts a crowded  Chinese atelier buzzing with figures polishing and painting lacquer onto various objects. Between these two scenes, the differences are jarring. The Dutch scene is subdued and contained, while the Chinese one is imagined and exotic. Despite the sharp contrast, both scenes reveal how early modern Europe had transformed Asian materials into a fantasy. These contrasting images, however, invite a question: what can recipes reveal about how the world was imagined, handled, and domesticated in early modern Europe? To see how distant worlds become embedded in recipes, we might start in a seventeenth-century Oxford manual that made “Asia” reproducible in decorations and on the surfaces of English furniture.

“Lacquer work (lakwerk)” from Print of Sixteen Crafts and Trades, Hendrik Numan (engraver), 1788-1796. Image credit: Nederlands Openluchtmuseum, object no. PR.2014. Public domain.
“Lacquer work (lakwerk)” from Print of Sixteen Crafts and Trades, Hendrik Numan (engraver), 1788-1796. Image credit: Nederlands Openluchtmuseum, object no. PR.2014. Public domain.
Dranken in Oost-Indië; Lakwerk en Papier uit China, etching by Romeyn de Hooghe, published by Pieter van der Aa (I), Leiden, 1682–1733. Image credit: Rijksmuseum, object no. BI-1972-1043-21. Public domain.
Dranken in Oost-Indië; Lakwerk en Papier uit China, etching by Romeyn de Hooghe, published by Pieter van der Aa (I), Leiden, 1682–1733. Image credit: Rijksmuseum, object no. BI-1972-1043-21. Public domain.

In 1688, John Stalker and George Parker published A treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (Oxford, 1688), a craft manual that offers readers and aspiring makers the promise of “distant mastery” by making it possible to reproduce the gloss and sheen of the much-admired Asian varnish without ever leaving home. “Japanning,” in short, was a craft of imagination that materialised in European craft manuals. The English japanner became a kind of armchair traveller — a maker who imagined the East through the replication of textual recipes.

Chapter I from the Treatise instructs its readers on how to select the best ingredients needed for “japanning”: “To choose gum Sandrick,” “To choose Benjamin or Benzoine,” and so on.[1] Each line lists a commodity extracted from distant colonies. Benzoin, also known locally in the Malay Archipelago as kemenyan, for example, was tapped from Styrax trees in the Sumatran highlands by local resin gatherers, then traded through Batavia to Amsterdam and London. “Sandrick,” or sandarac, was drawn from the Tetraclinis articulata of North Africa. Yet, the Treatise makes no mention of these routes or the labourers who made their extraction and trading possible. Instead, the instructions reduced global exchanges to simple verbs: melt, strain, mix, and apply.

Excerpts from A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (Oxford, 1688) by John Stalker and George Parker, detailing material instructions for gum lac, benjamin, shell-lac, and sandrick. Image credit: Digitized edition via Archive.org. Public domain.

Excerpts from A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (Oxford, 1688) by John Stalker and George Parker, detailing material instructions for gum lac, benjamin, shell-lac, and sandrick. Image credit: Digitized edition via Archive.org. Public domain.

Three excerpts from A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (Oxford, 1688) by John Stalker and George Parker, detailing material instructions for gum lac, benjamin, shell-lac, and sandrick. Image credit: Digitized edition via Archive.org. Public domain.
Three excerpts from A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (Oxford, 1688) by John Stalker and George Parker, detailing material instructions for gum lac, benjamin, shell-lac, and sandrick. Image credit: Digitized edition via Archive.org. Public domain.

Here, between the lines of this manual, transformation is not only chemical but also conceptual. Through craft, the  empire becomes domesticated where its raw materials are melted, strained, and mixed into manageable forms. “Japanning” is the epitome of the global recipe, one where cultural entanglement, armchair exoticism and colonial dependence become condensed into a set of formulaic instructions. With each varnish layered on the glossy surface, the trace of global commodities and distant labour is progressively erased.

Global trade became transmuted into domestic craft where the processes of making varnish in English workshops indicate not just a fantasy of control and possession but also acts of erasure and forgetting.

If Stalker and Parker’s Treatise turned encounters into varnish, the Malay Kitab Tib (medical manuscripts) transformed globalised commodities such as benzoin, camphor, ambergris, and musk into fragrance and medication. Across different manuscripts, one finds recipes that domesticate exotic materials not into fantasy, but into care and healing. One recipe for a special medicine (ubat Istimewa) in Kitab Tib MSS 2515: p. 194 for example, lists several rare ingredients to treat male impotence (mati pucuk):

Firstly, take male cubebs weighing nine mas[2], javanese cinnamon weighing nine mas, nutmeg weighing nine mas, ambergris weighing nine mas, cloves weighing nine mas, musk weighing nine mas, benzoin weighing seven mas, Bengal kara-kara root weighing one mas, mustaqim weighing half a mas, and camphor weighing one mas.[3]

Like the English recipe for varnish, recipes in various Kitab Tib manuscripts constituted commodities and incorporated rare ingredients transported across the oceans. The use of ambergris (ambar, or muntah ikan) reveals how non-European traditions also absorbed global commodities into local systems of healing and knowledge. Unlike Stalker and Parker, whose 1688 Treatise of Japanning detached resins and other global commodities from their geographical sources, Kitab Tib mapped its ingredients to known worlds: “javanese cinnamon (kulit manis Jawa),” “Bengal kara-kara root (akar kara-kara Benggala),” “Chinese galangal (lengkuas Cina),” and “nutmeg flower from Penang (bunga pala Pulau Pinang).”[4] These names turned trade into routes, marking a world already known to Malay healers and setting the ground for how global matter was embodied in local traditional healing practices.  In Malay medical manuals, global trade was neither exoticised nor imagined—it was rooted in the regional networks and embodied within local medicinal knowledge. The Kitab Tib transformed distant commodities into medicine and created scent that transformed the body’s balance. Where the English Treatise staged “Asia” at a distance, the Malay recipes absorbed it. Read together, these manuals show that early modern recipes were never just technical guides; they were ways of reimagining and embodying worlds, near and far. As Daniela Bleichmar observes for European processes of appropriation, “the expeditions’ selective efforts to make the empire visible always involved rendering parts of it invisible.”[5] The same applies to japanning: on every varnished surface, its sheen is not just beauty, but colonial possession that is made visible and invisible all at once by erasing the hands and landscapes that produced global commodities.

*****
Nur’Ain Taha is a PhD candidate in Art History at Utrecht University, Netherlands. Her research project, Crossing Worlds: The Global Materiality of “Netherlandish Objects” in the Early Modern Period, 1600-1800, examines the visible and invisible global origins of materials, techniques, and makers behind early modern “Dutch objects”. By tracing their trajectories, she reveals how cross-cultural exchanges shaped their creation and meaning, uncovering the interconnected worlds of production, influence, and knowledge beyond Europe.

FURTHER READING

Bleichmar, Daniela. Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Mat Piah, Harun. Kitab Tib: Ilmu Perubatan Melayu. Kuala Lumpur: Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia, 2019.

Stalker, John, and George Parker. A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing. Oxford, 1688. Digitized edition via Archive.org. https://archive.org/details/treatisejapanin00Stal/mode/2up.

 


[1] John Stalker and George Parker, A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (Oxford: 1688), 2–3.

[2] 1 mas ≈ 3.4 grams; recipes in old Malay manuscripts use early modern Malay measurement systems.

[3] Malay translation: Pertama ambil kemukus Jantan berat sembiln emas dan kulit manis Jawa berat Sembilan emas dan buah pala berat Sembilan emas dan ambar berat Sembilan emas dan cengkih berat Sembilan emas dan kesturi berat Sembilan emas dan kemenyan berat tujuh emas dan akar kara-kara Benggala berat seemas dan mustaqim berat tiga emas dan kapur barus berat seemas. From Kitab Tib: Ilmu Perubatan Melayu, ed. Harun Mat Piah (Kuala Lumpur: Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia, 2019), 102.

[4] Many other examples also appear throughout Kitab Tib MSS 2515, p. 194. See Harun Mat Piah, Kitab Tib: Ilmu Perubatan Melayu (Kuala Lumpur: Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia, 2019), 102-104.

[5] Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 151. On the thorny connections between visibility and invisibility, specifically in colonial Latin American visual culture, see Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1 (2003): 5-35.