Category Archives: Bodies

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.

 

Bal-Po Stew: The Empire’s Recipe

By Lewis Ebert

Bal-Po Stew in the "Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Diet." Figure scanned by CADAL from the Peking University Library displayed as part of the Open Source Chinese Text Project.
Bal-Po Stew in the “Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Diet.” Figure scanned by CADAL from the Peking University Library displayed as part of the Open Source Chinese Text Project.

The third entry of the section entitled “Strange Delicacies of Combined Flavors” in the medieval Mongol cookbook, “Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Food and Drink,” is the Bal-Po stew, a recipe that exemplifies the multivalent food culture of the Yuan dynasty:

Bal–po Soup [Stew] (Nepali Soup) (fig 1)

It supplements the centre, and brings down qi. It extends the diaphragm.

Mutton, cardamom pods (five), chickpeas (500ml, pulverize and remove the skins), Chinese radish.

Boil ingredients together to make a soup. Strain broth. Chop meat and radish. Add the mutton cut into coin-sized pieces to the soup, then add cooked Chinese radish [4 grams] of saffron, [8 grams] of Turmeric, [8 grams] of Black (“Iranian”) Pepper, [2 grams] of chicory, and coriander leaves.

Adjust flavours with a little salt. Eat over cooked aromatic non-glutinous rice. Add a little Vinegar. [1]

“The Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Food and Drink,” compiled in 1330 by Hu Sihui, occupies a unique position in the history of Eurasian cuisine. Written under the Mongol Yuan dynasty, it is designed to offer life-extending medical solutions for the emperor and to foster a healthy diet for the court. As it is described in a famous encyclopedia of the Qing era: “[the author] compiled into a single book the rare and unusual delicacies, medicinal soups, poultices, and decoctions he offered, along with the formulas and methods found in the medical works from famous physicians.” [2] This manual for life-engendering dietary practice straddles multiple cultural products, ingredients, economic ties, and ritual cosmologies. Its genesis mirrors the vast empire that it was designed to accommodate: Mongol ancestral food types met Near Eastern ingredients all condensed into Traditional Chinese Medical form. Its prescriptions for the imperial table reveal a world in which food was never merely sustenance but a medium for negotiating health, hierarchy, and cosmology. Later, during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), it was officially promulgated as a compendium of useful culinary insights; the Ming Imperial preface to the text states: “We have examined the entire book Yinshan zhengyao of the former Yuan dynasty…this book is not just an aid for hygiene and nourishing. It is also a great aid for training to receive the correct [way of living].” [3] The culinary and medicinal recipes detailed therein were thus disseminated by imperially sponsored publishing houses from the 14th century and beyond, even into the Qing dynasty. [4]

Among the “Strange Delicacies of Combined Flavours,” the Bal-Po stew, a seemingly modest dish of mutton, chickpeas, and spices, offers a particularly rich case study in the articulation of Mongol Empire culinary cosmology. The chapter features ninety-five courtly recipes, ranging from mutton to camel to wolf; each entry is first described in terms of its medical benefits (relation to qi or organs) before detailing its ingredients. At first glance, Bal-Po stew resembles the Mongol šülen, the mutton broth that, as Buell and Anderson have noted, was believed to contain the “very essence, the soul of the animal.” [5] The broth was achieved by the boiling down of whole animals, usually sheep, for extended periods of time until their collagen thickened the stew and the carcass imparted a strong flavour. In this way, the essence or soul of the sheep, its vital energies, were transposed directly into the broth, thus creating a nourishing meal. It is for this reason that the stew could be said to supplement the individual, balance the qi, or extend the diaphragm; its effects were at once nutritious and medicinal.

From this traditional šülen form, Bal-Po distinguished itself through its inclusion of imported aromatics (saffron, turmeric, and black pepper), Near Eastern ingredients (chickpeas), and ingredients typical of East Asia at the time (radish and cardamom). These ingredients, sourced across the empire from as far as India through Islamic trade networks, marked the stew as a product of the trans-Eurasian circulation that the Mongol empire made possible; they represented a new fusion of food that had never been consumed before on Chinese soil. The result, Buell and Anderson claim when cooking the recipes themselves, is a dish that resembles a curry from the Kashmir: “an excellent dish.” [6]

Of particular interest is the inclusion of chickpeas and radishes. The first, a typically West Asian ingredient, at once accommodates for the many Muslim clients of the Mongol Empire, but also fulfils a curious role as thickening agent. As mentioned above, šülen is generated out of the prolonged boiling of a sheep carcass until a thick broth is produced: chickpeas, however, along with a number of other thickening agents included throughout the cookbook, can expedite that process. In place of the long-standing collagen-based thickening technique, the introduction of the chickpea from West Asia symbolises an evolution of culinary technique: instead of waiting for hours for the broth to thicken, the use of chickpeas (along with ground almonds and mung beans elsewhere) can reproduce the desired texture in minutes. The second, the Chinese radish, had likely come into contact with the Mongol šülen in the past given the occasional assimilation between Mongol and Chinese cultures, but here, instead of being used in dumpling mixtures or in chopped salads, the radish’s inclusion has a more functional role: removing the gamey odour of the stew. As has been accounted for across the materia dietetica of this era, the šülen, although nutritious and of great spiritual significance, tended towards pungency. Thus, with the inclusion of one half-way domestic ingredient and one imported one, a stew could be produced with increased speed and reduced smell.

What appears to be a simple stew, then, actually features a unique set of cultural impulses that could only have come together during the territorial zenith of the greatest land empire in history: from its name, Bal-Po, meaning Nepal, one of the old territories of the Tibetan Empire then under Yuan dynastic control, to the diverse set of ingredients generated through an extensive Muslim trading network, to its textual representation in a Chinese medical framework, to its flavours that could even be considered West Indian, the dish exemplifies the multivalent nature of the Mongol Empire.
*****
Lewis Ebert is a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford, specializing in East Asian culinary and ritual cultures. His research focuses on Mongol and Chinese food cosmologies, examining how recipes encoded beliefs about vitality, spirit, and nourishment. Combining archaeological, textual, and anthropological analysis, he explores the intersection of food, ritual, and social life across the Eurasian world.

FURTHER READING

Buell, Paul D and Eugene N Anderson (2013). Soup for the Qan. Milton Park: Routledge.

Hu, Sihui (1994). Yinshan zhengyao sanjuan 飲膳正要三卷. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe.

Qinding Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao 欽定四庫全書總目提要 (1997). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.

NOTES

[1] YSZY 1994, juan 1, 27A. My translation: measurements have been adjusted for broader audience.

[2] Qinding Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao 欽定四庫全書總目提要 1997, 9026. My translation.

[3] YSZY 1994, 1A

[4] This text is printed and reprinted even up until the modern day, with critical editions being consistently produced at a regular basis. The impact of the text on the Ming is hard to measure but its official promulgation is evidence for an interest and investment into its recipes.

[5] Buell and Anderson 2013, 42.

[6] ibid., 272, footnote.

[7] Bal-Po Stew in the “Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Diet,” figure scanned by CADAL from the Peking University Library displayed as part of the Open Source Chinese Text Project.

Sound Recipes: Music as Medicine in Early Modern Goa

By Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi

"The Mount of the Good Shepherd," c. 1650, A.58-1949, Victoria and Albert Museum. Produced by Goan ivory artists, this statue combines Portuguese-Christian and Goan art styles and iconography. Image courtesy of the V&A.
“The Mount of the Good Shepherd,” c. 1650, A.58-1949, Victoria and Albert Museum. Produced by Goan ivory artists, this statue combines Portuguese-Christian and Goan art styles and iconography. Image courtesy of the V&A.

In early modern South Asia, sound worked as a therapeutic agent that crossed textual, ritual, and oceanic worlds. European observers in the Jesuit entrepôt of Goa — one of the most prominent hubs of Catholic missionary activity in India — and household compilers across the Atlantic world translated, adopted, or rejected these sonic practices. This contribution situates “sound recipes” within the logic of the pharmacopeia, according to which a rāga (a melodic framework in Indian classical music associated with specific moods and times) or mantra (a sacred verbal formula believed to have spiritual or healing power) can be dosed, timed, and combined with other substances, such as herbal infusions, perfumed oils, or mineral pastes, much like a drug.[1] Musicological studies on early modern South Asia, roughly spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, have linked rāga, time, and rasa (the aesthetic mood or emotional essence evoked in performance) to somatic and emotional states.[2] Building on this insight, this contribution triangulates close readings of three sources: first, Sanskrit medical and musical sources in which mantra, nāda (primordial or resonant sound), and rāga act as therapeutic agents, (e.g., Bhaiṣajya Ratnāvalī and Saṅgīta Parijāta); second, missionary letters and reports from Goa that frame healing as a site of translation; and third, early modern European recipe books in which prayer and chant appear beside simples.

Goa as a contact zone

On the western Indian coast, sixteenth-century Portuguese physicians such as Garcia da Orta and Cristóvão da Costa catalogued Indian materia medica while operating inside a Catholic imperial world.[3] Their dialogues show how Portuguese medicine negotiated local drugs, practices, and authority. Jesuit letters and mission histories from the same context present healing as a privileged site of cultural brokerage. Missionaries learned and sometimes used local therapeutics, staging cures that blended prayer, relics, and vernacular ideas of efficacy.[4] While the Jesuit archive highlights Christian ritual sound, it also attends to Indian bodily techniques and substances, suggesting that mantra-like repetition and Latin prayer were mutually legible within a shared recipe logic. In Jesuit infirmaries and domestic chapels, healing often unfolded as a multisensory practice: prayers were murmured over decoctions, oils were stirred in rhythm with chants, and Latin invocations blended with Sanskrit syllables. The result was a working grammar of healing in which utterance and dose reinforced each other. The ladle, mortar, and pestle set the rhythm, and the voice kept time. What emerged was not a confused hybrid but a practical recipe culture that judged efficacy by repeatable acts, including speech.

Jesuit correspondence from the Estado da Índia — the Portuguese imperial territories in the Indian Ocean, with Goa as their administrative and missionary center — consistently treated healing as a tool of persuasion. Medical care, herbal knowledge, and ritual sound became the means through which missionaries sought to demonstrate the efficacy of Christian devotion and attract converts. The letters sketch a choreography of roles: a lay brother to measure and infuse, a scholar to recite orisons over the sick, and a converted nurse to translate for patients and procure medical ingredients at the market. Prayer did not cancel the dose; it stabilized it. In practice, for example while cooking, repeated Pater Nosters or litanies functioned like a timer, dictating the duration of the simmer, the cooling, and the interval between spoonfuls.[5]

Garcia da Orta’s Colloquies catalogued Indian drugs and the social settings in which they were obtained. Merchants and physicians visited the houses of the sick, kitchen workers were consulted, and patients received decoctions that tasted of cinnamon and clove as much as of missionary hospitality. Orta weighed local testimony, sometimes admitting to a plant’s healing power while omitting information about the ritual words that accompanied its use. His description of Goa’s medical life reads less like a study than a domestic pharmacy staffed by servants and informants who knew that recipes often traveled with words, prayers, and spells attached to them.[6] Cristóvão da Costa’s printed Compendium extended Orta’s list of drugs and diagrams. Its path from Goa’s kitchens to Europe’s presses shows how a cure that began with a whispered invocation could be reduced to a chemical extract or powdered preparation — stripped of its ritual and sonic dimensions —     even as prayer in Goa’s Jesuit college continued to time the stirring of medicines in the infirmary.[7]

Music as medicine

The Jesuits also worked with an acoustic theory of cure. Relics, blessings, and the sign of the cross functioned as spoken technologies. In Goa, missionaries recognized that Indian patients already understood the logic of a spoken remedy. Atharvavedic and Ayurvedic pairings of plant and verse were not exotic outliers but familiar structures with different words. And so, in the mission kitchen, Latin did not replace mantra in the act of dosing so much as stand alongside it . A Konkani-speaking patient might not understand the words or meanings of Latin words but could recognize the pattern: an uttered formula, a breath, and the spoon. Jesuit chroniclers marked successful cures with the language of grace, while local interlocutors could interpret the same cure as the right plant, rightly cooked, with a voice that prepared the body to receive it.[8]

These spaces of missionary healing also served as spaces of translation. At the cauldron, a Jesuit brother preparing remedies learned to name plants as his patients did, adopting local terms and pronunciations so that recipes and treatments could circulate across languages and communities.. He learned timings shaped by coastal winds, monsoon humidity, and fasting calendars. He learned that certain decoctions were best taken at dawn, when the body’s heat and the day’s rāga aligned. Even if the mission did not adopt Indian musicology, it absorbed its clock. The schedule of matins and vespers met local dosing of mornings and evenings. In the Goan kitchen, college bells doubled as timers. The clang that called the community to prayer also told the cook when to lift the pot.[9]

European household  medicine and recipe culture had already prepared missionaries to accept words as curative adjuncts. Early modern recipe books placed psalms and charms beside simples without discomfort. A charm to staunch blood might sit next to a syrup for coughs. The value of these entries lay not in abstract theory but in the report that they had proven efficacy. When Jesuits in Goa encountered Indian sound medicine, they carried this idea with them. It allowed them to absorb counts of recitation or the tying of a thread while a verse was spoken. In the Goan mission kitchen, such actions could be recoded as Christian piety without altering the rhythm the patient’s body was used to feeling.[10] Yet the kitchen could also be erased. When cures moved from the voice-filled room to printed missionary accounts or natural histories, the words were often flattened. Efficacy was attributed to the drug alone, and the context of sound was treated as superstition or allowed to fade.
*****
Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi is an Associate Professor in the School of Languages and Literature at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, India. He earned his Ph.D. in English at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2012. At SMVDU, he teaches courses on applied linguistics and stylistics. His recent work has focused on folk songs, folks tales, and Hindi proverbs.

NOTES

[1] Schofield, K. B. (2023). Music and musicians in late Mughal India. Cambridge University Press. https://assets.cambridge.org/97813165/17857/excerpt/9781316517857_excerpt.pdf;  Jairazbhoy, N. A. (1971). The rags of North Indian music: Their structure and evolution. Lok Virsa Publishing House. https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.26725

[2] Rowell, L. (1992). Music and musical thought in early India. University of Chicago Press; Kaufmann, W. (1968). The ragas of North India. Indiana University Press. Open Library

[3] Orta, G. de. (1563/1913). Colloquies on the simples and drugs of India (C. Markham, Trans.). Internet Archive. https://archive.org; da Costa, C. (1578/1582). Tractado de las drogas y medicinas de las Indias orientales. Internet Archive. https://archive.org

[4] Županov, I. G. (1999). Disputed mission: Jesuit experiments and Brahmanical knowledge in seventeenth-century India. Oxford University Press; Wicki, J. (Ed.). (1948–1988). Documenta Indica (Vols. 1–18). Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu. HathiTrust Digital Library

[5] Lea T. Olsan, “Charms and Prayers in Medieval Medical Theory and Practice,” Social History of Medicine 16, no. 3 (2003): 343–366.

[6] Garcia da Orta, Colloquies on the Simples & Drugs of India (London: Henry Sotheran & Co., 1913), ix–xii, 65–72.

[7] Cristóbal Acosta, Tractado de las drogas y medicinas de las Indias Orientales (Burgos: Martín de Victoria, 1578), 1–10, 145–150.

[8] Ines G. Županov, Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1–20.

[9] Josef Wicki, Documenta Indica, Vol. III, 1553–1557 (Rome: Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, 1954), 45–47, 112–118.

[10] Guy L. Beck, Sonic Theology: Hinduism and Sacred Sound (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 1–12, 95–108.

Intimate Experiences: War and Food in Lee Miller

By Karina Elizabeth Vázquez

There are only a few steps between my living room and kitchen, so a section of the library stands directly opposite to a countertop stacked with cookbooks. It wasn’t until I began to think about what to write about Lee Miller (1907-1977), her work as a war correspondent, battlefield photographer, and her relationship with gastronomy, that I realized that two books sit opposite one another, one in the library and one in the kitchen: The Unwomanly Face of War (2017) by Svetlana Alexievich and Lee Miller: A Life with Food, Friends & Recipes (2017) by Miller’s granddaughter Ami Bouhassane. The texts engage in a necessary dialogue between what is expressed in testimonies from women of the Russian army collected by Alexievich and what is present in the lives of Lee Miller, the surrealist muse and photographer, the war correspondent for Vogue, and the brilliant chef. War is an extremely intimate experience, says Alexievich, and in their testimonies, women who participated in the war speak about what happened and didn’t happen to their bodies. During the war they didn’t feel like women; upon returning, their bodies had become dead, they had lost their menstruation, they had to deal with the scars, and they felt no desire. The burden of rebuilding daily life, following gender mandates, forced them to silence the trauma of that violent experience. What did Lee Miller feel in her body during the war? She too experienced silence. Upon returning from the war, she filed all her photographic material in the attic (rediscovered by her son, Anthony Penrose, only after her death in 1977). She instead found in the intimacy of the kitchen, in culinary creativity, a healing mechanism.

An overhead view of a history and photography book laying on a kitchen counter
Fig. 1.  A view of the author’s kitchen/library, courtesy of the author.

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Biographers and critics have pointed out that Miller led several lives: as a model and surrealist artist of the 1920s and 1930s, a fashion photographer of the late 1930s, a war correspondent and combat photographer from 1944 to 1946, and a creative chef from the postwar years until her death. Miller’s photography and culinary art are not separate and share a common spirit. There is a continuity between the surrealism of her early years, her experience at the front—where, as photojournalist David E. Scherman has noted, she used her culinary skills and knowledge to search for non-perishable foods and herbs to add flavor to rations and cooking stews in helmets—and the imagination and attention to detail of her later cooking.

Bright recipe and photography books lay open across a kitchen counter
Fig. 2. An alternate view of the author’s kitchen/library, courtesy of the author.

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Two images that have the body as a common component come to mind when I think about the relationship between war and food in Lee Miller’s work. The first is the photograph Severed Breasts From Radical Surgery In A Place Setting, from 1929, where the luminosity of her lens captures the violence inflicted on the female body by showing a removed breast served on a plate, ready to be eaten. The image denounces beauty standards, medical discourse, and eating norms, which coalescence as if they were simultaneously a scalpel and a utensil that intensely intervene in the female body and feelings. It’s clear that, even in her time as Man Ray’s muse and fashion photographer, Miller was a correspondent in another war and a photographer on another battlefield.

The transformation of everyday life imposed by the world of war on women’s lives and bodies appeared through Lee’s lens in critical montages that indicate the same thing as the testimonies collected by Alexievich: for women, above all, war is murder and, furthermore, a hard daily labor in which feeding themselves and caring for others occupies most of the time and space that survives the violence. I think of “Homeless: Like The Women Of German-Invaded Countries, German Women Now Cook In The Ruins”, a photograph taken in Nuremberg in 1945. Cooking is an act that never occurs in a vacuum, even when it is the result of the violent destruction of the meaning that, for better or worse, orders our hours and days.

The second image is the recipe for “Cauliflower Breast,” which appears in one of the photographs accompanying the article “How to Make an Art of the Happy Weekend. The Personal Strategy and Beautiful Food of Lee Penrose,” by Bettina McNulty, published in House & Gardens in 1973 (and reproduced in Bouhassane’s book) under the title “Cauliflower Mayonnaise.” As Bouhassane points out, this time the breasts are served by invitation only, a clear indication that Miller is positioned differently than in that 1929 image: equally critical, but probably more tired and, as a result of that tiredness, willing to create differently. I visualize Lee Miller in her kitchen, imaginatively searching for opportunities to counter what her camera captured at Buchenwald. Cooking is also a form of remembrance; dishes can become memories. Once again, I turn to Svetlana Alexievich.For her, memories are not impassive narratives of the past, but creative acts that allow us to rewrite our lives. And I can see Miller, with her recipe books, concocting something simple and disruptive like an “Onion Upside-Down Cake, and later on, as Bouhassane recalls, laughing and disappointed after winning a culinary contest that had a bag of onions as a prize. Her relationship with the culinary world, before, during, and after the war, was a way of being present, of relocating herself as a mechanism of resistance.

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Karina Vázquez (Ph.D., University of Florida) teaches and researches Latin American literature, and cultures, visual studies, and critical pedagogy. She the Director of Community-Based Learning (CBL) in the Department of Latina American, Latino & Iberian Studies at the University of Richmond. Her teaching specializations include Spanish language and seminars on work and gender, food and culture, and graphic novels. In 2023, Dr. Vázquez co-curated the exhibition Jay Lynn Gomez: Domestic Scenes Reconsidered / Jay Lynn Gomez: Otra mirada sobre lo doméstico at the Joel and Lila Harnett Museum at the University of Richmond. Some of her publications on Latin American literature and culture, literary and visual representations of work, CBL, and food studies can be accessed through https://scholarship.richmond.edu/lalis/.