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.
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.
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.
[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.
