Awarded to the best book by a North American scholar in any field of British Studies, and dealing with the period from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century, Reynolds’ book represents the first time a work on recipes has won this prize. With our ongoing support for scholarship on recipes — any time period, any place in the world — the Recipes Project is thrilled by this news, which represents a significant achievement for our field. We are even more excited because Melissa Reynolds is part of our RP Editorial Team!
Reading Practice was described by the prize committee as “a remarkable exploration of the complex interaction between manuscript and print publications about ‘natural knowledge’—medical recipes, almanacs, herbals, and pictorial prognostications.” The committee particularly praised the ways that the book speaks to and engages with many different subfields, including book and reading history, manuscript studies, gender history, business history, and studies of nature and the environment. As anyone who studies recipes knows, this is one of the many reasons why they are such valuable resources to writers, scholars, food professionals, and students; recipes connect and speak to so many aspects of human life.
Virginian Rock Polypody Fern. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
ByFiona 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.
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
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.
[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.
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.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.
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.
[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.
The earliest known recipe referencing tomatoes was published in Naples in 1692. This is not simply the earliest European recipe to include the ingredient, but the first written tomato recipe world-wide. The history of the tomato – a foodstuff indigenous to the Americas – is dominated by European sources: our recipes, botanical descriptions and illustrations all stem from either European or post-conquest authors.
How, then, can we use such European recipes to understand the cultural influence of Indigenous American cultures? This blog explores how following taste offers us a means to recreate the unrecorded past and to bring to the fore hidden histories.
I am not the first to note this issue: following Marcy Norton’s 2008 work Sacred Gifts, scholars have begun to reconsider the role of American foods in European cuisines. Nonetheless, studies to date have focused on foods that have distinct paraphernalia (chocolate cups or tobacco pipes) or that have necessary treatments, such as the nixtamalization of maize or de-toxification of cassava. The pre-Columbian history of the tomato is harder to grasp, but its study shows us that even the most ordinary of American foods had a fundamental influence on the food cultures of Europe.
[Xi]tomamolli: Mesoamerican tomato sauces
To reconstruct pre-Columbian tomato-usage (in Nahuatl xitomatl), we must consider the form and taste of food and relationship between ingredients.
The post-conquest primary sources we do have – ethnographies such as the so-called Florentine Codex and government reports such as the Relaciones Geográficas – provide us with two key pieces of information. These sources do not give us a fixed recipe of the type we would find in contemporaneous recipe European books, but there are notable consistencies in their reports that speak to common, repeated practice. Critically, these sources repeatedly tell us that tomatoes were consumed as a sauce or stew and that they were consistently paired with chili peppers: as the Relaciones report from Texcoco (1582) stated, ‘They have tomatoes and tomatillos, which serve as a spice with chilli, from which they make sauces and appetizers to eat’.
Ethnographic work suggests tomatoes and chilis were first charred to remove the skin and then pounded together using a stone molcaxitl (‘sauce bowl’) and a texolotl grinding stone. This sauce-paste was then used to flavour dishes such as tamales and stews of beans, turkey eggs or meat (deer/dog/turkey/fish/newt). As the authors of the Florentine Codex observed: ‘Where [it is] tasty, [it has] chili, salt, tomatoes, gourd seeds: shredded, crumbled, juiced’. This is the quintessential Mesoamerican tomato recipe, as recreated from common practice.
In the centuries following the conquest, tomatoes continued to be eaten in this way by the populations of New Spain. As one chronicler wrote in 1698, tomato-dishes were the ‘be-all, end-all of the stews of the Indies’.
Salsa de tomates: tomatoes in Iberia
Across the Atlantic, in the Spanish-controlled Mediterranean, we see a clear continuation of both these forms of cooking and of the tomato-chili nexus.
Almost all recipes from this period are directions to use tomatoes as a sauce or as the base for stews/casseroles (with one or two recipes directing tomatoes to be pickled or used in salads). If we deconstruct these recipes to their base elements, a consistent method appears that can be expressed as follows:
Take ripe tomatoes; roast them; remove their skins; mince or crush them until fine; mix with chili, oil and vinegar and [onions, garlic, ginger, cumin, oregano, or thyme], serve with [fish, chicken, eggs, beans, or rice].
Some aspects of the flavour profile varied between recipe in the choice of herbs, spices and alliums, but the addition of chili, as well as oil and vinegar, was almost always to be found. The association between the two foods was so strong that they were customarily depicted together in paintings.
Tomatoes, chili, oil (aceite) and vinegar (vinagre) – the staple ingredients of tomato sauce – in Francisco Barrera, August, 1640, oil on canvas, 102 x 155 cm, Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava. Public domain.
Love apple sauce: tomatoes in Britain
The transfer of tomato-tastes to Spanish colonisers and subsequently to their homeland in Iberia is perhaps not surprising. Yet through tomato recipes we can see that the spread of Mesoamerican tomato-chili sauces travelled further, into the early modern British diet.
English recipes for tomatoes – then called love-apples – fall into two categories: pickles and sauces/soups. Recipes for these sauces use the methods seen above: rather than ‘roasted’ they are ‘baked’ and their skins removed by pulping through a sieve rather than peeling, but the result is the same. Importantly, alongside ‘Old World’ ingredients such as onion and ginger, almost all these recipes contained chilis. We see this across both print and manuscript recipes, and usually in the form of ‘capsicum’ or chili vinegar, as in the recipe below.
These sauces came to Britain not through direct colonial contact with Mesoamerica, as in Iberia. Rather, the authors of eighteenth-century encyclopaedias and gardening manuals attested to a different origin of influence: Jewish refugees, specifically Sephardi Jews fleeing the Spanish/Portuguese inquisitions of the 1720s. As one horticulturalist noted, ‘it is agreeable in Soups. Those who are us’d to eat with the Portuguese Jews know the Value of it’. As Iberian consumers once adopted a taste for the tomato from Mesoamericans, so they later brought it with them to their new home.
In both Iberia and Britain, therefore, we see how the tastes of a minority group can have a powerful and lasting impact on the diets and desires of the majority, and how knowledge is spread through a series of incorporations and re-introductions.
‘Tomatar Sauce’ from Miscellaneous Household Recipes, Loveden Family, Buscot Park, Oxfordshire, c. 1780-1835. Reproduced with permission from the Royal Berkshire Archives, catalogue ref: D/ELV/Z5/1-15.
The enduring relationship between tomatoes and the chilis illuminates a path of cultural influence from pre-Columbian Mesoamerica to eighteenth-century Britain. While we lack detailed guides on how tomatoes were prepared prior to the conquest, understanding preparation methods and flavours profiles allows us to trace the movement of culinary knowledge over time and space and to reestablish the role of Indigenous American tastes in shaping European cuisine. ***** Serin Quinn is an early modern historian, specialising in food, horticulture and global connectivity. Her PhD at the University of Warwick was on the introduction of the tomato to early modern England and was funded by Midlands4Cities. Her article on the early English reception of sweet potatoes recently won the Food & History Best Article Award 2025. As of October 2026, she has a research fellowship with the Society for Renaissance Studies, working on a new project on aphrodisiac-foods in pre-modern Europe.