Category Archives: 17th Century

Fertility in the Early Modern Household

Leah Astbury

Domestic recipe books in early modern England abound with remedies to promote conception and prevent miscarriage. Frances Springatt’s recipe book, for example, contained a remedy ‘To help conception and strengthen Nature’, taken morning and night.[i] Notably, the vast majority of these receipts were explicitly for women, and in particular, intended to cleanse the womb. The Boyle family book contained a remedy for ‘Barrenness’ that opened up the womb when ‘shutt up, cleanseth the Same, Cherisheth the Seminal Vessels, Comforteth and Enliveneth the Womb & maketh it fit for Conception.’[ii]

Fig. 2. A woman seated on a obstetrical chair giving birth aided by a midwife who works beneath her skirts. Woodcut. Courtesy of Wellcome Collection CC BY.
Fig. 1. A woman seated on a obstetrical chair giving birth aided by a midwife who works beneath her skirts. Woodcut. Courtesy of Wellcome Collection CC BY.

The historical consensus has been, in Olwen Hufton’s words, that ‘under most conditions’ childlessness was attributed to female incapacity in early modern England. Aside from ‘brewer’s droop’ and impotence from bewitching, early modern people would have failed to consider the possibility of male impediment.[iii] Jennifer Evans’ work on fertility and aphrodisiacs has shown, however, that printed medical guides and advertisements understood problems with husbands, wives, or the couple together as causes of childlessness.[iv] So why then in domestic receipt books are remedies that target the causes of male sterility – weak seed, frail erection and lacklustre desire – so hard to find? This tension between the possibility of male infertility in printed material and absence in personal collections points to a complex system in which women were positioned as the caretakers of fertility, even if their bodies were not at ‘fault’. To revise Hufton’s claim, early modern people did know that men were responsible for childlessness but worked to minimise evidence of this. In this post I’m going to offer a few hints in domestic recipe books of the ways in which wives might labour to improve their own, and their husband’s, fertility without making male impediment or failure known. This is part of a larger book project examining the experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and afterbirth care in early modern England.

Fig. 1. Frances Springatt (& others), Collection of cookery and medical receipts: with later additions by several hands, Wellcome Library, MS 4683. Courtesy of Wellcome Collection CC BY.
Fig. 2. Frances Springatt (& others), Collection of cookery and medical receipts: with later additions by several hands, Wellcome Library, MS 4683. Courtesy of Wellcome Collection CC BY.

The first clue is in the prevalence of recipes that promised to reveal which party was responsible for childlessness. Such tests normally involved husband and wife each urinating on a seed or grain and observing their growth; the seed that failed to thrive indicated sterility. The inclusion of these diagnostic tests in domestic collections indicates at least a willingness to consider male impediment, even if evidence of their use is lacking.[v]

Second, the gender of the intended recipient of fertility recipes was often left unspecified or vague. Two remedies in the Jerningham family recipe book, one to ‘stir up’ lust and another to ‘causeth conception’, did not specify whether they were for a man or woman.[vi] Others were explicit that they could be useful for men and women. Frances Springatt’s remedy to help conception (Fig. 2) included the instructions that ‘man should take of it as well as the woman.’

More evidence can be found in recipes that were designed to be administered before or through the act of sex. Jane Jackson’s book instructed the user to anoint the man’s ‘yard’ with a concoction before sex in order to further chances of conceiving.[vii] Another suggested that both the ‘yard’ and the ‘womans private alsoe’ should be anointed. Then, the husband should simply ‘deale with her; and shee shall conceaue.’[viii] Such remedies configured men as the agent of cure, even if they were actually the intended recipients.

Recipe books did contain remedies to strengthen the yard, but importantly never mentioned sexual function. James Shrowl’s recipe book contained a remedy ‘To heale any Lame Member’ in which the ‘member’ was bathed for half an hour, ‘chaft’ with an ointment and then wrapped in lambskin before bed.[ix] Generation or even the ability to have sex was not mentioned. Many of these remedies were concerned with curing venereal disease and one might imagine rich fodder for the historian of fertility. And yet genital problems in men, in this context, were rarely linked to sexual performance or generative ability, further evidence to suggest that male sexual impediment was more embarrassing than childlessness understood to come from problems with the womb.

A final example from the almanac of Sarah Jinner suggests the ways in which male fertility was expected to be discretely managed by wives. The recipe section in Jinner’s almanac, which she advertised, ‘might be kept in good case and serve to the mutual comfort of man and woman’, included ‘A Confection to cause fruitfulness in Man or Woman.’ This powder, she noted, could be surreptitiously sprinkled ‘upon the parties meat’.[x]

The remedies found in domestic books skirt around the topics of weak male seed and impotence, but reading against the grain reveals the ways in which domestic practice, and in particular wives, might be able to manage male impediment without naming and shaming.

 

[i] Frances Springatt (& others) 1686-1824, Wellcome Library, MS 4683, fol. 92r.

[ii] Boyle Family, ‘Receipt Book’, Wellcome Library, MS 1340, recipe 312 fol. 86r.

[iii] Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her. A History of Women in Western Europe, vol. 1 (London: Fontana Press, 1997), p. 174. Randolph Trumbach makes a similar argument in The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England(London: Academic Press Inc., 1978), p. 167.

[iv] Jennifer Evans, Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Medicine in Early Modern England (Boydell & Brewer, 2014).

[v] As Catherine Rider has shown on this blog, these tests were not new to the early modern period and can be found as early as the twelfth century. https://recipes.hypotheses.org/2017

[vi] Jerningham family recipe book, Staffordshire Record Office D641/3/H/1, p. 63 and p. 67.

[vii] Jane Jackson, ‘Her Booke’, 1642, Wellcome Library, MS 373, fol. 82v.

[viii] Jane Jackson, ‘Her Booke’, 1642, Wellcome Library, MS 373, fol. 83r.

[ix] James Shrowl, 1625-c.1750, Wellcome Library, MS749, unfoliated.

[x] Sarah Jinner, An Almanack and Prognostication for the Year of Our Lord 1659 (London: 1659), sig.B8r.

From the Hearth to the Gas Stove: A Study in Apricot Marmalade

By Marissa Nicosia

The early modern hearth and the modern gas stove are rather different technologies for controlling heat. Again and again in my recipe recreation work for Cooking in the Archives, I encounter complex instructions for managing cooking temperatures on a hearth and try to translate those instructions to my own equipment. To what temperature should I set my oven? How high should I turn up the flame under the pot? What volume of water should I add when boiling water is called for and no volume is specified? How long should everything cook?

Early modern recipes trust that cooks know their hearth and ingredients well. Some recipes are very precise about weight and volume and others read like general concepts on which a cook might improvise as best suits their needs, inclinations, or tastes. Cooking these recipes on a hearth with variable fire types and temperatures demanded a skilled cook who could manage heat effectively.

This is the part of updating recipes that most challenges me: I have a PhD in English, but no formal culinary training. This is also the part of updating recipes where I have been most challenged by others. Members of the historical reenactment and historical interpretation communities have in turn urged me to try these recipes again on a hearth to taste the different flavors the fire instills and chastised me for attempting to cook these recipes without a hearth in the first place. As I grow as a cook and expand this project, I’m going to accept these kind invitations to cook alongside skilled recreators [1]. But Cooking in the Archives is a project designed to give all readers a taste of the past: even if those readers possess only the tiniest apartment stove. That’s the kind of stove that I had in my West Philadelphia rental when I launched the site with Alyssa Connell in 2014.

In order to cook these recipes on my stove, I have to determine some basic information: Is this something I should make on the stovetop or in the oven? In a pot, pan, or roasting dish? Is the recipe asking for water and should that water be boiled first or with the ingredients? To answer these questions, I naturally start with the recipes themselves. The phrases recipe writers use for the ferocity or gentleness of the fire are subtle, but informative. Then I look at recipes in modern cookbooks. The “Jumball” cookie mix looked like a shortbread cookie so I started with the oven temperature from a familiar cookie recipe and kept track of the time [2]. These are skills that I learned from baking growing up and cooking for myself while I was in graduate school, but not, exactly, skills that I learned in the academy. Neither humanities course work nor historical recreation holds all the answers for how to, say, make an apricot marmalade from a late-seventeenth-century culinary manuscript in a twenty-first century kitchen.

This recipe “To make Marmalaid of Apricocks” is from Ms. Codex 785 at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania. I’ve prepared quite a few recipes from this specific manuscript, and this recipe, like a few others in the volume, derives from Hannah Woolley’s cookbook The Queen-like Closet or Rich Cabinet (1670) [3]. This marmalade is both fragile and delicious. It needs the careful tending outlined in the original recipe. I have attempted to convey this level of care in my updated recipe at the end of this post.

To make Marmalaid of Apricocks

Take Apricocks, pare them and cut them in
quarters and to every pound of Apricocks
put a pound of fine Sugar, then put your
Apricocks in a Skillet with half the Sugar
and let them boil very tender, and gently, and
bruise them with the back of a Spoon, till they
be like pap, then take the other part of the
Sugar, and boil it to a Candy height, then put
your Apricocks into that Sugar, and keep it stirring
over the ffire, till all the sugar is meted, but
do not let it boil, then take it from the ffire,
and Stir it till it be almost cold, then put it
into Glasses, and let it have the Air of the
ffire to dry it.

Images 1 & 2 – The recipe in Ms. Codex 785, 6-7

The recipe asks you to boil the apricots with sugar until the fruit is so tender that it breaks down into a luscious pulp. Then the recipe instructs you to make a simple syrup of sugar and water and allow the mixture to come to candy height or what we would now call the soft-ball stage. Early modern cooks would have been especially skilled at the subtle art of watching sugar change under the influence of heat. The cook is next told to stir the apricot puree into the hot sugar over the fire and then off the fire until the mixture is almost cold. The final instruction: “and let it have the Air of the ffire to dry it” is the most evocative image for me. The preserved apricots in glass containers glowing in front of the hearth.

This apricot marmalade is delicious on toast, lightly crisped by the heat of a toaster oven or toaster, of course.

 

An Updated Recipe

8 apricots (7 oz, 200 g)

generous 2/3 cup sugar (7 oz, 200 g)

1/3 cup water

Peel the apricots, remove their pits, and cut them into quarters. Cook them to a pulp with half the sugar. The apricots will release their own juices so no water is necessary here. (Approximately 10 minutes.)

Make a simple syrup with the remaining 1/3 cup sugar and 1/3 cup water in a saucepan. Use a candy thermometer to keep track of the temperature and cook until it reaches candy height/pearl stage 240F on the thermometer. When the syrup has reached this temperature, add the cooked apricots to it. Stir to combine over the heat, but do not allow the mix to boil.

Remove from heat and stir as the mixture cools. Transfer into a clean jar. This amount of apricots and sugar nicely filled an 8oz jelly jar.

Keep refrigerated and eat within two weeks. (You can also properly can this for longer storage.)

[1] Johnson’s work in particular suggests what traditional academics can learn by spending time with reenactors and participating in reenactments. Katherine M. Johnson, “Rethinking (re)doing: historical re-enactment and/as historiography,” Rethinking History 19, no. 2 (2015): 193-206.

[2] https://rarecooking.com/2014/09/19/my-lady-chanworths-receipt-for-jumballs/

[3] https://rarecooking.com/tag/ms-codex-785/

Beauty and Global Trade in Margaret Baker’s Book

This is the second part of a two-part post by a former student of mine, who also happens to be an author of popular history.  Karen has written on fun things like fashion and Essex Girls in history. Her original, longer post is taken from a digital group project on Margaret Baker’s recipe book that was completed for my 2016-7 module, The Digital Recipe Book Project.


By Karen Bowman

 

The unlovely looking ambergris. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In my last post, I examined themes of alchemy and beauty in Margaret Baker’s early modern recipe book.  Today I want to consider what her beauty recipes can tell us about England’s growing global connections in the late seventeenth century.  At first glance, the  list of ingredients in Baker’s recipes appear domestic. But those seemingly-simple household recipes had extensive connections to trade and empire. For those who could afford them, there were an increasing number of luxury ingredients available from around the world.

Through her beauty recipes, Baker was buying into the expansion of the luxury market. With a growing foothold in India via the East India Company, traders imported silks and spices. In turn, they sold these commodities onto grocers and apothecaries from whom Baker was able to purchase ingredients to make her perfumes.

I was alerted to her participation with empire through her use of luxury ingredients in her culinary recipes, such as wines and quantities of sugar in order to make “sugar cakes” (f.88). In her perfume, she included civet (musky smelling substance from anal glands from civets) and ambergris (waxy substance secreted from the intestines of sperm whales).

Civet and ambergris were regularly used in perfume manufacture. In the seventeenth century, the aromas of musk and spice most effectively covered body odour.  It would not be until the eighteenth century that alternative base notes would be used, allowing some perfumes to become increasingly more fragrant in conjunction with improvements in basic hygiene. Both ingredients continue to be used today, even with our vast range of scent choices.

We can see the use of civet in Baker’s recipe for perfumed gloves, as well (f.98). Spanish and Italian glovers settling in England in the sixteenth century had established the practice to sweeten the smell of leather, as the tanning process could leave an unpleasant scent. The most common fragrances were cinnamon or cloves, but the more expensive gloves were infused with musk, civet, ambergris and spirit of roses.

Seventeenth-century embroidered gloves. Credit: Metropolitan Museum.

The fact that Baker was perfuming her gloves is a significant social comment. By indicating in the first line of her recipe that damask rose water should used could signify to readers that her gloves were expensive, hinting at a level of wealth. Of course, it is equally plausible that her gloves were only made of linen. In that case, we can see an earlier connection to the Lady Croon’s pomatum that I discussed last week. In both cases their inclusion may point to Baker as a woman with social aspirations.

Baker’s instructions for perfuming gloves are similar to those found in seventeenth-century manuals, such as Sir Hugh Plat’s Delights For Ladies, which were considered part of a woman’s ‘secret knowledge’ (Rankin and Leong, 172). Plat provided instructions for perfuming up to eight pairs of kid-skin gloves at a time, proof that women knew how to redress the leather at home (Dugan, 150).

In a manuscript recipe book from 1685, Mary Doggett included instructions for perfuming gloves in the ‘spanish manner’. The gloves should be anointed until they ‘swim with amber [ambergris] and ‘drink up the ointment’–emphasizing the Spanish ingredients: ambergris, civit, and musk. Again echoing Baker’s recipe, Doggett suggested that the gloves should then be ‘Rowled up in fair paper very close so they do not lose their smell’ and next ‘layed 3 nights under the first bed quilt of the bed you lie on’ (Dugan,150).

Baker’s links with global trade rest with the transference of geographical, specialist, and domestic knowledge, as well as a household’s connections with foreign markets. The sourcing of ingredients resulted in the smells of luxury infusing the early modern kitchen (Dugan, 151).

It also gives us a social link to Baker via her gloves. Was she wealthy enough to afford expensive gloves that she would have wanted to keep scented? Or, was she simply buying into the early modern expansion of empire and perfuming cheaper gloves to give an impression of status? Whether the recipe was aspirational or reveling, Baker’s scented gloves were not just ornamental. The ingredients used in their perfuming highlight the ways in which recipes, global trade, and social status were tightly entwined.

The Long Boil: Recipes for Ale and Beer in late Seventeenth-century England

By Elaine Leong

I read Marieke’s recent post on beer as medicine with great interest. Like many of you out there, I’m a lover of all things ale and beer and was cheered both to learn about medicinal beer and to find ever more reasons to visit our local biergarten. Coincidentally, I have also been spending my time learning about early modern beer brewing. My entry into this adventure was via a recipe found in the correspondence of Edward Conway, second Viscount Conway and Colonel Edward Harley. In 1651, Harley send his uncle a recipe to brew ale which requested the maker to boil water on its own for three hours.

Intrigued, I embarked on a journey to try to understand why any early modern householder might utilise their resources in such an um… interesting way. My research took me a number of different directions from learning more about drinking water and water quality to mineral spas and baths to iatrochemical theories. Along the way though, I also read recipe after recipe after recipe for home brews.

The brewery at Charlecote Park, Warwick. Image courtesy of wikimedia commons.

The seventeenth century was, of course, the heyday of English country house brewing.[1] Like the production of medicines and foodstuffs, the brewing of ale and beer was seen to reside firmly within the purview of the early modern English housewife. Indeed, Gervase Markham, one of the most frequently quoted early modern conduct book writers, devotes an entire chapter to the art of brewing in his The English Housewife.[2]

Given that many of the surviving manuscript recipe books were produced within the homes of well-off landed gentry, many of whom resided in large countryside estates, it is not perhaps surprising that recipes of ale and beer are common features in these texts. From ‘cock ale’ (on which Joel Klein so engagingly wrote last year) to ‘heath beer’ to ‘laxative beer’ to ‘Doctor Ffryers beere for ye Scurvy’ to an ‘Ale by Dr Willis when sharp Humours in the Blood cause convulsive motions in the joynts’, instructions to make all kinds of ales and beers abound in early modern English household recipe books. In general, these can be separated into two groups.

The first deals with the actual brewing of ale and beer. That is, it offers readers suggestions for the proportions of malt to water to hops and instructions on the different steps of brewing. The second group of recipes involve boiling or seeping a variety of herbs in ready-brewed ale or beer. Willis’ recipe mentioned above is good example. There, the compiler (in this case, Johanna St. John), advises the maker to boil in 4 gallons of ale 4 handfuls of fur or pine tree and 6 orange peels and ¼ of a pound of yellow dock roots if brewing in the winter or male peony roots and 2 ounce of chine root if brewing in the summer. The ale here serves a dual function – both as medicine and as a liquid carrier for the herbs infused within.

The other group of recipes for ale and beer concern the brewing process itself and provide fascinating insight into ‘brewing science’ in the early modern household. Thanks to James Sumner and Otto Sibum, we are well aware of the range of knowledge and techniques required of commercial or common brewers.[3] As with recipes for other medicines and foodstuffs, there is a great deal of variation in the ‘recipe archive’. Two recipes particularly stand out and I aim to share both with you over my next two posts.

The first recipe is for strong beer and is recorded in at least three contemporary manuscript recipe books (here, here and here). This version, to make two hogsheads of beer, uses malt, wheat, dried ‘pease’, oates and hops. Interestingly, the recipe suggests that the ‘brewer’ boil the liquor for two hours – revealing both who is actually doing the brewing (unlikely the recipe compiler) and the country gentry’s preference for the ‘long boil’ which so irked later writers such as Thomas Tryon and Jeffrey Boys.[4]

Johanna St. John, a frequent subject of posts on this blog, also preferred the long boil. In a letter to her steward, she gave very specific instructions for the stocking of her cellar. This included the preparation of two sorts of strong beer and an ale which she ‘would have it boyled for 4 to 5 howers at the least’.[5] There might be many reasons for seventeenth-century gentlemen and gentlewomen opted for the ‘long boil’. Given that this step might have been performed in an open-copper, this step must have affected both the taste and the strength of the finished drink. The fashion for the ‘long boil’ faded by the eighteenth-century when brewers preferred shorter boils of around an hour. An example can be seen in Joseph Boys’ Directions for Brewing in which the recommended boil lasts only an hour or an hour and a half, depending on the kind of beer brewed (p. 15).

All this talk about beer has weakened my resolve to write, lured by the early summer sunshine and some good German heiferweizen, I think that I might just go visit that local biergarten. I haven’t, though, forgotten about the second intriguing beer recipe. It’s one to make strong ale and I promise to talk more about it in my next post.

[1] Pamela Sambrook, Country House Brewing in England 1500-1900 (London and Rio Grande, OH, 1996).

[2] Chapter 8, Of the Office of the Brew house, and the Bake house, and the necessary things belonging to the same. Gervase Markham, The English House-wifes in The Way to get Wealth (London 1631), 243.

[3] Heinz Otto Sibum, ‘Reworking the Mechanical Value of Heat: Instruments of Precision and Gestures of Accuracy in Early Victorian England’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 26.1 (1995): 73-106 and James Sumner, Brewing Science, Technology and Print, 1700-1880 (London, 2013).

[4] Thomas Tryon’s A New Art of Brewing (London 1690) and Jeffrey Boy’s Directions for Brewing Malt Liquors (1700)

[5] Brian Carne, Some St. John Family Papers. Reproduced, with corrections and additions, from the Report of the Friends of Lydiard Tregoz, 27, 28 and 29 (1994-6), 95.