Category Archives: Early Modern

Gathering Ingredients For Early Modern Recipes/Herbal Remedies

By Jennifer Munroe

An entry from Mary Doggett’s receipt book from 1682 in The British Library for a “Water called Rosa Solis” includes a curious set of instructions, curious not so much for the way it explains how to make said water, but rather for the lengthy details about how to gather its ingredients:

“How to make ye Water called Rosa Solis to be gathered in the Month of June or July”:
Take this herb called Rosa Solis it growes in Meadows or Marshy Grounds and in no other places, it is of an herb color and grows very Low and flat to ye ground wth a long stalk in the midst wth six branches, springing out of ye root round about ye stalk, and wth a leaf herb color, and of main bredth and length; and when you gather it take heed in any case you touch no where but ye stalk when you put it up for ye vertue lys in ye leaf, and if you touch it it’s gon; lay it in a very clean basket for ye leaves of this herb is of great strength, vertue and nature…(BL Add 27466 f.2r)

While we might assume that early modern Englishwomen collected their ingredients from their own gardens or from neighboring natural areas, receipt books from the period do not typically say as much. In fact, it would have been entirely possible for women to purchase the ingredients for their receipts. This receipt makes it clear, though, that Doggett’s reader is expected to get them herself.

But what does this receipt tell us about the plant and the woman (or person) collecting it? I find it interesting, first and foremost, that while many receipts in Doggett’s book (and so many others) seem to take for granted that the reader will already know how to acquire and use (and will probably have on hand) key ingredients, this receipt does not. Instead, the reader learns not only where to find it, but also how to identify it once she traipses through the meadow or marsh where it grows. So, either this plant isn’t as common as it might seem, as it appears in countless receipt books in the period without such instruction, or Doggett provides these directions because she assumes that her reader has simply never gathered rosa solis before. After all, the warning about how to handle the plant bespeaks an attention to (critical) detail that one would presumably not require if one had actually picked and used the plant before. Otherwise, would one not already know to “take heed in any case you touch no where but ye stalk when you put it up for ye vertue lys in ye leaf, and if you touch it it’s gon”? Reiterating the restorative powers of the leaf, not the stalk, Doggett’s receipt insists at the end that the reader must lay the leaf ever so carefully in the basket after picking as well, as the “leaves of this herb is of great strength.”

Perhaps this receipt indicates more, though, than something about its user. It may tell us as well about Doggett, about her aspirations as a manuscript compiler of receipts. Doggett’s book is arguably itself an exercise in underscoring the authority and expertise of its author. The book is presented in beautifully rendered italic hand, elaborate in such a way as to mimic the care taken in preparing an illuminated manuscript. It is neatly ordered: first waters, then salves and ointments, followed by plasters, balsams, and then medicines for different parts of the body. What this book tells us is that Doggett was concerned with how it represented her as its knowledegable source. And so, when we read not to touch anywhere but the stalk, we are reminded of the care one should take while gathering, but we are also reminded that Doggett has likely tried this receipt herself, that she too has crossed the meadow or traversed the marsh in search of the rosa solis; and we should be grateful that she has spared us wasting our precious ingredient by not knowing that the virtue lies in the leaf, that she has done the experimenting for us.

Green sickness, red plants

By Helen King

I’ve been interested for a long time in green sickness, a condition affecting girls at puberty that involved menstrual suppression, often along with some sort of dietary ‘blockage’. The remedies for it, over the 400 or so years that it was recognised as a disease, raise all sorts of problems. For example, in the 19th century it was seen as a form of anaemia, so iron was prescribed. In the 17th century, before that level of knowledge of blood existed, ‘steel filings’ were often part of the remedy, and iron is a constituent of steel. So, how did they know to use steel? Or was this nothing to do with the iron content, but instead about steel being imagined as ‘cutting through’ the blockages?

Langham’s text. From http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/insrv/libraries/scolar/digital/healthyreading.html . Copyright: Cardiff University, used with permission.

William Langham wrote ‘The Garden of Health’ in 1597. It was based on earlier recipe collections, and I came upon it when I was thinking about using recipes to tease out what exactly was supposed to be causing the symptoms – so, if the recipe involved plants that were clearly evacuative, then this could suggest that the cause of the disease was seen as a blockage. Langham arranged plants in simple alphabetical order, rather than arranging the material under the names of diseases; but, as part of his accessibility, he also gave a list of conditions with references to the different plant entries where the reader could find out more.

Langham gives a range of recipes for green sickness. One is packed full of ‘red’ plants –

‘seethe powder of the Keyes [i.e. the ash tree] with Betonie, red Sage, red Mynts, and Magerom [marjoram] in running water from a pottell [= 2 quarts] to a quart, and drink thereof a good draught with sugar warme morning and evening’

Elaine Hobby pointed out to me that this recipe also appears in 1677 in ‘The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight’ by ‘T.P.’ (possibly Hannah Woolley), but with ‘red Fennel’ instead of ‘red Mynts’. There was a second edition of Langham in 1633, and maybe the author used this.
So what’s all this red about? Betony, sage and marjoram often appear together in later collections as a gentle sternutatory. Red sage and betony are used against bilious attacks. Ash keys feature today on ‘wild food’ sites with the warning that they are very bitter and need to be boiled several times before eating, but what was used here was the ripe seed, dried and then reduced to powder. The ash-powder is used elsewhere for the stone (by provoking urination), jaundice and dropsy.

So maybe there’s something here about getting rid of obstructions. But to me, all this redness suggests the colour of blood, and the use of running water also makes me think that this is aimed at restoring or establishing a normal menstrual flow. How do we balance the known effects of the plants chosen, with the symbolic power of red? Comments please!

Helen King is Professor of Classical Studies at the Open University, UK. Her book on green sickness is  The Disease of Virgins.

To Preserve Quinces, White or Red?

By Rebecca Laroche

Wellcome Library, Manuscript 1340, Digital Image 0087

Through a current collaboration with Thomas Ward (United States Naval Academy), I have found something of interest in early modern quince preserves.[i] Across the Wellcome Library Digitised Collection, examples of recipes “To preserve quinces” evenly divide between two (or three types), “To preserve quinces red” and “To preserve quinces white” (the third category being some mixture or in-between of the two).[ii] Regularly, a white quince recipe will be on the same page as a red one, which presents an immediate choice to the preserver. In close reading, I have come to realize that this choice is about something more than color.

Setting a red recipe next to a white one, we can begin to suss out the issues, but three late seventeenth/early eighteenth century recipes provide both the red and white options within one entry and thus make the differences most apparent.  Generally, red quinces are  boiled at a “leisurely” pace (one recipe, MS 3341/009, records a four hour process,), covered, and with lower grade of sweetener (not necessarily refined sugar, even using fruit juices instead, which also added a gelling component).  White quinces are often boiled rapidly in the syrup made with double refined sugar, sometimes cooked before being added to the syrup, and, at some point determined by fruit tenderness, color change, and/or syrup thickness, the quinces are removed from the syrup to cool while the syrup continues to thicken, and then they are added again later in the process.  Much of the time making red quinces is uninterrupted, allowing for “multi-tasking,” either in or out of the kitchen.

Not necessarily so in preserving white quinces.  Not only are you often told to boil the quinces “as fast as you can uncouered” (see MSs 7818/52, 7999/10, 3341/10), which would present the danger of boiling over and burning, the added step of taking them up before they turn red requires extreme care.  One recipe even calls for “shifting” the quinces into “water ready to boil,” not once or twice, but “into seuerall such waters till they be tender (MS 2330/5).

Clearly white quinces are more difficult to make as they require extra care and a larger proportion of time spent watching the pots. Because much of this care is about anticipating the moment of color change, the implication is that the more a person makes the white quince recipe, the more aware she or he would be of signs of the oncoming change. That is, the more experienced preserver would be more prepared and his or her quinces would thus be whiter.

It follows, then, that the choice between red and white quinces has meaning beyond a color preference or even taste. Whether or not white quinces taste better than red ones is almost beside the point. If you present white quinces at the table, you signified an occasion deserving of the more “high maintenance” preserve, whereas red quinces, made at a more leisurely pace and with cheaper ingredients, are likely to be your “everyday” variety. At least the experienced cooks among your guests would appreciate the difference.


[i] I have also noted this variation with pippen preserves.

[ii] All parenthetical citations refer to the manuscript and image number accessed through the Wellcome Digitised Collection page: http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/node352.html

‘Crost by mistake’: Scribbling in early modern recipe books

By Elaine Leong

As anyone familiar with early modern recipe collections well knows, recipe compilers liked to cross things out.  One compiler, Lady Anne Fanshawe, particularly springs to mind.  Her notebook is filled with pages of recipes which she has crossed out with a large ‘X’.  Take a look at the following page from her notebook.

Wellcome Library, Western Manuscript MS 71113, p. 10.

Here, it seems out of the four recipes laboriously copied by her scribe Joseph Avery, only one survived the attack of Anne’s pen. Anne Fanshawe was, of course, not the only recipe compiler who had this habit of <ahem> defacing recipe books.  Other contemporary recipe book owners also happily crossed away.  Elizabeth Okeover, for example, also indulged in the practice.  Take a look at this page from her book…

Wellcome Library, Western MS 3712, Recipe Book associated with Elizabeth Okeover, fol. 6v.

Interestingly, while Anne gives us few hints of why she so brutally crossed out all those recipes in her book, Elizabeth was kind enough to let us know why she crosses out recipes.  At the bottom of a crossed-out recipe on page 4, Elizabeth writes ‘Right ritt and an approved & good Salve but crost by mistake’.

So, for Elizabeth, the crossing-out of recipes was reserved for information, which was erroneously transcribed, and/or know-how which did not meet her approval.  These were not the only reasons that led Elizabeth to scribble out information, she also crossed out duplicate recipes as she explains in this little tidbit on a loose bit of paper: ‘Some Reseits in this Book by mistakes was writ twice over; So one of each is crost But this harder yellow Salve Should not have bine Crost’. With no rubber/erasers, Tipp-Ex/whiteout or delete buttons to hand, crossing-out, for early modern recipe users, was a way of information management.

For many of you, my mention of Tipp-Ex may bring back school-day memories and that other helpful tool the ink eradicator.  I, for one, have not used either deletion/correction tool for at least a decade which brings me to the point of how we as 21st century recipe collectors/users now manage our stores of household information.  My mother-in-law, an avid home-cook, manages her cookbooks with a system of external indices (lists of selected recipes awaiting trial), post-its and meticulous annotations.  Flipping through her archive of Gourmet or Bon Appetit, one finds little penciled notes in her neat cursive hand next to tried and tested recipes.  A diligent and conscientious note-taker, she records not only the date and occasion the dish was served but also whether it garnered the approval of her dinner guests.  Disappointing dishes are marked as such or with more descriptive criticisms such as ‘too bland’ or ‘too sweet’.  In none of her 30-year run of the main American cooking magazines or her shelves full of cookbooks can one find a completely crossed-out recipe.  As a modern reader, trained by public libraries on the evils of book defacement, she simply couldn’t bring herself to reject recipes with the same flourish as Anne Fanshawe and Elizabeth Okeover did hundreds of years ago. How we read and use recipe books is not only intrinsically tied to how we value books as material objects but also to how we were trained to read.

My mother-in-law, if she will forgive me for disclosing this, came of age in the 50s when printed cookbooks, magazines and newspapers served as the main way of circulating recipes publicly.  For our generation, dare I say it, paper is slowly giving way to digital media.  We now search for, learn about and discuss recipes on blogs, social networking sites and twitter.  There is no longer a need to cross-out unwanted information or to wait for the Tipp-Ex to dry, we merely have to press the delete button.  It is all so simple for us but if Anne Fanshawe and Elizabeth Okeover left historians a trail of crossings-out to reconstruct their narratives, what are we leaving future historians?