Category Archives: Family and Household

‘All Manner of Fluxes:’ Plants and the Natalist Conquest of British Colonial America

Virginian Rock Polypody Fern. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Virginian Rock Polypody Fern. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

By Fiona 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.
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

Packe, Susanna. Cookbook of Susanna Packe [manuscript].1 674. Folger Shakespeare Library, V.a.215. https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Recipe_books_at_the_Folger_Shakespeare_Library

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.

[10] Kettilby. A collection, 133-134

[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.

The King of Fruits: Pineapples and Class Culture in British Cookbooks from 1661-1850

By Elizabeth Schmidt

In 1789, John Taylor sent a pineapple to his mother Jean in Scotland; the pineapple was from his cousin’s plantation in Jamaica, where John lived and worked as a merchant. Not having seen the fruit before, Jean turned to friends for guidance. On November 20, she wrote to John: “I have not looked in to the Pine Apple yet as they tell me its only to show out a Grand Table & not to be eat.” Four months later she added, “I do not intend to open the Pin Apple till you Come.” Laying on maternal guilt to convince him to return for a visit, she promised John a party in his honor where the pineapple could sit center stage.

Native to South America, the pineapple was cultivated by Indigenous peoples across the Caribbean. The plant was called hoyriri or anona by the Tupi, and iaiama by the Taino. Columbus and his crew were probably the first Europeans to taste the fruit in Guadalupe, and they brought back a case of pineapples for King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Only one survived unspoiled enough to eat, but King Ferdinand declared it his favorite fruit after just one taste. In England, the first pineapple was presented to the king somewhere around 1661, a “queen-pine” from Barbados.[1] The fruit is quite beautiful: the hexagonal eyes around the body grow in a spiral sequence that are often cited as a three-dimensional representation of the Golden Ratio, and the leaves on the top of the pineapple are commonly referred to as its “crown.”[2]

In a painting by Hendrick Danckerts, ca. 1675-1680, King Charles II is presented with a pineapple. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
In a painting by Hendrick Danckerts, ca. 1675-1680, King Charles II is presented with a pineapple. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Why did Jean’s friends tell her it was not to be eaten, and only “to show”? Even today, producers harvest and ship pineapples before they are perfectly ripe to ensure that the fruit reaches its destination while still attractive, since ripe fruit bruises easily and rots quickly. Unfortunately, once a pineapple is harvested, it does not continue to ripen.[3]

In eighteenth-century Scotland, Jean’s pineapple would have looked attractive but tasted terrible. Cookbook authors capitalized on this, offering instructions to preserve pineapples whole for repeated display. First seen in Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English House-keeper (1769), preservation recipes were offered for readers who desired pineapple centerpieces. The fruit was brined for five days in saltwater, then boiled in a saucepan with the brining liquid. Then, the sugaring process began: the cook would submerge the pineapple in a thin sugar syrup for a week, remove it, re-boil the syrup, and then submerge again. This process was replicated over eight to ten weeks, with the syrup re-boiled two or three times in that period to prevent molding. Francis Collingwood refined these instructions in The Universal Cook and Country Housekeeper (1792): the pineapple was left in the jar for six to eight weeks, re-boiling the syrup every week. The final instruction was to remove the pineapple from the jar and cover it with a thick, cool, sugar syrup that had been boiled with slices of ginger, a natural preservative. According to Raffald and Collingwood, a pineapple preserved in this way would “keep several years, if tied down close with a bladder.” This preservation process had been used on fruit in Europe since the fourteenth century. Preservation played a key role in both cuisine and medicine through the eighteenth century, especially as diet remained a key element in managing health.[4]. In fact, Collingwood’s 1792 cookbook had similar instructions to preserve cherries with their stalks and leaves to “make a very pretty appearance in a desert [sic] by candle-light.”

By the mid-eighteenth century, aristocrats could buy pineapples grown in “pine-houses” rather than imported from the Caribbean. Dutch horticulturist Agnes Block experimented with propagating new pineapple plants from the crown of the fruit and successfully produced the first European-grown specimen in 1687. Later, horticulturists realized they could import whole plants from the West Indies: the plant is drought-resistant and capable of storing water in its leaves to keep it alive.[5] Soon elite estates across Britain built their own pine-houses. Cookbooks aimed at the upper classes introduced recipes for pineapple desserts as early as 1732, when Richard Bradley included a pineapple tart in The Country Housewife and Lady’s Director. In 1770, Borella’s The Court and Country Confectioner, a book clearly aimed at either royal or aristocratic houses, included two recipes for “Anana, or Pine Apple Cream Ices.” By the mid-nineteenth century, pineapple recipes were much more numerous yet still aimed at the upper classes. Charles Francatelli’s The Modern Cook (1846) had ten recipes with pineapple, including fritters, souffles, and brioche. Yet Francatelli was the chef to Queen Victoria, and his cookbook did not purport to be written for the average English housewife.

The practice of displaying pineapples continued long after recipes were developed for baking them into sweet treats. In P. Masters’s Young Cook’s Assistant, and Housekeeper’s Guide (1841), the recipe for “Pine Apple Cream” tells readers that “the pine must be quite ripe – one too ripe for the table will do for this purpose.” Cookbooks authored for the “middling classes” kept including the preservation recipe first written by Raffald, as pineapples remained quite expensive. A 1787 memoir of a London actress tells the story of finding pineapples for sale for one pound per fruit. The author remarks of the actress that “for the first time since I knew her, she declined to gratify her inclination at such an expence.”[6] At the coronation of King George IV in 1821, hundreds of hothouse pineapples were purchased for the banquet.[7] Some were certainly eaten, but others were displayed on tables as exotic centerpieces, as showcased in a painting of the event by Denis Dighton (1821)

The Third and Last Challenge by the Champion during King George IV's Coronation Banquet in Westminster Hall (1821). At intervals along the table, you can see the yellow pineapples with their green crowns. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
The Third and Last Challenge by the Champion during King George IV’s Coronation Banquet in Westminster Hall (1821). At intervals along the table, you can see the yellow pineapples with their green crowns. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

So, while John probably thought he was sending his mother an exotic, expensive, and exciting gift, he actually sent her a project: a fruit that required significant labor to transform it into a centerpiece she could showcase.
*****
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.

[1] Kaori O’Connor, Pineapple: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), 17-20.

[2] Judithlynne Carson, “Fibonacci Numbers and Pineapple Phyllotaxy,” The Two-Year College Mathematics Journal 9:3 (June 1978): 132.

[3] Fran Beauman, The Pineapple: King of Fruits (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005), 6.

[4] Anne Stobart, Household Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).

[5] Bauman, The Pineapple, 31; O’Connor, Pineapple, 24.

[6] Elizabeth Steele, The Memoirs of Mrs. Sophia Baddeley. Late of Drury-Lane Theatre (Dublin, 1787), 90.

[7] Sir Roy Strong, Coronation: A History of Kingship and the British Monarchy (London: Harper Collins, 2005), 33; James Jennings, Two Thousand Five Hundred Practical Recipes in Family Cookery (London, 1837), lv.

The Tomato-Chili Nexus: Reconstructing the Mesoamerican Influence on Europe through Taste and Method

By Serin Quinn

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.

The earliest recipe, from Spanish Naples, is for a tomato sauce ‘in the Spanish style’, and sauces and stews/soups also form the bulk of recipes in Spanish and Portuguese. The author of a manuscript Portuguese cookbook (c. 1715) wrote: ‘Tomatoes in all foods, that is, in meat, in stews, or in roast sauces, add a particular flavor to everything’.

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.
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.
‘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.

 

Rhyming Recipes in the Early Modern Arab Mediterranean

By Leonie Böttiger

On the purpose of the urjuza:

This urjuza I have entrusted / with useful benefits, all of them tested

Of what our collection will have need / so, accept what I say in evidence, indeed

O you who these matters investigate / memorise all that I relate

For I have set for humankind in my verse / nothing but the truth of all you observe[1]

The beginning of the Eloquent Poem in a manuscript now held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France: Département des Manuscrits, Arabe 6844, f. 134v-135r.
The beginning of the Eloquent Poem in a manuscript now held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France: Département des Manuscrits, Arabe 6844, f. 134v-135r.

Why versify a recipe, let alone an entire recipe collection?

Readers might be familiar with what is arguably the most famous of English rhymed recipes: the witches’ song from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in which the three sorceresses cook up a potion featuring ingredients both disgusting and nonsensical. This Barbadian rum punch rhyme or Reverend Sydney Smith’s rhymed salad recipe might instead offer more delectable examples of culinary poetry, while The Recipes Project has previously highlighted playful aspects of recipes, including satire and rhyme.

Arabic, a language famed for its poetical tradition, also boasts its fair share of food-related poetry—but a curious North African craft recipe collection made up entirely of rhymed couplets might be a closer kin to the English playwright’s double trouble, though admittedly less renowned.

The Eloquent Poem in Rajaz[2] on the Proper Crafts was probably composed sometime in the fifteenth or sixteenth century CE by one Abu Bakr al-Kharrat, likely somewhere in North Africa, based on the manuscript evidence—we don’t have any other sources about his life. The Eloquent Poem has survived in at least five manuscripts which are now housed in Paris, Leiden, Gotha, and Djerba, and one of which is dated to 1579 CE. Arranged in four maqālāt (sg. maqāla) or treatises, the short book is a didactic poem which consists of recipes for various household and other craft activities.

Versified recipes can be considered an almost ‘double-didactic’ genre: both the recipe and the poem are inherently concerned with the transmission of knowledge. As such, they present an intriguing lens through which to approach the poetic adaptation and dissemination of knowledge: what does it mean to transform recipes for scribal arts and household activities into didactic verse?

For Abu Bakr, poetry had the decisive advantage of being easier to memorise and transmit—a device humans had taken advantage of for centuries, if not millennia, before its mechanisms were ever explained by psychologists and neurolinguists. He explains in his brief foreword:

“Now then, brother, […] I have compiled for you in this poem benefits and useful properties for whatever purposes you wish. You informed me that you are keen to attain it in a way that eases its memorisation and transmission, and I have abbreviated the composition and clarified what I have set forth of my knowledge…”

Abu Bakr does not mention any of his sources, but many of the recipes contained in the poem have parallels in older Arabic recipe collections from all across the Arabic-speaking world, dealing with stain removal and other crafts, as well as in books on the occult properties of substances, attesting to a fluid body of knowledge that was nevertheless transmitted somewhat cohesively.

Unlike his predecessors, Abu Bakr, however, did not seem to hold much esteem for established authorities: as we see in the excerpt above, as well as in several other places in his text, he continuously highlights his own expertise, claiming that he is presenting his own knowledge. Where older texts make frequent reference to Greek, Roman, or even Indian physicians and scholars (think Dioscorides, Galen, or Suśruta) to substantiate and verify the efficacy of their recipes, Abu Bakr does not mention any ancient authorities. This might reflect both a shift in how expertise was construed at the time the Eloquent Poem was composed as well as its expected audience: What use was it to namedrop Aristotle if his name meant nothing to your readers—or perhaps, listeners? It seems that Abu Bakr considered highlighting his own practice-based expertise a more useful strategy to convey authority onto his text.

So, what did that look like in practice? The following recipe, to remove stains from clothes, may give a little taste of Abu Bakr’s style (I have tried my best to retain the rhyme scheme):

Whoever loves knowledge, clearly to comprehend / Should vinegar and potash blend

In a pot, raised on the fire to stay / For three hours of the day

And wash the fabric and the wool with this / For it is described by my premise

I mean it removes every stain, alluded / before this, and is concluded.

Illustration of an alchemical operation in the Kitāb al-Diryāq, now held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France: Département des Manuscrits. Arabe 2964, p. 15.
Illustration of an alchemical operation in the Kitāb al-Diryāq, now held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France: Département des Manuscrits. Arabe 2964, p. 15.

About half of this recipe consists of material that is merely there to make the rhyme work. It thus facilitates memorisation but wouldn’t be strictly required to actually follow the procedure. Additionally, and similarly to its non-versified cousins, the recipe above does not offer any quantities or measurements apart from the “three hours” boiling time for the vinegar and potash. Now, stain removal is not necessarily an exact science, but the absence of such specifications indicates that people were likely familiar with the procedures described. This lack of measurements is also the case in recipes that require more precision, such as making inks, where a drop of liquid can mean the difference between a rich, saturated colour and a watery splotch:

Green verdigris, o you of bright mind / with vinegar smoothly grind

And mix it, my friend, with dissolved mastic / Write with it, it turns doubtlessly fantastic

Among the most amazing things with which to write / And ask, if you don’t know, someone who has tried!

As we have seen, Abu Bakr’s Eloquent Poem provides a unique glimpse into what was considered useful knowledge, addressing a wide array of needs in an easy-to-memorise format while stressing the importance of practical experience. Finally, italso offers practical solutions for getting rid of all kinds of pests—no quantities required, but PLEASE do not try at home:

Whoever wants to expel every mouse / from all the corners of the house

Should scatter arsenic on the fire / in his room or the house entire

He does this once, on a Friday / and doesn’t see a mouse in his house—all away!

Illustration for the chapter on the mouse from the Manāfiʿ al-ḥayawān by Ibn Baḫtišūʿ, now held in the Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.500 fol. 53r.
Illustration for the chapter on the mouse from the Manāfiʿ al-ḥayawān by Ibn Baḫtišūʿ, now held in the Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.500 fol. 53r.

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Leonie Böttiger (formerly Rau) is a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin) and the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies. Her PhD project investigates premodern Arabic recipe collections as resources of knowledge, focusing on a variety of disciplinary contexts, periods, and regions. Leonie has written about premodern Arabic recipes for the Library of Arabic Literature, the American Historical Association, and The Recipes Project. She is the managing editor at ArabLit & ArabLit Quarterly.

[1] All translations from Arabic are mine.

[2] An Arabic poetic metre typically used for didactic poetry. A poem written in rajaz is called an urjuza.