Vincent Van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Have you encountered a reference to potatoes from before 1800?
I’m interested in all early modern potatoes and would be delighted if you could alert me to any references, however fragmentary. You can email me on r.earle@warwick.ac.uk or use this form.
This Potato Project asks two inter-connected questions.
How, why, and by what routes did the potato spread around the world and into individual diets after Europeans first encountered the tuber in the sixteenth century?
Why did states across eighteenth-century Europe begin to promote the cultivation and consumption of the potato?
The first question builds on the pioneering work of Alfred Crosby. Crosby and other scholars suggested that the spread of new world foods such as potatoes and maize helps explain the dramatic increase in the world’s population over the last five hundred years, and also hinted at the ways in which these foods travelled to Africa, India and elsewhere. At the same time, the details of their dissemination remain in many cases opaque. The Project traces the ways in which potatoes entered the diets of individual eaters around the world.
The second question examines the historical roots of the our conviction that food, agriculture, health and state security are intrinsically linked. The Project investigates the moment, in the late eighteenth century, when European philosophers, political economists, agronomists, doctors, bureaucrats, priests and other historical actors began to insist that strong, secure states were inconceivable without a resilient agricultural programme grounded on significant changes in the dietary practices of the population as a whole. It was in the eighteenth century that the processes connecting individual diets to the wealth and strength of the state began to be theorised in ways that allowed for effective manipulation and state intervention. Many projects and proposals for dietary reform were articulated in the eighteenth century. This Project focuses on the central role the potato played in many of them.
It’s the time of year when everyone seems to go down with coughs and colds. Perhaps that’s why on a recent trip to Oxford to look at collections of medical recipes, my eye was caught by a series of cough remedies recorded in one sixteenth-century manuscript. I’m not aware of much published scholarship on the history of the common cold (though I haven’t checked extensively so if you know differently I’d be interested to hear) but it’s an area which has been attracting attention recently in the Recipes blog and elsewhere online – see for example Katherine Allen’s post on eighteenth-century cold remedies last November and the links there, and Sally Osborn’s comments on asses’ milk as a remedy for colds and chicken soup, rather surprisingly, being recommended in eighteenth-century England not as a remedy for colds but for stomach problems. This was not purely an eighteenth-century phenomenon. As this manuscript makes clear, earlier recipe collectors were also interested in collecting remedies for this widespread condition.
The manuscript I was looking at was Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson A.393, a collection of remedies for all kinds of illnesses. It was copied from an older recipe collection in 1529 by John Reed, who was the parson of Nether Broughton in Leicestershire and had previously been the vicar of Melbourne in Derbyshire. Several of the recipes are accompanied by marginal notes which state that the remedy has been ‘proved’ by Reed himself or one of his acquaintances, which is unusual but not unique in this period. An article published by George R. Keiser in 2005 gives more details on its context and contents. (“Robert Thornton’s ‘Liber de Diversis Medicinis:’ Text, Vocabulary, and Scribal Confusion.” in Rethinking Middle English: Linguistic and Literary Approaches, ed. Nikolaus Ritt and Herbert Schendl (Frankfurt am Main, 2005), 30-41.)
The section of cough remedies in the manuscript distinguishes carefully between different kinds of coughs: ‘the dry cough’, ‘the cough of the lungs’, and the ‘cough that has phlegm’. These distinctions are similar to the ones still made by modern cough mixtures between dry and chesty coughs. The remedies themselves tend to be fairly simple, relying on a small number of plant ingredients mixed with wine or honey. For example for ‘cough of the lungs’, the reader is told to make an electuary (a paste mixed with honey or sugar) from the seeds of ‘ache’ (used to refer to celery or various kinds of parsley), anise and pepper, mixed with honey and a little wine, to be used every morning and evening ‘till thou be whole’. For dry coughs, ‘ache’ and anise are again recommended, mixed with violet seeds and cooked with wine ‘to it wax thick’. It also seems that Reed or his acquaintances had tried at least some of these remedies and sought out others. Against one remedy a marginal note, in Latin, notes that this is a ‘Medicine which has very often been proved to be good, and which never fails.’ At the bottom of the page is some more advice, though not a recipe, emphasized with underlining: ‘Above all thing go not from a warm fire to a cold bed, ne from a warm bed to put on your clothes cold. Warm your clothes at both ye changes, etc.’
As the other posts show, these remedies are part of a much longer tradition and in later centuries they continued to be made at home and sold, as with this ‘lung tonic’ advertised around 1900.
Lung Tonic Advertisement, c. 1900. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.
We still use home remedies for coughs and colds today, alongside ones that can be bought from pharmacies: various relatives of mine recommend hot Ribena, or honey and lemon in water, and more exotically one friend recommends hot milk with garlic (I’ve never dared try that one). Although they are starting to be noticed, these and similar remedies have not yet been clearly fitted into wider scholarly debates in the history of medicine and illness in the way that remedies connected with (for example) sex and fertility, or mental illness, or plague have been. Nevertheless, they offer a window onto some of the less serious illnesses and everyday concerns of medieval and early modern recipe collectors.
Image from the manuscript of Dergici toktobuha Ge ti ciowan lu bithe, from a manuscript (Mandchou 289) in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.
I study and write about the history of science and medicine in early modern Eurasia, with a focus on China in that context. In particular, I’m interested in how medical and culinary recipes were translated in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, and how the recipe format became a medium of epistemic exchange across early modern Eurasia.
A text that has been particularly exercising me lately is the Xiyang yaoshu 西洋藥書 [Handbook of Western Drugs]. It was written by two French Jesuits, Joachim Bouvet (1656 – 1730) and Jean-François Gerbillon (1654-1707), some time after they had arrived at the court of the Kangxi Emperor in 1688. The book itself was smaller than a modern passport. It begins with a series of thirty-six recipes for treating myriad illnesses, many of which were broken down into varieties on a common theme. After this, the text opens out into almost forty further discussions of drugs and illnesses, many roughly translated from European-language texts about health and the body.
Importantly, the text was written in a language called Manchu, one of the official languages of the Qing court and a crucial medium of translation of scientific and medical knowledge during the Kangxi Emperor’s reign. Many of the recipes used the Manchu script to transliterate the names for drugs in Chinese, French, Latin, and other languages. The text contains many recipes for making remedies for poisons of all kinds.
Reading through this text, I began to think deeply about these recipes as literary objects. What if we understand a recipe not just as a kind of text, but also as a form of storytelling? If a recipe does tell a story, what kind of story might that be? And how might understanding recipes in this way change the way we read and experience them?
Thus began the Qing Bodies project, a long-term multi-media foray into considering various forms of scientific and medical writing in the Qing period from the perspective of a history of storytelling. Qing Bodies asks a very simple, but potentially transformative, question: how might reading Qing medical and scientific texts with an eye to narrative form open up creative possibilities for working and writing with the history of Eurasian science and medicine? This has been tremendous fun, to put it mildly!
One recent experiment stemming from this project (and inspired by the work of Raymond Queneau) has led to me thinking about the relationship between recipes and drama. Can we map a recipe onto–for example–a traditional three-act dramatic form? And how might that change how we experience recipes as literature?
If Act I of the recipe introduces the protagonist (or protagonists), sets out the conflict, and presents the incident that will set the ensuing events in motion, Act II introduces an obstacle for the main character and brings the protagonist to a moment of crisis. Act III resolves the crisis. Here, the recipe becomes a story involving characters (drugs, a body in crisis) that are transformed through their interactions in time.
In tomorrow’s post, I’ll share the result of this experiment with you…
Ingredients in Eighteenth-Century Chocolate, Courtesy of the Historic Foodways Division of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
Last semester I taught a course on Tudor and Stuart Britain, and devoted one week to study of the Commercial Revolution. This “revolution” in taste and consumption occurred c. 1650-1750, as exotic goods from British colonies came up for sale in metropolitan British markets. From Edinburgh to Bristol, and from London to Dublin, early modern Britons began to purchase these “new world” products in great numbers, significantly changing British financial markets and British tastes. The students readily grasped the economic and logistical details of this historical shift, but I wanted them to understand that the Commercial Revolution also marked a sensory change for early modern Britons, whose senses of smell, taste, sight, and touch mediated their interactions with new goods. So I planned an experiment for the last day of the unit: the students would drink chocolate in class.
In early modern Europe, chocolate usually was consumed as a hot drink – Amy Tigner explored the many ways that early modern people ate and drank chocolate in her excellent Recipe Project posts on chocolate here and here – with crushed cacao nibs mixed with spices, hot water, and a bit of sugar. I wanted the students to try early modern chocolate, and (luckily for me) there’s a company that makes it. Starting in 2003, the Historic Division of MARS Chocolate North America began work on an eighteenth-century-style chocolate drink. Partnering with historical organizations such as the Colonial Chocolate Society, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Fort Ticonderoga, and the University of California, Davis, MARS created a chocolate blend which it believes is historically accurate. The mixture is available for sale, and I purchased a container for the class. After mixing the powder with hot water as directed, I poured each student a small cup and asked them to compose “tasting notes” on the drink, describing the flavors and asking them to identify what they thought was in the recipe.
Some of the students loved the chocolate. Several thought it contained coffee, reporting that it reminded them of their caffeinated drink of choice:
“The texture and thickness reminds me of Turkish coffee.”
“It’s like thicker coffee which is nice and soothing.”
Most of the students believed that the chocolate contained spices and fruit extracts. For many, the spicy and fruity flavors in the drink were evocative of banana:
“You can smell the different spices. It seems to have fruity tones.”
“It tastes like banana after a while…I don’t like banana.”
“It tastes like hot cocoa and apple cider had a baby. Kinda has a banana flavor.”
Many students commented on the fact that the drink was not very sweet. In trying to emulate eighteenth-century recipes, MARS included only a bit of sugar in their recipe.
“I wish it was sweeter.”
Most students found the texture and the thickness of the chocolate to be disconcerting. For these modern American students, chocolate was supposed to be smooth and sweet. They thought that the texture and flavor were off-putting, even revolting:
“It’s like warm liquid cough medicine.”
“I’m slightly disturbed that there are yellow oily stains inside of my cup.”
“It reminds me of vomit.”
After everyone had finished their chocolate (or discreetly tipped it into the trash) and turned in their tasting notes, we sat down and discussed the recipe. MARS doesn’t reveal the precise details online, but it does say that the chocolate contains ingredients commonly found in eighteenth-century recipes: anise, chili pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, orange peel, and vanilla. One by one, I revealed the ingredients to the class, and then we mapped them onto an atlas, exploring where each ingredient originated in the early modern period, the shipping processes and time required to bring them to British markets, and how much they would have cost. Many of these ingredients would have seemed strange, and their tastes or textures unpleasant, to early modern Britons themselves. We finished the class by discussing how consuming fashionable products may not always have been a positive experience for people in eighteenth-century Britain — and sometimes even for those in twenty-first century America.
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Many thanks to the students in “HIST 308: Tudor and Stuart Britain” (Fall 2013) at Christopher Newport University for their enthusiastic participation in this project, and for their permission to reproduce their tasting notes online.
