Category Archives: Series: Organizational Techniques

Early Modern, Records, Documents and Notes, Series: Hannah Wolley, Series: Organizational Techniques

This is How My Grandmother Cooks: Manuscript Recipes in the Composition Classroom

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By Samantha Snively

This past summer, the relationship between early modern recipes and teaching undergraduates was on everyone’s mind at the “Teaching Early Modern Recipes in the Digital Age” workshop at Attending to Early Modern Women. How could we bring manuscript receipt collections into our classrooms, and what could students learn from them?

Manuscript recipes raise questions of form, genre, and purpose, and these questions are key to undergraduate writers’ development of academic writing skills. Most of the ideas proposed in June were intended for literature or history courses, but as a graduate student teaching a standardized composition syllabus, I wanted to know: What could manuscript recipes teach an introductory composition course about writing?

I ran the experiment this winter in my UWP001: Expository Writing class, and it turns out that manuscript recipes are perfect texts to think with in a composition classroom. I incorporated selected manuscript recipes into a unit on rhetorical analysis, and a day on “Genre” seemed most germane for my class to discuss the ways that manuscript recipes intricately combine genre and form with audience concerns. I wanted my students to realize that formal, generic, and linguistic choices are vital to constructing rhetorical messages.

Wellcome manuscripts 2535 and 3107
Wellcome manuscripts 2535 and 3107

I used two recipes from the Wellcome Library’s digital collections: a recipe for “biskett bread” from the 1686 recipe book of Elizabeth Godfrey & others (MS 2535, folio 14) and a recipe for “ginger bread cake” from the 1699 manuscript of Edward & Katharine Kidder (MS3107, folios 19 and 20). I paired this with a recipe for “French Bread” from Hannah Woolley’s 1672 The Exact Cook (142).

However, it would be cruel to make a group of undergrads read 17th-century handwriting, so I transcribed the manuscripts for our discussion. I then asked my students: Based on these texts, what are the formal conventions of a recipe? How does the genre change over time, or among rhetorical situations? And what do these genre conventions suggest about audience expectations and expertise?

My students were at first bemused by the diction, phrasing, and imprecision of the 17th-century recipes, but quickly inferred audience expectations from the genre conventions they observed. They noted that the form of a manuscript recipe required a variety of literacies in its audiences, and from there were argued that manuscript recipes also assumed a body of experiential knowledge acquired prior to reading the recipe.[1] We then discussed the reciprocity of this relationship: if you can infer qualities about the audience from a text, how might a writer use genre conventions to interact with their audience?

Recipe slide 2My students at first had some difficulty articulating the complex way that recipes both required and contributed to a shared culture of experiential knowledge. They found the injunction in Woolley’s recipe to “let not your Oven be too hot,” odd in a text intended to teach its audience a new skill. However, they were able to navigate this question by retracing these ideas through their own experiences interacting with recipes. A number of students noted that “this sounds like the way my grandmother describes her recipes/makes her food,” and we discussed the way that genres function as a contract between writer and reader.

Student wisdom
Student wisdom

Using recipes to think about the ways an audience for a piece of rhetoric is partially determined by form was a productive exercise for my composition students. Not only were they able to watch a genre develop and change over time—thereby realizing the social nature of written genres—they were also able to think about their own abilities to control and work with genre conventions to further their own rhetorical message.

[1] Wendy Wall describes this as “kitchen literacy” in “Literacy and the Domestic Arts.” Huntington Library Quarterly 73.3 (2010): 383-412.

This post was first published on the emroc blog (early modern recipes online collective) on 24/02/2016

Food and Drink, Records, Documents and Notes, Series: Organizational Techniques

Recipes, index cards and paper slips

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By Elaine Leong

Deep in my closet is a battered 1970s red and white tin box decorated with various characters from the Peanuts cartoon strip with the word ‘RECIPES’ written squarely on the front. I, of course, am not the real owner of the box, after all how can I possibly be old enough to purchase anything in the 70s? The box is actually one of those objects that I appropriated from my mother’s possessions as a child. While the box’s outward appearance suggests a treasure trove filled with 1970s dishes – lasagna, duck l’orange, meatloaf, shrimp cocktail and more – the box is actually sadly empty and lingers, though much loved, unused.

My Peanuts recipe box is part of a larger trend of using index cards as a paper technology. Some might comment that such cards are outdated, but I am willing to bet my last mince pie that a stained and worn set of index cards filled with culinary recipes still adorn many kitchens around the world.  For decades, these 3×5 inch recipe cards served as one of the main ways in which food recipes were exchanged in North America and beyond. Women’s magazines such as Good Housekeeping and Ladies Home Journal included pre-printed recipe cards in their publications and, indeed, Martha Steward Living continues to issue tear-out recipe cards.  Even websites such as Epicurious allow readers to print out their recipes on either a 3×5 or a 4×6 card format. The index card provides note-takers with a flexible and extendable system, allowing them to rearrange their notes to their fancy. So, we can mull over and change our minds repeatedly on whether Yotam Ottolenghi’s Turkish Baked Eggs recipe rightly belongs to the section on ‘breakfast’ or ‘light lunch’ or ‘vegetarian dishes’ or ‘dinner’.  In addition, the diminutive size of these recipe index cards made them portable and the standard dimensions ease the exchange of cards and the combining of different collections.

Alas, index cards or loose paper slips were not a paper tool adopted by early modern recipe collectors.  In the case of index cards, this is not surprising. Recent studies demonstrate that the modern day index card system was developed in the 18th century in association with the collecting of botanical information and library catalogs.[1] However, systems of information organization involving loose paper slips were well established in the early modern period.  Scholars have uncovered a number of readers, such as Conrad Gesner, Robert Boyle and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz to name a few, who organized their notes with such systems.  Yet, the majority of early modern recipe collections now in libraries and archives exist in bound volumes.  Undoubtedly, recipes circulated on loose slips of paper (in letters or just handed over in person) but the information on these loose slips were more often than not diligently copied into the family recipe book. Why did early modern recipe compilers shy away from keeping loose recipes? One reason might be the precariousness attached to such collections.  Whilst loose paper slips might have allowed recipe compilers to endlessly re-categorize and rearrange their collections, they were also unstable in the sense that individual slips could easily fall by the wayside.  Recipes were just too precious to keep on loose paper slips.  One also wonders whether the very act of writing a particular recipe into a bound book served to consolidate both the recipe’s place within the family treasury of household knowledge and the recipe donor’s place within the family’s social network. After all, it may be easy to get rid of a loose slip of paper but much more work is required to delete a recipe written in the middle of a bound notebook.

This is the time of New Year’s resolutions and, normally, I don’t much go in for that.  However, this year, I think that I will resolve to better organize my recipe collection (i.e. no more desperate Epicurious searches at the supermarket). I just found a stack of index cards in the stationary cupboard at work and 2013 might just be the year that I will start filling up my Peanuts recipe box…

 

[1] Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines.  About Cards and Catalogs 1548-1929 (Cambridge, MA and London: The M.I.T. Press, 2011) and  Isabelle Charmentier and Staffan Müller-Wille, ‘Natural History and Information Overload: The Case of Linnaeus’, Studies of History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43, 1 (2012), 4-15.

Early Modern, Manuscripts, Records, Documents and Notes, Series: Organizational Techniques, Tools and Techniques

Recipe Organization: It’s not as easy as A, B, C.

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By Elaine Leong

In my last post, I bemoaned the lack of a flexible search engine and information management technologies in the ‘favourites’ recipe box of the Epicurious iPhone app.  While still declaring my adoration for the app, I would like to talk a little more about issues of categorization in alphabetical information organization.

Now some of you might wonder, is she seriously offering a post about information categorization and alphabetization? Well, yes I am! And I bet this will even spark debate around your dinner table tonight!

Why don’t I start by sharing with you some of the recipes in the ‘B’ section of my Epicurious app recipe box: Baked pork chops with a parmesan sage crust, Baltimore crab cakes, Barbecue turkey burgers, Bass with herbed rice, Beef stroganoff and Blueberry buttermilk pancakes.

Of course, this is a historical recipes blog and so why don’t we pair this with a look a few of the recipes under ‘B’ in Johanna St John’s alphabetically organized mid-seventeenth century recipe book: for a kanker in a woman’s Brest, Dr Mathias for the whites and the weaknes in the Back, for a Bone ach excellent,[1] for Bleeding at the nose, For a Blast or the poison of the Toad,[2] for any knob or hardnes in the Brest or milk quard,[3] For the Bitting of a mad dog never failing and Mr Boyles Balsame of Sulphire.[4]

As you can see, inadvertently, the electronic search engines of the Epicurious iPhone app used several different knowledge categories to create the list of my favourite recipes beginning with ‘B’.  Here we have cooking method (baked, barbecue), locality (Baltimore) and ingredient (bass, beef and blueberry).  Johanna St. John, too, uses several different categories: parts of the body (breast, back, bone), action (bleeding), type of medicament (balsame), and external actions on the body (blast, dog bites).

Alphabetization and categorization is not as simple as A, B, C. While it is obvious that the Epicurious app merely assumed that the first word of each recipe title represented the key word, Johanna St. John’s parameters for categorization are not so clearly laid out. In fact, it appears that she herself was unsure about particular groupings and, in a later reading of the books, re-categorized a number of recipes.  Take a look at this folio, from the ‘W’ section, below:

Wellcome Western MS 4338, fols. 210v-211r.

 Many of the recipes on this page are to be used during childbirth. Some ease the experience of the mother-to-be, while others address potential complications.  In my mind, these recipes were first collected in the ‘W’ section as St. John saw them as a cohesive body of knowledge dealing with Women’s health concerns. However, if you look closely, you can also see a number of letters written to the right of the recipe titles.  Thus, a ‘D’ is written next to ‘To hasten delivery’, a ‘R’ next to ‘For an immoderate flux of the Redds’ and a ‘G’ next to ‘A Glister to be given in labor’ and so on…

Initially, these letters baffled me but after a bit of pondering, I realized that they are records of St. John’s second attempt to categorize her book of medical knowledge. Evidently, the second time round, she decided that a remedy to haste Delivery should be filed under ‘D’ rather than ‘W’, and that the ‘Redds’ and ‘Glister’ are the keywords in the other two recipes. St. John’s first pass at categorization suggests that, for her at least, there is a defined body of knowledge dealing with women’s health issues. In her second pass, this knowledge was folded into the rest of her collection.

So, where recipes are concerned at least, our methods of categorization are revealing of how we imagine and view bodies of knowledge. They also, as we now know, play a crucial role on whether we can ever find the required recipe again.  After all, I don’t immediately look under ‘B’ for pork chops or crab cakes, do you?

[1] Wellcome Library, Western MS 4338, fol. 14r.  For emphasis, I have capitalized and put in bold what I think are the relevant ‘B’s in these recipe titles.

[2] Ibid., fol. 14v.

[3] Ibid., fol. 16r.

[4] Ibid., fols. 17r and 18r.

British Studies, Early Modern, Manuscripts, Networks of Knowledge, Records, Documents and Notes, Series: Oral History, Series: Organizational Techniques

What is a ‘remedy collection’?: Recording Medical Information in the Seventeenth Century

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What exactly is a ‘recipe collection’? The most obvious answer is something like the example shown below, a formal ‘receptaria’ book of medical receipts and remedies. In the early modern period, and across Europe, these types of collections were fairly common, and especially in wealthier households. These were often carefully constructed documents, containing indices and sometimes containing groups of remedies according to various types of remedy, or parts of the body. In many ways these were the high-end of domestic medicine.

But were such formal collections necessarily representative? In other words, did everyone (or at least everyone capable of writing remedies down) collect their medical information this way? No. As a great deal of recent work by historians is revealing, the committal of recipes to paper was often a much more haphazard, and far less regimented, process.
For a start, paper was an expensive commodity in the early modern period. It could often be bought easily enough; apothecaries often sold reams or ells of paper, as did other retailers from merchants to haberdashers. But it was nonetheless quite costly. Unlike today, where scribble pads and notebooks can be bought for pennies, the buying of paper, or a bound book of notepaper, would have been something out of the ordinary, especially for those on low incomes.

Firstly, the recording of remedies was an expedient and often pragmatic process. Remedies usually spread firstly by word of mouth, with people passing on their favourite receipts to friends, neighbours and acquaintances. As Adam Fox’s work on early modern oral culture has shown (Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500-1700 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000)) people had a strong ability to commit information to memory, and this made sense at a time when the majority of the population couldn’t read or write. Nevertheless, for those wishing to record the remedy accurately for future use, there was a need to do so quickly, and often using whatever was to hand.

As such, many ‘remedy collections’ are little more than assemblages of roughly scribbled notes, sometimes on torn bits of paper, sometimes on the back of unrelated documents, and sometimes even including a variety of other information on the same page. In fact, the very survival of many remedies is probably attributable to the fact that they have been incorporated into other, non-medical, documents.

Nevertheless, the recording of remedies in certain types of document was often a more deliberate decision. In Wales, for example, there were several instances of medical remedies being written on notepaper purloined from a church. In one sense this was pragmatic and reflected the simple availability (and probably abundance) of paper, given the needs of the church to keep records. But some were written inside church documents. In parish registers, for example, it was not uncommon to find receipts. A common example was that of a ‘receipt for the biteinge of a mad dogge”, often originally attributed to the register of Cathorp Church in Lincolnshire, but which seemed to move around the country. An example of the remedy, occurring in the Monmouthshire church of Llantillio Pertholey, can be seen here: http://www.peoplescollectionwales.co.uk/Item/7637-a-recipe-to-cure-the-bite-of-a-mad-dog-llanti.

In another sense, though, putting remedies in amongst religious verses, as often occurred in commonplace books and notebooks, was a way of allying the remedy to the power of religion. If it was next to God’s word on paper, perhaps it would have more power?
Above all, for the remedy to be of any use, it had to be easy to find when needed. Some, for example, kept remedies within the pages of their business ledgers. Here, the regimented layout perhaps suited ease of future reference. But perhaps most common was to keep remedies within the pages of personal sources. Many diarists noted down examples of favoured remedies, especially when they had suffered from an ailment and attributed their recovery to the taking of a particular remedy.

Commonplace books, notebooks and copy books were also common places for the jotting down of useful information, and could be easily referred to if needed. It was not uncommon to put remedies within pages of miscellany, including accounts, quotes, poetry and family records, locating it firmly within the context of ‘useful’ information. Many literate families also kept letters. Health was a regular topic of conversation amongst letter writers, and it was common to fire off a few missives seeking potential remedies from within one’s social network. When a reply duly came, here was a ready-made receipt that could be kept without needing to write it down again. Prescriptions and directions from practitioners might be especially prized as they represented a virtual consultation, specially tailored to the recipient’s humoral constitution.

One often-overlooked method, however, were medical almanacs. It’s worth looking at a typical example of how these sources could be used. Cardiff Public Library MS 1.475 is a small memoranda book dating to around 1708, and seemingly originating from London, with the names John and Elizabeth Price prominent. A little list of family notes inside the front cover reveal a touching and tragic tale.

February 10th 1708/9
Married then to the pretty, the charming Mrs Elizabeth Price by the Rev’d Dr Typing of Camberwell.

My daughter Anne was born the 17 of April 1712 about twenty min(utes) after eight in the morning and baptised the 1. of May
She was a very beautifull, lovely child but God was pleased to take it May 3. 1712

Much of the document, however, is actually drawn on the reverse side of copies of almanacks. These were part-astrological, part-magical and part-news documents which contained everything from prognostications and predictions to religious dates, weather information and medicine. The first almanac in this document is ‘Merlinus Liberatus, being an alamanack for the year of our Blessed Saviour’s Incarnation, 1708…by John Partridge, student in Physick and Astrology at the Blue Ball in Salisbury Street in the Strand, London”. Partridge was clearly an entrepreneur; the very next page of his almanck is dedicated to ‘Partridges Purging Pills, useful in all cases where purging is required”!

A second almanac pasted into the book is “The Country Physician; or a choice collection of physic fitted for vulgar use: Containing 1) a collection of choice medicaments of all kinds, Galenical and Chymical, excerpted out of the most approved authors 2) Historical observations of famous cures collected out of the works of several modern Physicians 3) A Cabinet of specific, select and practical chymical preparations in two parts, made use of by the Author, by W. Salmon M.D”

This sort of document was a cheap means of buying a ready-made remedy collection, complete with the latest thinking and couched in terms of the layman. There were many self-help volumes of family physick available, but these cheaper almanac and chapbook style documents were easier to read and easier to keep. It is also clear that the spaces on the back of pages were useful places to note down other remedies as they accrued.

For example, the Prices noted down a number of receipts on the back pages, including a receipt “To prevent a return of the ague”, another for the “dead palsy”, including mistletoe, oak and saffron, and another for “flushings in the face”. Here, then, the printed and the written remedy intertwined to become a completely distinct and individual family collection. In many ways this was as formal a collection as a ‘receptaria’, and probably included many of the same sorts of remedies, but in a different form.

The recording of remedies, and the idea of a ‘remedy collection’, therefore, shouldn’t necessarily be limited to a single, formalised and regimented document. These were organic documents, sometimes constructed carefully, but often just growing as collections of rough notes. Remedies might be deliberately placed within documents, or they might be the result of a roughly-scribbled note. Equally, people might keep ready printed or written remedies, and simply add their own notes as required. In this sense, there is no single ‘remedy collection’ document; instead, there are a myriad different ways in which people collected remedies.

Apologies for cross-posting. This post appeared on my own blog: dralun.wordpress.com (22 August 2012).