Awarded to the best book by a North American scholar in any field of British Studies, and dealing with the period from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century, Reynolds’ book represents the first time a work on recipes has won this prize. With our ongoing support for scholarship on recipes — any time period, any place in the world — the Recipes Project is thrilled by this news, which represents a significant achievement for our field. We are even more excited because Melissa Reynolds is part of our RP Editorial Team!
Reading Practice was described by the prize committee as “a remarkable exploration of the complex interaction between manuscript and print publications about ‘natural knowledge’—medical recipes, almanacs, herbals, and pictorial prognostications.” The committee particularly praised the ways that the book speaks to and engages with many different subfields, including book and reading history, manuscript studies, gender history, business history, and studies of nature and the environment. As anyone who studies recipes knows, this is one of the many reasons why they are such valuable resources to writers, scholars, food professionals, and students; recipes connect and speak to so many aspects of human life.
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.
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 Projecthas 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.
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.
***** 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.
Roselli, G. d. Epulario quale tratta del modo de cucinare ogni carne, ucelli, pesci de ogni sorte, et fare sapori, torte, et pastelli al modo de tutte le provincie / [giovanni de roselli]. Venice: 1538. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.
Collating together in one single volume the medical and culinary knowledge and recipes, or any other form of instructions, of food preservation and fermentation, is an activity that has been performed by many social groups, regardless of size (be it family, estate, professional association, church, congregation). Usually in manuscript form, these recipe collections are the essence of shared culinary traditions and common knowledge and, ultimately, they are brought into existence by a desire to protect and preserve that knowledge and traditions for future generations.
Not having the tangible economic value and purpose of their printed counterparts, manuscript culinary recipe collections represent a type of text that can offer a wide range of analysis exactly because of their more intrinsically personal and variable nature. Due to their different origins, scope, and purpose, these manuscript recipe collections can assume varied forms; they can be prepared exclusively for personal use or for collective fruition; they can be prepared to be shared with individuals outside of the social group or not; they can be created for simply preserving the common shared knowledge of a specific social group or to praise and extol the social group that produced them; and they can also be considered as cultural objects. These different types of culinary recipe collections are the focus of Kernan’s and Müllneritsch’s edited volume Culinary Texts in Context, 1500-1800. The nine contributions to the edited volume focus on culinary texts: the way these nine contributions are organized within the edited volume richly illustrates the wide scope of the research being done on manuscript culinary texts while, and at the same time, it stretches the boundaries of the research field itself.
Ultimately, culinary texts are fascinating due to the low degree of authorship they display. One can claim authorship of a story, of a poem, of a play, or an idea, but is it even conceivable claiming authorship of the set of instructions for a culinary preparation, which is, by definition, shared and common knowledge? Although a person might inscribe herself/himself as the initial compiler of a manuscript recipe collection, this person is just the organizer and editor of the chosen contents. Moreover, in case of family recipe collections more than one initial individual might collaborate by commenting on, adding to, and expanding the recipes of the original collection.
Two concepts that stand out throughout the volume are recipe collection and dissemination. Collecting recipes, when it comes to manuscripts culinary recipe compendia, at least in early modern and modern times, implies combining personal or household traditions with knowledge from attestors(such as geographical region or personal connection via recipes offered by friends, a person from another family, etc.), along with other information collated and collected from a variety of other sources: printed books, other publications, etc. In this latter case, although not impossible, the source of that recipe is not always easy to trace. Culinary recipe collections dissemination, although much easily detectable when it comes to printed cookbooks, is also present in the manuscript tradition. Recipes can be translated and transcribed in another language, giving access to culinary traditions of foreign countries. In this respect the chapters on Sir Martin’s Westcombe’s Iberian Recipes by Annamaria Valent and on Finnish manuscript recipe books by Maren Jonasson and Märtha Norrback are particularly interesting since, although in different social and historical contexts, they reveal how not only culinary recipes and food preparations but ingredients can be disseminated beyond geographical and regional boundaries.
I mentioned before that Culinary Texts in Context, 1500-1800 by Sarah Peters Kernan and Helga Müllneritsch stretches the boundaries of the research field that focuses on manuscript recipe books. By giving a wider geographical scope to the research being done, this volume will not only entice further research and investigation, but also, and hopefully, expand the representation of other culinary traditions within the European continent within the research community.
Lino Mioniis Subject Librarian for Romance Languages and Literatures, Latin American Studies, and Linguistics at Washington University in St Louis Libraries. In his PhD dissertation (Indiana University 2020), he analyzes the 14th and 15th century traditions of culinary recipe collections of the Italian peninsula and investigates how these recipe collections are reappropriated and disseminated in printed editions. The introduction of print changed, among many other things, how culinary knowledge was produced, shared, and, consequently, used. Maestro Martino, and the manuscripts attributed to him, are a paradigmatic example of how a culinary recipe collection in manuscript form were used and circulated through print and by print. The many printed editions of the Epulario, which take the text from the Maestro Martino’s tradition, shed light on the editorial success a culinary recipe collection can have once it is transposed from manuscript to printed form, as well as on the characteristics of 16th and 17th century popular print culture.
Attr. Rin Shihei, “Nederlanders aan de maaltijd,” Japan, ca. 1790-1810, color woodcut on paper, NG-1978-110, Rijksmuseum. In the image, two enslaved people from the Indonesian archipelago serve food and drink to five white Dutch men; they are probably intended to symbolise VOC personnel on Deshima/Dejima.
Understanding global exchanges has played a central role in food history research in recent decades. Recipes, as a type of source, present both challenges and opportunities when it comes to investigating cultural flows. Culinary Texts in Context, 1500-1800 offers a series of case studies on topics such as English-Iberian and Finnish-Swedish culinary interactions, as well as the introduction of ingredients from the Americas to the Iberian Peninsula. Beyond offering a number of case studies, the volume reminds us that recipe collections are “material and textual manifestations of familial, friendship, and professional networks” and that they “contain traces of the places that people, ingredients, and recipes travel.” (Kernan, Müllneritsch, 25) The various contributions to the volume follow such traces and highlight how recipes showcase regional and global cultural flows.
As expected for the early modern period, many of the recipe collections under discussion show the influx of non-European ingredients. These ingredients serve not only as expressions of a new economic globalization, but also as evidence of how ingredients were adapted and adopted in new foodscapes. Yet Culinary Texts in Context provides its most valuable insights into cultural interaction not merely through analyses of ingredients, but by exploring how the transmission of recipes contributed to the creation of particular culinary texts. We learn how Philipp Hainhofer, agent to August of Saxony, assembled the ducal book collection with its culinary texts in Germany, Austria, and Italy (Denicolò, 71-74); which donors informed Sir Martin Westcombe’s Iberian recipes (Valent, 103-108); how familial connections between Swedish and Finnish upper social strata facilitated recipe exchanges in the 18th and 19th centuries (Jonasson, Norrback, 125-130, 150-151); how Maria Clara Dückher assembled her recipe collection with the help of family networks; or how Mary Leadbeater’s culinary collecting in 18th/19th century Ireland was nurtured through correspondences (Ridolfo, 265-270).
Tracing these paths of transmission offers a deeper understanding of the processes of inclusion and hybridization of foods and dishes. It tells the story of why certain collectors included unfamiliar recipes in their culinary texts, or how they even acquired such recipes in the first place. Analyzing signs of use—such as stains or marginalia—can also provide insight into whether such transmissions concerned mere textual knowledge or were part of culinary practices. By combining sources on the genesis of culinary texts, such as correspondence and diaries, with internal evidence from the culinary texts themselves, we gain an understanding of the “microhistories” (Valent, 101) of culinary cultural flows. At this intersection, we can begin to determine whether a recipe in a collection was the result of culinary transculturation—shaped by influences from all involved spheres of culinary culture—or whether it was an outcome of a superficial cross-cultural impetus that unleashed little cultural transformation. As Isabel Braga notes, there is an important distinction between “a recipe from a certain place” and one “in the style of.” (Braga, 197) Recipes “in the style of” are often found in early modern culinary texts, indicating a region of origin, such as Indian pickles. These recipes typically draw on ingredients or preparation methods characteristic of a specific region but were not collected in that region. Instead, they were recorded in the recipe author’s home region, often with modifications that reflect the culinary culture of the author or projected ideas of culinary otherness onto an imagined region of origin. In contrast, recipes like those of Francisco Broges Henrique from Brazil (Braga, 196-198), Martin Westcombe’s from Spain (Valent, 101-108), or, on a local scale, the recipes transferred by traveling confectioners between Barcelona and Northeastern Catalonia (Manzanares Mileo, 173-177), speak of an actual engagement with ingredients and methods from one region and how they were adapted and integrated into new foodscapes. The distinction made by Braga, is key to understanding how the cross- and transculturation of recipes operated within systems of global communicative and power imbalances.
As Marlene Ernst observes, while it may be possible to trace the transfer of specific recipes, these were often “adapted to local languages and dialects.” (Ernst, 230) In many cases, it may not be possible to locate additional sources, such as correspondence or diaries, that detail the transfer of culinary texts. However, by tracing similar recipes across different collections, we can examine the changes between them and investigate the linguistic shifts Ernst mentions. Culinary Texts in Context demonstrates how the history of culinary text transmission through individual actors and their networks, the use of ingredients, and forms of describing a ‘culinary other’ in recipes offer rich opportunities for understanding how culinary cultural flows operated in the early modern period.
Anil Paralkar currently writes his PhD on early modern European ideas about Indian food and foodways at Heidelberg University. He is also a lecturer at Witten/Herdecke University, where he explores the history of Renaissance and early modern knowledge with his students. In his research, he investigates how Renaissance and early modern European writers projected a culinary ‘other’ onto India and how the European presence on the subcontinent altered these projections. In this endeavor, he also published on the earliest English recipes for South Asian food. His interests include postcolonial and transcultural theory, global food history, and a good meal.