Category Archives: Series: Reading Practices

Education, Family and Household, Food and Drink, Knowledge Transmission, Material History, Modern, Posts, Printed Books, Series: Reading Practices, Students, Women and Gender

Navigating a New Domesticity: Women, Marginalia, and Cookbooks

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By Rachel A. Snell

Example of annotation from A new system of domestic cookery, formed upon principles of economy, and adapted to the use of private families. By a lady. Boston, W. Andrews, 1807. LOC.
Example of annotation from A new system of domestic cookery, formed upon principles of economy, and adapted to the use of private families. By a lady. Boston, W. Andrews, 1807. LOC. 

During the first half of the nineteenth-century, as domesticity was increasingly redefined as a skill demanding instruction and experience, the geographical mobility of the industrial age removed young women from the traditional source of that instruction, their mothers and other female relatives. To meet this need a cadre of women authors published a canon of cookbooks and domestic manuals to instruct middle-class American women on the art of housekeeping.

These household manuals included recipes and advice on all aspects of domestic work, including managing servants, caring for the sick, aiding the poor, laundry and other cleaning tasks, and even advice on selecting furnishings and attire. By their design and purpose, these texts encouraged annotation by the reader. Housekeepers commonly used blank pages to record additional handwritten recipes, mark favorites and failures, and alter recipe measurements or make substitutions. These marginalia provide the researcher with invaluable clues about how ordinary women navigated domesticity. After all, “a women’s recipe book is the record of her life.”[1]

Women created annotated household manuals and cookbooks for their personal use, reminders that allowed them to perform their daily and seasonal tasks more efficiently. However, marginalia also allow the researcher a window into a previously inaccessible space: the nineteenth-century, middle-class kitchen. Printed cookbooks and household manuals also record the development of domesticity during this period. The marginalia in these texts suggest how ordinary women both conformed to and negotiated with cultural expectations of their proper place in society. Much scholarship focuses on the extraordinary women who supported themselves (and often their families as well) with their pens and worked to define domesticity, but what about their readers? How did the relatively silent majority of educated, middle-class, white women who consumed domestic literature apply that ideology to their daily lives? Marginalia may hold the key to answering these questions.

Figure 1
Figure 1

Ten copies of A New System of Domestic Cookery by Maria Eliza Ketelby Rundell published between 1807 and 1866 illustrate some of the ways that marginalia preserve the reader’s experience. Collected from the archives at the University of Guelph, the University of Waterloo, and the Library of Congress, this sample contains the most common types of annotation found in cookbooks, including handwritten recipes, newspaper clippings, inscriptions, and a variety of means for marking recipes for later attention. As figure 1 reveals, the annotators devoted most of their attention to cakes, pastries, puddings, and sweet dishes with more practical methods of food preparation largely ignored. The contrast is even more apparent when categorized by purpose. Of ninety-two total annotations, fifty-four modified to recipes related to entertaining (cakes, fruit preserves, wines, etc.), while just sixteen annotations related to everyday cookery and even fewer to keeping house and home remedies.

Figure 2
Figure 2

Why such disparity? During a period when the expectations of housekeeping were expanding and authors specifically addressed the poor quality of everyday cooking in their manuals, why aren’t women paying more attention to the everyday? One explanation for the general lack of concern toward daily cooking tasks is, as Janet Theopano offered, that “everyday cookery was common knowledge, [it] required no detailed instructions.”[2] Women knew how to bake bread, prepare a simple supper, nurse a sick child, and serve a hearty breakfast. These were the routine tasks that composed the daily life of the nineteenth-century housewife.

Thus, marginalia in printed cookbooks and household manuals is indicative of the influence of educational opportunities on women during the early nineteenth-century. Women identified species of birds, noted the best seasons for salmon, adapted chemical leaveners to older recipes, and recorded the production of their gardens in the pages of their cookbooks. While many annotators mark books as part of a learning process, a habit developed in the classroom, cookbook annotators (although often clearly educated) practice annotation for a different reason.

Their annotations mark them as experts rather than learners; they modify the text to suit their needs and experiences. Despite the stated purpose of the cookbook authors and the opinions of those who decried the influence of women’s education on domestic endeavors, most women did not depend on cookbooks as instructional manuals for the daily practice of domesticity, but turned to them for special occasions and entertaining. Women were empowered and confident in the domestic space–and their marginalia reflects that status.

This post references copies of A New System of Domestic Cookery that are part of the following collections:

The Una Abrahamson Canadian Cookery Collection at the University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada.

Special Collections at the University of Waterloo Dana Porter Library, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

 

 

Early Modern, Emotion, Family and Household, Food and Drink, Ingredients, Manuscripts, Medicine, Networks of Knowledge, Series: Reading Practices, Women and Gender

Never Too Many Cooks: Female Alliances in Early Modern Recipes (Part II)

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By Amanda E. Herbert

This page from Anne Brumwich’s recipe book shows contributions by different authors, with different styles of handwriting. Anne Brumwich and Others, 1625–1700, MS 160. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

In this blog post and in my previous post, I’m presenting material from my forthcoming book: Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).  The material in this post comes from Chapter Three, “Cooperative Labor: Making Alliances through Women’s Recipes and Domestic Production.”

In my last post, I discussed how early modern advice books encouraged women to work together in kitchens.  But did women follow these directions in their own homes?  Kitchen accidents and mistakes of course caused tempers to fray.  When Elizabeth Freke discovered that her servant had damaged a pot, she was so angry about it that she recorded it in her kitchen inventory, saying that the pot had been “brok out by Amey”!  But you can also find proof of women’s attempts to foster positive relationships with each other.

One of the best sources for understanding “real” early modern women’s work in kitchens is through their manuscript – handwritten – recipe books.  Recipe books were living manuscripts, typically added to and amended by many people. Women collected recipes from their female and male friends and noted donors’ names next to borrowed recipes in their books. Jane Baber’s manuscript recipe collection of 1625 included eight attributions from other women, among them a recipe “for the woorms” she had received from her “sister Earnly.” Women probably did exchange these recipes in person, but manuscript evidence shows that they also received them in correspondence from their female friends and relatives.  In the later seventeenth century, Anne Lany scrawled a recipe “for Guidiness of the head” on the back of her letter to her friend Anne De Gray. Sometimes women valued the recipes that they received from friends over those offered by male physicians: Beatrix Clerke wrote in 1665 that she hoped to procure a recipe from her friend Lucy Hastings, stating that she “doth believe that your Honor’s study and practice in phisicke is above our docters.”

Even the recipes themselves show how women helped one another in the kitchen. Female authors wrote recipes from a communal perspective. Mary Bent’s recipe book featured instructions on how “to pickle cowcombers the best way,” and the author noted that “you may put a little pepper in if you please but we do not.” The use of the plural “we” here suggested that, for the recipe’s author, pickling cucumbers was a communal rather than a solitary activity.

Women thus counted on one another for help in the kitchen, but they also used their recipes to advance female independence. Women’s recipes allowed them to share knowledge about acquiring materials and ingredients, navigating through urban spaces, and negotiating with shopkeepers. Many recipes encouraged women to purchase supplies in London, which had large numbers of apothecary shops. “M.B.’s” recipe of 1640 “to whiten the Teeth” called for “the stones of crabbs,” and readers were told that “you may buy [them] at the Redd Crosse in Cheap side a drugist.” An anonymous mid-seventeenth-century woman’s book recorded that “Vatican Pills” could be purchased from “the Apothecary . . . in the old Bayly in London.” Anne Brumwich’s book contained a recipe for a lotion that was said to prevent hair loss, and the ingredients for this lotion had to be purchased at “a Chymist a dutchmans in high holborn neare Grayes Inn field.” And Mary Chantrell’s book had a recipe for “an Excellent Coole pummatum [pomatum] for the face,” with ingredients that could be purchased “in See Lane in Holbourn.” From Gray’s Inn to Cheapside and from the Old Bailey to Holborn, early modern women used the information they gleaned from the recipe books of friends and relatives to traverse urban space. This knowledge was surely both useful and empowering. By furnishing women with information about reliable dealers, fair prices, and shop locations, handwritten recipe books allowed female recipe authors and their readers to share vital knowledge with one another and assert their independence in London’s streets and alleys.

*****
Manuscripts cited in this blog post:
1. Elizabeth Freke, “Kitchen Inventory,” October 18, 1711, Freke Papers, MS 45718, British Library.
2. Jane Baber, Recipe Book, 1625, MS 108, f. 18, 22, Wellcome Library.
3. Anne Lany, Letter to Anne De Gray, c. 1670, Correspondence of the Family of Gawdy, ADD 36989, F540, British Library.
4. Beatrix Clerke, Letter to Lucy Hastings, Countess Huntingdon, 1665, Hastings Collection, Box 25 HA 1466, Huntington Library.
5. Mary Bent, Recipe Book, 1664, MS 1127, f. 2, Wellcome Library.
6. Anonymous Woman [Possibly Mrs. M. Baesh], Recipe Book, 1640, MS 8086, f. 14, 19, 35B, 54, 81, 94–94B, and 102, Wellcome Library.
7. Anonymous, [possibly “EG”], Recipe Book, 17th c., MS 7391, Wellcome Library.
8. Anne Brumwich and Others, 1625–1700, MS 160, f. 94, Wellcome Library.
9. Mary Chantrell and Others, Recipe Book, 1690, MS 1548, f. 84, Wellcome Library.

Early Modern, Family and Household, Food and Drink, Networks of Knowledge, Posts, Printed Books, Series: Reading Practices, Women and Gender

Never Too Many Cooks: Female Alliances in Early Modern Recipes

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By Amanda E. Herbert

Too many cooks spoil the broth? Not in early modern England.

We know that early modern women were charged with the feeding and care of their family and friends and that lower-status women were often employed in the domestic labor of cooking, brewing, dairying, baking, and gardening. More surprising is that women were expected to collaborate in the kitchen, undertaking these traditional tasks in groups.  The expectation was that in any well-run household, domestic laborers (usually, but not always, women) would share their knowledge, time, labor, and kitchen-space – without grumbling, fighting, or competing!

Such guidelines for behaviour can be found alongside cooking in prescriptive recipe books. If you spend time with early modern prescriptive literature and printed recipe books, you quickly learn to flip to the front first: elaborate frontispieces often decorate the inside covers of these works. Although recipe books were supposedly intended for elite readers, authors and publishers marketed their products in sophisticated ways. Prescriptive literature conveyed information through images as well as writing. The mix of text and print was supposed to appeal to many different kinds of consumers. Literate people could read the text, while partially-literate people could “read” the images in order to learn about the mechanics of domestic labor in elite homes.

William Henderson, The Housekeeper’s Instructor; Or, The Universal Family Cook (c. 1790). Image credit: Wellcome Library, London.

One of my favorite frontispieces can be found in William Henderson’s Housekeeper’s Instructor; or, the Universal Family Cook (c. 1790). The image shows a busy kitchen, with many workers cooking, carving, stirring, and slicing in order to prepare a meal. Most fascinatingly, the frontispiece shows itself–several people in the image are using recipe books. In the middleground of the picture, an elite woman (marked by her powdered wig) offers a book to a female servant (marked by the knife held in her right hand). At the bottom of the frontispiece, an “Explanation” of the image confirms that the picture shows “a Lady presenting her Servant with The Universal Family Cook who diffident of her own knowledge has recourse to that Work for Information.”

Men are also shown using recipe books. In the foreground of the frontispiece, two male kitchen workers carve a roasted fowl. The figure on the left points with one hand to an illustrated diagram in a book, which indicates how the meat is supposed to be cut, and with the other hand gestures toward the roast. The male figure on the right, who wields the knife, looks toward both the book and his companion for guidance. These men are not reading the text of the guidebook, but are instead examining its pictures in order to learn how to carve correctly.

The kitchen in Universal Family Cook is an ideal cooking space, being calm, pleasant, and productive. It shows both high and low status people cooperating with one another in a friendly manner as they work towards a common goal. Friendliness, cheerfulness, and passivity were also qualities that were idealized in early modern women. A good woman, this image tells us, is like her kitchen: productive and cooperative, efficient and pleasant.

But did “actual” early modern women live up to these expectations?  Did they cooperate and collaborate in their kitchens?  Find out in my next post…

Editors’ note: This blog post is based on chapter 3 of Amanda’s forthcoming book: Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). The chapter looks at “Cooperative Labor: Making Alliances through Women’s Recipes and Domestic Production.”

Early Modern, Manuscripts, Printed Books, Research and Writing, Series: Reading Practices

Recipe [book] studies: an editor’s postscript

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By Sara Pennell

As some of you may already be aware, I and another contributor to this blog, Michelle DiMeo, have finally seen the publication of the volume Reading and Writing Recipe Books, 1550-1800 (MUP) in August 2013, almost five years to the day that the inspiring conference on which it is based (and which some of you also attended), took place at the University of Warwick.

Our intention in putting together a collection of essays about the nature of research into early modern, English-language recipe writing, collecting and publishing, was always about enabling a survey of approaches, rather than seeking to co-edit the dernier cri in ‘recipe book studies’ (of which more below).  That is why we have contributions from fields as different as historical linguistics, historical and experiential archaeology and lived religion, as well as from historians of natural philosophy, medicine and health, food and cuisine, and literary history.

Hannah Woolley, The Queen Like Closet (London, 1679), title page.

What still impresses me about the range of approaches on display in the collection is just that: the range. While one contributor might use a Hannah Woolley text in this way, another gloss a recipe for a glister just so, and a third unpick the poetic resonances of the recipe form, the possibilities of reading recipes differently, so differently, are wholly manifest across the nearly 300 pages. It bears out the suggestive call to arms by Susan Leonardi in 1989, that recipes have an active cultural relationship with the ‘reading, writing mind’ that we cannot leave to one side when we study them, any more than when we use them.

As readers, you will no doubt curse Michelle and I for our omissions, or engage critically with other contributors’ takes on manuscripts and publications upon which you may have very different views. But what we hope you will engage with most in the collection, is the act of collection: our desire to lay out a shop-stall for the validation of these texts as not simply about ‘who ate what when’ (or what might have treated which condition when) or about enlarging the ‘canon’ of women’s literary participation. Recipes as components of aesthetic trends, recipes as poesie, recipes as life-writing, recipes as routes into domestic religiosity, recipes as processual tools in materialising the ephemeral (kitchen or dining) table, recipes as tokens of regional and individual engagement with prevailing therapeutic, nosological and pharmaceutical knowledges – these are just some of the roles of recipes in early modern Anglophone society, but by no means the only ones.

Hannah Glasse, The art of cookery, made plain and easy (London, c. 1770), Frontispiece. © Wellcome Images
Hannah Glasse, The art of cookery, made plain and easy (London, c. 1770),
Frontispiece. © Wellcome Images

Although the book is entitled Reading and Writing Recipe Books (which is, we admit, an imperfect title to capture what we think the collection covers), does it represent a clarion call to scholars to recognise the field of  ‘recipe book studies’? This co-editor, speaking entirely for herself, is still not convinced that the recipe collection can bear such a weight of genre expectation, and the very process of putting this edited volume together has further cemented that belief. If we go looking for shared characteristics across texts, whether print or manuscript (and surely shared characteristics is what defines a genre), that coherence is difficult to elucidate and illuminate. The recipe collection, as the linguistic contribution to the volume examines, is but a ‘discourse colony’, a gathering of separate recipe text components that can, without disturbing collective meaning or coherence, be rejigged any which way (as many, many instances of borrowings, sharings and outright plagiarism in early modern recipe collections attest).2 If the components that help to produce those shared characteristics can be so comprehensively reshuffled (and indeed removed), aren’t their shared, generic qualities illusory? Dismantling the recipe collection is formally and methodologically easier than we might first think, when faced with the seemingly enduring leather covers, brass clasps and thick leaves of a hefty MS or a cared-for research library copy of Hannah Glasse (recipe plagiariser par excellence, let us not forget). This publishers and printers of recipe collections also knew and exploited, in their reconfigurations and reconstitutions of recipes in new collections, new editions, new formats (a process beautifully examined in a chapter on Hannah Woolley in our collection).3

What then of ‘recipe studies’? This brings us back to the component text as the unit of analysis. As many previous entries in this blog ably demonstrate, the shape, contents and idiosyncracies of the individual recipe – as in Rebecca Laroche’s and Michelle DiMeo’s work on recipes for oil of swallows, or Sally Osborn’s forthcoming research on diet drinks receipts — especially when tracked across time and space, can reveal more about the contexts of knowledge production, use and circulation, than analysis of whole collections, wherein it is the processes of knowledge circulation and use which have perhaps dominated recipe scholarship to date. Even a single recipe text (Ann Fanshawe’s chocolate, for example) can take us far beyond the recipe collection in which it sits, to the royal courts of Madrid and Lisbon.  The recipe text – both as text and as material object — can take us closer, perhaps, to the why of the knowledge formation and circulation that they encode, while the collection is the (documentary and material) tool for understanding the how.

I would like to thank my co-editor, Michelle DiMeo for her infinite patience and support throughout the past five years (and more), from conference inception to dogged pursuit  of the publisher and myself in the final months; and our no less patient contributors (you know who you are!), whose excellent contributions I urge you all to read. The book is now available from Manchester University Press, so please order one for your libraries!

 

1. Susan J. Leonardi, ‘Recipes for reading: summer pasta, lobster a la Riseholme, and Key Lime pie’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 104:3 (1989), 340-7.

2. Francisco Alonso-Almeida, ‘Genre conventions in English recipes, 1600-1800’, pp. 68-92

3. Margaret J.M. Ezell, ‘Cooking the books, or, the three faces of Hannah Woolley’, pp. 159-78.