Category Archives: Series: Transcription

Manuscripts, Records, Documents and Notes, Research and Writing, Series: Jane Baber, Series: Transcription, Teaching Resources, Women and Gender

Teaching Recipes

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Nearly every year, I teach a senior seminar in the English department at the University of Texas, Arlington (near Dallas) that changes thematically each time.  With the recent proliferation of both cookbooks and books about cooking, I decided this spring to try out a class that focused on literature that features recipes as a major component, and, as a kind of juxtaposition to the literature, I also wanted to consider recipes as a literary pursuit.  Students would delve into texts that exhibit literary, lyrical, and aesthetic sensibilities about recipe-writing and recipe-execution, and that mark particular cultural shifts in food praxis and politics. At the same time, students would study how recipe writing calls upon a host of literary and cultural practices.

The literature that we read was primarily contemporary novels, including Annia Ciezadlo’s Day of Honey, Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate and Nicole Mones’s The Last Chinese Chef, though we also read M.F.K. Fisher’s classic work, How to Cook a Wolf.   For the recipe side, we read Hervé This’s Molecular Gastronomy and Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse Café Cookbook. But, as I am an early modernist by training, I also wanted the students to be exposed to earlier recipes to understand how recipes have developed and changed in the last four hundred years.

Here the class intersected with my own research interest in women’s manuscript receipt book writing of sixteenth and seventeenth century England and with my involvement with the newly formed digital humanities group, Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC), many of whose members write for this blog.  I was inspired by Lisa Smith’s autumn class, “Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe,” who had worked on transcribing Johanna St. John’s recipe book. (See her blog post “An Experiment in Teaching Recipe Transcription,” April 12, 2013.)  I was also working in tandem with Rebecca Laroche, who teaches at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, as we decided that we would have our students transcribe the same seventeenth-century recipe book, so that the text could be double-keyed.  Rebecca and I chose Jane Baber’s receipt book, available in digitized form from the Wellcome Library, because it was short, only twenty-six pages, and in a hand, we thought, that was not too difficult.  Our students would code their transcriptions in XML on the Textual Communities crowd-sourcing transcription platform, run by the University of Saskatchewan.

With a couple of exceptions, the students in the class were senior English majors so they were used to reading and writing about literature. Reading and transcribing early modern writing, however, was something that they had never encountered before–and the task seemed at first quite daunting.  To teach the skill of transcribing, Rebecca and I had students utilize the online Cambridge handwriting course, which moves progressively through more and more difficult early modern handwriting.  My class met on Thursdays in a computer classroom, and we devoted the class period to transcription.  What I noticed was that students started working collectively on the transcriptions, and such communal learning made all the parties stronger transcribers.

So when it finally came to transcribing Baber’s receipt book, I decided to have them work in groups.  What we all noticed was that the group work allowed everyone a safety net to have the confidence to do difficult work, with as much accuracy as possible. I also learned a lot about transcribing from the students as they experimented with various techniques, such as using a tablet or large T.V. to look at the recipe while writing the transcription on a laptop. Students became tenacious in figuring out what words could be, looking them up in the Oxford English Dictionary or in a Google search.  They also struggled to learn to code in XML and to make everything work correctly on the Textual Communities site.

Throughout the semester, students had to write short, researched analytical commentaries, and in the next few days some students from the class will be posting their discoveries about Jane Baber’s recipes.  I am sure you will enjoy their discoveries, and it is exciting to see such keen interest in these receipt book manuscripts.

 

Jane Baber 1r                              Jane Baber 6r

Early Modern, Ingredients, Knowledge Transmission, Manuscripts, Material History, Medicine, Posts, Remedies, Series: Transcription, Women and Gender

Exploring CPP 10a214: The Angel (not) in the Recipe

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By Rebecca Laroche with Hillary Nunn

Last month, Hillary Nunn (20/02/21013) introduced our series of entries that are considering an exceptional manuscript owned by one Anne Layfielde and dated 1640 housed at the Medical Historical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia.  Our interest in the manuscript stems largely from the remarkable number of attributions the section compiled by one “Cal: Downing” records.  Over 100 of the 134 recipes written in that hand have some version of a “probatum per” or “proven by” attached to them.  The first recipe, “To make an excellent Salue called Flos vnguentorum,” along with 41 others, is attributed to a woman named Elizabeth Downing.

Recipes for “Flos Unguentorum” or “The Flower of Ointments” are ubiquitous in various versions throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The version in The College of Physicians manuscript begins “Take Rosen & Perosen of each / halfe a pound.”  The reader is thereafter instructed to heat together several gums and powders with “virgin wax,” which are cooled “till [the mixture] be bloode warme.”[1] The page following these directions is dedicated completely to “the vertues of this salue,” which include, among many others, the curing of “old wounds,” head aches, and hemorrhoids.

Now I mentioned briefly back in October (18/10/2012) that the Elizabeth Downing who is the source of so many recipes in this manuscript may have some connection to the “Mistress Downing” named thirteen times throughout the print collection Natura Exenterata: Or Nature Unbowelled (1655), and a couple of the print recipes do have suggestive overlapping ingredients and wording with recipes from the Layfielde collection. Natura Exenterata, which is clearly connected to the House of Arundel through its front matter, also includes a recipe for “Flos Vnguentorum” (but one not attributed to Mistress Downing) in which the virtues and directions are reversed, but the directions are almost exactly the same, starting with like ingredients, including an allusion to blood temperature, and ending with the directions to put the salve into rolls for the later use of the practitioner.

The Arundel example, however, includes one detail in its list of virtues not found in Layfielde manuscript: “it cometh of Jesu Christi by an Angell to a house of Religion at the red hill in Almayn [Germany], which wrought there many marvails.”[2] A third manuscript, an anonymous one found at Bryn Mawr dated 1649 (before the print text) also includes the recipe for the flower of ointments, one which almost exactly corresponds to the recipe in Natura Exenterata and includes the origin myth. The Bryn Mawr manuscript also includes several recipes from the Countess of Arundel, Anne Dacre Howard (1557–1630), mother-in-law to Aletheia Talbot Howard (d. 1654), whose portrait graces the front matter of Natura Exenterata.[3]  The inclusion of Mistress Downing in the Natura and the naming of the Countess of Arundel in the Bryn Mawr manuscript, along with the overlap in the Flos Unguentorum recipes, suggest a triangle of relations, at least in the generation before the decade of compilation around the 1640s.

The correspondences in the recipes may imply a fourth outside source, but if this is the case, somewhere in transmission the origin myth was omitted from the list of virtues in the Downing example. What, if anything, can the mythic origin of this recipe, its inclusion or exclusion, tell us about a recipe’s more immediate historical source, particularly of collections compiled in years of religious conflict? The Countesses of Arundel were known Catholics, and the inclusion of divine intercessors in manuscripts and books of their circle would not have been unexpected.  All signs (including his mother’s name, Elizabeth), however, point to the “Cal: Downing” of the Layfielde manuscript being Calybute Downing (1606–44), Protestant minister (as also possibly Anne Layfielde’s husband) and Parliamentarian, whose doctrine would be less likely to include such intercessors. Was this omission then made for expediency’s sake or was it indicative of the beliefs of the compilers?

This is the second in a series of monthly posts on this topic.

[1] College of Physicians Manuscript 10a214, page 1.

[2] Natura Exenterata, 332. Another Elizabethan print source which, like the Downing recipe includes the directions first then lists the virtues, recounts the origin in Germany, but not the angel, Thomas Lupton, A thousand notable things of sundry sortes (London, 1579), 104.

[3] Bryn Mawr College Special Collections MS 19, fol. 5.

Article Round-Ups, Digital History, Early Modern, Food and Drink, Manuscripts, Remedies, Series: Transcription

Food History Panel Recordings from the Cookbook Conference

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By Lisa Smith

In February, I attended the Roger Smith Cookbook Conference in New York. It was a fun conference, with a mix of academics and non-academics. A particular highlight, though, was realising that cookbook authors often bring samples of their food to panels! A delight in the case of cookies, though I’m sure the puppy water I discussed wouldn’t have gone down nearly so well.

The panels, for you recipe and cookbook afficionados, were all recorded and can be found at the conference home page. The panels below were the ones I found most interesting and, not surprisingly, primarily historical…

1. “Filling Our Hearts with Food and Gladness”: Christian Celebration and Food Traditions”

This insightful panel, which focused on medieval food and modern foods with religious origins, included Ken Albala (University of the Pacific), Anne Mendelson, Evelyn Birge Vitz (New York University) and Willam Woys Weaver.

2. “Wartime Cookbooks: Artifacts of Home Front Culture, Tools of Social Engineering, Narratives of Survival”

This was an exciting mix of junior and senior scholars, all of whom provided accounts of the complicated relationships between food, ideology, nationalism, and practice. The speakers included Kyri W. Claflin (Boston University), Barbara Rotger (Boston University), Diana Garvin (Cornell University, Ithaca NY), Ian Mosby (University of Guelph) and Amy Bentley (New York University).

3. “From Disgust to Delight: The Civilizing Influence of Recipes”

The main theme of the panel was how people in the West might be persuaded to incorporate insects into our diet. The panel began with the distribution of chocolate-covered insects, which I could not bring myself to eat despite the best will in the world. This thought-provoking panel raised more questions than it answered. e.g. is covering insects in chocolate really helpful in persuading people to eat insects as a staple food?

Tory Higgins was the final speaker and his argument ultimately failed to convince me. He focused on marketing and referred to successful government endeavours during World War Two–something that had been revealed as problematic during the “Wartime Cookbooks” panel. Speakers included Renee Marton (Institute of Culinary Education, New York), Tory Higgins (Columbia University),Kian Lam Kho, and Margaret Happel Perry.

I ended up speaking on two panels. The longer presentation was for “Personal Manuscript Cookbooks: What Do They Tell Us That Printed Cookbooks Do Not?”  Steve Schmidt provided an introduction, described his project The Manuscript Cookbooks Survey and gave an overview of what manuscript recipe books can tell us. Peter Rose’s talk, which begins at 23 minutes, discussed early modern Dutch recipes in New York.  Sandy Oliver (starts at 42 minutes) considered what she has learned from a number of manuscript recipe books. My own talk (1:02-1:19) was about why researchers should not overlook the medicinal recipes in collections.

In addition, I spoke for five minutes (from 25:20) during a “Digital Show and Tell”. I introduced the Textual Communities platform for teaching manuscript recipe transcription and the crowd-sourcing plans of Early Modern Recipes Online Collective. (See also my previous post for further details.) There are some other really interesting digital projects out there! One that caught my imagination was described by Jill Adams (Ph.D. student, CQ University Australia) about 20 minutes in: “The Cookbook in a Day Project“.

There were an intriguing selection of panels at the conference, allowing researchers and cookbook authors to think historically, culturally and practically about food. As an added bonus, the conference was also a great excuse to spend a few days in New York…

Manuscripts, Records, Documents and Notes, Research and Writing, Series: Johanna St John, Series: Transcription

An Experiment in Teaching Recipe Transcription

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This term, my third-year class on “Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe” was involved in my research: testing the Textual Communities crowd-sourcing transcription platform.*  The class has been busy collaboratively transcribing the seventeenth-century recipe book of Johanna St John and it’s been an adventure for us all.

Johanna St John’s Book, Wellcome Library, WMS 4338. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

The students had little to no experience in digital creation or transcription at the start of term, but in the last three months, they have learned the logic of XML and gained an appreciation for the exactness required in transcription. These are habits of thought, as well as useful skills.

The Textual Communities site was by no means complete when we began our transcriptions. As we became familiar with Johanna St John’s book and worked on our transcriptions, it became easier for us to identify what we needed the system to do. Every week, we would discover at least one new problem with it. But Peter Robinson and Xiaohan Zhang have been constantly developing the platform in response to our needs, from figuring out how to implement semi-diplomatic conventions  in XML or to represent marginal notations to ensuring that the preview and submit buttons work. By witnessing this process of creation, the students have also learned much about the way in which digital resources are constructed and the choices that researchers make in both transcription and data design.

We have had to be flexible and patient: research is a messy business of failures and false starts. Advanced researchers are only too familiar with this, but it’s something that undergraduates often don’t see–or think about it only in terms of their own work. When teaching, we ordinarily (and for good reasons) present students with a set syllabus and assignment description, from which we don’t deviate. But this term, we have had to revise a number of deadlines and assignment guidelines as we encountered research problems along the way. Truly research-led teaching!

This is by way of an introduction for the next few posts, which will focus on Johanna St John’s book and have been written by some of the students.

 

* Two of my collaborative research groups, Recipes: Food, Magic, Science, and Medicine and Early Modern Recipes Online Collective, will be launching projects on this platform in 2013. Stay tuned!