Category Archives: Series: What Is A Recipe? Virtual Conversation

Day 3: What is a Recipe?

M. Darly, The Macrony Shoe Maker, 1775. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

Come… make yourself comfy! Welcome to the third event day for our ‘What is a Recipe?’ Virtual Conversation. We’re looking forward to a a busy day ahead.

There are a few things to check out that happened yesterday. Emily Contois has a wonderful post on ‘Listening to the Voices in Historic Cookbooks‘, which discusses a recent weeklong recipes workshop she attended, but it also has a number of crossover themes with our ongoing conversation for ‘What is a Recipe?’. Hillary Nunn and Whitney Thompson had a Twitter bake-off of a seventeenth-century recipe; you can follow their experiment under #recipesconf. And Cardiff University Special Collections and Archives shared some recipe-related highlights from their collection (@CUSpecialColls).

Today, we’ll be hearing from…

If you want to pick up some themes from Day 2, check over here for Laurence Totelin’s helpful summary and Tallulah Maait Pepperell’s Storify.

UPDATE (June 19, 2017): A Storify of Day 3 by Tallulah is available over here.

Henri’s kitchen: 2. Chouquettes

Harry Hayfield, a resident of Ceredigion in Wales, has long had an interest in the stories of the Musketeers which are set in early 17th century France, this led in turn to an interest in the Stuart period of history and joining a living history group. However, as a registered carer for his grandparents, he is unable to get to many of the events and yet wanted to do something to help. One day he was watching “The Little Paris Kitchen” broadcast on the BBC and thought “These are recipes designed by the French, therefore could they be converted in the 17th century versions of themselves?”. Doing some research he found that they could. Harry will therefore contribute four of the recipes as shown in the programme as if cooked by Henri de Ceredigion (Harry’s Stuart persona) a cadet member of the Musketeers, with able assistance from Planchet, his manservant cum stable lad.

There is nothing nicer after a hard day’s training as a cadet to get back to my digs, command “Planchet, chouquettes please!” and know that about half an hour later you can be doing a very good impression of Athos at a grand dinner relaxing and enjoying life. I’ll admit that when Planchet first introduced them to me, I wasn’t entirely sure about them, but once I tasted one I couldn’t have enough. And what are these little wonders, you may be asking? Basically little pastries that, ooooh, you cannot describe without having experienced them first. So, if you fancy making some, here’s how you do it. First you take a quarter of a cup of water (and before you hold your hands up in horror, don’t worry, this is freshly collected rainwater, I know to avoid the stuff in the streets), the same amount of milk, a little salt and a little sugar, some butter, roughly the length of your index finger, chopped into small pieces. Put it all in the pot. Then add a third of a small packet of flour and mix. Now, when I first made this, at this stage it just looked, well, wrong is the only word I used. It was lumpy and reminded me of very badly made porridge. But Planchet was on hand to help and spent the next several minutes mixing it so hard that by the time it had turned into a solid mass, he was breathing hard. When it reaches that point, place it in a bowl and then move on to the next ingredient.

Chouquettes. Credit: Aerith, Wikipedia

That ingredient is eggs; however, do not do what I did the first time I made this on my own, because if you add the eggs now, they will scramble, and although I like scrambled eggs of a morning, that’s not what I was wanting to make, so here’s a little tip from Planchet. Give the mass a stir until the pastry is cool enough so that it is still warm but nothing like as hot as when it came out of the pot. Add the eggs and keep on stirring as you do so and don’t worry if it looks like it has all gone wrong, you are on precisely the right path, as you want to end up with something that looks like mud in terms of its consistency. Then you put that into a special bag for piping, available from any half decent chef ,or in my case, my manservant, and then it comes to piping it. Now, there’s a special technique for this. In order to pipe properly make the shape of a letter L with your thumb and finger next to it; then turn the shape around, place your thumb part of the shape to the left of the bag and then wrap the other finger around and you are ready to go. Hold the bag upright and count to three whilst squeezing at the top and, if you will pardon the term, voila, chouquettes! Then, if you can get any, dust with icing sugar and decorate with either small pieces of chocolate or if you like, small pieces of cheese, although technically that will turn them into gorcherge, but that is purely personal preference.

Now comes the tricky part of the whole exercise: baking them. Ideally they need to be baked until the smell of baking fills the kitchen and here is where the problems can start. We first made this on a very hot day and so had all the windows and doors open, just as we finished making them the local priest walked in, quite unexpectedly and asked if we would be willing to donate anything to help raise funds. All we had were these chouquettes so we asked if that would be all right. He popped one into his mouth and collapsed with desire before placing the rest into a bag, blessing us and walked back the way he had come. So we had to make another set; however that version caught the attention of Athos and I regret to say that his reputation precedes him. He managed to devour four sets of them before he had his fill. If that wasn’t bad enough, just as we thought we would have some to ourselves, lots of children starting rapping at our door asking for some. So a word of advice: never bake these on the hottest day of the year or if you have to then, do it during the coolest part of the day. If you do manage to get them out of the oven before anyone realises that you have, make sure they are nice and golden brown and devour before anyone gets the chance to pinch them.

What is a Recipe? Week 3

Welcome, welcome, welcome. Please pull up your chair and make yourself comfortable. We have a wonderful week ahead, with something going on every day.

We’ve had some great conversations already.  On Day 1, we wondered what is a recipe, considered their sensory and experiential nature, and appreciated their wildness.  On Day 2, stories emerged as the theme du jour: from favourite recipes and family history, to big stories, to reading and literacy…

Snowdrift Secrets, early 20th century. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

And this week, we dare you to take a crack at writing your own recipe story, with the ‘Cooking with Anger’ Netprov event on all month. Emotions as story ingredients, anyone? Perhaps in the ‘Henri’s Kitchen’ series, which is back on Tuesday with time-travelling cookery and a lively master-servant relationship in the kitchen. And in a podcast that considers cosmetic recipes in Ovid’s poetry (Thursday), Marguerite Johnson further blurs the boundaries between literature and recipes.

Experiments are another theme. Siobhan Clarke’s 1791 potato growing experiment continues both days on Twitter and Instagram and Sietske Fransen tweets on Tuesday about her trawl through the Royal Society archives. Also on Twitter (Tuesday), Emily Thompson takes a look at some seventeenth-century instructions for growing saffron.

Edison phonograph with a carbon microphone, 1878. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

Taking a turn away from written stories and recipes, we’ll also be considering the oral functions of recipes. Peter Jones (on this blog, Tuesday) examines the oral and written transmission of medieval recipes used by medieval friars interested in alchemy. Véronique Ginouvès of the MMSH will consider (in an English and French blog post on Thursday) the uses of collected oral recipes within the context of a sound archive.

There are many other recipe treats on — such as Louise Cilliers’ blog post (here) on ancient recipes for breast engorgement, Simon Walker’s YouTube video and Twitter chat on a First World War recipe from the trenches, and my own reflections (Twitter and blog post) on teaching early modern recipes.

Once again, we have several institutions joining us to tweet, insta, facebook, and blog about their collections: Cardiff University Special Collections and Archives (Monday); Folger Shakespeare Library (Tuesday); Wangensteen Historical Library (Wednesday); and Provincial Archives of Alberta and Royal College of Physicians, London (Friday).

It’s going to be a recipe-packed week for us, and we look forward to more recipe chat with you.


PROJECT DETAILS

‘Cooking with Anger Netprov’, Mark Marino and Rob Wit

This week-long event is modelled on TV cooking competitions. Cooking with Anger is a netprov where storyteller chefs improvise a tale and a recipe from a given basket of ingredients. Many have written about cooking with love; now it’s time for all the other emotions.

  1. Get a basket from the Protag-o-Matic ingredients machine. Copy and paste your basket at the top of your tale.
  2. Create a small dish of a stirring story — 300 words or less — using ALL the ingredients from your basket. Use people places and things as narrative; use food items for a recipe folded into the fiction. Season the tale with the emotional spice packet.
  3. We encourage you also to post a video in which you either tell the story, tell about the story, or tell how you made the story.

    Eyes expressing extreme emotion, from coldness to rage, c. 1794. After: Johann Caspar Lavater and Thomas Holloway.
    Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

Website:          Cooking with Anger
Twitter:            @markcmarino and @Netprov_RobWit

Cardiff University Special Collections and Archives

Will be sharing recipe-related material from their collections on Twitter.
Twitter:                 @CUSpecialColls

“Spuddenly Farming: A reconstruction of Rev. Mr. Cochran’s Potato experiment, 1791”, Siobhan Carlson

Following the American Revolution, the British crown gave Loyalists land to farm throughout the Canadian Maritimes. This migration gave rise to the emergence of an English print culture in the region that included agricultural recipes. Amongst these entries, on the 24th of March, 1792, the Royal Gazette and Miscellany of the Island of Saint John, printed the experiment entitled, “To determine whether it is best to plant large or small Cuttings of Potatoes; in a Letter from the Rev. Mr. Cochran to the Secretary of the Agricultural Society for the County of Hants, dated Winsor, Feb. 1791.” The experiment outlines the best methods to grow Prince Edward Island’s famous export – the potato. The goal of this project is to reconstruct the experiment, to think about/consider the experience of Maritime Settlers.
Instagram:            @SpuddenlyFarming
Twitter:                 @Spuddenly_Farm

“Recipes in the Early Royal Society Archives”, Sietske Fransen

The seventeenth-century fellows of the Royal Society were interested in every part of the natural world. They collected and reproduced a large variety of recipes, from the making of pigments to finding the recipe for the best French bread, to a recipe for universal medicine. During my research days in June, investigating the visual practice of the early Royal Society (www.mv.crassh.cam.ac.uk), I will tweet the various recipes I encounter in the archive of the Royal Society. At the end of those weeks the found recipes will feature in a blogpost on recipes in the early Royal Society.
Twitter:             @sietske_fransen and @MVCRASSH
Blog:                    www.mvcrassh.cam.ac.uk and recipes.hypotheses.org

“A Relation of the Culture, or Planting and Ordering of Saffron (1678)”, Emily Thompson

She will look at a recipe by Charles Howard as a recipe (an atypical one to be sure, but a sound set of step-by-step directions for attaining a particular outcome i.e., the production of saffron). She argues that Howard’s recipe may be identified by its purpose, ingredients, procedure, equipment and administration. The recipe can be contrasted with later treatises and gardening manuals that build on his work and flesh it out into something beyond his dispassionate and precise step-by-step approach.
Twitter:                 @joiedelivre

Folger Shakespeare Library

Will be sharing its extensive recipes-related holdings via social media.
Twitter:                 @FolgerResearch

“Henri’s Kitchen”, Harry Hayfield

Harry Hayfield, a resident of Ceredigion in Wales, has long had an interest in the stories of the Musketeers which are set in early 17th century France, this led in turn to an interest in the Stuart period of history and joining a living history group. However, as a registered carer for his grandparents he is unable to get to many of the events and yet wanted to do something to help. One day he was watching “The Little Paris Kitchen” broadcast on the BBC and thought “These are recipes designed by the French, therefore could they be converted in the 17th century versions of themselves?”. Doing some research he found that they could, and therefore will contribute four of the recipes as shown in the programme as if cooked by Henri de Ceredigion (Harry’s Stuart persona) a cadet member of the Musketeers, with able assistance from Planchet, his manservant cum stable lad.

Collection of iatrochemical and chemical recipes
Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

“Distilling and Deflowering”, Peter Jones

He will discuss alchemical recipes associated with English mendicants, collected in the Tabula medicine text of 1416-25. The word ‘deflowering’ is a term that describes the way that they culled recipes from various sources—written and word-of-mouth—before recording it in the book. His blog post will appear at The Recipes Project.

“Historical Chocolate Tasting Events”, Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and  Medicine at the University of Minnesota

Animated gif of chocolate bar with link to the full article in newsletter and additional link to historical choc tasting events at GYST Fermentation Bar, a collaborative effort with the Wangensteen Library. Also links to their digitized collection of recipe books.
Facebook:            https://www.facebook.com/umnbiomedlib
Twitter:                 @umnbiomedlib
Instagram:           @umnlib

“Recipes from the Sound Archive”, MMSH

The MMSH sound archive blog has a monthly feature on old recipes collected through interviews. In English and French, Véronique Ginouvès discusses what is a recipe when it comes to the sound archives.
Twitter:                 @Bagolina and @phonothequemmsh

“Theodorus Priscianus and Women’s Ailments”, Louise Cilliers

In a post for The Recipes Project, she considers the recipes of a 4th century physician from Constantinople: what did he use to treat women’s ailments?

Lady looking into mirror, 18th century.
Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

“Recipes for Beauty in Ovid”, Marguerite Johnson

Recipes for beauty were commonplace in the ancient Mediterranean and among the most comprehensive sources for cosmeceutical blends was Ovid’s Medicamina Faciei Femineae – 100 lines of which remain extant. When Marguerite Johnson translated the lines for her recent book, Ovid on Cosmetics (Bloomsbury 2016), she approached the task by taking the embedded lists of creams and treatments as recipes, and discussed the ingredients of each one and the methods of preparation. In this podcast, Marguerite will discuss the five recipes in the Medicamina with a focus on the ingredients – from honey to the mysterious alcyonea – and their properties for beautifying and preserving the skin.
Twitter:                 @MMJ722

“Introducing the Margaret Baker Project”, Lisa Smith

Over the year, my students on The Digital Recipe Book Project module read about early modern recipes and their wider social and cultural framework. We worked alongside other classrooms in the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective who were also working on Baker’s book. Along the way, they learned how to read old handwriting, transcribed several pages of a seventeenth-century manuscript recipe book by Margaret Baker, and built a website about Margaret Baker’s recipes. In this presentation, I’ll discuss the challenges of teaching recipes and working with Margaret Baker, as well as share the students’ insights from the year.
Blog:             drbp.hypotheses.org
Project site:     UofE Baker Project
Twitter:          @historybeagle

Ship’s biscuit, England, 1875
Credit: Science Museum, London.

‘Hard Tack Lemon Pudding’, Simon Walker 

He presents the YouTube cooking series Feedingunderfire wherein he cooks trench food recipes and tests them on guests. This episode focuses on an ‘apparently’ yummy dish.
YouTube:       Feeding Under Fire
Facebook:     Feeding Under Fire
Twitter:       @Dark_Nocterna

Provincial Archives of Alberta, Canada

Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, the PAA will be highlighting some its holdings on food history over the month with Facebook posts and on Twitter.
Facebook:      Provincial Archives of Alberta
Twitter:                 @ProvArchivesAB

Royal College of Physicians, London

We’re interested in approaching the theme of ‘What is a recipe’ by considering one of the RCP’s most important publications, the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis (1st edition 1618). Depending on how you define it, the Pharmacopoeia probably isn’t a collection of recipes, though it is a collection of instructions for making medical prescriptions. It was translated into Nicholas Culpeper, with explanatory text added, in 1649, and Culpeper’s version may have more claim to recipe-ness. We also have manuscript recipe books in our collection that include similar prescriptions or recipes, so we’d like to explore the issue by bringing these three sources together, and by illustrating a couple of the recipes with examples from our collection of English apothecary jars, and specimens from our medicinal garden.
Blog:                     https://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/news/
Twitter:                 @RCPMuseum

What is your favourite recipe? Reflections on Day 2

Post by Laurence Totelin; Storify by Tallulah Maait Pepperell

The second day of our Virtual Conversation ‘What is a recipe?’ has been very busy indeed, with contributions on Instagram and Twitter. Some clear themes started to emerge, and I take the opportunity of this post to draw them out.

We opened the day by asking people to share photos of their favourite recipe books.

Several of you tweeted pics of treasured family heirlooms: books with pressed flowers, stained recipe cards, well-thumbed volumes. Often these had been passed down the generations, usually from mother to daughter, but we also heard about some father-to-son transmission. There was a sense of nostalgia, but not of sadness, as we recalled past smells, tastes and gestures. Perhaps the written words of the recipe serve as proxy for all those other things that we find so difficult to express? Through short recipes we remember family stories and traditions. Please continue to share your favourites with us over this month!

Perhaps more strictly ‘historical’ was our question about ‘big stories’ in the transmission of recipes. We touched upon issues of class (Mrs Beeton and the rise of the middle classes); nationalism versus internationalism, and the link between recipes and empires; the importance of celebrity culture; and the prevalence of antidotes and panaceas in pharmacological recipe books. Celebrity endorsements, ancient and modern, seemed to strike a particular chord, especially endorsements for cosmetic products (Alfred Curie’s radium cosmetic powder anyone?).

Lisa Smith asked whether the celebrity serves as a guarantor of efficacy or as an ingredient. I need to ponder that question further, but it raises the further question of ‘what counts as an ingredient’? Is skill an ingredient? I mean, without skill and embodied knowledge, a recipe can fall flat like bread without yeast. If so many contributors to the Recipes Project and its Virtual Conversation are able to recreate historical recipes, it is often because they are skilled cooks (and at times gardeners, because they need to grow rare herbs): they can fill in the blanks. And this leads us to the question of secrecy, which fleets in and out of focus in our conversation. What exactly constitutes secrecy in recipe transmission?

We also touched upon literacy and grammar. I have often argued, following the anthropologist Jack Goody, that recipes are intimately linked to literacy and writing. Recipes, to me, are a written genre. Of course, recipes can be read aloud, and oral transmission of knowledge accompanies and complements recipes; but they remain texts. And as texts, they obey to specific grammatical and structural rules. We left the algorithms, knitting patterns, and musical scores a little behind today, but I hope we will get back to them in our future events.

Do join the conversation in the coming weeks. Share photos, reminiscences, and asks questions to our community. You may find someone who knows that treasured recipe book, which you lost in that move years ago, as it happened today to one of our contributors. A lovely moment!

Find out more in the Storify by Tallulah Maait Pepperell