gender | The Recipes Project

By Bethan Davies
Rootling through my mother’s files in the midst of moving house last year, I came across ‘The Emscote Cookery Book’, a recipe collection created by a group of teachers in the late 1970s as a community fundraiser for their Warwickshire primary school. My maternal grandmother Betty Richards was headmistress at Emscote Primary School and contributed multiple recipes to the collection. Gently flipping through the 18 pages which had been modestly stapled together to form a book, I saw a beautiful calligraphic font which detailed over 30 sweet and savoury recipes for food and drink, alongside careful illustrations of kitchen utensils, platters, and foodstuffs.

Image 1 The Emscote Cookery Book front cover. Image courtesy of the author. — Image 1: The Emscote Cookery Book front cover. Image courtesy of the author.

Image 2 The Emscote Cookery Book title page. Image courtesy of the author. — Image 2: The Emscote Cookery Book title page. Image courtesy of the author.

Beginning to read the recipes, I discovered the community collection to be a tantalising glimpse into culinary trends of the 1970s and the gendered expectations around domestic economies at the time. All of the contributors to this collection, bar one (a Miss Gent) were married women, working both as teachers and as homemakers. The style of many of the recipes are curt, providing the reader with detailed yet precise instructions for culinary success. Mrs Wigmore’s recipe for a ‘Quick Dessert’, which involves boiling some apples and mixing with lime jelly, a dish that could be whipped up rapidly, suggests these women straddled professional and domestic life and possessed strategies for fulfilling the demands of teacher, homemaker, and hostess. The relative sparsity of detail of the personal resonances of these recipes aligns with the cookbook’s role within a boundaried school environment, and is a reminder of the often intensely personal nature of recipe knowledge and exchange, repurposed here within a professional community. There are hints of women’s culinary and domestic responsibilities in moments when the professional façade slips, a Mrs Heelis’ recipe for ‘A Guinness Cake’ amusingly notes in her recipe ‘there will still be a slurp [of Guinness] to put the cook in a good frame of mind to tackle the washing up’, a tongue in cheek moment which gestures towards 20th c. British women’s multifaceted roles within the home.

Image 3: Mrs Heelis’ recipe for ‘A Guinness Cake’. Image courtesy of the author.

Most striking were the clues that suggested that this communal cookbook, despite its overt function as a fundraiser, worked as a compact textual marker of social display and a register of class co-ordinates. This evidently gave teachers power to self-fashion and construct their identities as women of economic means, belonging to part of a larger familial structure that could afford to experiment with recent culinary fashions, which include the protean fusion of Anglo culinary traditions with global ingredients and European recipe cultures. A recipe for ‘Biskotta’ (Mrs Charlesworth) is an English take on tiramisu, and the magnificent ‘Spaghetti Platter’ (Mrs Wigmore) specifies the use of ‘long Italian spaghetti’ but also calls for a tablespoon of Branston pickle, a quintessential English relish. A detailed illustration of said platter indicates spaghetti’s relative novelty on the culinary scene. Other recipes are intriguing both for their use of foreign ingredients and for their relative expense, indicating some teachers’ desire to signal their ability to buy such rarefied goods, and perhaps representing a form of exclusion for those who could not afford to buy such ingredients. Mrs Jackson’s recipe for ‘Hummus’ provides the interpretative tag ‘chick peas’, alongside instructions for where to find ‘tahina’, ‘a paste from sesame paste available from delicatessens’, suggesting hummus’ new-fangled nature and its potential expense.

Image 4: Mrs Wigmore’s recipe for ‘Spaghetti Platter’. Image courtesy of the author.

Mrs Hammond is an individual keen to demonstrate both her expensive household appliances and her rarefied tastes. She supplies a recipe for ‘Microwave meringues’, using the flashy appliance of the microwave which was only just starting to become affordable for domestic use in the late 1970s. Mrs Hammond also has an indulgent recipe for ‘Chocolate Peppermint Gateau’, an adaptation of the Black Forest Gateau, which calls for copious amounts of After Eights and whipped cream, and involves an intricate decorating scheme which would rival that of any British Bake-Off contestant today. In a moment of seemingly false modesty, she instructs that one can add crème de menthe into the layers of the cake: ‘an extravagant touch’, a phrase belying the evident richness of her cake even without the addition of liquor; her recipe is rich both in terms of taste and cost. While this is a community and charity cookbook, it is evident that the teachers are creating specific personas through their recipes which are deeply invested in social and class structures.

Image 5: Mrs Hammond’s recipe for ‘Chocolate Peppermint Gateau’. Image courtesy of the author.

Moving for a final moment from the communal to the personal, it is the memories of my grandmother, which are held within the cookbook’s pages, which encourage me to revisit the recipes. Her recipe for ‘Coconut Clag’, a kind of coconutty Florentine biscuit, is easy to make and designed to please a crowd, a reminder of her happily hectic life in multiple roles as headteacher, mother of three, and vicar’s wife. The pages sticky from golden syrup and sugar, this cookbook constitutes a living familial heirloom, and an emblem of family community and continuity in the present day.

Image 6: My grandmother Mrs Richard’s recipe for ‘Coconut Clag’. Image courtesy of the author.

Bethan Davies is a final year PhD student at the University of Roehampton in the Department of English. Her studies are funded by the Arts and Humanities Research council. Her research looks at the global and domestic intersections between sugar and women in English culture at a time when colonial economies were in their nascent stage of development. She has recently worked as a researcher on the BBC history podcast ‘You’re Dead to Me’, and collaborated with The National Archives to produce resources on sugar, tobacco, global trade, and intoxicants for schools and audiences beyond the academy.

Related Recipes Project blog post: ‘Astonishable Composed Posset’

By Yi-Li Wu

Figure 1. Depictions of boys at play were a popular Chinese decorative motif during the sixteenth century, imbued with auspicious meaning and conveying hopes for male offspring. This porcelain bowl was made in Jindezhen during the Jiajing reign period (1522–66). From the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Gift of Denise and Andrew Saul, 2001. Accession number 2001.738. On-line at https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/64484

Throughout imperial China, a family’s well-being and longevity required the birth of sons. [Fig. 1] Sons performed the ancestral rites, inherited land, and were responsible for supporting aged parents. And only men could take the examinations for government office which conferred elite socio-economic status. But at age 40, Liu Xiaoting was still sonless (wu zi). He appealed to the physician Gong Tingxian (15`38-1635), promising him rich recompense if he could help. As Gong recorded in his influential treatise, Curing the Myriad Diseases (Wanbing huichun, preface dated 1587), Liu’s “male member was weak, and his semen was icy cold.” Furthermore, his pulses were flooding when felt at the first position (cun) at the wrist, but deep and faint at the third position (chi). Gong’s diagnosis: a profound deficiency of primordial qi (yuan qi), the source of all the body’s vitalities and material manifestations. This was caused, he explained, by excessive drinking and sexual indulgence.

Depletion from debauchery was a common diagnosis for upper-class men of the time, those who had the means to own concubines and patronize courtesans. Doctors agreed that such carousing exhausted the body’s vitalities, not least because male semen was produced from “essence” (jing), the vitality that enabled growth, generation, and reproduction. Besides depleting the body, excessive outflows of semen harmed the kidneys, the organs that produced, stored, and transformed essence. To cure Liu, Gong prescribed a 16-ingredient formula called “Elixir to Solidify the Root and Strengthen Yang” (Guben jianyang dan) (see below). After taking one recipe’s worth, Liu felt that his nether parts were warm again. After an additional half-recipe, he felt recovered. To his great joy, he then begat a son. Liu subsequently shared the formula with a Liu Boting and a Liu Min’an (probably kinsmen) who also used it successfully. [Figs. 2 and 3]

Figs. 2 and 3: The recto and verso of a page from a seventeenth-century edition of Gong Tingxian’s Curing the Myriad Diseases, showing his recipe for Elixir to Solidify the Root and Strengthen Yang (Fig. 2, recto) and explaining how he used it to cure Liu Xiaoting (Fig. 3, verso). Note that Chinese books were read from right to left. From Expanded edition of “A Collection on Curing the Myriad Diseases” by Mr. Gong Yunlin, Confucian doctor (Zengbu ruyi Gong Yunlin xianshen Wanbing huichun ji), Renren shushe woodblock edition, 1641. Yulin was Gong Tingxian’s sobriquet (hao). In the collection of the Berlin State Library, Germany. Digitized and on-line at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-PK digitalisierte Sammlungen, permanent URL: http://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/SBB000160F000000000.

Gong Tingxian placed Liu Xiaoting’s case in his discussion of “seeking descendants” (qiu si), which was part of a larger section on “women’s diseases” (fu ke). “Descendants” here referred specifically to sons. Although Chinese medical writings on childbearing focused primarily on the female body, people had also long recognized that male ailments could impede conception. These concerns were especially salient in Gong and Liu’s time, when population pressure, urbanization, and commercialization were creating new forms of socio-economic mobility and instability. As Charlotte Furth has shown, this inspired a proliferation of writings on male self-cultivation and producing sons. Such material appeared in various textual genres, and it was not uncommon to find the reproductive illnesses of men discussed in chapters on women. These discussions assumed, furthermore, that a deficient man might still be able to father daughters, but that only a properly regulated male body would create sons. The question was how best to achieve that regulation.

In medical discussions of infertility, cold could refer to somatic sensations of chillness, as well as to a sense of deficiency and absence of vitality. Writings on women were primarily concerned with ensuring the ample and free flow of female blood, which constituted the female seed, nourished the fetus, and later transformed into breast milk. But doctors also worried about coldness in the womb, whether from an invading wind, or arising from internal depletion. Cold would cause female blood to stagnate and become corrupt. But concerns about female cold were also expressed in terms of agricultural metaphors which portrayed the womb as a field that needed to be warm and nurturing to receive the male seed.

Women with cold wombs would simply not produce children. But when couples produced only girls, this suggested deficiencies in the man, who played a key role in determining the child’s sex. The various theories of sex selection might differ as to details, but they agreed that a man could produce boys by shooting (she) his seed into the woman on certain days, in a certain manner, at a certain point in the copulatory act. Particularly important was the belief that both men and women released reproductive seed during orgasm, and that the fetus’ sex was determined by the seed that came last. A man who wanted sons thus needed to bring his female partner to climax before releasing his own seminal essence. His semen also needed to be sufficiently “dense” (mi), lest it dribble uselessly out of the womb.

Coldness in men was thus associated with impaired copulatory function, manifesting as cold and watery seed and as a weak penis unable to control its emissions. Gong Tingxian’s fertility formula echoed this understanding, relying heavily on substances that were classified as “principal drugs for treating spermatorrhea” and/or as “principal drugs for treating impotence” in Li Shizhen’s authoritative and encyclopedic Compendium of Materia Medica (Bencao gangmu,preface dated 1590). At the same time, Gong’s formula implicitly rebuked those who would treat male coldness with heating drugs. This objection was rooted in a particular understanding of how cosmological yin and yang forces expressed themselves in the male body.

To simplify enormously: yang referred to things that were external, active, and hot, while yin was internal, receptive, and cool. Men were the yang of humankind, and male potency and fertility were understood as expressions of bodily yang. As a result, people routinely tried to treat sonlessness with heating drugs. But some doctors warned that too much heat would damage and consume yin, harming the kidneys (yin) and consuming its essence (yin). Excessive heat would sicken the man, and even if he managed to conceive a son, the heat would remain as a latent poison in the fetal body and the boy would die young. Instead, they argued that the proper way to regulate yang was to address the underlying deficiency of yin. Gong Tingxian shared this viewpoint, and the key drugs in his prescription acted by nourishing bodily yin and the kidneys. As Liu Xiaoting swallowed the dozens of pills that Gong prescribed, he may have had initial doubts about their efficacy. But the birth of his son would have convinced him that, at least in this instance, Gong’s approach to male coldness was the correct one.

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Elixir to Solidify the Root and Build Yang (Guben jianyang dan)
Dodder seed (tu si zi) cooked in wine, one and a half taels[1]

White poria, root end (bai fu shen), skin and woody bits removed
Dioscorea (shan yao), steamed with wine
Achyranthes root (niu xi), stems removed, washed in wine
Eucommia bark (du zhong), washed in wine, skin removed, roasted until crisp
Angelica root, main body (dang gui shen), washed in wine
Cistanche (rou cong rong), soaked in wine
Schisandra fruit (wu wei zi), washed in wine
Black cardamom (yi zhi ren), stir-fried in salt water
Tender deer antler (nen lu rong), roasted until crisp
One tael each of the above

Prepared rehmannia (shu di), steamed in wine
Dogwood fruit (shan zhu yu), steamed in wine, the pit removed
Three taels each of the above

Sichuanese morinda (chuan ba ji), soaked in wine, the heart removed, two taels

Teasel (xu duan), soaked in wine
Milkwort (yuan zhi), processed
Cnidium seeds (she chuang zi), stir fried, the husks removed
One and a half taels each of the above

Add:
Ginseng (ren shen), two taels
Goji berries (go ji zi), two taels

Grind the above into a fine powder, and mix with honey to form pills as large as the seeds of the parasol tree. For each dose, take 50 to 70 pills on an empty stomach, washed down with salt water. With wine is also fine. Before bedtime, take another dose. If the woman’s monthly affair is already concluded, then this is the time for planting sons, and if one takes three doses a day, that is no problem. If essence is not stable, then add dragon bone (long gu) and oyster shell (mu li), heated in fire and quenched in salted wine three to five times. Use one tael, three mace of each. Moreover, add five taels of tender deer horn.

[1] The weight of the tael (Ch. liang) has varied over time, but during Gong Tingxian’s lifetime would have been equivalent to approximately 37 grams. A mace (Ch. qian) is one-tenth of a tael.

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Yi-Li Wu is a Center Associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (US). She earned a Ph.D. in history from Yale University and was previously a history professor at Albion College (USA) for 13 years. Her publications include Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 2010) and articles on gender and the body; medical illustration; forensic medicine, and Chinese views of Western anatomical science. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the history of wound medicine in China.

The Recipes Project

Tag Archives: gender

‘An Extravagant Touch’: Emscote Primary School’s Charity Cookbook

Cold Wombs and Cold Semen: Explaining Sonlessness in Sixteenth-century China

Food, Magic, Art, Science, and Medicine