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.
To make something edible is arguably the anticipated end-expectation of the design and use of any food recipe. Making is entwined with cookery, from the writing of its instruction, guided by the experimentation involved in developing a recipe, through the tactile creation process of the consumable result.
As scholars, we can approach the study of recipes from different perspectives. My educational background is in technical communication, but my doctoral work has been done through the University of Central Florida’s innovative digital humanities program, Texts and Technology.
Within this program I typically focus on historical domestic technical communication, the old receipts that instructed Americans for centuries on how to run households. But rather than solely approaching my research from methods historians or technical communicators might default to, I approach my work like a digital humanist, and have found critical making to be useful in exploring my studies.
In this article I aim to introduce the critical making research method to recipes research by showcasing a digital exercise I have completed using it. Through this, I hope to encourage other recipe scholars to experiment with this method.
Ratto explains the method includes three stages: a literature review, prototyping, and reconfiguration, discussion, and reflection. The method is performed to bridge gaps between technology and society.
The critical making process can be interactive or collaborative and various digital tools can be used to perform it. In this exercise I used Twine, an open-source hypertext platform that allows for the formation of scholarship through online interactive non-linear narratives. I would describe it as a tool to create a digital choose-your-own-adventure.
Image Credit: Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/poeticalcookbook00moss/page/n8/mode/1up
I worked with Twine to explore a historical cookbook that interested me because of its creative use of poetry to instruct meal preparation. The book is Maria J. Moss’ A Poetical Cook-Book, a community cookbook originally published in 1864 during the American Civil War. An aim of the project was to generate public and scholarly interest in historical recipes through gamification. I thought that perhaps a younger, technologically savvy audience might have their interest in American culinary history piqued through a digitally interactive experience. I used the critical making research process to create a hypertext narrative game based on the cookbook.
The following is an abbreviated example of the show-your-work type of documentation done during the prototyping stage of critical making.
To begin, I consulted Twine’s discussion boards and searched for tutorial videos on using the platform. I wanted to create all the passages and arrange them in the way I felt would make sense to a user. While it was easy to select and place each recipe, it was harder to figure out how to lead up to them, transition between them, and end the journey.
In the next passages, I offered information about the project, and I allowed the recipes to be accessed in the order of what people typically consume during mealtimes, and additionally in any other way they want to access them (i.e., dessert for dinner). After I added all the recipes, I played with how they could link together. It was then that I realized the way to click through them could be a conversation between the user or attendee and the host.
Image Credit: Twine, https://twinery.org/
I eventually ordered the passages and links together as pictured above. I then started to fiddle with color. I used a tutorial to guide me through the tips on how to change the font within the stylesheet. While I was initially successful in finding fonts and colors for the game, I ran into some issues.
I tried to figure out why my colors displayed incorrectly. I had copied and pasted code from a forum discussion response that claimed to be a coding answer. Revisiting it, I realized there was code missing. Once I added it, the issue was solved. This type of refashioning constituted a reconfiguration portion of the project.
Image Credit: Twine, https://twinery.org/
I felt the exercise in gamifying a historical cookbook was successful and well received. Through the process of critical making, I found that it has provided a path to be more creative as a scholar by exemplifying the traditional ways of generating knowledge are not the only ways. Research can be designed in ways that allow for it to be presented in ways that may speak to more people, expanding its reach and impact. Turning historical rhyming recipes into a digital narrative game is just one way to garner more interest from scholars and the public in recipes, history, and literature.
Special thanks to Dr. Anastasia Salter for all the knowledge imparted within their course on Critical Making for Humanist Scholarship.
I recently stumbled upon a small print cookbook at the Newberry Library in Chicago while I was working on another project. I couldn’t help but request this 1560 volume which was supposed to have recipes, according to the catalogue entry. I was particularly intrigued given its title, Wyl bucke his Testament, which made no mention of cooking, food, or recipes. Once I began reading the book, I realized this delightful book had likely fallen through the cracks of culinary scholarship because it has been categorized as a poem rather than a cookery. The verse details a hunter’s killing of a buck and his last will and testament prior to his death. The subsequent recipes, which are in prose, coordinate with the verse, as they are entirely devoted to dishes featuring deer meat and offal. While this collection of sixteen recipes has not been listed in cookery bibliographies, it is not entirely unknown. The book was reprinted in 1827 and several literature scholars have recently, albeit briefly, discussed the introductory verse.[1] I found this unique cookbook to be very entertaining; here I hope to introduce you to recipes which may prove useful in your own academic and culinary adventures.
Richard Ansdell, “The Dying Stag,” 1871, New York Public Library Digital Collections. Source: The New York Public Library.
Wyl bucke is unlike any other medieval or early modern cookbook I have encountered. In a way, it is reminiscent of the fifteenth-century Liber cure cocorum in its literary attributes and oddity (for the entire cookbook is composed in verse), or even the famous eighteenth-century poem by Robert Burns, “Address to a Haggis.” Wyl bucke is personal; it is a voyeuristic peek into the last moments of a dying, anthromorphized deer. The recipes are a direct connection to the buck’s death and the instructions are interspersed with plain instruction for breaking down and preparing a deer for consumption. The buck bequeaths each part of his body for different purposes and people. The deer is cognizant of his destiny on the table as he bequeaths his body “to the colde seler.”[2] He feeds the royal and the ordinary, his body providing both sustenance and pleasure.
The recipes use different parts of the deer, both flesh and offal. Beginning with a menu for a three-course venison feast, the recipes are interspersed with instructions for harvesting the organs and breaking down the joints after the hunt. The recipes are not dependent upon the procuring of a male deer; the author provides options for buck and doe meat, as well as comments on cooking with the meat of a fawn or other small deer.
One of the most extraordinary attributes of this collection is that the recipes are focused on a single ingredient. The fact that the ingredient is venison is also remarkable. As a hunted ingredient, venison was typically reserved for noble households. Nevertheless, non-nobles could procure venison through both legal and illegal means as venison was available for sale and was poached. While venison recipes appear in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cookbooks, it is usually in roasted or baked form. The recipes in Wyl bucke, however, are familiar dishes with deer meat and organs substituted for more typical meat products. One finds Ising pudding, haggis, frumenty, and chewets, as well as preparations for tripe, trotters, tongue, liver, and numbles. I was struck by the juxtaposition of high- and low-status ingredients in this cookery. Humble oatmeal appears with some regularity, and many recipes use few or no spices. Yet other recipes instruct a very liberal use of saffron, an always expensive spice, even when produced domestically.
There is a lone exception in this collection: a recipe for “tarte Barbones” excludes venison, or flesh of any variety.[3] I have not encountered this recipe in other collections. In fact, I cannot even find another reference to this dish after searching my own records as well as the Oxford English Dictionary, but it does look delicious despite its outlier nature. The tart is a low-walled cheese tart flavored with saffron and sweetened with sugar; no doubt an excellent accompaniment with or conclusion to a venison meal.
The authorship of Wyl bucke remains shrouded in mystery. The poem also appears in two sixteenth-century manuscripts (Bodleian Library, Oxford S Rawlinson C 813, fols. 30-31v and British Library MS Cotton Julius A V, fol. 131v), but the recipes only appear in the print form. The printed text credits John Lacy, but he is not otherwise known as an author.[4] I am tempted to say that the recipe author was from Northern England due to the reoccurrence of oatmeal. While this ingredient pops up in other early modern recipes, it is rare to see oatmeal multiple times in a single collection. I suspect that one could better hone in on the geographical origins of the recipes, and possibly the collection’s authorship, by delving into the provenance of two recipes in the collection: “tarte Barbones” and “Bawderikes.”[5]
A little more is known about the book’s printing than its authorship. Wyl bucke was printed by William Copeland. An active printer, Copeland produced a variety of books. Earlier in his career, he tended toward printing books with a theological bent, but by 1560 he was producing books popular in the late Middle Ages. That year he also printed A mery geste of Robyn Hoode and of hys lyfe, Syr Beuys of Hampton, and The knight of the swanne. Soon thereafter he produced several books which serve as friendly accompaniments to cookeries, like The craft of graffing and planting of trees (1563), The boke of secretes of Albartus Magnus of the vertues of herbes, stones and certaine beastes. (ca. 1565), and The first booke of the vertues of certayne herbes (ca. 1565). Wyl bucke’s account of a hunt, as well as many accompanying common medieval recipes, aligns with Copeland’s printing record. At only eight leaves, Wyl bucke is a small book which would have been priced inexpensively, and therefore available to middling and gentry consumers.
I hope that this very brief introduction has whetted your appetite and culinary scholars will remember Wyl bucke and include it in their own research. There is much more to learn about this small volume’s recipes, authorship, and connection to other contemporary texts.
NOTES
[1] The most extensive treatment of this book is: Edward Wilson, “The Testament of the Buck and the Sociology of the Text,” in The Review of English Studies 45, no. 178 (1994): 157–184.
In my last post, I introduced the twelfth-century verse herbal of Henry of Huntingdon, Anglicanus Ortus (“The English Garden”). This work is mostly medical in nature, but one poem on the medicinal uses of parsley also contains two culinary recipes for savory green sauces used on mutton or pork. Such recipes are rare for the twelfth century, so I wanted to share them here at The Recipes Project. But Henry’s herbal tells us more about twelfth-century cooking than just a couple recipes; through his satirical verse, he presents amusing portraits of contemporary cooks and kitchens.
An early modern interpretation of the Roman kitchen of Apicius.
Henry wrote two poems on parsley, the first of which contains the aforementioned recipes for herby, spicy green sauces. It is near his second poem on parsley that Henry introduces the character of a belligerent cook, and through him demonstrates what may have been common stereotypes about cooks, kitchens, and vegetables. For example, cooks are frequently drunk, garrulous, and rude, and common vegetables are not useful in medicine. The cook fights back, however, and addresses Henry as a “poetling”, a plagiarizing hack, and eventually tells him simply to “go to hell, Mr. Envy”. We shouldn’t assume Henry actually felt this way about cooks in general, but was rather building on a long tradition of animosity against cooks. Satires about cooks, foodies, and kitchens have a long pedigree, appearing in the works of ancient Roman authors like Juvenal and Petronius.
Juvenal, Country Meal. CAPTION: The satirist Juvenal attacked Roman high society, including their meals and pretentious cooks. Here is a simpler country meal, in an early modern printing of Juvenal, illustrated by Wenceslaus Hollar.
In some poems of the Anglicanus Ortus Henry the author poses as Henry the narrator, a pretentious master of medicines. After he finishes five books of the herbal, this Master Henry boasts that he is a great physician and a worthy follower of Apollo:
…thus similar to Phoebus’s physicians, most pleasing to all, I’ll be read throughout the entire world, I’ll have an eternal name!
Suddenly, the cook appears, much as Apollo had suddenly appeared in the first poem on parsley, to criticize his failure to discuss common vegetables:
While I was boasting overmuch, a certain cook smirked and said to me, ‘By Phoebus [Apollo], worthless man, you’re quiet about greater matters, and have also kept silent about Leeks, and Onions, and Cabbage— vulgar things, to be sure, but by all means very pleasing.’
Henry then objects:
‘We name herbs, not foods, in our writings, and these, by Jove, aren’t herbs, since they are foods!’
Simple Roman ingredients. Here, the preparation for a Roman cheesecake.
Henry, as narrator, steps aside, and allows this cook to describe how the vegetables onion, leek, and cabbage can be used in medicine, then adding orache (saltbush), parsley, and garlic. Sadly, the cook does not offer any culinary recipes here, but tries to show up Henry by describing elaborate cures, and namedropping the greatest authorities in learned medicine, like Galen, Hippocrates, Dioscorides, and Cato the Elder. Then, in a tour de force poem about garlic, the cook piles on cure after cure using mundane kitchen vegetables, while calling on more ancient authorities like Pythagoras, Diocles, and Macer. Seemingly out of breath, and apparently drunk, the cook finishes with a brief note of cooking advice, one that is still welcome today:
‘I say that the flavour of no spice will equal it [garlic], if Pepper is added and ground for a long time.’
Henry the narrator uses this culinary aside as an opportunity to interrupt and take back his herbal. He sends the cook off with good wishes for more alcohol:
‘At last, brother, you’ve returned, stumbling, to your stew pots! May the gods grant you frequent fruit of the vine as your due.’
This portrait of a cook is not meant to be realistic, since Henry is using it primarily as a tool for criticizing himself and the pretensions of learned physicians. Still, through this cook, we get a glimpse of the standard vegetables and greens in a twelfth-century English kitchen. While these vegetables were undoubtedly common, some of the herbs and spices in the sauces described in my first post were luxury items, like the pepper and costus root. These recipes are thus not peasant food, but neither do they seem intended for the lord’s high table. Rather, they represent the comfort food of a twelfth-century churchman: a dinner of hot mutton with a spicy green sauce, and cold pork the next day for lunch.