Tag Archives: Tea

Nun Chai: A Story from Trade Routes to Survival

Namkeen Chai at pastoralists meadow also called Dhok in Poonch, Jammu and Kashmir. Image courtesy of the author.
Namkeen Chai at pastoralists meadow also called Dhok in Poonch, Jammu and Kashmir. Image courtesy of the author.

By Garima Sudhan

The popular understanding of Kashmir is heavily anchored in its selective portrayal of cultural symbols, wherein its food and clothing practices are used as bait to increase tourism attraction. Kashmir’s tea culture is no stranger to this trend. Upon entering Kashmir, the spectacle of commodification is at play for consumable experiences of tourists, often washing away the histories behind these practices. Prominent commodities in this case would be the Kashmir tea and Kehwa. Kashmiri salt tea or nun chai is well renowned.  It is a hot, salty beverage with a pink colour that is quite different to sweet tea varieties prevalent throughout South Asia. Prepared with a thorough brewing of green tea leaves and a little bit of salt, it is known as nun chai or namkeen chai  in Kashmir. The tea leaves and preparation are different from Indian chai. At present, it is also made quickly with the addition of soda powder that accelerates its color and preparation. This method is widely used in households today as it is less time consuming

Traditionally brewed in a Samovar, nun chai holds cultural and political significance. The Samovar was introduced in Kashmir during the early modern period via trade contact with Persian and Central Asia. Samovars are a staple in a Russian tea culture that gradually made its way to Asia.  In Kashmir, tea is brewed in a copper vessel with intricate motifs, finished with a lustrous nickel coating (qalai), making it both a work of art and a household essential.

Preparation of Kashmiri tea has significant components: the method of brewing, the right aroma, and, most importantly colour. The way of presenting it also sets it apart from what is usually served in other parts of South Asia. There are various regional variants of Kashmiri tea as well.  In the Kashmir valley it is called nun chai or salt tea, but in the mountains of Kashmir, it is also known as namkeen chai, sabz chai. The pastoralists of Kashmir often prepare tea with a little bit of sugar and corn flour. This preparation is popular in Azad Jammu and Kashmir.  From Ladakh’s “Gur Gur chai” (butter tea) with yak butter, the pink tea has evolved into variants across the region. The preparation of this tea has evolved with time and has been contingent to the trade scenario, especially tea bricks and the salt trade. Sources like the Tarikh-i-Kashmir by Hasan Bin Ali Kashmiri from the early modern period (Mughal rule) give us an idea of the tea trade and its consumption patterns in Kashmir. The many ways of making and consuming salt tea  reflect its historical variation across the region, which was dictated by local ingredient availability and trade.

The undivided region of Kashmir has served as a crucial gateway to Central Asia, Yarkand, and Tibet, especially due to its geographical proximity to silk routes. Here, Kashmir refers to the political entity under Dogra rule, comprising Ladakh and Gilgit-Baltistan. The Mughal occupation of Kashmir in 1586 not only created favourable conditions for trade with Central Asia but also gave a push to Kashmir’s trade with other neighbouring regions. There were two famous trade routes to Central Asia. One was through Gilgit and Kashgar, and the other, from Skardu to Yarkand, crossing the Baltoro glacier. During the early modern period, Kashmiri products like saffron, shawls, and fruits were imported to the rest of the Mughal empire. Furthermore, the Pashmina wool and tea trade flourished. ​

Nun chai with local Kashmiri breads (baqerkhani and girde). Image courtesy of the author.
Nun chai with local Kashmiri breads (baqerkhani and girde). Image courtesy of the author.

Ladakh and Tibet maintained a close trade relationship through official missions, regulated by the Treaty of Tingmosgang, signed in 1684, under which Ladakh got the monopoly over shawl-wool in Tibet, and the Tibetans acquired the exclusive right to the brick-tea trade with Ladakh . These missions continued with some interruptions under Dogra rule until 1946 and came to a complete halt with the annexation of Tibet. The Lapchak, a triennial mission from Leh to Lhasa led by a senior monk and a Muslim merchant, carried presents and was viewed by Tibet as a tribute mission. In return, the annual Chapba (tea man) mission traveled from Lhasa to Leh, bringing Chinese brick tea for sale. The most vital commodity was Pashmina wool. Ladakh held a monopoly on this wool trade, constituting up to half of its trade, which it supplied to Kashmiri weavers. In the late 1840s, merchandise valued at about seven and a half lakh rupees was exchanged in Ladakh.​

Nun chai with local Kashmiri breads (baqerkhani and girde). Image courtesy of the author.
Nun chai with local Kashmiri breads (baqerkhani and girde). Image courtesy of the author.

Arjun Appadurai and Anne Allison argue that food is a political and cultural signifier, but they analyse it with different social scales. Appadurai, in his concept of gastro-politics, argues that food is socially condensed. For him, the politics of food are embedded in the routine practices that define social belonging. 

Cultural anthropologist Anne Allison examines the macro-level of state ideology and social structures. She argues that food preparation and aesthetics are mobilized as an ideological state apparatus to reinforce political agendas. Borrowing from these arguments, one can study the evolution and survival of Kashmiri tea across centuries of foreign rule. Under severe militarisation and violent historical ruptures, Kashmiri tea has been an important identity marker of Kashmiris in different parts of the world. Even under constraints like curfew, warlike situation, military crackdowns, Kashmiris seek nun chai as opposed to the more affordable Indian chai (known as Lipton chai). Kashmir has been a melting pot of cultures – under the Dogras and after its partition, Kashmir has witnessed a violent history of integration and control. Therefore, understanding Kashmiri food culture requires recognising its precarious political realities, wherein culinary traditions have contributed in  strengthening  solidarities and identity preservation. 

*****
Garima Sudan is a graduate student in the Department of History and Archaeology at Shiv Nadar University, New Delhi.  Their work is based on understanding social histories in post partitioned Kashmir, especially through concepts of space and belonging. They like to learn new languages and when not working, they spend time in the mountains of Kashmir. They aspire to bridge the gap between academic practice and community work.

References

​Appadurai, A. (1981). Gastro‐politics in Hindu South Asia. American Ethnologist.

Allison, Anne. (1991). Lunchbox as Ideological State. Anthropological Quarterly.  

Huttenback, Robert A.(1961). Gulab Singh and the Creation of the Dogra State of Jammu,

Kashmir and Ladakh. Journal of Asian Studies.

Karim, Afsar. (1994). Kashmir: The Troubled Frontiers. New Delhi: Lancer Publishers.

Keay, John. (1977). When Men and Mountains Meet: The Explorers of the Western Himalayas

Lamb, Alastair. (1960). The Road to Lhasa.London.

Lawrence, Walter.(1895). The Valley of Kashmir. London.

Noble, Christina. (1991). At Home in the Himalayas. London: Fontana

Rai, Mridu. (2004).  Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir. Permanent Black.

Rizvi, J. (1996). Ladakh: Crossroads of High Asia. Oxford University Press.

Rizvi, Janet. (1999). A Self-Reliant Economy: The Role of Trade in Pre- Independence Ladakh. Ladakh Studies

Rizvi, Janet. (1999). Trans-Himalayan Caravans, Merchant Princes and Peasant Traders in

Ladakh. Oxford University Press.

Torrens, H.D. 1863). Travels in Ladakh, Tartary and Kashmir. London: Saunders Otley.

Vigne, G.T. 1842. Travels in Kashmir, Ladak, Iskardo etc. London: Henry Colburn.

Van Beek, M, & Pirie, F. (2008). Modern Ladakh : anthropological perspectives on continuity and change.

 

Outside Issues: Tea Gardens in Early Modern London

By James Brown

The HERA-funded research project Intoxicating Spaces (2019–22), on which I was fortunate enough to work and which explored material environments for the production, trafficking, and consumption of new intoxicants in Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, and Stockholm 1600–1850, coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant lockdowns. An avid user of bars, cafes, and restaurants in Sheffield in the UK, where I live and where the project was headquartered, I admired and became fascinated by the creative ways in which these hospitality businesses adapted and repurposed outdoor spaces – gardens, pavements, patios, roads, and yards – in response to bans and restrictions on indoor socialising (measures which have a long historical precedent in plague time). These present-day crisis developments inspired me to take my own research on early modern London outside into the open air.

Photo of two shoppers at ordering at the outdoor window of a bar.
Gatsby on Sheffield’s Division Street with its new outdoor serving window – ‘The Great Hatchby’ – in April 2021. Photo: Author.

There were various kinds of al fresco food and drink retailing in the early modern capital, from the street-sellers recently investigated by Charlie Taverner and Freya Purcell, to the temporary (or, in modern parlance, ‘pop-up’) booths that sprouted in the royal parks and during fairs. However, one of the most common was the tea garden, a distinctive species of space that flourished in the metropolis – as in other cities across the continent – between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. The significance of these environments, especially for the enjoyment and assimilation of new intoxicating substances, has yet to receive the historiographical attention it deserves. Environmental and garden historians have tended to focus their energies on large-scale, well-documented pleasure gardens such as Marylebone, Ranelagh, and Vauxhall. Most historians of intoxicants and intoxication, meanwhile, have generally ignored tea gardens in favour of the more familiar indoor locales of alehouse, coffeehouse, household, inn, and tavern; they get only a single passing reference, for example, in this excellent recent monograph on tea. This is possibly because, faced with London’s spiralling population and growing pressure from property developers, most of them disappeared from the urban landscape over the course of the nineteenth century.

Watercolor painting of white building with several people standing in the lawn in front of the building.
An 1853 watercolour by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd depicting Copenhagen House tea garden in Islington. British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The heyday of the metropolitan tea garden was the eighteenth century into the early decades of the 1800s. Estimates of their numbers vary, from c.200 at the top end to the more conservative figure of 65 proposed by Penelope Corfield. I’ve identified around 90, the locations of 81 of which I’ve been able to pinpoint with some accuracy using the visualisation software Tableau. As the interactive map shows, tea gardens were broadly dispersed across the capital and its rural hinterland, although in the terminology of human geography five broad ‘clusters’ can be identified: there was a particularly concentrated central group around Clerkenwell; a Marylebone group; a Chelsea group; a south of the river group; and two outlying Islington and Hampstead groups scattered along the leafy roads and arteries leading out of the city to the north. Within the overarching rubric of tea garden, however, surviving visual evidence indicates there was a huge amount of spatial variety; compare Copenhagen House in Islington, a huge semi-rural tavern with extensive grounds, to the much more bounded setting of the Yorkshire Stingo public house and tea gardens in Paddington.

Water color painting of a two-story pub with fenced front yard where several patrons are sitting.
A mid nineteenth-century watercolour by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd showing the Yorkshire Stingo pub and tea garden in Lisson Grove. British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Food and drink was central to the offering, and – as their name denotes – tea gardens were most closely associated with a new generation of New World intoxicants, especially caffeinated beverages, and particularly tea. There were three main ways in which they fostered the incorporation of these novel substances into the diets and habits of Londoners. First, they were highly visual environments, dedicated to spectacle, the gaze, and the pleasures of the eye. Perhaps more so than any other kind of space, this made them ideal viewing platforms for the conspicuous consumption of fashionable new commodities like coffee, sugar, tea, and tobacco, and the cultivation of polite rituals surrounding them (the tea arbour or trellis is a recurring motif within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century century artistic discourses). Second, the availability of new intoxicants at the handful of spa gardens formed around natural springs – like Bermondsey Spa tea gardens, here described by the printer George Smeeton – would have strengthened existing conceptual associations between coffee, tea, tobacco, and good health. Third, while not wishing to labour the obvious, tea gardens were botanical. Their lawns, shrubberies, and trees offered a carefully curated, sometimes exotic rusticity, while those in outlying locations to points north, east, west, and south offered vantage points from which the sprawl of the global imperial city could be appreciated and admired. They were therefore almost archetypal settings for the enjoyment of agricultural derivatives from tropical climes.

Black-and-white water color painting of many patrons enjoying tea in the gardens abutting a large house.
An 1830 watercolour by George Scharf depicting Jack Straw’s Castle in Hampstead, featuring customers taking tea in distinctive arbours or alcoves. British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

However, in characteristic fashion, tea gardens were also hybridised consumption spaces that retained close associations with traditional stimulants and intoxicating spaces. They were not standalone or sui generis ventures emerging from nowhere, but were generally opened by enterprising publicans on sites contiguous with inns, taverns, and alehouses; as well as the example of the Yorkshire Stingo above, see this drawing of the Chalk Farm tea gardens in Camden, where the outdoor space is adjacent to the colonnaded public house. As such, ‘old’ intoxicants in the form of alcohols (beer, wine, and spirits) were just as likely to be served and consumed within them as caffeinated drinks. This satirical etching, for example, depicts Bagnigge Wells, a fashionable spa and resort in Clerkenwell; while a kettle sits abandoned in the distance, a grinning waiter uncorks a bottle of wine or spirits for the three fashionably dressed male customers. This chimes with our findings elsewhere in the project; coffee’s percolation throughout provincial England, for example, was facilitated not by freestanding coffeehouses but by the creation of ‘coffee rooms’ within long-established drinking houses.

Hand-colored etching of four men smoking and drinking alcohol at a table outdoors.
A satirical 1804 etching showing three men consuming alcohol at Bagnigge Wells spa and tea garden. British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Danny Bowien’s Post-Authentic Asian America

By Leland Tabares

In a recent interview, James Beard Award-winning chef and restaurateur Danny Bowien admits that if he were to create authentic diasporic Asian food, he would be making “Hamburger Helper” and “buttery canned vegetables.”

A Korean adoptee of a white middle-class family who grew up in Oklahoma, Bowien shows the relationship between food and diasporic identity to be messy when it comes to authenticity. For instance, he never tasted Korean food until he left Oklahoma for San Francisco at the age of nineteen and never formally trained to cook Chinese food prior to opening his now famous Mission Chinese Food restaurant. Discourses on authenticity do not readily account for ethnic narratives like Bowien’s. Indeed, he considers himself “the least authentic chef.” Influenced by his unique background, Bowien sees the current culinary world as what he calls “post-authentic,” defined more by “credibility” than “heritage.”

Bowien’s notion of the post-authentic becomes legible through a recent collaboration with the Arizona Beverage Company. The New York-based company, known for their AriZona Iced Tea line and intentionally gaudy 1990s aesthetic, partnered with Bowien to create a special one-time menu using AriZona beverages as the primary ingredients. This brand deal was organized in 2019 as a pop-up event held at the Brooklyn outfit of Mission Chinese Food.

Image Credit: AriZona Iced Tea

The “Great Buy” menu—a reference to AriZona’s “Great Buy! 99 Cents” tagline—featured two entrées, a dessert, and a cocktail. They included, respectively: Mucho Mango Fried Rice, Smoked Green Tea Chicken Noodles, Grapeade Ambrosia, and Green Tea Ginsenger. The 99-cent price point for the dessert paid homage to the tall 99-cent AriZona Iced Tea cans popularized in the 1990s and early-2000s.

Image Credit: AriZona Iced Tea

To many in the culinary establishment, the notion that a chef would monetize his menu is antithetical to the profession’s values around creative freedom. Celebrity chefs like Tom Colicchio, Michael Symon, and Marco Pierre White have partnered with brands like Coke, Lay’s, and Knorr. But none had brought a sponsored product into their restaurants. Famed food writer Pete Wells of The New York Times equated the event to Bowien selling a brand “access to [diners’] heads.” Bobby Flay publicly condemned Bowien, saying that he would “never take a product and force it into [his] menu” because such an act desecrates the “sacred” nature of a chef’s menu.[i] The backlash to Bowien’s collaboration would appear to have damaged his credibility, a devastating irony for a chef who places credibility at the forefront of the post-authentic. But Bowien remains as popular as ever.

What the collaboration makes visible has less to do with Bowien and more to do with the culinary establishment. It reveals how industry norms gatekeep minoritized chefs who prepare nontraditional foods, demonstrating how access to credibility is unequally distributed. As I have written elsewhere, Bowien represents an emerging generation of misfit chefs whose nontraditional approaches to professionalism literally and symbolically mis-fit within the industry. Acts of mis-fitting expose how industry norms render some chefs unfit for professional belonging. Professional norms thus play direct roles in the formation and regulation of culinary authenticity and identity. Bowien realizes as much when, in response to the criticism, he explains, “I believe in breaking the system that says a certain type of cuisine or price point should be frowned on.”

Bowien’s notion of the post-authentic then does not do away with identity, as if identity no longer matters. In fact, he indicates that identity is essential to the post-authentic: “Identity definitely interests me. I feel like today it’s all about identity.” Rather than using terms like inauthentic or nonauthentic, terms that might signal a refusal or avoidance of engaging with authenticity, Bowien employs post-authentic to highlight the important (and often damaging) ways that the restaurant industry’s professional norms—norms that place value in Western Anglo-European food traditions—not only contribute to the production of authenticity but also commodify and exploit minoritized cultures in the process.

By monetizing his menu, Bowien asserts control over the means of commodifying his Asian Americanness. In the fashion world, streetwear culture popularized brand collaborations between industry elites and smaller independent businesses. Bowien draws inspiration from these collaborations because they challenge the ideologies that separate so-called high and low culture. “Look at fashion,” Bowien explains, “how brands are doing collaborations with other brands. There’s this old guard that says you have to be haute couture or you’re not one of us: you have to do your haute couture first, then you can do your street-wear line. I’ve played that game [in the food world] and tried to do what made everyone else happy, but I wasn’t happy.”[ii]

Bowien’s collaboration with AriZona turns the tables back on the culinary establishment to insist that a menu composed of mass-produced commodities and branded content not only emblematizes an authentic contemporary American dining experience, but also illustrates the degree to which culture industries—from fine dining to advertising—produce and regulate notions of authenticity. For Bowien, the post-authentic is a critical accounting of these processes of cultural regulation by capitalist industries. Rather than refuse to participate, Bowien leans in to assert his own agency and individualism amid the system: “I believe that what I’m doing is good. I want to be myself.”[iii]


References:

[i] Qtd. in Wells, Pete. “This Menu Is Brought to You by Arizona Iced Tea,” 7 May 2019.

[ii] Qtd. in Birdsall, John. “Chef Danny Bowien doesn’t care that you have a problem with his Arizona Iced Tea deal,” 10 May 2019.

[iii] Ibid., Birdsall.

A Great Tea-Drinking: Collective Memory and Victorian Invalid Cookery

By Bonnie Shishko

Midway through Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), Esther Summerson relinquishes her beloved role as adopted housekeeper and assumes another: sick nurse. In a tense scene that’s painfully relevant in this era of COVID, Esther rushes to isolate herself and Charley, a servant who has contracted smallpox. Quickly locking her bedroom door, Esther quarantines with Charley and nurses her around the clock. The two women mark Charley’s recovery by drinking tea. “It was a great evening,” Esther tells us, “when Charley and I at last took tea together.”

But it is the night of the celebratory tea that Esther realizes she and Charley have shared more than a room and a food ritual. Esther has contracted Charley’s smallpox. In a role reversal foreshadowed by the chapter’s ambiguous title, “Nurse and Patient,” Esther becomes the patient and Charley, at thirteen years old, the nurse.   

Although told from Esther’s perspective, the chapter “Nurse and Patient” makes one thing clear: for many Victorian women, illness and disease was not a private but a collective experience. “If I am to be ill,” Esther tells Charley, “my great trust, humanly speaking, is in you” (433). Esther’s assumption that she and Charley—both young, inexperienced, and of different social classes—are capable of and responsible for nursing each other through a grave disease exemplifies what Talia Schaffer calls the “reciprocal” and communal nature of Victorian caregiving. For much of the nineteenth century, “nursing occurs within the home,” Schaffer writes. And so, “in Victorian fiction, care really does take a village” (198; 193).  

While the realist novel might have fictionalized collective care through food, another genre offered explicit instructions in how to provide such care: “invalid cookbooks,” or cookery books intended to nourish the ill and disabled. Such cookbooks were not groundbreaking; invalid recipes appeared in manuscripts and print domestic manuals since the Renaissance (Notaker 201). Yet, Victorian discoveries in nutrition science and the ensuing effort to reform domestic cookery prompted a plethora of publications geared to help women prepare nutritionally-appropriate meals for the sick (Adelman 189; 194; 203).

For all their claims to modernization, however, a glance across the dishes in mid-Victorian invalid menus reveals a noticeable uniformity with cookbooks past—and with each other (Adelman 193-4). In her bestselling 1859 Book of Household Management, for example, Isabella Beeton includes a chapter on “Invalid Cookery,” with dishes that echo Hannah Glasse’s 1747 The Art of Cookery: mutton broth, barley water, gruel. Other writers boosted this trend. Caregivers who wished to spice up Beeton’s recipe for “Toast Sandwiches”—a slice of toast layered between two buttered and salted slices of bread—need look no further than J.W. Walsh’s recipe for “Toast Sandwiches for Invalids” from The English Cookery Book (1859). In a twist on the bland diet traditionally assigned to the ill, Walsh’s recipe permits a dab of mustard (316).

On the one hand, the repetition of recipes across Victorian invalid cookbooks testifies to received beliefs around invalid diets. As Juliana Adelman argues, such texts established a “canon of foods” for the ill (193). But Victorian writers were not merely standardizing but collecting; they self-consciously harnessed the recipe’s status as a form built for exchange in order to construct a discursive care collective for working- and middle-class women who, like Esther and Charley, found themselves performing the role of nurse. What I especially want to emphasize is the centrality of the recipe as a narrative form to this enterprise. Janet Floyd and Laurel Foster explain that “[t]he root of the word recipe,” the Latin imperative recipere, or “take,” signals the restlessness of the form; its need to “exist in a perpetual state of exchange” (6). “Meaning both to give and to receive,” they write, recipes function as what Luce Giard calls ‘multiplications of borrowing’” (6). Recipes are mobile; they are traversable; they cross borders of time and space. With each “borrowing,” the “care community,” to borrow Schaffer’s term, multiplies. 

Frontispiece, Book of Household Management, Isabella Beeton (1861). Credit: British Library, London.

 

To see the invalid recipe in action as an exchanged object, we might turn again to tea; this time, to the popular invalid dish “beef tea.” Between Beeton and Walsh, we find six recipes for beef tea, including plain, “baked,” and one “quickly made.” The recipe I want us to notice, however, belongs to a third writer: the celebrated French chef, Alexis Soyer. Beeton borrowed Soyer’s previously published “Savoury Beef Tea” for the chapter. Visually demarcated by the parentheticals “Soyer’s Recipe,” yet tucked between her own beef tea recipes, Beeton’s recirculation of Soyer’s instructions makes visible—and replicable—another option to administer care. In Walsh’s cookbook, the network of exchange materializes in the very subtitle, undergirding the work’s structure itself: “Receipts Collected by a Committee of Ladies.” Although “compiled” by women “at the head of well-conducted establishments,” Walsh spotlights their diversity and dailiness. “Many come from their own family scrap-books,” he boasts, and are “In Daily Use By Private Families” (iii; Title Page).

Soyer’s Recipe for Beef Tea, Book of Household Management, Isabella Beeton (1859). Credit: author’s own photograph.

 

Invalid recipes are a form of recollection; a food memory. As formal objects with histories of exchange from “family scrap-books” to the print marketplace to sickrooms across Britain, invalid recipes like Walsh’s collect and publicly record private sickroom experiences of both eating and feeding. As we track the kinetic energy of the recipe, its urge for movement across space and time, a vast collective record of care, illness, and recovery comes into view. Perhaps more than any other recipe type, invalid recipes thus occupy the border of public and private memory. In his study of food and its relationship to memory, David Sutton argues for food’s ability to blend “social” and “individual” memory. “In producing, exchanging and consuming food” he explains, “we are continuously criss-crossing between the ‘public’ and the ‘intimate,’ individual bodies and collective institutions” (160).

Invalid Recipes, The English Cookery Book, J.W. Walsh, editor (1859). Credit: author’s own photograph.

 

Perhaps this is why Esther narrates her personal recovery from smallpox through a shared food memory. “How well I remember the pleasant afternoon when I was raised in bed with pillows for the first time, to enjoy a great tea-drinking with Charley!” (481). Both the communal act of drinking tea and the recollection of doing so carry healing for Esther. Yet this alimentary care is delivered not by Charley alone, but relies on a third woman: Esther’s beloved friend Ada, who prepares a tea-table for the event. Although banned from the sickroom per Esther’s strict infection protocol, it is the tea-table’s traversability that I want to call attention to, particularly its ability to move between and bind together three women of different social classes isolated in separate spaces of their home. For “nurse and patient”—and for their friend, relegated downstairs and off the page—the “great tea-drinking,” like the invalid recipe, connects the nodes in the care network and memorializes its collective labor.


References

Adelman, Juliana. “Invalid Cookery, Nursing and Domestic Medicine in Ireland, c. 1900,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 73, no. 2 (2018): 188-204.

Beeton, Isabella. Book of Household Management. London: S.O. Beeton, 1861.

Dickens, Charles. Bleak House, edited by Jennifer Mooney. New York: The Modern Library, 2002. 

Floyd, Janet and Forster, Laurel. “The Recipe in its Cultural Contexts.” The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions, edited by Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. 1-11.  

Notaker, Henry. A History of Cookbooks: from Kitchen to Page Over Seven Centuries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017.

Schaffer, Talia. “Disabling Marriage: Communities of Care in Our Mutual Friend.” Replotting Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, edited by Jill Galvan and Elsie Michie. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2018. 192-210.  

Sutton, David. “A Tale of Easter Ovens: Food and Collective Memory.” Social Research: An International Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 1 (2008): 157-180.  

Walsh, J.T. The English Cookery Book. London: G. Routledge and Co, 1859.


About

Dr. Bonnie Shishko is Assistant Professor of English at Queens University of Charlotte. Her research and teaching focus on the history of women’s domestic writing, especially the Victorian cookbook and the contemporary food novel. Her work on the recipe and its transformation into a mode of art criticism in the late-Victorian era is forthcoming in the edited collection Elizabeth Robins Pennell: Critical Essays (Edinburgh University Press, Spring 2021). She has also explored the connection between Victorian recipes and the national trend of baking bread during Covid-19. Her essay can be read here