Reading and writing recipe books, 1550–1800

Recipe books or collections, one of the most common forms of manuscript compilation to survive, in print and manuscript have only recently received mainstream attention from academic scholars. This book is collection of essays that rehabilitate the early modern recipe text as more than simply a document of domestic life and a functional text of instruction by revealing and debating some of its varied cultural contexts and meanings. The issue of 'authorship' is another point studied in the book. Both print and manuscript recipe texts are invaluable in extending the knowledge of how women were educated. The book addresses ways in which written sources, specifically recipe books, and, within them, culinary recipes and associated writings can be used by archaeologists. It explores genre conventions in English recipes, showing that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English recipes exhibit some variation that foreshadows the shape of modern recipes. The period 1550-1700 witnessed a burgeoning literature dealing with domestic duties and the philosophy and practice of housewifery. The Foote sisters' copy of The Compleat Housewife opens up at least three routes of inquiry into the religious lives of the Foote women. Hannah Woolley's The Ladies Directory and The Queen-Like Closet show a fluid nature of supposedly stable printed texts, as well as raising questions about the image of the author as a feature of the newly emerging culture of 'celebrity'. The book also explores a selection of medicinal advice and recipes gathered initially by the Boscawen family of Cornwall in the seventeenth century. This collection of essays provides an overview of new scholarship on recipe books, one of the most popular non-fiction printed texts in, and one of the most common forms of manuscript compilation to survive from, the pre-modern era (c.1550-1800). This is the first book to collect together the wide variety of scholarly approaches to pre-modern recipe books written in English, drawing on varying approaches to reveal their culinary, medical, scientific, linguistic, religious and material meanings. Ten scholars from the fields of culinary history, history of medicine and science, divinity, archaeology and material culture, and English literature and linguistics contribute to a vibrant mapping of the aspirations invested in and uses of recipes and recipe books. By exploring areas as various as the knowledge economies of medicine, Anglican feasting and fasting practices, the material culture of the kitchen and table, London publishing and concepts of authorship and the aesthetics of culinary styles, these eleven essays (including a critical introduction to recipe books and their historiography) position recipe texts in the wider culture of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They illuminate their importance to both their original compilers and users, and modern scholars and graduate students alike -- Provided by Publisher Front matter Contents List of figures and tables Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction Part I Methodologies Authorship and medical networks: reading attributions in early modern manuscript recipe books ‘A practical art’: an archaeological perspective on the use of recipe books: Genre conventions in English recipes, 1600–1800 Part II Textuality and intertextuality Reading recipe books and culinary history: opening a new field The ‘Quintessence of Wit’: poems and recipes in early modern women’s writing The Foote sisters’ Compleat Housewife: cookery texts as a source in lived religion Part III Cultures of circulation and transmission Cooking the books, or, the three faces of Hannah Woolley Crossing the boundaries: domestic recipe collections in early modern Wales ‘Lett her refrain from all hott spices’: medicinal recipes and advice in the treatment of the King’s Evil in seventeenth-century south-west England Making livings, lives and archives: tales of four eighteenth-century recipe books Select bibliography Index The book will be of interest to students and academic in Literature, cultural studies, material culture and the history of medicine