Recipes for Thought
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Recipes for Thought

Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen

Wendy Wall

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Recipes for Thought

Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen

Wendy Wall

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About This Book

For a significant part of the early modern period, England was the most active site of recipe publication in Europe and the only country in which recipes were explicitly addressed to housewives. Recipes for Thought analyzes, for the first time, the full range of English manuscript and printed recipe collections produced over the course of two centuries.Recipes reveal much more than the history of puddings and pies: they expose the unexpectedly therapeutic, literate, and experimental culture of the English kitchen. Wendy Wall explores ways that recipe writing—like poetry and artisanal culture—wrestled with the physical and metaphysical puzzles at the center of both traditional humanistic and emerging "scientific" cultures. Drawing on the works of Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and others to interpret a reputedly "unlearned" form of literature, she demonstrates that people from across the social spectrum concocted poetic exercises of wit, experimented with unusual and sometimes edible forms of literacy, and tested theories of knowledge as they wrote about healing and baking. Recipe exchange, we discover, invited early modern housewives to contemplate the complex components of being a Renaissance "maker" and thus to reflect on lofty concepts such as figuration, natural philosophy, national identity, status, mortality, memory, epistemology, truth-telling, and matter itself. Kitchen work, recipes tell us, engaged vital creative and intellectual labors.

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CHAPTER 1

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Taste Acts

I another’s Appetite may whet; May teach him when to buy, when Season’s past, What’s stale, what’s choice, what plentiful, what wast, And lead him thro the various Maze of Taste.
—William King, The Art of Cookery
I am acutely aware of how preliminary components set the scene for the remainder of a book, in part because my subject matter in this chapter is the front matter of published recipe books. In order to track the changing social stakes of early modern recipe books, I focus on the way that their preliminaries introduced readers to domestic work by generating particular scenes and locales for reading. It is through these apparatuses that recipe books staged what Priscilla Ferguson, in her history of modern French cuisine, calls “taste acts,” the process by which culinary subcultures, taste communities, and reading publics are shaped. She writes: “Whereas food calls for eaters, a culinary culture contends with a different sort of consumer, the reader-diners whose consumption of texts rivals their ingestion of food. Reading and evaluating, like eating and cooking, are so many ‘taste acts’ by which individuals ‘perform’ their connections to a taste community. That participation in turn—the culinary practices, norms, and values that derive from and support the cuisine in question—sets us in a culinary culture.”1 In positing that food-texts mediate and translate the human activity of eating into a cultural field, Ferguson views consumption as a performance implicated in social, textual, and economic protocols. Taking this view of consumption as my cue, I see the early modern recipe book as constituting an understudied representational framework, one that rendered food practices and shifting notions of taste culturally legible in the early modern period.
What was taste in the domain of early modern recipes? Introducing cookery recipes as part of his estate guide, Gervase Markham contended that a housewife should have a sound judgment rooted in sensory expertise. She must possess qualities of character, he observed, chiefly, “a quick eye, a curious nose, a perfect taste, and a ready eare.”2 Markham’s fellow recipe writers, by contrast, argued expressly for the cultural capital afforded by recipe knowledge; they recommended that the domestic lady develop a flair for social discrimination that could be demonstrated by serving precisely the right sauces and pies. For most early recipe writers in England, “perfect taste” was less a personal attribute and more a technical expertise that could be used to mobilize social identity. Almost two hundred years later, novelist and recipe writer Eliza Haywood observed that a “woman of fine taste” was defined in part by how little she knew of the menial tasks of British housewifery. Voltaire, Haywood’s contemporary, differentiated current conceptions of taste from earlier incarnations such as Markham’s, when he reminded readers that the sense by which the flavor of food was distinguished had become the figurative basis for the apprehension of beauty.3 The early English recipe book, we discover, marked evolving and contested meanings of taste that configured and reconfigured sensation, status, and aesthetics.
In this chapter, I trace English printed recipe books from their appearance in the 1570s through the eighteenth century, focusing in particular on how their preliminary material used spatially imagined scenes to assert, test, and contest values for the taste communities they crafted out of reading publics.4 In asking consumers to define appetitive practices within a framework that would later be categorized as “cuisine” or “gastronomy,” recipe books performed what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describes as the work of discrimination and distinction. Because Bourdieu’s theories have thoroughly informed cultural studies, it’s standard to interpret cultural practices as establishing and negotiating social boundaries. “Taste,” Bourdieu has famously written, “classifies, and it classifies the classifier.”5 It’s worth returning to his terms to remember the culinary roots of the trope that began to define aesthetics and acts of mental judgment in the Enlightenment. Pre-modern recipes certainly participated in acts of social classification long before taste took on its modern meaning as a refined mental sensibility tied to social hierarchies. In earlier textual and social operations taste was, strikingly, the product of an active practice that women orchestrated—something tied to physical sensation, social judgment, and sweaty labor.
While it’s not possible to provide a comprehensive study of the social struggles that recipes engaged during this vast sweep of time, I identify one key conceptual shift that occurred with regard to recipe publication and taste: while early recipe books fantasized about opening an elite closet to female readers, later texts turned to the nationalized kitchen as the primary site of recipe literacy.6 In the first ninety years of their publication (1570–1660), English recipe books, I argue, marketed a female closet newly accessible in print, a space that was a bookish marker of elite standing and one that entailed a particular conception of manual, cognitive, and somatic use. In the 1650s and through the eighteenth century, representations of recipe work shifted to the kitchen, where professional chefs and female housekeepers vied to define the relationship of food to nation building, gender, and class-stratified labor. This transformation in the textual scene of recipe consumption altered the meaning and scope of domestic knowledge, as readers shifted from ladies/housewives to chefs to servants. It also dramatically recalibrated reading and labor. My story concludes at the historical moment when newly aestheticized conceptions of taste filtered into recipe discourse.
Thinking about the recipe book as activating consumption within particular spaces allows us to track the evolving relationship between reading and domestic practice. We see that particular recipe producers alternately related and disassociated labor, reading, gender, and privilege as they shifted from broadcasting a culture of prestige to embracing culinary nationalism. It’s significant for our understanding of domestic intellectual life, I will argue in this book, that recipe producers founded taste communities precisely on the figure of the female practitioner—a fantasy housewife with “perfect taste” who was also a “lady.”

The Recipe Closet

John Partridge kick-started the fashion for publishing recipes to a diverse readership when he put forth The Treasurie of Commodious Conceits, & Hidden Secrets and May Be Called, the Huswives Closet, of Healthfull Provision. Mete and necessarie for the profitable use of all estates both men and women. Although recommended for people across the social spectrum, Partridge’s book was conceptualized around and named for the housewife, the person who was assumed to possess a closet stuffed with information and goods. English publishers did not initially market recipe books to capitalize on any radical innovation in cuisine. Indeed the taste-scape of early recipe books registered only incremental modifications to what was essentially an elite medieval diet. Instead book producers anticipated that a new group of literate consumers would be interested in purchasing recipes about exclusive foods and methods. The first published recipe collections in England thus promised to unleash aristocratic medical and culinary secrets to a wider population; and they marked that release spatially in terms of gender and class. Partridge’s text gambled on the existence of a population ready to be educated in stylish gastronomical “taste,” in Bourdieu’s sense of the term.
What did it mean to locate domestic information within a closet? Defining the early modern term “closet” turns out to be a surprisingly complicated and loaded problem. In the last decade, scholars of gender, literature, and sexuality have identified the closet as a key site around which to anchor claims about the birth of the individual, the historicity of same-sex relations, the division of public and private spheres, and the clash of gendered subjectivities. Because of its particular modern connotations, the closet has particularly been the locus of recent theorizations and histories of early modern male-male eroticism. As a relatively new, secluded, and locked space within the early modern home, the closet (or cabinet) has also intrigued scholars interested in charting emerging conceptions of privacy, sexuality, gender, class, and property.7 Alice Friedman and Mark Girouard argue that closets first came into being in England in a wave of radical architectural changes that amplified the number and size of places for polite entertainment, while, at the same time, proliferating spaces for intimate exchange. With the creation of hallways and expansion of rooms used for withdrawal, homes began to differentiate public and private areas.8 While scholars initially interpreted closets as signifying a newly privatized sense of the individual that correlated to this new division of space, they soon recognized that closets were multipurpose sites where people sat, worked, studied, talked, read, transacted business, counted money, prayed, and even slept. The common denominator for all these spaces, Lena Cowen Orlin observes, was that they could be locked.9 As such, closets routinely housed the valuable consumer goods increasingly available to a wider range of households on the social spectrum: jewels, miniature paintings, money, and—perhaps unexpectedly for a modern audience—foodstuffs such as spices, drugs, and sweetmeats. The closet, with its multiple functions, dispositions, and affects, endowed goods or activities lodged within its confines with prestige.
How did the analogy of the recipe book as a closet shape the meaning of the domestic information newly disseminated in print? This question is significant because Partridge’s association between closets and recipes was not idiosyncratic. In fact, the metaphor of the closet not only flourished in recipe writing for the next one hundred years, but also became the most common lens through which this type of technical writing was viewed. Witness the following titles of recipe books: A Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin . . . Verie Meete to Be Adjoned to the Good Huswifes Closet of Provision for Her Houshold (1594); Delightes for Ladies, to Adorne Their Persons, Tables, Closets, and Distillatories (1600); A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen (1608); The Ladies Cabinet Opened (1639); The Ladies Cabinet Opened and Enlarged (1654); The Queens Closet Opened (1655); The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt. Opened (1669); The Queen-Like Closet; or, Rich Cabinet (1675); The Ladies Delight; or, A Rich Closet of Choice Experiments (1672); A Supplement to the Queen-Like Closet (1674); The Accomplished Ladies Rich Closet of Rarities (1687). Given that many of these texts went through multiple reprints, it is no understatement to say that the print market in England was flooded with recipe-filled closets over the course of a century. This primary fantasized scene of recipe knowledge and taste began to be rivaled by other conceptual frameworks only in the 1650s. In the next chapter, I consider ways that the closet trope in recipe writing mobilized a particular conception of domestic pleasure that was implicated in eros and art. In this chapter, I argue that Partridge’s use of the closet trope created a powerful and enduring conception of a household maker whose manual labor was literate, active, and prestigious.
In The Treasurie, Partridge essentially invented a domestic incarnation of the “books of secrets” that had been popular throughout Europe in the sixteenth century. Esoteric in nature, books of secrets offered miscellaneous information about remedies, party tricks, invisible ink, foods, chastity tests, and other sundry skills.10 Yet The Treasurie addressed a domestic and female audience that had not previously been acknowledged in the secrets genre. Partridge sought this audience by identifying his recipes as part of the cheap market that his printer Richard Jones cultivated in the late sixteenth century. Jones was known for published accounts of pirate adventures, monstrous births, treason, and juicy news stories, ballads, poems, and popular defenses of women. Having himself previously translated versified stories of martial combat and martyrs, Partridge took a calculated risk in joining Jones to court a novel audience for his refined, yet practical, housewifery book directed to female and male readers.
Despite an increase in books addressed to female readers during these decades, printed advice on domestic labors might have seemed to hail a non-existent audience.11 Who would have read such a newfangled thing? Weren’t the women who cooked and made homey medicines largely illiterate servants? Would literate women of means truly have cared to know details of boiling, stewing, and dairying? Despite our skepticism about the project, Partridge seems to have discovered—or perhaps invented—a ready and receptive audience. Reprinted in thirteen separate editions spanning eighty years, The Treasurie of Commodious Conceits inspired a wave of like-minded texts. Partridge launched another recipe book called The Widdowes Treasure (1588); Jones followed with the anonymous A Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin (1594); and writers such as Thomas Dawson, Hugh Plat, John Murrell, and Gervase Markham moved swiftly to capitalize on this market. Gilly Lehmann estimates that by the end of the sixteenth century, 14,500 copies of recipe books were in circulation in twenty-nine editions in England.12 Although we cannot assess the exact proportions of men, noblemen, noblewomen, and/or housewives who actually read these books with any degree of certainty, it is clear that Partridge defined a new marketing niche that reached a more encompassing and gender-mixed readership.13 Ownership marks by non-noble women, for instance, show that the address to women was not merely a flight of fantasy. Noble women were interested in honing the prestigious tasks of confectionery and medical care, while gentry women and affluent merchant’s wives sought to introduce expensive foods into their social circles. Recipe texts validated the post-Reformation ideal that sought to unify nobility, wealthy farmers, yeomen, country gentry, merchants, and aspiring householders in the quest for hands-on knowledge about the nuts and bolts of running a home. Branded a ...

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