Recipes and Everyday Knowledge

Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England

Elaine Leong

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226583525
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

Across early modern Europe, men and women from all ranks gathered medical, culinary, and food preservation recipes from family and friends, experts and practitioners, and a wide array of printed materials. Recipes were tested, assessed, and modified by teams of householders, including masters and servants, husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, and fathers and sons. This much-sought know-how was written into notebooks of various shapes and sizes forming "treasuries for health, " each personalized to suit the whims and needs of individual communities.
 
In Recipes and Everyday Knowledge, Elaine Leong situates recipe knowledge and practices among larger questions of gender and cultural history, the history of the printed word, and the history of science, medicine, and technology. The production of recipes and recipe books, she argues, were at the heart of quotidian investigations of the natural world or "household science". She shows how English homes acted as vibrant spaces for knowledge making and transmission, and explores how recipe trials allowed householders to gain deeper understandings of sickness and health, of the human body, and of natural and human-built processes. By recovering this story, Leong extends the parameters of natural inquiry and productively widens the cast of historical characters participating in and contributing to early modern science.

CHAPTER ONE

Making Recipe Books in Early Modern England

Material Practices and the Social Production of Knowledge

Archdale Palmer (1610–1673), gentleman landowner, high sheriff, and lord lieutenant of Leicestershire, had a habit of collecting recipes.1 On 27 November 1658, Palmer, then in his late forties, took his first step toward creating his collection by purchasing a blank notebook for the sum of sixpence. To mark the occasion he twice wrote on the flyleaf, “Arch: Palmer his book” and the date he bought it. A little over a month later, on 3 January 1658/59, Palmer entered his first tidbit of medical information—a recipe “for running gowte” collected from “cozen” Mary Williams. For the next fourteen years Palmer maintained a healthy interest in recipes and an active collecting habit. He continued to add to this notebook regularly, gathering new recipes every few months. On 8 June 1672, a little over a year before his death on 6 August 1673 at age sixty-three, Palmer wrote his last entry. By then he had amassed more than 150 pieces of medical, culinary, household, and veterinary information from his family, friends, and chance acquaintances.

Almost twenty years after Palmer collected his last recipe, another family from another county began a similar project. The Whitney Collection of Cookbooks Manuscript 9 is a household recipe collection written in what was once a commonplace book. The notebook contains nearly three hundred recipes, scattered among sections of philosophical and religious writings.2 In contrast to Archdale Palmer’s notebook, where authorship and agency are clearly stated, the compilers of the Bennetts’ notebook were more reticent in asserting their role as creators of the work. A recipe likely written in 1707 or 1708, titled “for my son Samuel Bennetts lame Knee William Coleman of Brewham used when he was neere 13 years of Age” connects the collection with Philip Bennett the younger (d. 1725) and Anne Strode Bennett (d. 1735) of Somerset.3 Starting in 1694, for nearly four decades the Bennetts worked together to gather recipes from their family, friends, and neighbors and recorded them in their notebook.

Like the scores of other household recipe books surviving from the period, the Palmer and Bennett books contain a miscellany. Readers find instructions for making remedies to alleviate a wide range of general ailments such as scalds and burns, rickets, giddiness of the head, gout, ague, rupture, nosebleeds, and toothaches. Archdale Palmer and the Bennetts cast a wide net when seeking out recipes, and their notebooks present an assortment of information taken from oral, manuscript, and printed sources described as “Perkins’ almanac” or “Dr Micklethywat” or “sonne Wm Palmers wife Martha.”4

We know a great deal about the collecting habits of both sets of compilers because they took unusual care in recording the time, location, and source of recipe donations. The two notebooks were organized chronologically by date of entry, and this journal-like arrangement enables us to situate the practical know-how needs and the place of recipe collecting within the everyday lives of the Palmers and the Bennetts.5 Reading between the lines, it is clear that though adding to their recipe books might not have occurred daily, for both families seeking out and collecting new recipe knowledge was constant and sustained for many years. Filled with bountiful details, the collections also offer tantalizing hints to Palmer’s and the Bennetts’ social and knowledge networks and to social occasions, spaces, and actors involved in the exchange of recipes. Additionally, they reveal contemporary assessment criteria for collating practical knowledge and the various processes used to construct treasuries of household know-how. Together these two books provide a unique glimpse into both processes of recipe knowledge collection and the social worlds of early modern England.

Guided by these two recipe collections, this chapter explores the multiple paths by which householders encountered recipe knowledge and the various ways they recorded it. The chapter opens with a general overview of patterns of recipe collecting: adopting “starter” collections and gathering single recipes. The rest focuses on four main themes: the importance of family; sociability and knowledge making; recipes and gift economies; and the social and cultural function of recipe exchange. Overall I argue that within early modern households, gathering recipe knowledge was shaped by family and social networks, economies of social credit and debts, and systems of gift and information exchange.

Getting Started

In 1694, when Philip and Anne Bennett began their recipe book project, they turned for information to their neighbor, the widowed Florence Mompesson. Thomas (d. before 1693) and Florence Mompesson (d. 1698) and their elder daughter, also named Florence (d. c. 1709), lived across the river Brue at a nearby farm known as North Court or Batts. The entries in the Bennett notebook suggest friendly relations between the two households.6 Before her death, the elder Florence Mompesson contributed in several ways to the Bennetts’ notebook of recipe knowledge. First, when Philip and Anne began their recipe book in 1694, they copied a long series of culinary recipes from Mompesson’s collection to form their own “starter collection”—a practice I discuss further below. As Philip and Anne began gathering single recipes to build on this “starter” collection, they again turned to Mompesson. She obliged on two occasions and offered them instructions on making ointments, oils, and remedies to ease burns and rickets.7 A number of these had themselves been given to Mompesson by others. The ointment recipe, for example, came with the endorsement that Mompesson’s Aunt Drew of Exeter had “cured many of the cancer at the first coming,” and the recipe for the oil of charity came with the tag “This madam Moore did much good with.”8 By sharing her medical and culinary knowledge with the Bennetts, Mompesson opened access to her own network of family and social contacts. This group of “Mompesson” recipes in the Bennett family notebook highlights both the common pattern of recipe collecting and the important role of sociability in making recipe knowledge.

When Philip and Anne Bennett chose to adopt a section of the Mompesson recipe book as the first step toward their own collection, they were joining in a well-established practice. Whether they obtained them from family members or from friends and acquaintances, many recipe compilers began their books with “starter” collections. These take the form of a large section of copied text written in a uniform hand, occurring at the beginning of the manuscript. The notebook is then filled up with a substantial number of additional recipes in a different hand or hands. This combination of a group of recipes clearly transcribed from another collection and additional recipes gathered singly is one of the most common constructions. Many of these starter portions are written out in a neat scribal hand, in contrast to the less practiced hands used to fill in the blank pages with additional recipes, and they are often well organized, with an index or a table of contents. In fact, with many of the collections, the method of organization disintegrates only after the additional recipes are put in. Many starter collections are copied leaving blank pages for later additions; some were written only on the recto pages, leaving the verso pages to be filled by subsequent owners of the notebook. If indexes and tables of contents accompany the starter portion of the collection, space is left within them for additional entries.

Aside from the Bennett family book, another good example of a “starter” collection is the notebook owned by Anne Brumwich, Rhoda Hussey Fairfax, Ursula Fairfax, and Dorothy Cartwright.9 The first folio of the manuscript bears the following inscription: “Mris Anne Brumwich her Booke of Receipts or Medicines for severall sores and other Infirmities.” The hand that wrote this inscription also added a set of recipes organized alphabetically by ailment. Thus the Brumwich hand begins with recipes for the ague and continues with recipes for consumption, cough, and so on. At the end of each section, space is left for additional recipes. An index was constructed at the end of the volume, where space was again left for additions. The recipes written in the Brumwich hand are not attributed to any particular author. The uniformity and organization of these recipes suggest they were copied to order out of Anne Brumwich’s book—all the recipes were by Anne Brumwich, hence there was no need to reiterate authorship. Once the starter collection came into the hands of Rhoda Hussey, soon to be Rhoda Fairfax, she began to fill in the empty pages with her own recipes for the same ailments and updated the index. The subsequent owners of the volume, Rhoda’s daughter Ursula and granddaughter Dorothy Cartwright, also added their own recipes. The book as it exists now has almost alternating sections of the Brumwich hand and the later hands. The recipes added by the later hands bear the signs of compilation, and most note their authorship or origin. Rhoda Fairfax sometimes recorded the date when she obtained a particular recipe. Examples include “a pill commended for mee R. F. by Doctor Catlin, 1653 when I was very ill”; “The Yellow Salve—Lady Hussey’s 29 September 1684,” and a recipe on a loose piece of paper titled “this was sent from London for the payne in my shoulder . . . R. F. the 29^th July 1682.”10 It appears that the copy of Anne Brumwich’s collection provided Rhoda Fairfax with a base of medical knowledge and information that she built on and personalized during her lifetime, then passed on to her daughter.

Not surprisingly, these starter portions are common in early modern recipe notebooks. Many householders elected to copy or adopt a group of already assembled recipes as the basis of their own collection. We might think of these as initial assemblages of household knowledge to give compilers a head start. The origin of these starter portions varied. Some, like the Bennetts, obtained their starter collections from neighbors or friends. Occasionally, as with those of the Temple and Bourne families we will encounter in later chapters, a family member might take the time to copy out the starter portion. In other cases compilers might themselves take the initiative to create these books, either by doing the copying themselves or by commissioning a scribe, as when Anne Fanshawe hired Joseph Averie to copy the collection of her mother, Margaret Harrison.11

The presence of starter collections indicates that both the producer/donor and the receiver/future compiler saw a need for a ready-made set of recipes. Yet this need for general information was paired with a desire to personalize these collections and adapt them to one’s own requirements—hence the blank spaces left in each collection and the subsequent evaluation of the information they contained. Household recipe collections were by nature ever-expanding books of knowledge that changed according to the needs of the current owners.

Whether armed with the starter collection or working from scratch with a blank notebook, men and women like Palmer and the Bennetts actively gathered single recipes or groups of recipes through various avenues. As I outline in the following sections, family, friends, and neighbors provided householders with an abundance of recipe knowledge. Yet family and social networks did much more than just supply new information; as I discuss below, they also shaped the very making of recipe knowledge.

Working Together as a Family

Family played a central role in collecting, exchanging, and recording recipe knowledge. Family members such as husbands and wives, fathers and sons, and mothers and daughters collaborated on their collections. Recipe gathering was often directed by the sickness and needs of individual family members and other household dependents. Additionally, recipe compilers often reached out to extended family and kin for new recipes. In this section I examine each of these areas in turn—collaborative compiling, collecting to cure, and calling on family and kin—to argue that making household recipe knowledge was a family affair.

Collaborative Compiling

When Philip and Anne Bennett decided to start writing down recipes in an old commonplace book, they were a long-married couple with a large and well-established family. Recipe collecting was a joint project for them. A recipe for “the collick,” gathered on 3 May 1719, comes with the endorsement that “my wife took it,” revealing Philip Bennett’s active role in the project.12 Entries made after Philip’s death in 1725 show that Anne also contributed to the family book. During this period it was not unusual for male and female family members to take collective responsibility for the health of the household. Contemporary correspondence reveals that fathers and husbands often wrote about the health, ailments, and subsequent treatment of their wives, children, and dependents, and at times took care to produce medicines—either with their own hands or, more likely in elite families, by instructing their servants.13 The actions of Philip and Anne Bennett make it clear that men’s interest in the family’s health extended to another kind of household medical activity: collecting and recording recipes.

Philip and Anne were, of course, not the only husband and wife to work together on a recipe book. The recipe archive contains many such instances. One particularly clear example is the collection now known as Arcana Fairfaxiana, created through the joint efforts of the Reverend Henry Fairfax and his wife, Mary Cholmeley Fairfax. Like many of the collections described above, the Arcana Fairfaxiana begins with a starter collection, probably created before Mary wedded Henry in 1627.14 This section is written in a clear hand and lists a series of medical recipes by ailment, followed by several recipes written in abbreviated Latin, suggesting that they were taken either from an apothecary’s formulary or from a physician’s notes.15 In this section of the book, if a recipe spanned more than one page, catchwords were used, suggesting that the text was first copied and then bound. This same hand also wrote a note on “Miss Barbara’s” lessons on the virginal and listed late sixteenth-century musicians on the back flyleaf.

Once married, Henry and Mary began to fill in their recipe book together, but Henry seems to have taken the lead. His neat, precise hand is dominant throughout the book. He inscribed his name on the first folio of the volume, wrote out and translated a Latin epigram, compiled the indexes in the front (later crossed out) and back of the volume, and added information on weights and measures.16 He added a substantial number of single recipes on the blank pages of the notebook and also inserted several among information dealing with similar ailments. For example, he added a recipe “For a Sore Breast” under a recipe “to eale the greate heate in the brests of women or in the privy members of men.”17

Mary Cholmeley Fairfax also contributed to the volume and wrote in many recipes interleaved with those copied by Henry. One entry, seen in figure 1.1, is particularly interesting. The recipe is titled “Quene Elisabeth her pother for wind.” The recipe is entirely in Mary’s hand, but it bears corrections and additions in Henry’s. Mary’s version instructed the reader to “ponde all [the ingredients] together”; above this Henry added “& searce them.” Even though the recipe is titled “for wind,” Henry felt compelled to reiterate that “it expells winde” in Mary’s list of additional virtues.18 This is not the only recipe written by Mary and annotated by her husband. In a recipe to m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Recipes, Households, and Everyday Knowledge
• CHAPTER 1.  Making Recipe Books in Early Modern England: Material Practices and the Social Production of Knowledge
• CHAPTER 2.  Managing Health and Household from Afar
• CHAPTER 3.  Collecting Recipes Step-by-Step
• CHAPTER 4.  Recipe Trials in the Early Modern Household
• CHAPTER 5.  Writing the Family Archive: Recipes and the Paperwork of Kinship
• CHAPTER 6.  Recipes for Sale: Intersections between Manuscript and Print Cultures
• Conclusion: Recipes Beyond the Household
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index