Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-sxzjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T19:45:27.422Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

One British Thing: A Manuscript Recipe Book, ca. 1690–1730

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 May 2020

Jack B. Bouchard  and
Amanda E. Herbert Open the ORCID record for Amanda E. Herbert [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

A single eighteenth-century British manuscript recipe book, bound in parchment decorated with gold tooling, can tell us an enormous amount about Britain's gastronomic and imperial ambitions. That is because this book, now known by its call number, V.a.680, and held by the Folger Shakespeare Library, contains recipes like “Indian Pickle,” which included ginger, garlic, cauliflower, mustard, turmeric, and long pepper. How did this distinctly South Asian recipe find its way into a London recipe book? In this essay, we explore how British households engaged with and circulated new ideas about food during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We analyze two remarkable recipes, one for mutton kebabs and another for sago pudding, both brought to Britain through emerging imperial projects. Although one recipe originated in the eastern Mediterranean and the other in Southeast Asia, both were changed and altered to suit British metropolitan tastes. We then examine the book itself as a material object created and altered over time, offering evidence of the ways that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuscripts were amended, torn apart, repaired, organized, and ultimately professionalized over multiple generations. As physical testaments to the social alliances and networks of knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britons, manuscript recipe books were tools of empire, used to appropriate, translate, and transmit the global foodways that permeated Britain's earliest colonial schemes.

Type
Original Manuscript
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 59 , Issue 2 , April 2020 , pp. 396 - 399
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies, 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Receipt book, ca. 1690–1750, V.a.680, fol. 160 and fol. 169, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC.

2 References to sites such as “Crooked lane by the Monument,” the memorial to the Great Fire, offer evidence that the book was compiled in London. Receipt book, V.a.680, fol. 161.

3 Leong, Elaine and Pennell, Sara, “Recipe Collections and the Currency of Medical Knowledge in the Early Modern ‘Medical Marketplace,’” in Medicine and the Market in England and Its Colonies, c. 1450–c. 1850, ed. Jenner, Mark and Wallis, Patrick (New York, 2007), 133–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Leong, Elaine and Rankin, Alisha, eds., Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800 (Surrey, 2011)Google Scholar; Rankin, Alisha, Panacea's Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany (Chicago, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Leong, Elaine, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science and the Household in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Receipt book, V.a.680, fol. 128.

5 See “Cabob, n.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/25772. Kofte may have appeared in London as early as 1660; see Mrs. Mary Miller, Mary Miller Recipe Book, 1660, MS3547, fol. 31v, Wellcome Library. Thanks to Sara Pennell for this reference.

6 See, for example, Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook: Kitab al tabikh fi-l-Maghrib wa-l-Andalus fi ‘asr al-Muwahhidin, li-mu'allif majhul, trans. Charles Perry (n.p., 1993); Perry, Charles, ed. and trans. Scents and Flavors: A Syrian Cookbook (New York, 2017)Google Scholar.

7 H. M. Chichester, “Forbes, George, Third Earl of Granard (1685–1765), Naval Officer and Diplomatist,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/9826.

8 “Sago, n.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/169771.

9 Receipt book, V.a.680, fol. 14

10 Receipt book, V.a.680, fol. 67.

11 Receipt book, V.a.680, fol. 107.

12 Receipt book, V.a.680, fol. 129.

13 Shanahan, Madeline, Manuscript Recipe Books as Archaeological Objects: Text and Food in the Early Modern World (Lanham, 2015)Google Scholar.