Abstract
Recipes, which have a primary instructional focus, are frequently encountered in scientific texts in the English vernacular written in all periods of the language. Research on recipes in English historical texts has mostly accounted for the linguistic and the structural patterns that they show, often intending to characterising not only recipes themselves, but also the type of text that includes them and/or the potential audience of the text. In line with this research, this article focuses on the recipes in London, Wellcome Library, MS 8086, which holds an Early Modern English recipe collection. The collection is analysed with particular attention to medical recipes, and its features are explored to put it into the broader perspective of recipes and recipe collections in the Early Modern English period. These findings are in turn used to examine the potential readership and character of the text.
Highlights
Evaluation and efficacy are assessed in W8086 with reference to efficacy phrases first, and to other mechanisms that mark the efficacy of a remedy
EPs have been studied in more detail regarding Middle English (ME) medical texts, especially by Jones, who first described them as tags or phrases that “attest to the value of a recipe, and which are found in this final closing position” (1998: 201)
This article has focused on the linguistic and structural features of the recipes contained in the Early Modern English (EModE) recipe collection in W8086
Summary
Recipes have long formed part of the English vernacular writing tradition. Notwithstanding this, they have not changed much across time, as Görlach remarked in his pioneering contribution about the cookery recipe (1992: 756). Some corpus-based studies have been conducted using the Early Modern English Medical Texts corpus (hereafter, EMEMT) that have addressed efficacy phrases (Mäkinen 2011), interpersonal strategies (Marttila 2011) and the structure of recipe headings (Bator and Sylwanowicz 2018). Alonso-Almeida has carried out another corpus-based study to determine the structure of Modern English recipes (including medical, culinary and magical ones) (2013: 69), and de la Cruz Cabanillas (2016, 2017) has surveyed the structure of EModE recipes in various recipe books written by women. Alonso-Almeida’s study is based on evidence extracted from the Corpus of Early English Recipes (CoER), which draws from both manuscript and printed sources (2013: 69), while the analyses by de la Cruz Cabanillas are described as being entirely based on manuscripts from various sources (2016: 80; 2017: 13).
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