Preserving on Paper: Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen's Receipt Books ed. by Kristine Kowalchuk

Abstract

Reviewed by: Preserving on Paper: Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen's Receipt Books ed. by Kristine Kowalchuk Madeline Bassnett Kristine Kowalchuk, ed. Preserving on Paper: Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen's Receipt Books. University of Toronto Press, 2017. 374 pp. $34.95. "To make Surrup of Snailes" (135); "To make a Carrott Pudding" (231); "to mack a venison pasty" (312). These are the types of recipes (or receipts, in the vocabulary of the day) to be found in Kristine Kowalchuk's useful edition of three manuscript recipe books attributed to and owned by seventeenth-century women and held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Carefully transcribed, these three books accurately represent their genre. They provide a medley of intermingled instructions for sweet and savoury cookery, medicinal remedies, and the occasional beauty and household product. They assume some previous knowledge of early modern kitchen practices, which makes them challenging for the modern reader, not to mention the aspiring historical chef. The recipe "To Colleer a pigge," from the book of Constance Hall, for instance, not only requires the cook to select a young pig, presumably easily plucked from the property's pig stall, but also to butcher him on the spot: "Take a good fat pigg of a month or fiue weeks old and kill him and dres him fit to rost." Similarly abbreviated instructions continue into the recipe itself, which advises the reader to take "a handfull … a littel … a few" of various herbs and spices, further trusting that the cook will know how to make the "thin water grewell" that serves as a base for further seasoning (216–17). Many of the recipes are attributed to a source—for example, "A Dyett drink, Lady Shirleys" in the book attributed to Lettice Pudsey (288–9); "Mr William ffens receat to make rare Inke" in that of Mary Granville and Anne Granville D'Ewes (104–5). And, despite the books' attachments to individual or family names, they are filled with a multitude of unidentifiable hands that break down our assumptions of authorial design and control. Kowalchuk's edition makes these defamiliarizing seventeenth-century collections available to adventurous modern cooks, but its audience is more likely to include those with an academic (whether theoretical or practical) interest in recipe books, women's writing, and food history and culture. Her semi-diplomatic transcription attempts to retain the distinctiveness of the manuscripts, reproducing original and often haphazard spelling practices, and preserving in-text markings such as the marginal manicules (or little pointing hands) that highlight the unique collection of ink recipes found in the Granville/D'Ewes manuscript. In the mini-introductions to each book, Kowalchuk offers available biographical information (Pudsey is notably difficult to trace), alongside an overview of [End Page 175] the styles and types of recipes. She has chosen to keep the recipe books themselves relatively clear of editorial apparatus but includes some of that apparatus elsewhere. Particularly helpful are the lists of named contributors to the recipe books provided in the introductions, which can help us to locate recipes in time, place, and within community networks. She also provides a detailed glossary for the terms (of which there are many) now unfamiliar to twenty-first-century readers. From "adarme" to "hoxy croxy" to "zedoary," this indispensable section is relevant to the period's recipe books more broadly and serves as a mini-dictionary. In the editions themselves, she is careful to identify the switch from Hand A to Hand B, even though these hands can rarely be tied to a named individual. Although the sparse use of footnotes makes for easier reading, a useful addition to the apparatus would have been a cross-referencing of repeated recipes, which would facilitate further comparative investigation of knowledge transmission and individual practice. Instructions on making "Shrewsbury Cakes," for example, appear in both Granville/D'Ewes and Pudsey (137, 312). In this instance, we have three versions of the recipe, as Pudsey's book provides an editorial intervention by the writer—"as I mack it" (312)—thus highlighting a comparison between standard and personal practice. More detailed editorial guidance would also help to define Kowalchuk's textual selection process: why, out of all the available...