Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen by Wendy Wall

Abstract

Reviewed by: Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen by Wendy Wall Lara Dodds (bio) Keywords recipes, women's writing, Wendy Wall, science and literature Wendy Wall. Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. viii + 312 pages. $69.95. Wendy Wall's Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen begins with the question, "why were recipes so popular in early modern England?" (xii). Drawing upon a remarkable archive of print and manuscript sources, Wall answers this question by theorizing the recipe as not only a repository of domestic knowledge but also as a site where epistemological and ontological questions could be negotiated. In Wall's account, recipes become thinking machines: texts that, through the intersection of their conventional generic features and the domestic practices that they describe, allow for the theoretical interrogation of fundamental concepts such as food, writing, taste, nature, letters, matter, and knowledge. Recipes are founded on the "transformation of natural elements into 'made' worlds—through labor, contrivance, artifice, techne" (3). Recipes become, therefore, ideal texts for examining the kinds of questions that have traditionally been important, although in different ways, to literary scholars and historians of science. Beginning with a theoretical and historical introduction, Recipes for Thought is thereafter organized into five chapters, each defined by a central problem that the recipe addresses, such as taste, knowledge, or time. The first two chapters focus on recipes in print and tell a story of historical change in the recipe as a genre and in how recipe books address their readers. Chapter 1, "Taste Acts," examines the preliminary matter of printed recipe books between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. Books in the earlier [End Page 140] part of this period construct the closet as space for engaging with the recipe, but after 1650 recipe books began to focus on the kitchen as a space of work, a move out of "the elite closet altogether and into a kitchen staffed with paid professionals" (35). Although these books were concerned with "Englishness," that concern did not manifest as anxiety about the global realm; rather, recipes featured ingredients from all over the world. Chapter 2, "Pleasure: Kitchen Conceits in Print," focuses more narrowly on the presence of "conceits," which were instructions for elaborate and fantastical edible displays. This chapter begins to show one of the primary strengths of the book, as Wall places the recipe as conceit into dialogue with other forms of wit and invention. We are accustomed to thinking of the poetic conceit, valorized as the metaphysical conceit, as a vehicle for serious play and philosophical speculation. Wall shows how recipes likewise engaged in the exploration of fundamental categories: "nature, art, representation, form, essence" (68). Food itself, and the recipes that describe its creation, shows that the relationship between nature and art is no less a concern of the domestic than it is of the poetic or scientific spheres. Drawing from recipe books housed at the Wellcome Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the New York Public Library, the University of Pennsylvania Library, and the Huntington Library, the remaining chapters of Recipes for Thought focus on manuscript materials. Chapter 3, "Literacies: Handwriting and Handiwork," serves as the theoretical center of the book as it examines the overlap between handwriting and other forms of handwork. Wall argues that recipes are a "manifestation of the physical, creative, and organizational handiwork of the home" and a "condition of domestic thought" (117). The chapter recounts a dizzying array of different practices that represent alternative domestic "literacies"—handwriting, of course, but also confectionary, knotting, carving, and needlework—in order to contest previous accounts' "overemphasis on the regulatory nature of handwriting" (161). Wall shows convincingly that the discovery of new archives requires a new theorization of gendered literacies, although this chapter suggests that there is much more work to be done given the complexity and variety of the domestic practices it describes. The final two chapters demonstrate Wall's primary claim about the importance of recipes for intellectual history. While recipes have rarely been considered as contributions to philosophical speculation on the problem of...