Recipes for Life: Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen's Household Manuals
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University of Alberta Recipes for Life: Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen’s Household Manuals by Kristine Kowalchuk A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English English and Film Studies ©Kristine Kowalchuk Fall 2012 Edmonton, Alberta Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission. Abstract This project offers a semi-diplomatic edition of three seventeenth-century Englishwomen’s household manuals along with a Historical Introduction, Textual Introduction, Note on the Text, and Glossary. The aim of this project is multifold: to bring to light a body of unpublished manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.; to consider the household manual as an important historical form of women’s writing (despite the fact it has not received such consideration in the past); to acknowledge the role of household manuals in furthering women’s literacy; to reveal new knowledge on the history of food and medicine in England as contained in household manuals; and to discuss the unique contribution of household manuals to critical issues of authorship and book history. Therefore, this project contributes to several fields: early modern culture and literature, women’s writing and history, and the history of science. In particular, this project focuses on the household manuals attributed to Mary Granville, Constance Hall and Lettice Pudsey. These three works are typical of what I have termed the household manual genre in that they all contain intermingled culinary recipes and medical remedies, they are all hand-written, and they all reflect social authorship (geographically and through time as the manuscripts were passed down through generations). The manuscripts were all begun in the mid- to late-seventeenth century, but were added to over subsequent decades. The Historical Introduction provides context for these household manuals, giving information on: the domestic role and expectations of the early modern housewife, primarily as outlined by Gervase Markham’s The Complete Huswife; the meaning of food and health in early modern England; early modern women’s participation in reading, writing, and manuscript culture; and the genre of the household manual. The Textual Introduction describes each manuscript in detail. The Note on the Text outlines my editorial principles. The Glossary covers culinary and medical terms. Acknowledgements Many people contributed to this edition, and I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to all of them. Firstly I would like to thank Patricia Demers for her encouragement, model efficiency and open-minded thinking; she also helped set everything into play for this project to be possible. The work then greatly benefited from the help of John Considine, who read every transcription word for word, helped fill many holes in the Glossary, and was always gracious in his comments (e.g., “You can’t hold six pounds of flour in your hand. The form seems to be trind, a variation of trendle – “‘a round vessel used in baking’”). Robert Merrett served as an inspiration from the very beginning: his public lecture on cookbooks, which I attended before even embarking upon my doctorate, helped me to realize such study was possible, and he fed my enthusiasm over an early chat about food, wine, and Toulouse. Beverly Lemire helped round out my knowledge of seventeenth-century material culture by hiring me as her research assistant, and talking with her was always motivating. Stephen Reimer offered excellent feedback and suggestions for my Note on the Text. Heather Wolfe gave helpful editorial advice, and it is an honour to have Victoria Burke serve as my external thesis reader. Ann de Leon lent her time and expertise in checking my translations of Mary Granville’s Spanish recipes. Finally, my mom brought me delicious soup when I had no time to cook, and my sister ensured I kept a sense of humour throughout this endeavor; they both kept me going when the rest of life became complicated. And my dad, who passed away in 2010, always believed in me and taught me to follow my own path. Table of Contents Historical Introduction 1 Textual Introduction 49 Note on the Text 80 Three Seventeenth-Century Household Manuscripts: I. Mary Granville: Receipt Book (c.1640-1750) 82 Translations for Spanish Recipes 155 II. Constance Hall: Receipt Book (1672) 158 III. Lettice Pudsey: Cookery and Medical Receipt Book (c.1675) 231 Culinary and Medical Glossary 286 Works Cited 329 “...the life of the average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect it and make a book of it.” –Virginia Woolf “...there is a connection between the search for authenticity in the written and printed word and the search for it in culinary matters.” – Patience Gray “...literature of the kitchen obscures the boundaries of past and present, private and public, self and other, cerebral and corporal. Reading a recipe, preparing and consuming it are, in the end, the word and body become one.” – Janet Theophano Historical Introduction Early modern women’s writing in England has, over the past few decades, received increased attention from literary, textual, and women’s studies scholars. A recurring theme across these fields of research is the need for a widened consideration of what actually constitutes women’s writing in order to reach an accurate understanding of the subject. For, while Virginia Woolf legitimately claimed she could find few early modern women’s books on the library shelves, women did indeed write; they just did not often publish their works, and their works were not always literary. The widened consideration of women’s writing thus extends to manuscripts and to a broader spectrum of genre. Open any recent anthology of early modern writing and women are finally more fully represented; open any anthology of early modern women’s writing, and besides poetry, drama and fiction, the contents might include letters, diaries, religious writing, and sometimes translations, as well as references to miscellanies and commonplace books. Helen Ostovich and Elizabeth Sauer, in Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscript and Print, 1550-1700, explicitly list ten purposes for their collection, including “to identify and present a substantial selection of materials from original editions of women’s writings, which have traditionally been underrepresented in early modern literary studies” and “to display the wide array of private and public genres in which women wrote” (5). However, there is one genre that is still overlooked by their anthology and by most scholarship on early modern women’s writing, even though seventeenth-century Englishwomen developed and dominated the form, and even though it was “an intricate 1 part of women’s manuscript participation in the culture of early modern writing” (Wall 106), and that is the household manual: highly collaborative personal notebooks that included culinary recipes, medical remedies, and household tips. The general omission of household writing from the study of early modern women’s writing likely relates to the fact that the genre is not a literary form; some might also argue it is not a personal form. The first statement is legitimate: recipes are collected and compiled, not created from scratch. However, much like photography, the act of compilation is in itself creative: just as a photographer decides what to include in the frame and what to leave out, and then may manipulate the image, the writer chooses which recipes to include and which to leave out and often subtly changes the recipes or comments upon them. (The endless variation in recipes for preserved apricots in the manuals proves the point.) New historicism and theories on authorship by Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and others point out that all writing involves selection rather than pure creation; it is, however, also obvious that a continuum of literary and non- literary writing exists, and household manuals take their place closer to the latter. Regardless, the act of selection draws on subjectivity that proves the latter statement above to be untrue; household writing is indeed personal. And, indeed, it may be this combination of “non-literary” and “personal” qualities that explains the persisting dismissal of the genre, due to a second-wave feminist impulse to value only literary work as ever important to women, and to ignore the significance of women’s work in the home. Anne Haselkorn and Betty Travitsky, for example, in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, considered the genre a means simply to “equip [women] better for their traditional domestic roles” (24). However, as 2 is evident in the recipes themselves, women’s tasks in the home were essential ones, relating to life and death, and to deny the value of these writings, as well as the miracle that the writing happened amidst so much physical work and despite so little formal schooling, is to deny a significant part of women’s historical reality. It also denies, I believe, a significant aspect of the history of women’s literacy, education and writing in England. For it is precisely women’s work in the home that enabled the writing of household manuals—which, in turn, were passed on as a form of knowledge, not only of cooking and curing, but also of reading and writing.