The Supernatural
Is there evidence of the supernatural in Margaret Baker's Recipe Book?
The ingredients used in Baker's recipes are just as diverse and interesting as the recipes themselves. When transcribing a recipe to help convulsive fits I came across an especially bizarre addition: elves hooves. This definitely caught my attention and made me curious as to what exactly she meant. Was this evidence of supernatural influences? If so, where were they getting these ingredients? It's natural to treat people in history as almost fictional characters, where we peer into their life and accept oddities because life was so much different then. But what we have learnt from studying Baker's book is that the differences are can be small.
The biggest difference between recipe books from the 17th century and now is how much more public these books were. Recipes were almost treated as a commodity, considered valuable knowledge that was shared both with the family and exchanged with your social circle. Elaine Leong argues that especially with medical recipes there was a lot of trust put in the supplier of the recipe, as people were entrusting their well being to the knowledge of another person. She argues that recipes had commercial value as they were often given as gifts, stating “the values placed on the texts donated and received were framed by social relations, as much as any inherent ‘value’ in the recipe itself.” (Leong, 2007).
However while the ingredients used and the techniques may differ personally I saw a lot of similarities between the way she uses her book and the way my dad uses his - lots of revisions, notes in the margins, talking about where they found the recipe. This makes it all the more interesting when you come across something out of the ordinary.
I think people are naturally drawn to the absurd and bizarre. When we see things that don't necessarily connect with our world and our view point we want to take a closer look. Even when it ends up being something more ordinary there is always the puzzle of trying to work out what it is. So - was Margaret Baker running around trying to find the actual hooves of fantastical elves? Honestly - we don't know. But we can try to make an educated guess.
Was Baker using Elf hooves?
The recipe including elves hooves appears on page 102 recto, right next to a quick recipe to make Tripe Pies. This makes it all the more bizarre to me. Having a recipe with such strange ingredients to a modern day person right next to a very traditional recipe with no obvious change in style makes for interesting reading. Her recipe is for specifically convulsive fits in children and instructs:
"Take the houf of an Elfe it is best that lives in the mountaine & hath tenn claws upone one foote one of those clawes must bee rasped and maide in to very fine powder then take the pouder of a dead mans head that hath binn washed very cleane in water & dryed in a window"
While taking a dead mans head and making it into a powder (no matter how thoroughly cleaned) may seem off putting to us, it was actually fairly common in 17th century medical recipes. As amusing as the idea of having a drying head in the window of a family home might be, it is definitely the houf (hoof) of an Elfe that is of particular interest to the historians that studied this text. It captured the interest of the entire class simply because it seems so out of place next to other seemingly mundane ingredients.
There is much discussion on whether or not Baker meant this literally, for instance Historian Lisa Smith’s blog post suggests that Baker in fact meant either the herb elecampane, which is known to go by names such as Elf Dock or mandrakes. There is another argument to be made that in fact the recipe originally called for Elk's hooves.
In A Compleat History of Druggs (Pomet, 1737), on the section on elks it reads:
“he is very subject to the Falling-Sickness; and as soon as he is attack’d with this disease, he fails not to put his left foot to his left Ear, to cure himself thereof; which has given Occasion to the antients to believe that the Elk’s claw, or the Horn upon the left Foot, was a specifick for the Epilepsy.”
While Elks were not found in Britain at the time it is believed that Baker was influenced by practitioners on the continent, and may have either traveled to Europe herself or was close with immigrant communities found in London. The problem with this is that the elks found in Europe generally lived in forests and marshy areas instead of mountains.
Other Mystical Ingredients
This is not the only evidence of supernatural-sounding ingredients in Baker’s recipes. For instance another ingredient mentioned in Baker’s recipe is Dragon Water on page 55r. While this sounds magical and conjures the image of 17th century adventurers braving a battle with fierce monsters, the Online Oxford English Dictionary actually has a far more mundane explanation. It is thought to be a fairly popular ingredient in medicinal recipes, made from the distillation of the leaves of a plant commonly known as Dragon - Dracunculus vulgaris. This is far more straight forward than the elf hoof puzzle, and shows that often when we see something we believe to be supernatural in old texts in fact there can be a much simpler explanation.
The Supernatural and God
The problem is that in her recipe for convulsive fits Baker clearly wrote elves not elks. One explanation for this is that the original recipe - which may have come from the continent - called for elk hooves and Baker mistranslated it to mean elves. This would mean that Baker believed in the supernatural and was willing to incorporate such things into her recipes. As seen on Florence's page about religion in recipe books Christianity was central to the lives of people living in the 17th century. Witchcraft was seen to be the antithesis of religiousness, as it meant making a pact with the devil. When it came to hunting witches many of the people targeted were small time practitioners who offered herbal remedies.
Baker's incorporation of the supernatural and (if you read further below) unconventional methods for crop growth could suggest a link to witchcraft. However spells and charms were not always seen as totally separate to religion, as religious items were often used in spell-like rituals for protection. The interesting thing is that Baker's recipes are never overtly magical. Where there are curiosities and magically affiliated recipes there are often other explanations for what she really meant.
Looking at further recipes on page 55r. there are other curiosities. For instance to make your vines grow fayer grapes the instructions include knocking out a dog and tying him up, alive, to the root of the vine. As seen on Tracey's page about animals, Baker was by no means against animal cruelty, and this is yet another example. While many of her animal-bashing recipes are for medicine or food this is something else entirely. Baker's recipes to cure illness and disease often have a long history of use - being very similar to other recipes in circulation at the time - but tying an alive dog to the roots gives a much more supernatural vibe to the book.
However it is unlikely that Baker was indulging in witchcraft recreationally (not impossible - just unlikely). There is evidence of people burying animals as protection against witches, instead of burying them as a magical means. For instance burying a dog or cow near stables or a cowshed was meant to stop a plague on cattle caused by witches.
There is evidence of supernatural ingredients being sold at the time. One particularly prominent ingredient is unicorn horns, which were believed to be a powerful antidote. In fact people were being sold the horns of narwhals, and passing them off as unicorn horns. This shows that people were buying supernatural ingredients, and incorporating them into medicinal recipes. This means it is not impossible that Baker really did mean elves in her recipe, and she may have had influences from white magic users.
The use of both religious and supernatural influences in her work shows what a broad spectrum of interests Baker had. From the variety of ingredients and recipes she selects to put in her book we can assume that she was fairly well read and had really interesting social dynamics.
The fact that the elves hooves were not questioned by Baker does go to show that the supernatural still had a hold on recipes in the late 17th century. Because she had such a broad social circle meant that she would have had recipes from all sorts of people. By focusing on the strange and supernatural we are able to find out what sorts of things people believed in, and how they interacted with day to day life. For me to come to my conclusion I think it is important that we focused so much on Baker and her recipes. As I said earlier, it is easy to dismiss people from the past as a sort of fictitious character, but because we knew a fair bit about Bakers interactions and the fact that lots of her recipes are very similar to other recipes of the time I was more likely to question her use of elves hooves. While supernatural ingredients were being used at the time - especially in medical recipes - it is important to consider other options before automatically assuming they meant what you think it meant.
It is fascinating to engage with a text on this level, and the fact that it comes from a recipe book is all the more interesting. Before this I would have never believed that you could get a sense of personality and lifestyle from a recipe book, but this goes to show that everything I thought about recipes was wrong.
Meriel Morgan.
Bibliography:
Baker, Margaret Receipt book of Margaret Baker [manuscript] (~1675)
Pomet Pierre, A Compleat History of Druggs (London, 1737)
Roosa St.John, D.B A practical treatise on the diseases of the ear : including a sketch of aural anatomy and physiology (1878)
Bauer Petrovska, Biljana Historical review of medicinal plants’ usage (Pharmacogn Revue 2012)
Bonser, Wilfred The medical background of Anglo-Saxon England : a study in history, psychology, and folklore (Publications of the Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1963)
Briggs, Katharine M. Medieval survivals in 17th century English medicine (CMA Journal Vol.109, 1973)
Culpeper, Nicholas Culpeper's Complete Herbal & English Physician (Applewood Books, 2006)
Cumo, Christopher Encyclopedia of Cultivated Plants: From Acacia to Zinnia [3 Volumes]: From Acacia to Zinnia (ABC-CLIO, 2013)
John Carter, Anthony Myths and Mandrakes (J R Soc Med, 2003)
Leong, Elaine and Pennell, Sara Recipe Collections and the Currency of Medical Knowledge in the Early Modern “Medical Marketplace”’, pp. 133-152 in M. S. R. Jenner and P. Wallis, eds. Medicine and the Market in England and Its Colonies, c. 1450-1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
Rennie, Claire The Treatment of Whooping Cough in Eighteenth-Century England (University of Exeter)
Riley Auge, C. Silent Sentinels: Archaeology, Magic, and the Gendered Control of Domestic Boundaries in New England, 1620-1725 (University of Montana, 2013)
Stobart, Anne Household Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016)
Watts, D.C. Dictionary of Plant Lore (Academic Press, 2007)
http://theappendix.net/issues/2013/4/bespelled-in-the-archives
https://blog.shakespearesworld.org/2016/07/20/the-mystery-of-the-elf-hoof/
http://www.cell.com/trends/pharmacological-sciences/pdf/S0165-6147(02)01895-3.pdf
https://emroc.hypotheses.org/ongoing-projects/the-baker-project