Early Modern Bread Pudding

The early modern recipe we worked with came from a what was likely a noble family. This can be determined from several aspects of the book itself as well as the recipe. The pudding calls for a whole nutmeg which like chocolate was a more expensive item at the time, and had links to colonization and global trade.[1] The use of these more expensive ingredients can also give us insight into what the life of the creator of the recipe was like. Keeping with the theme of cooking the ingredients in the recipe can tell us more about the owner’s kitchen was like, and the implications this had on women’s labor and recipes themselves.

Early modern kitchens were dangerous places. They often contained open fires, scalding liquids, and heavy objects. They were built near a hearth or on the ground level of a home. In light of their reputation as dangerous places many wealthy individuals had servants help in the kitchen, they would also eat as far away from the kitchen as possible.[2] Elite women also relied upon servants to complete kitchen labor. This meant that in order for their recipes to be cooked properly they would need to be written down in detail.[3] This is likely why we find references to cooking time being half an hour, or measurements such as a quart of cream, and half a handful of sugar in our recipe.

Like definitions of pudding*, kitchens also evolved over time.[4] This included new sources of fuel, and technology. These made cooking easier and to some degree reduced women’s work.[5] The ability to quickly heat an oven or put the pudding in the fridge to cool definitely reduced our baking time. However new technology also allowed for more complicated recipes and changed the types of food people ate as baking became more prevalent.[6] This is one way through which we can see changes in women’s labor based on technology.

Our ability to glean information regarding the social class of a recipes author which leads us to more information about their life, based on ingredients found in the recipe shows that food is an important tool through which we can study women’s labor, social class, and the influence that the two had on the recipe.

When planning for the project, the general idea that we had had was to create an early modern recipe similar to an older recipe we use today. In order to get this recipe, Morgan called her Grandmother Judy Milhollen asking for suggestions. Judy Milhollen suggested the custard pie that her Grandma Grasby used to make; she provided both the original recipe and the modern substitutions. The recipe itself goes back five generations at least and originally called for ingredients such as lard. As with traditional Early Modern recipes it has been changed to suit current needs.[1] To ensure that the two would be comparable a quick google search was conducted to ensure that custard and a pudding were the same. The initial search indicated that they were, so we proceeded with the project.

Very shortly into baking, we realized that these were two completely different recipes. The custard pie was a traditional American custard while the Early Modern Baked Pudding was more comparable to a bread pudding. However, we would not be the first to make this mistake as English pudding is traditionally hard to define. This likely stems from the many forms of pudding that existed. [2]

These discrepancies did not clear up as time went on. Traditional puddings were still based on Roman sausages. Baked puddings such as the one we created stemmed from variations of that in the 16th century, where many “ordinary houses had small ovens built into the chimney breast, or at the side of the main bread oven where there was one. These ovens were not very hot. It was possible to bake a white pudding mixture or a cereal pottage slowly enough to suit it. Often, it was enclosed in pastry, wholly or partly. So this path led to baked puddings.”[4] This form of pudding is likely the origin of the pudding we recreated. Other types of puddings are sponge puddings, boiled puddings, sweet and savory puddings. Changing labor practices and households brought about the steamed pudding as many women found pudding cloth difficult to use.[5] This shows us that labor was a central part of everyday life and that economic changes altered not only who was preparing the food but the very way that food was prepared, as upper-class cooking went from being the result of a cooperative effort between groups of women engaged in[6], to a smaller scale project. Economic changes did not only affect the jobs offered to women as we saw in Judith Bennet’s work on Brewsters, it affected the ingredients at their disposal, the technology that they could use to cook, and the relationships that Amanda Herbert describes in her work on female alliances.[7]