Embedded Files
By Reilly Gambelli
Amanda E. Herbert, associate director at the Folger Institute, holds a Masters and Ph.D. in history from John Hopkins and a B.A. from the University of Washington. In a discussion held on October 8th at Wake Forest University, Herbert explained her particular interest in recipe books. These sources illuminate hidden elements of women's lives and work. In her book Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain, Herbert wrote a particular chapter called "Cooperative Labor: Making Alliances through Women's Recipes and Domestic Production." By identifying previous research done on the taxing nature of men's work in artisanal shops and acknowledging the contribution feminist historians have made in underlining the essential and equally challenging role of women's labor, Herbert makes space for her own argument. Pinpointing the lack of conversation around work inside elite homes, due to the difficulty gathering evidence, Herbert calls for a study that allows “comparison of women’s labors across Britain and its colonies over long stretches of time, [and that] allows [historians] to examine working relationships between women of different educational backgrounds.”[1] To analyze women's labors and working relationships, Herbert uses personal household inventory (which account for the expenses of the household), prescriptive guides (guide books, usually written by men, that help women maintain their household), and handwritten medical and culinary recipe books that have been preserved into the 21st century. This evidence allows Herbert to construct an investigation around the conflicts, cooperation, and agency women found in the home.
In this discussion, I am going to focus on women's agency. Agency meaning a women's power and/or influence over something, such as her household and family. It is essential to acknowledge the context women lived in during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Simply put, even if women ran their households, her household was her husband's. Even more, ““work” became tasks that carried an occupational label, whereas cooking, cleaning, laundering, care for family members, and anything else done in the home was not “work”, but “housekeeping” or at best “domestic work.”[2] By redefining women's work as "housekeeping" and the lack of evidence of women's labor, women's work is often invisible. The invisibility leads me to another concept for conversation around how knowledge is preserved.
Handwritten manuscript recipe books are an excellent example of how women could develop agency within and outside the household. Herbert writes that recipe books:
defended traditional practices of women’s labor; they advocated the advancement and development of women’s skill; they gave advice on managing the crowded, noisy, dirty, and dangerous work environments of elite homes; they offered help in procuring rare ingredients and hard to find supplies; they taught their readers how to traverse urban environments and how to negotiate confidently with male practitioners of trades like printing, apothecary, and surgery; and they shared knowledge about the flora and fauna of foreign countries, giving aid to British immigrants in the new worlds of the Atlantic and Pacific.[3]
Recipe books were often compiled and passed down through generations, fostering increasing independence in navigating difficult situations in the home, city streets, and abroad[4]. This knowledge of how to be independent fostered an agency that allowed women to influence their families' health and the transfusion of other cultures into the home. How was this knowledge preserved? The nature of recipe books as family heirlooms helped protect women's wisdom.
As stated above, the compilation of recipe books demonstrates influences of imperialism and women's effects on imperialism. In Amanda Herbert and Jack B. Bouchard’s introduction to “One British Thing: A manuscript Recipe Book ca. 1690-1730”, they explore “how British households engaged with and circulated new ideas about food during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”[5] Recipes from Asia were “adapted and appropriated” to fit Londoner’s tastes[6]. Evidence for interactions between the British and their colonies is found by passing recipes and ingredients, and women were often responsible for spreading different Asian dishes around London. On the other hand, British women were responsible for sustaining imperialism as they expanded empire through cementing the place of international markets. All of this research indicates how recipes and food helped transform culture in Europe. Susan D. Amussen and Allyson M. Poska expand on this idea in their work "Shifting the Frame: Trans-imperial Approaches to Gender in the Atlantic World". Their article works to explain how a gendered analysis of imperialism often explains cultural shifts in trade and consumerism. Like Herbert and Bouchard, Amussen and Poska use food, specifically coffee, tea, and drinks to demonstrate cultural assimilation and to illustrate how women also influenced and perpetuated colonialism by becoming consumers of imports connected to the slave trade.
As experts are discussing food culture within early modern Europe. A similar conversation is taking place regarding Indigenous Americans. The corresponding discussion surrounding food cultures emphasizes the universal importance of food cultures and how they perpetuate autonomy, knowledge, and empire.
On October 12th, 2020, The Newberry Library held a panel discussion, centering around the questions, “what can books from the early modern period tell us about Indigenous foodways, and what do they miss?” and “how have Indigenous people preserved traditional foodways in spite of settler colonialism, and how does this continue to work today?” The panelists included indigenous chef Sean Sherman (Oglala Lokota), anthropologist Elizabeth Hoover (Mohawk/Mi'kmaq), and Eli Suzukovich III (Little Shell Band of Chippewa-Cree/Krajina Serb). They spoke about the preservation of knowledge through “empathizing the contemporary revitalization of traditional Indigenous foodways led by Native people,…[and] highlight[ing] the efforts to protect Indigenous food sovereignty, resist centuries of exploitation, and remove colonial influences from diets.” [7]
Each panelist centered their responses through a specific lens. Eli Suzukovich focused on medicinal and food sovereignty. His simplest explanation was that if someone is broke and needed to get food they should be able to produce and/or gather their own food. Suzukovich believes that food sovereignty goes beyond the political picture and comes down to a simple question if you could not go to the grocery store, would you be able to provide food for yourself? Elizabeth Hoover focuses her explanations of food sovereignty on seeds. “You cannot say you’re sovereign if you can’t feed yourself.” Her work and research centers around heirloom seed and seed “rematriation”. She wants to bring seeds back to their natural environments. She hopes reconnecting indigenous people with the seeds of their land will spark autonomy and sovereignty within indigenous communities. Chef Sean Sherman is increasingly interested in indigenous food knowledge. He explains that the loss of indigenous cultural knowledge is relatively new. His grandfather's generation is the first generation of Indigenous people to not possess indigenous knowledge. He believes that culinary craft can be utilized to explore indigenous knowledge in real-time. Investigating Indigenous foodways will reveal how Indigenous populations survived for thousands of years with their natural surroundings
Herbert (first picture top of page), Hoover (second), Suzukovich (third), and Sherman (fourth) are some of the voices in a larger conversation surround how foodways increase autonomy, preserve knowledge, and grapple with imperialism and empire in new ways.
“…So much knowledge about indigenous foodways is outside of those sources so much of it is with people and with the land, so I wonder if each of you could talk a little bit about the importance of oral tradition and in revitalizing these foodways…as opposed to traditionally thinking about research in the way in which we so often think about it within academia…?”
Hoover acknowledges that it is essential to get out there and talk to the elders when studying Indigenous people's cultures and food traditions. The act of gardening, cultivating, and maintaining seeds acts as a form of knowledge. Suzukovich agreed with Hoover. He said spending time with elders and learning about indigenous land opens up conversations surrounding traditional foods and plants. Sherman adds that he works with different plants from different Indigenous regions and tries to figure out what to do with them, and "learns from the people who know those plants really well." Sherman wants to "focus on how do we make this a mainstay within our indigenous communities where our indigenous children can grow up have access to this knowledge base." It seems that the land, seeds, and understanding traditional ways of maintaining the land would provide food sovereignty and autonomy to Indigenous communities and preserve traditional knowledge as recipe books have for the women of the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries.
“What is the relationship between food and families and food and the larger relationships and relationality within communities? How does food collect to cultural revitalization, language revitalization?”
"Food is at the center of everything," Hoover claims. It involves relearning language (the names of different plants). It consists of understanding how food plays into cultural and religious traditions. When are certain foods eaten, and how does that play into religious festivals and celebrations? Suzukovich focused his response more on how gardens and food teach language and explore how language and culture are relevant. The Folger Library has also acknowledges how food can demonstrate the importance of history and the significance of studying foodways through their project "First Chefs: Fame and Foodways from Britain to the Americas." Sherman adds to this conversation by stating that it is vital to normalize indigenous foodways and remember the land's stories. Pointing to his shirt, which says, "decolonize education," he emphasizes recognizing and preserving marginalized knowledge.
Further conversations surrounding indigenous foodways
Work Cited:
Work Cited:
[1] Herbert, Female Alliances : Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain, 79.
[2] Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 116.
[3] Herbert, Female Alliances : Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain, 103.
[4] Herbert, 105.
[5] Bouchard, Jack B, and Amanda E Herbert. “One British Thing: A Manuscript Recipe Book, ca. 1690–1730.” The journal of British studies. 59, no. 2 (April 2020): 396–399.
[6] Bouchard, and Herbert. “One British Thing.” 396–399.
[7] https://www.newberry.org/10122020-indigenous-foodways-past-and-present
[8] Amussen, Susan D., and Allyson M. Poska. "Shifting the Frame: Trans-imperial Approaches to Gender in the Atlantic World." Early Modern Women 9, no. 1 (2014): 3-24. Accessed November 3, 2020. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26431280.
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