The Early Modern Recipe Book as Emblem of Empire

When one imagines empire-- whether for its tales of romanticized grandeur or brutal violence-- the image is often focused on the lives and experiences of men. The conception of empire as depicted within the European historical framework often excludes the actions of women as important to the record. However, for the upper class, early modern woman-- especially one living in the 17th and 18th century in Britain-- existed in a changing world that was expanding rapidly. These changes are often reflected in the deeply personal receipt books of the period; references to far-flung lands and new ingredients are sprinkled throughout recipes that had existed since medieval times. However, this paper will argue that receipt books thus delineated new consumption patterns and interactions that the world had never seen before. As such, recipe books were symbolic not only of the feminine domain and the granted agency within the home and domestic sphere, but likewise symbolic of the growing network of trade. To understand further how such receipt books did so, three case studies will be presented that emphasize changing ideas of women in the wider world. Put simply, as will be delineated, these receipt books over time became important emblems of empire.

Before properly beginning, it is important to emphasize modern scholarship on recipe books and empire to reveal the various assertions on the matter. As is no surprise, scholarship is divided on the role food consumption played on the expanse of empire. In The Hungry Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World, Lizzie Collingham argues that growing demands for foodstuffs in Britain (and the wider European world as a whole) was the driving factor behind the British Empire. As Britain rounded the corner into the eighteenth century, the diets of the average citizen became more dependent on imported goods and plantation systems in the Caribbean. As such, pursuits of empire were catalyzed primarily by the diets of the general populace. On the other hand, in Eating the Empire: Intersections of Food, Cookery and Imperialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Troy Brickham asserts that the so-called “empire-related cuisine” was in large part due to the desire for individuals to appear more cosmopolitan by consuming international cuisine. These cosmopolitan diets in turn sparked changes in consumption patterns that necessitated greater involvement in the regions of the world where such goods were found. Thus, growing trends within British society, Brickham argues, prompted the pursuit of empire. This paper’s argument falls somewhere in-between; while both a growing dependency on imports and the in-vogue fashion of consuming luxury items were important factors, neither were entirely responsible for the massive growth of the British Empire.

In a mid-17th century receipt book from Britain whose owner is now lost to time, small, neat handwriting consumes nearly three hundred pages of paper. Despite the anonymous nature of the book itself, its pages and contents stand in as a representative of a period before stark changes to the global stage. Prior to the widespread growth of imperialistic involvements in the New World and other regions that would eventually become colonized, receipt books in the early-modern world were ways for women to gain agency and connections within the domestic sphere. For the most part, receipt books were passed between family generations as sources of collective knowledge whose mutability, in turn, created a living document for its owner. Among mothers and daughters especially, receipt books were objects that could be formed and manipulated. In many recipe books, the crossing out of unsuccessful recipes or leaving pages blank for the next generation were ways in which women of the period could transform a space not possible outside the domestic sphere. In the recipe book aforementioned, for example, the owner of the book hastily scribbled out a recipe, perhaps suggesting a lackluster taste or result on page 339. On the page, therefore, the writer was able to modify the altered reality in their recipe book that satisfied their desires. In some sense, then, the reality found within the pages could be easily morphed to please the owner of the book. Likewise, these books also contained traces of familial identity. Most notably, receipt books could contain a plethora of documentation such as dates of baptisms, rent receipts, and handwritten notes. Furthermore, written recipes who were entitled to be from distant cousins or mothers also emphasized the significance of the interfamilial connection in the early modern period. As such, receipt books went far beyond a categorization of useful information; rather, such books offer a way for individuals to understand their identity within their web of connections. Given both of these factors, receipt books were ways for women not only to have some semblance of agency, but to likewise form an understanding of self.

As the pursuits of empire began to grow in the mid-17th to early 18th-century, women’s receipt books marked new trends in a consumerist culture that reflected an expanded market. Take, for instance, the receipt book of Lady Catherine Fitzgerald written in the very early portion of the 18th century in Britain. As is clear both in the size and complexity of her recipe book, Lady Catherine existed within an upper-class household who had the opportunity to obtain luxury items from faraway parts of the globe. Most notable in her book, as with the rest of the wealthy and privileged in Western Europe at the time, Lady Catherine included recipes that contained copious amounts of sugar-- much more than books from even a generation or two before. In the first ten pages of her book, all but two recipes contained some trace of sugar. Troy Brickham, as quoted in Madeline Shanahan’s Manuscript Recipe Books as Archaeological Objects: Text and Food in the Early Modern World, asserts that commodities like sugar “...bonded the Empire and perceptions of it to consumerism, thus enabling imperial concerns to infiltrate the daily routines of most British men and women.” With growing global markets inextricably linked to the slave trade, early-modern households were made complacent in human exploitation via the goods they consumed. Even more so, such an uptick in the prevalence of such problematic ingredients-- whether they be sugar, coffee, or tea-- directly shaped the market and need for more enslaved labor. In sugar plantations especially, an increase in such labor caused plantation owners to employ the use of ‘gang labor systems.’ This system, as described by Sidney Mitnz in Sweetness and Power, was developed within plantation economies to extract the greatest amount of wealth and commodities from its laborers via a continuous flow of labour. It is this practice that saw brutal treatment of individuals who fell below production thresholds. Given that women like Lady Catherine were consumers whose need for such items increased rapidly, receipt books are a testament to how growing empires were shaped by individuals.

As we conclude, let us turn finally to an example that falls outside our geographical boundaries and reveals the lasting impact of empire. In the 1795 edition of “One thousand valuable secrets, in the elegant and useful arts: collected from the practice of the best artists” printed by William Woodward in Philadelphia, the foundational ideas mentioned prior reached the United States in their infancy. The pamphlet, whose main focus is to do with metallurgy and similar crafts, exemplifies the extent to which deeply embedded ideas of empire had become international. The title itself suggests the mysteries and allure of an empire’s pursuits with its use of the word mystery to describe the processes of faraway lands. In one leaflet in particular, the title reads: “To render silk stuffs transparent, after the Chinese manner; and paint them with transparent colors likewise, in imitation of the India manufactured silks.” This example, as well as countless others in the book, emphasize how ideas of empire became solidified in the texts of similar publications. Although the pamphlet does not contain recipes like the prior two receipt books, which weave empire through ingredients or new foodstuffs, it nonetheless exemplifies how growing trade markets developed new ideas. While the details of the author of this book-- specifically that of the author’s gender-- is lost in time, there are some things that are certain. For one, as examined earlier, an increase in global trade was reflected in the materials and items created in receipt books. For this recipe in particular, the author combines processes of both China and India to create a commodity. As Maxine Berg asserts in “In Pursuit of Luxury,” European adoption of such practices stood in as symbolic of a “civilized way of life” that was globally connected. For the people of an empire, commodified products became synonymous with ideas of class and wealth. Secondly, while perhaps we do not know who exactly would have been the consumer for this receipt book, an underlying assumption is that women-- whether in Europe, newly conquered colonies, or the Americas in their infancy-- would have had a direct impact in the consumption of such goods. Their choice of ingredients such as sugar or luxuries like silk directly shaped and manipulated the ever-changing market in sometimes disastrous ways. By the end of the 18th century, commodified slave labor was concretely linked to the products consumed by homes all over the globe.

Before ending this essay, it is important to remark on the exclusionary nature of these receipt books. We must remember that widespread literacy and writing abilities were often only afforded to the elite and that poor families as well as enslaved individuals were barred from entry into the realm of receipt books. Furthermore, in the books of elite women, such as Lady Catherine, the actors who might have made the recipes or contributed greatly to their refinement are oftentimes silenced or forgotten. While Lady Catherine’s book contains another hand-- quite illegible with words written phonetically-- who the individual was is lost. In Recipes for Thought : Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen, Wendy Wall examines specifically on the relationship between literacy and empire. While new notions of ‘artisanal literacy’ have emerged in the field of this study, ‘literacy’ is still connotated with notions of privilege and class. The idea of “literacy for whom?” addresses the ways in which receipt books are sometimes problematic sources of information. Nonetheless, the early modern world was wrought with complex identities stemming from race, gender, and class. For women especially, growing empire sparked the incorporation of domestic duties with imperial commodities. Women were not confined solely to receipt books of familial lineage, but introduced to new worlds wrought with complexities. To return to the introduction, receipt books and the women who wrote them became emblems of empire in an uncertain world.

Works Cited (Paragraph 1)

Collingham, Lizze. The Hungry Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

Collingham, Lizze. The Hungry Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World.

Bickham, Troy. "Eating the Empire: Intersections of Food, Cookery and Imperialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain." Past & Present, no. 198 (2008): 71-109. Accessed December 3, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25096701. Accessed 2 December 2020., p. 106.

Bickham, Troy. "Eating the Empire: Intersections of Food, Cookery and Imperialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain.", p. 106.

Paragraph 2

“Cookbook [manuscript].” Folger Shakespeare Library. https://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/view/search?search=Search&q=call_number%3D%22V.a.19%22+LIMIT%3AFOLGERCM1%7E6%7E6&QuickSearchA=QuickSearchA&cic=FOLGERCM1%7E6%7E6&sort=mpsortorder1%2Ccall_number%2Ccd_title%2Cimprint&pgs=250&res=2

Elaine Leong, “Collecting Knowledge for the Family: Recipes, Gender, and Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern English Household,” Centaurus 55 (2013): p. 86.

“Cookbook [manuscript]”. p. 339.

Leong, p. 89.

Ibid., p. 96.

Paragraph 3

“Fitzgerald, Lady Catherine.” Wellcome Library n.d. https://search.wellcomelibrary.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb1929459__S2367__P0,4__Orightresult__U__X3?lang=eng&suite=cobalt.

Ibid.

Bickham, Troy. "Eating the Empire: Intersections of Food, Cookery and Imperialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain."

Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Penguin Books. p. 58.

Deutsch, Tracey. “Labor Histories of Food.” In The Oxford Handbook of Food History, 2012. https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199729937.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199729937-e-4.

In Mintz’s book, an interesting statistic is given that within a century (1700 to 1800), the British per-capita consumption of sugar went from four pounds to twelve. This highlights the growing consumption of these goods in British society. Mintz, Sidney, Sweetness and Power, p. 67.

Paragraph 4

This edition was printed in Philadelphia, and was based upon an edition printed in London. There is scant information about the origins of the text, as we are only offered the printer. Woodward, William Wallis. One Thousand Valuable Secrets, In the Elegant And Useful Arts: Collected From the Practice of the Best Artists ... First American edition. Philadelphia: Printed for B. Davies ..., and T. Stephens ..., 1795.

Ibid., p. 100.

Berg, Maxine. "In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century." Past & Present, no. 182 (2004): 85-142. Accessed December 3, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600806., p. 94.

Conclusion

Wall, Wendy. 2015. Recipes for Thought : Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Accessed November 19, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central. p. 115.

Ibid.