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Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen
For a significant part of the early modern period, England was the most active site of recipe publication in Europe and the only country in which recipes were explicitly addressed to housewives. Recipes for Thought analyzes, for the first time, the full range of English manuscript and printed recipe collections produced over the course of two centuries.
Recipes reveal much more than the history of puddings and pies: they expose the unexpectedly therapeutic, literate, and experimental culture of the English kitchen. Wendy Wall explores ways that recipe writing--like poetry and artisanal culture--wrestled with the physical and metaphysical puzzles at the center of both traditional humanistic and emerging scientific cultures. Drawing on the works of Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and others to interpret a reputedly unlearned form of literature, she demonstrates that people from across the social spectrum concocted poetic exercises of wit, experimented with unusual and sometimes edible forms of literacy, and tested theories of knowledge as they wrote about healing and baking. Recipe exchange, we discover, invited early modern housewives to contemplate the complex components of being a Renaissance maker and thus to reflect on lofty concepts such as figuration, natural philosophy, national identity, status, mortality, memory, epistemology, truth-telling, and matter itself. Kitchen work, recipes tell us, engaged vital creative and intellectual labors.
Recipes reveal much more than the history of puddings and pies: they expose the unexpectedly therapeutic, literate, and experimental culture of the English kitchen. Wendy Wall explores ways that recipe writing--like poetry and artisanal culture--wrestled with the physical and metaphysical puzzles at the center of both traditional humanistic and emerging scientific cultures. Drawing on the works of Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and others to interpret a reputedly unlearned form of literature, she demonstrates that people from across the social spectrum concocted poetic exercises of wit, experimented with unusual and sometimes edible forms of literacy, and tested theories of knowledge as they wrote about healing and baking. Recipe exchange, we discover, invited early modern housewives to contemplate the complex components of being a Renaissance maker and thus to reflect on lofty concepts such as figuration, natural philosophy, national identity, status, mortality, memory, epistemology, truth-telling, and matter itself. Kitchen work, recipes tell us, engaged vital creative and intellectual labors.
- GenresNonfiction
360 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2015
53 people want to read
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December 14, 2021
I read this one as a continuation of Wendy Wall's superb article on 'Literacy and the Domestic Arts' (2010), which actually has been incorporated into a chapter on 'Literacies: Handwriting and Handiwork'. I think early modern recipes are a great focus for a book, and I love the way Wall emphasises the value of the domestic labour of early modern women. Recipes for Thought is a really useful book for anyone thinking about conducting similar archival work, but also for anyone interested in early modern housewifery and the domestic sphere.
However, not everything about this book worked for me. I think it tried to cover too much ground in too short a book, and some of the sections (especially on pleasure and knowledge production) never fully came together for me. I was also a little disappointed that Wall didn't engage more with Kim F. Hall's discussion of 'exotic' commodities, which Wall mentioned in passing and which I think could have been very relevant here. So three stars rather than four.
Recipes for Thought certainly lives up to its title, and I think it's a great starting point for thinking about such a rich, but often overlooked, field of research.
However, not everything about this book worked for me. I think it tried to cover too much ground in too short a book, and some of the sections (especially on pleasure and knowledge production) never fully came together for me. I was also a little disappointed that Wall didn't engage more with Kim F. Hall's discussion of 'exotic' commodities, which Wall mentioned in passing and which I think could have been very relevant here. So three stars rather than four.
Recipes for Thought certainly lives up to its title, and I think it's a great starting point for thinking about such a rich, but often overlooked, field of research.
Displaying 1 of 1 review