Manuscript Recipe Books as Archaeological Objects: Text and Food in the Early Modern World by Madeline Shanahan (review)

This slim volume is based on Madeline Shanahan’s doctoral thesis, awarded by University College, Dublin. Despite the wide embrace of the subtitle, the study focuses on a collection of forty-eight manuscript recipe books held in the National Library of Ireland, all of which are described by Shanahan in her Appendix. All of the books are deemed to have been started before 1830, and the two oldest seem to have been started in the 1670s. All are in English, and most appeared to have been compiled and/or owned by high-status women of the Protestant Ascendancy. Shanahan identifies three broad types: household notebooks, recipe collections, and planned volumes.

According to Shanahan, the use of documentary sources by historical archaeologists ‘remains contested in some fundamental ways’ (p. 9). Other historical archaeologists might, then, find her introductory methodological chapter of interest. Historians familiar with the use of recipe books as source documents, as well as manuscript scholars accustomed to considering the essential materiality of written texts, are unlikely to find Shanahan’s methodology in need of explanation. Nor is it evident, despite her felt need to define historical archaeology as a discipline, that her approach differs in any significant way from any of the various approaches that might be adopted by a trained historian whose expertise included the study of written manuscripts. As Shanahan eventually concludes: ‘I confess that there are times when I myself have questioned at what point “historical archaeology” becomes “archaeological history”’ (p. 29).

Chapter 2 describes the nature, chronology, and contents of the manuscripts. Chapter 3 argues that the recipes reflect ‘an impulse towards consumerism, materialism, and standardization in the context of emergent modernity’ (p. 67). Quotations from the manuscripts are fairly sparse and sporadic in these chapters, but the reader is able to get a somewhat closer view of the recipe books through the more substantial quotations appearing in the second half of the study.

Chapter 4, gesturing towards the broader geographic scope evoked in the book’s sub-title, argues that the Irish manuscript recipe books were closely associated with England and Englishness, and were part of the colonisation and Anglicisation of the island. Chapter 5 seeks to show that redefinition of modern notions of femininity are reflected in these manuscript recipe books. Chapter 6 considers them as, simultaneously, spaces for self-expression and heirloom objects, handed down, often with additions, from one generation to another.