Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen by Wendy Wall (review)

Twice in Wendy Wall's broad study of the textual history of early modern recipes, Sir Philip Sidney makes an appearance. No, a long lost manuscript of the English Petrarch has not surfaced in a family archive revealing his penchant for conserves and salves as well as sonnets (yet). Rather, the references here are to his Defense of Poesy. The first makes a connection between his discussion of "conceits" as poetic pleasures tied to the "conceits" of the kitchen (e.g., pastries shaped like letters of the alphabet) meant to give amusement (66). The second calls up the Defense's well-known linguistic lesson on the poet-as-maker, glossing the many recipe titles beginning with the phrase "to make" as a kind of artistic endeavor (165). Thus, this English sonneteer highlights the intellectual work that is done in and through recipes and reveals both the continuities and the tensions of Wall's larger project.

That is, Recipes for Thought may be read as a "Defense of Recipes," one that construes early modern print and manuscript recipe collections as works of intellection and innovation rather than conservation and convention. The analysis looks for evidence of "taste, pleasure, knowledge, literacy, and memory as they saturated the early modern kitchen," thus removing recipes from the role of "solely . . . documenting the domestic world of the past" (251)—and articulating through them "recipe culture" (7).

Including texts by John Partridge, Gervase Markham, and Hannah Woolley discussed at length in Wall's Staging Domesticity (2002), chapters 1 and 2 constitute a return of sorts for Wall as they survey the many print recipe books from 1573 to 1780. While these chapters turn to Milton's Paradise Lost and Ben Jonson's "To Penshurst" in suggestive codas, here recipe books are no longer a context for understanding Renaissance literary culture but are themselves the objects of study. The methodology of the first two chapters is akin to Wall's Imprint of Gender (1993) in calling upon paratextual and metatextual elements of print books to outline the ways in which authorship and publication frame the intellectual and aesthetic work of recipe making.

The turn in the third chapter is newer ground for Wall. Drawing on studies by Bill Sherman and Heidi Brayman Hackel, she looks at the front matter of manuscript recipe collections held at the Folger, Wellcome, University of Pennsylvania, and New York Public Libraries. Through these material texts, Wall discusses women's access to textual literacies of different kinds, and—as is typical with this research—the emphasis is on moments that point to textuality itself. The discoveries in these chapters are representative of the delights of the archive, filled with flourishes and doodles that show the recipe writer as reader and as writer.

Chapter 4 seems most of a piece with Wall's recent publications as it focuses overtly and extensively on a dramatic text, All's Well That Ends Well, the only Shakespeare play in which a written recipe has a role. Where others have looked to Helena's practice and the nature of her medicine, Wall turns more specifically to how her use of the recipe "is embedded . . . in the discourse of seasoning" (178). Unlike other chapters, the literary reading dominates here, as Wall shows how the abstractions of "knowledge" and "mortality" are positioned against one another (181). Chapter 4 thus serves as a pivot toward the final chapter on knowledge-making in recipe culture.

Currently discussed by historians of science and medicine, recipes and secrets in knowledge-making occupy ground not soon to be exhausted. Thousands of extant manuscript recipes trace practices that consistently intersect with the work of the Royal Society, and many scholars are showing the vibrancy of this intersection. Wall's final chapter, in particular her reading of the probatum est ("it has been proved") often found next to recipes, tracks her previous chapters in...