Printed Communities: Domestic Management Texts in the Eighteenth Century

JEMCS 3.2 (Fall/Winter2003) Printed Communities: Domestic Management Texts in the Eighteenth Century Sandra Sherman The Wellcome Institute in London holds a large collec tion of manuscripts, dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, dealing with "domestic medicine and receipt[s]."1 Such manuscripts are far from rare, and are kept at country houses, Record Offices, and libraries around Great Britain.2 Without exception, women created these texts, initially as domestic commonplace books to record "receipts" acquired from relatives, friends, and members of the community whose experience?whose authority?could be trusted. Recipes for syllabub and "a good plumb cake" jostle with nostrums for a "scal[e]d head" or the "green sickness" or even cures for horses with "coughs or colds," often credited to someone known (per sonally or by reputation) to the writer. A typical example in one manuscript reads "To make Lemon Cream the Lady Warwicke Way."3 The texts are personal documents, pre pared for the writer's own use (usually from a family orig inal), or passed down to (or copied by) a relative who might add to and annotate the text. In the latter case, it is not surprising to find two, three, even four distinct handwrit ings, usually in successive sections of the bound text, and as many versions of the same recipe. Few are systemati cally organized, though in some cases culinary and Sherman 37 "physick" entries are separated. Rarer still, a new owner has produced an alphabetized fair copy, appending an index. These are texts in process, open-ended and subject to the whims of successive owners. Many have blank pages, which a new owner could have?but did not?fill in. As each owner came into possession, she read and wrote the text idiosyncratically. The reader/writer's relation to others via the text is to prior reader/writers, probably in her immediate or extended family, and through them to a community of contributors to whose roster she might add herself. The texts evoke a close knit community inwhich domestic knowledge is shared and preserved among individuals who know, or know of, each other, and can be trusted to know whereof they speak. Thus while domestic manuscripts are personal property, and are "personalized" as an owner inscribes herself into them, they reflect?indeed depend on?the owner's confidence in a com munity that supports her, and that expands only if she con tinues to augment the text. This is a controlled, "gated com munity": friends, relatives, neighbors, whose knowledge? perhaps derived from someone notable?is presumably reli able because of their relation to the manuscript's owner(s). The one thing this knowledge is not is commercial, a prod uct detached from known authority that someone wants to sell. Because no one is selling anything, the owner is insu lated from hacks and mountebanks, an effect fostered by entries such as "A remedy to hinder the markes of the small pox being Recommended as a safe one By Mad. DeMurphy," or an ale recipe from which "my mother Mrs. Lisle brews eight hogsheads" annually.4 The implied community in these texts derives from entries that abolish anonymity, that are authorized already or when the new owner inscribes them, and may be changed based on the owner's experience. As if to acknowledge this relation to authority, many entries in Mary Preston's early eighteenth-century manuscript bear the annotation "M. P.," while Abigail Smith's manuscript states at the end of her entries "approved by Abigail Smith," and in other places "probatum A.S." 5 Implicitly, these early compilers accept, indeed pro mote, an idea that culinary success is not just a matter of following rules, but of following "receipts," prescriptions 38 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies that originate in a community, that are authorized by it and transmit its knowledge. As Susan J. Leonardi observes concerning modern cookbooks: A cookbook that consisted of nothing but rules forvarious dishes would be an unpopular cookbook indeed. Even the root of recipe?the Latin recipere?implies an exchange, a giver and a receiver. Like a story, a recipe needs a recom mendation, a context, a point, a...