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Opening the Queen's Closet: Henrietta Maria, Elizabeth Cromwell, and the Politics of Cookery
- Renaissance Quarterly
- Renaissance Society of America
- Volume 60, Number 2, Summer 2007
- pp. 464-499
- Article
- Additional Information
The essay shows how two royalist recipe books — The Queens Closet Opened (1655) and The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth (1664) — fashioned Henrietta Maria (1609–69) and Elizabeth Cromwell (1598–1665) as very different housewives to the English nation. By portraying the much-disliked French Catholic Henrietta Maria as engaged in English domestic practices, The Queens Closet Opened implicitly responded to the scandalous private revelations of The Kings Cabinet Opened (1645); while, in contrast, the satiric cookery book attributed to Elizabeth Cromwell stigmatized her as both a country bumpkin and a foreigner. Yet the cookery books also had unintended republicanizing effects, as consumers appropriated the contents of the queen's closet for their own cabinets and kitchens.