Illumination: Mary Pearson's Recipe Book, 1755, and: Maps from The Universal Magazine, and: The Compleat Housewife, 1727, and: Elizabeth Sloughter's Heart, and: Mary Owen: Home Remedies, 1712

Illumination: Mary Pearson's Recipe Book, 1755

And what was there to do in the hours
of the boiling fowl, of bread dough
swelling in the bowl? She could make

another batch of ink, dye another dress
she'd only wear on Sundays. Violet, or blue,
this time, she thought, but didn't rise

from the chair. Instead, she dipped
her quill again, having just blotted dry
her note at page 47's receipt for ginger wine:

Mrs. H uses one Lemon to each
gallon. Results approved. How many times
she'd added a flavor, a spice – cinnamon

in the rice pudding, a sprinkle of cloves
in the cake – but who had ever noticed?
He wanted his food heaped high, and, yes,

he praised her, a good wife, a fine manager
of her domain, but had he even once paused
at a bite to reflect on its difference from yesterday's

taste, the beauty of plums, preserved in honey,
glowing in a white bowl under candlelight?
Like blossoms, she mused, tracing circles in circles

in the blank space on the first page,
just above the chicken fricassee.
In and around Mary Pearson, Her Book,

one word to each corner, the letters' points
enveloped (though no one would ever see) like petals,
she imagined, or perhaps a woman's curves.

Maps from The Universal Magazine

Found in an 18th-century domestic manuscript, National Library of Wales

Trimmed neat and glued upside-down in the back
of her recipe book – perhaps the author

flipped from her list of herbs for the pestilence –
rosemary, rue, wormwood, lavender,

sage – to study roads while a rabbit stewed
on the fire. Staffordshire, Yorkshire, Berkshire,

Wales. Did she travel? Probably not – the child
who watercolored the sailboat pasted

to the page after puddings would have held
her at home, and she wouldn't have known her

Norfolk paths trace Margery Kempe's pilgrim
route: Lynn, Norwich to Yarmouth, where she leapt

a ferry, headed toward Jerusalem.
The headings twice the size of the script for

Portugall Salad or How to Prevent
Miscarage, the counties lie hidden – so

many blank sheets between them and her life,
lost, at last, to plague or exhaustion or

giving birth. So many meals, so many
ailments, and no good housewife's records – three

ways to cure the gout, four methods of potting
veal – ever strayed far from her domestic realm.

The Compleat Housewife, 1727

The first popular cookbook published in Great Britain

Learning to thigh a pigeon or tame a crab
was now within any woman's grasp,
even a maid could be taught to carve. No

continental chefs, no foreign messes
on the boards of honest British wives, though
the authoress, enlightened Eliza Smith,

would not omit such Recipes from France
as may not wholly disagree with English
palates, as might be presented without

disgrace. The countries, after all, were
at war, and gentlemen could have their Paris
cooks, but merchants' meals would be laid

by their own women's hands. And so it was:
not even Hannah Glasse, in her Art of
Cookery Made Plain and Easy

(1747), dared to place a fricassee
before a Welsh Rabbit or Oyster Loaves.
Roasting in the native style was still

preferred for flesh, though keeping a good
brisk fire and saving drippings required
a sacrifice of hours. Puddings and jellies

could be, meanwhile, perfected. The mistress
must provide instructions for the lower
sorts, who, progressive as their nation,

would study letters in their leisure hours.
Every Servant who can but read will make
a Cook, the Art assured, and no true

wife would fail to...