Rhetoric and Epistemology in Early Printed Recipe Collections

JEMCS 3.2 (Fall/Winter2003) Rhetoric and Epistemology in Early Printed Recipe Collections Robert Appelbaum The classic cookbook borrows features from the otherwise radical ly opposed genres of encyclopedia and confession. On the one hand, theworld categorized, diagnosed, defined, explained, alpha beticized; on the other, the self laid bare, all quirks and anecdotes and personal history. All contributions to the form belong on a continuum with Larousse Gatronomique at one end and at the other . . .well, perhaps I can leave that to the reader's imagina tion. One could name here any of theworks ofwhich my Proven?al (English) neighbor (now dead) used to say: "I love cookbooks?d'you know, I read them like novels? ?John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure Here is another type of writing that could be included in the annals of literary history. It turns out to have a com plicated legacy of its own, entailing divers forms and uses and bringing up a number of issues with which literary and cultural studies have commonly been concerned: the early printed recipe collection. One says arecipe collection" instead of "cookbook" advisedly, for the transformation of recipe col lections into cookbooks in a recognizably modern sense is part of the history of the recipe collection; it is even by no means the only transformation, the only crystallization of recipes into a solid generic form, that the recipe collection would undergo. One says "printed" recipe collection advised ly as well. Recipe collections circulated in manuscript form long before the printed collection appeared, and they contin 2 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies ued to flourish well into the eighteenth century. Professional chefs, housewives, housekeepers, stewards, and connois seurs all seem to have had a use for them. But the printed recipe collection had a life of its own. If it entered into the lit erature of the West out of the legacy of manuscript collec tions and in continual communication with them, it came to be designed for different purposes and contexts; it had dif ferent practical and theoretical effects and it adopted a far more public, and for that reason farmore developed, literary language. Perhaps surprisingly, however, the history of early printed recipe collections as literary texts has yet to be told. Much less have such categories of analysis so central to its literary development as rhetoric and epistemology been applied to the study of its history. Food was always a language, in L?vi-Strauss's sense: food was always structured in order to articulate symbolic meanings. And language about food, though itwould seem to be an unmediated language about sensations and things, was thus always also a language about a language. So far as it concerned itself with behavior, this language about a lan guage was necessarily rhetorical, designed to sway and shape behavior. So far as itwas grounded in systems of knowledge that readers needed to adopt (about nature, cul ture, and the foodstuffs that a meeting of nature and culture could provide), it inevitably communicated an epistemology: a systematic approach to classifying, categorizing, organiz ing, and defining relations between the need to eat and the materials and practices for accommodating it. Handing down lists of ingredients, recipes, techniques, and orders of service, the written record swayed and shaped, communi cated and systematized, supplementing oral tradition with a scripture of cookery. The manuscript, again, was already functioning this way?rhetorically, epistemologically, and, by the same token, supplementarily. But the appearance of printed recipe collections gave rise to a new set of issues. When recipe collections began to be printed, a transformation in the relation between writing and food, between an order of words and an order of cooking and dining, began to take place. That transformation paralleled other developments associated with the print revolution and the history of early Appelbaum 3 modern literature, but itwas inmany respects sui generis. A specifically written and public language came to be deployed to regulate and supplement the language of food; and the roles of rhetoric and epistemology came to be accordingly expanded and complicated. What "you will find in the fol lowing Sheets," Eliza Smith writes in an early eighteenth century compilation, "are Directions generally for...