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

Strange as it might seem, England was one of the most important sites in Europe for printed and manuscript recipe collections between 1570 and 1750, and the only country where these books were written for women as their intended and explicit audience. In and of itself, this information would be enough to attract attention to Wendy Wall's important book. In Italy, such an extensive popular food recipe culture did not exist. All the great Italian recipes collections such as Maestro Martino de Como's De arte coquinaria, Platina's De honesta voluptate, Messisbugo's Banchetti, Scappi's Opera, and Romoli's Singular doctrina, to cite the most famous, recorded historic meals for princes and popes, as well as practical information on food service at court, but did not describe recipes for the home kitchen. The huge Italian collection of "books of secrets" included all sorts of recipes, from how to make colors, cosmetics, and remedies for illness, but virtually no recipes for food. Thus, the English case is worthy of attention. Wall's book, however, is not really a study of the practice of cooking in England. Rather, it rethinks the genre of food recipes (or receipts) in the context of a new vision of domestic labor that considers its creative dimensions.

The first chapter looks at the front matter of published books from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Early printed books played on the idea of recipe books as "closets" kept by women, both noble and non-noble, who needed help with the practical, medical, and social functions of food, but also with textile-making and care of the body, altogether a set of knowledges positively defined as housewifery. After 1660, many books written by men began to establish cookery as an artistic skill similar to architecture or geometry, and separated housewifery from cooking in an attempt to establish cookery as an elevated art, exercised by trained men. Wall focuses much of her discussion on the writings of Hanna Wolley, a domestic celebrity and a woman of humble origins who used her skills as a key to social mobility. For Wolley, food preparation went along with medical care, distilling, decorating, letter-writing and money-handling, all tasks that defined the positive identity of the English housewife. In a sense, Wolley brought the recipe archive out of the closet and onto the nation stage, exalting English domesticity as thrift and experience. Significantly, many cookbooks published later were derivative or at least greatly influenced by Wolley. They all criticized French influence and French methods of cooking and re-coded many dishes as authentically English. Eventually, however, eighteenth-century recipe collections excluded upper-class women from the kitchen, undermining Wolley's earlier positive vision of domestic labor and cooking.

In the second chapter, "Pleasure: Kitchen Conceits in Print," Wall examines how food recipes often designated as "conceits" (from the Italian concetti) pointed at witty (quasi-poetic) modes of expressions and at new ways of conceiving flavors and textures in the context of the pleasures and delights of cooking for women. The idea of culinary conceits suggests how a group of upper-class women were involved in a world of ideas that have often been overlooked by scholars. For instance, these housewives were encouraged to try to reproduce a chicken's natural form or a bird's lifelike posture via sugar sculpture, or to create dyes to simulate the color of meat in a meatless dish. To a scholar of Italian history, these instructions for engendering wonder at the table do not seem a novelty, as they were common in Renaissance banquets and already documented as mirabilia gulae in Maestro Martino da Como's cookbook, but the difference here is that English housewives were the intended addressees of these pleasurable and playful conceits, rather than cardinals, princes, and ladies at Italian courts. However, culinary...