The word “recipe,” literally meaning “take” from the Latin recipere (to receive), denotes a
Set of prescriptive instructions for the preparation of food or medicine. In early modern Europe, both women and men invented, collected, and exchanged recipes in manuscript, print, and by word of mouth. In England, the recording of “recipe” (or “receipt”) was a popular form of everyday writing, and women circulated recipes exclusively in manuscript until the mid-1650s, when their collections first began to go into print.
Many literate women of the middle and upper classes kept receipt books dedicated solely to the topic of recipes, although occasionally they included other miscellaneous writings, such as poems, hymns, sermons, and family records. These receipt books were often handed down and across generations of women. For example, the receipt book of Englishwoman Mary Granville (ca. 1620-1750) belonged to three generations of women since Mary inherited it from her mother and then left it to her daughter, Anne. The cloistered nuns of the Ursuline Order in rue de Capucins in Paris kept a comm_unal Catalog of Remedies (1725), a collection of medicinal remedies circulated among the nuns responsible for providing care to the sick and elderly of the convent.
A particular recipe collection could include culinary or medicinal recipes, or it could include a mix of both. Culinary recipes focused on the preparation of ordinary and exotic foodstuffs: meats, pies, puddings, confections, ales, beers, and chocolate. Mary Baumfylde collected both culinary (such as “to preserue Apricoks or any other greene fruite”) and medicinal (such as “a bath for an olde soare”) receipts in her notebook (ca. 1626). Medicinal recipes included remedies for purges, ointments, salves, simples, waters, and charms. Lady Grace Mildmay (1552—1620) from Northamptonshire collected over two hundred and fifty folios of medicinal receipts, and she maintained an extensive lay practice for much of her life. In France, the royal midwife to Marie de Medicis, Louise Bourgeois, published a collection of two hundred and eighty medical and cosmetic recipes, the Recueil de divers secrets pour diverses maladies, in 1626, and her popular book was republished into the eighteenth century.
Recipes were exchanged as gifts, given in bids for patronage, and circulated among select coteries, and thus they were social and communal texts (similar to commonplace books), as well as individual ones informed by the writing, reading, and practice of the author/compiler. Women’s recipe practice was also informed by male-authored household manuals, herbals, and technical “how-to” books, yet, as a genre, recipe writing was particularly accessible to women given their training and expertise in the areas of preserving, cooking, and household medicine. Recipes were collected on loose scraps of paper, exchanged in letters, written on walls in the home, recorded in diaries, or copied into notebooks (called “receipt books”) by the owner or by a hired scribe. Alice Thornton noted a medicinal recipe for curing her mother’s cough, which required “the use of bags with fried oats, butter and camomile chopped, [and] laid to her sides. . . ,” in her autobiographical Book of Remembrances (1668).The Venetian writer, Moder-ata Fonte, in The Worth of Women (1600), used recipes to further her argument advocating for the rights of women. While discussing the difficulty of finding an appropriate remedy to “cure men of their defects” and make them more “re-spect[ful] and lov[ing]” to women, she systematically catalogs medicinal and culinary recipes for other kinds of bodily ailments (such as using rhubarb “against fevers”).
The categories of culinary and medicinal were indistinct for much of the early modern period since every ingestible substance was believed to have humoral properties capable of affecting the individual body’s fragile “complexion,” or balance. This fluidity between the medicinal and culinary, along with the collaborative nature of most collections, made the receipt book a flexible genre, one that enabled female self-expression through the writing and exchange of recipes for the well-being of body, home, and community.
Catherine Field
See also Bourgeois, Louise; Fonte, Moderata; the subheading The Practice of Pharmacology and Laywomen (under Medicine and Women).
Bibliography
Primary Work
Fonte, Moderata. The Worth of Women. Edited and translated by Virginia Cox. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Secondary Works
Hunter, Lynette. “Women and Domestic Medicine: Lady Experimenters, 1570—1620.” In Women, Science and Medicine, 1500—1700.
Edited by Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton, 89-107. Phoenix Mill, UK: Sutton, 1997.
Pollock, Linda. With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman, Lady Grace Mildmay, 1552— 1620. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
World History
