Invention of the Modern Cookbook

Invention of the Modern Cookbook

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Invention of the Modern Cookbook Sandra Sherman

Copyright 2010 by Sandra Sherman All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sherman, Sandra. Invention of the modern cookbook / Sandra Sherman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-59884-486-3 (hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-59884-487-0 (ebook) 1. Cookery. 2. Cookery, British—History. 3. Food habits—Great Britain—History. 4. Cookery, American—History. 5. Food habits—United States—History. I. Title. TX652.S525 2010 641.5973—dc22

2010005736

ISBN: 978-1-59884-486-3 E-ISBN: 978-1-59884-487-0 14

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This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Greenwood Press An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America The publisher has done its best to make sure the instructions and/or recipes in this book are consistent with their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century originals. However, they are included mainly for illustrative purposes; users should apply judgment and experience when preparing recipes, especially parents and teachers working with young people. The publisher accepts no responsibility for the outcome of any recipe included in this volume.

CONTENTS

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Timeline 1. Culinary Authority

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2. Intelligible Recipes and Competent Instruction

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3. Complementary Material

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4. Celebrity Chefs

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5. Marketing Strategies

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6. Niche and Specialty Cookbooks

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7. Point of View

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Selected Bibliography Index

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PREFACE

Like most books that emerge from someone else’s suggestion, this was almost a different book. When Greenwood approached me to write a history of American cooking, I almost agreed. But as I thought about the project and my interest in British cookery, I wondered whether the fit was right. After some back and forth, however, I realized that the pre-history of American cookbooks is totally British and that to understand how the American cookbook developed we must think of it as initially Anglo-American. Once I came to that realization, Invention of the Modern Cookbook became a perfect fit. This book explains what makes a cookbook a cookbook—something that may not always be clear—and traces those qualities back to their British originals. I have been interested in old cookbooks for more than ten years, ever since I began researching a book about eighteenth-century poverty. That book, Imagining Poverty: Quantification and the Decline of Paternalism (2001), demonstrated that the crisis of the poor in late eighteenth-century Britain was largely a food crisis. When I read cookbooks for the poor, I was sometimes aghast. When I read cookbooks for the rich, I knew that I had to study the whole genre. I spent a year at Cambridge University reading hundreds of texts, an astonishing trove that barely had been touched. I discovered women’s domestic manuscripts—the culinary memory of country houses—and their connection to print just blew me away. I have been writing about cookbooks ever since.

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Of course, no matter how much scholarship one piles on, there is a subjective element in explaining phenomena that one finds exciting. When I wrote my first book, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (1996), I admitted that Daniel Defoe was my hero. This book does not have heroes, but it has two heroines: Elizabeth Raffald, author of The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769), and especially Martha Bradley, whose The British Housewife (1756) challenged the matrix of cookbook norms. As you will see, Bradley lives on in twenty-first-century genre-bending culinary texts. One further personal note. Lurking beneath this foray into cookbooks is Julie & Julia, the 2009 box office blockbuster. As I wrote this book, I realized that the eighteenth-century cookbook reader was a lot like Julie—young, urbanized, with no one to turn to for advice. Invention of the Modern Cookbook is about how cookbooks learned to address Julie’s Georgian predecessor, offering recipes that she could understand and providing uplift while she struggled. I felt an instinctive camaraderie with that reader, and I expect that you will too. This book is for anyone who loves cookbooks and who reads them seriously even if they never cook. Julie had a whole trunkful, and most of us—who really do not cook—still cannot resist picking one up. So I hope that if you read Invention of the Modern Cookbook, cookbooks will be even more fascinating and decidedly more fun. Actually, I hope that you will see them in a new, literary light, totally worth reading apart from the cuisine that they present.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Indiana University Press for permission to quote from my article, ‘‘Printed Communities: Domestic Management Texts in the Eighteenth Century,’’ Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 3, no. 2 (2003): 36–67, and Duke University Press, for permission to quote from ‘‘‘The Whole Art and Mystery’ of Cooking: What Cookbooks Taught Readers in the Eighteenth Century,’’ EighteenthCentury Life 28, no. 1 (2004): 115–35. I also thank my friends for listening to me carry on about celebrity chefs, intelligible recipes, and the explosion of generic norms. Phyllis Spaeth listened even with a broken wrist. Ann Rakoff looked up from her eternal spreadsheets. Heather Dubrow confirmed my sense that genre theory was crucial, even before I suggested that it was. Amelia Uelmen and Yael Mandelstam sacrificed lunch hours to my obsession. Tom Kaczorowski, who collects antique toy cars rather than old cookbooks, turned eighteenth-century woodcuts into gorgeous digitized image files. My boss, Prof. Hugh Hansen, gave me a wide berth. Indeed, were it not for the kindness and resources of Fordham Law School, this book would not be. I also thank my editor, Wendi Schnaufer, for her indulgence. This may not be the book that she expected . . . but it is not what I expected either. I learned a lot as I went along, especially during those weekend mornings at Barnes & Noble that turned into afternoons. Cookbooks are energizing, and I want to convey their excitement.

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INTRODUCTION

This book starts from the premise that cookbooks in English— like the English novel—have a distinct, peculiarly eighteenth-century history, and that during that period they assumed a ‘‘modern’’ form that still dominates the skillfully edited, heavily marketed texts available today.1 The relationship that English speakers have with the cookbooks they own—that they read in bed, take to the supermarket, or have at their elbow while the blender is running—is not that much different from the relationship envisioned by eighteenthcentury authors intent on making their own texts indispensable. Invention of the Modern Cookbook argues that early English cookbooks were designed to captivate readers (as novels did) and that, as a consequence, their authors had to learn to communicate so that readers felt comfortable, trusting, and eager to remain involved.2 But unlike novels, which promised nothing more than a good time and occasional moral uplift, cookbooks had to convince readers that laboring in the kitchen would produce tangible, successful outcomes on the way to even greater success. Both were purveyors of fantasy, but only one genre had to deliver verifiable results.3 Cookbooks had to convince readers that they would be better for relying on them, a complex enterprise that turned their eighteenth-century authors into pitchmen, psychologists, cultural arbiters, and cultural authorities. This book explores how that happened. *** ‘‘American’’ cookbook history begins in 1796 with Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery, opening up an immense terrain that

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Invention of the Modern Cookbook does not survey.4 Instead, this book examines the rise of what could be termed the Anglo-American cookbook, that is, a genre that becomes mutually recognizable on both sides of the Atlantic, spurred in part by American imports, reprints, and pirating of English texts during the eighteenth century.5 Thus, the real history of avowedly American cookbooks unfolds in England, beginning just after the Restoration (1660) and ending around the turn of the nineteenth century.6 American cookbooks have deep English roots, and the story of what is considered a ‘‘cookbook’’ is English until it becomes Anglo-American. This story is not primarily an account of specific recipes or types of preparations—though many of these naturally crossed the Atlantic—but rather of textual strategies, ways of communicating with readers that ultimately defined the genre. It involves how English cookbook authors learn to teach cooking, an art that almost from the beginning was passed down through real-time demonstrations and hands-on apprenticeships.7 Indeed, one old confectioner apologized in advance for his text’s limitations: As the Old Saying is, It is Use that makes Perfectness; and no Person can do with a Pen, that your seeing and observing shall do; for, if so, then all arts would be easily obtained; and, What needed Seven Years Apprenticeship?8

Such self-reflexivity, touching on the limits of the genre and indeed of language itself, ultimately would find its place in novels. Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which appeared between 1759 and 1767, satirized the narrative capacity of novels by never getting past the hero’s childhood. English cookbooks, like English novels, were at times uncomfortable with themselves and with the limits of print to communicate directly. They struggled with contradictory visions of themselves, at points asserting pedagogical competence, while also carefully limiting their claims and advising readers to Practice, Practice, Practice. Yet if hands-on experience was the ideal case, and authors had no measure of readers’ individual situation, what assumptions could they make about readers’ general knowledge and abilities? How did cookbooks finally replace in home-cooks’ esteem the handwritten collections of recipes and remedies that they personally had adapted in consultation with friends and family? The history of cookbooks is an important chapter in the History of the Book.9 Concomitantly, cookbook

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‘‘The Dinner Spoil’d.’’ (Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.)

history opens into cultural history, providing entry into an array of phenomena: domesticity, class, health, urbanization, nationalism, a changing food supply, and the effect of colonialism on developing tastes.10 More than any genre of their time, eighteenth-century cookbooks were self-promotional. They were artifacts of the market, rivaling novels and chapbooks as the first truly mass-market texts. Cookbook

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history, therefore, is tied to the expanding book trade, where booksellers developed techniques to enhance books’ circulation.11 Indeed, cookbooks were often avatars of larger promotional ventures—for taverns, nurseries, catering establishments—that centered on farming and food. Most boisterously, during the eighteenth century, cookbooks became vehicles for celebrity chefs. While many lateseventeenth- and early eighteenth-century cookbooks were aimed at professional cooks in upper-class households, subsequent cookbooks registered the growth of markets and the middle class; they reflected the notion that keeping up with the best and latest was of crucial importance.12 Indeed, as artifacts of the market, cookbooks were not above scaring readers into making a purchase. Amelia Chambers’ The Ladies Best Companion (1780) raised the specter of domestic and even economic ruin should the reader’s skills be deficient: It is well known, that the woman who is ignorant of cookery is neither qualified to be a mistress or a servant; for the dressing of victuals . . . is so essential a part of female education, that those who neglect to acquire some knowledge of it, labour under many difficulties in their advanced years.13

While few people now consider cooking ‘‘essential’’ to success in life, anyone might still consult a cookbook on those occasions when cooking looks to be fun, adventurous, or perhaps a strategic imperative (how about Recipes for Romance from the Epicurious editors?).14 The only trick is to find the right text. Yet, for all the ways that cookbooks can coddle one’s individuality, they actually are astonishingly similar. That similarity—and how modern cookbooks attained it—is the subject of this book. Invention of the Modern Cookbook therefore addresses the fundamental question of what a Modern Cookbook is. This introduction briefly describes its characteristics; subsequent chapters discuss their development. The last chapter discusses how cookbooks are now breaching the limits of the genre and taking off in new directions. This development was also foreshadowed in the eighteenth century. CULINARY AUTHORITY When a reader randomly chooses a cookbook from hundreds at the bookstore, she expects that the recipes have been tested; that they work; that they will not poison her family. She even assumes that

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the recipes taste pretty good. Thus, even if she is not persuaded to buy the book, she does not ordinarily question its authority, its reliability. The development of authority (or rather the appearance of authority) during the eighteenth century was a foundational element in printed cookbooks’ ability to supersede domestic manuscripts, and it has remained central—if more subtly touted—in these old cookbooks’ modern descendants. Returning to questions of authority in different contexts in successive chapters, Invention of the Modern Cookbook examines how print culture deployed many of the features of manuscript culture to replace that culture, creating texts in which readers could have even greater trust. Print texts created a kind of immediacy, an expanded intimacy that manuscripts lacked, giving readers the sense that authors were there with them, guiding them, urging them through the challenges of learning to cook. Authors claimed to feel readers’ anxieties—to anticipate their needs—as if such authors had the type of affinity with readers that characterized manuscript culture. The Preface to Charlotte Mason’s The Lady’s Assistant (1773) observes that, on account of personal experience, she understands that loneliness in the kitchen can be debilitating: The great inconvenience, I experienced, on commencing mistress of a family, from the want of such assistance [i.e., ‘‘instructions for

‘‘The Business of the Kitchen’’ (Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.)

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Regulating a Table’’], has since prompted me to attempt a set of bills of fare, which, I flatter myself, will be of great use to ladies in general, but particularly to the younger part of my sex, who, on their entering into life, may not have those advantages which arise from instruction, as well as from practice, and are greatly at a loss how to conduct their table with that decency and propriety which are much to be desired.

The cookbook appeals to a need and suggests that help is at hand. It projects empathy, and by that same token, an awareness of readers’ precise needs. It claims an ability to know just how to help, and rests its seeming authority on just such precision.15 Cookbooks, therefore, take up where manuscripts leave off, imitating but also outdoing them in the amount of detail that recipes can provide. The development of niche cookbooks constituted yet a further step in this direction. Cookbooks aimed to convince readers that they contemplated an individual, particular reader (the one reading the text), an illusion that modern cookbooks cultivate through an array of devices that simulate intimacy.

INTELLIGIBLE RECIPES AND COMPETENT INSTRUCTION Although cookbooks can be difficult and demand that readers use complex techniques (think of boning that duck in Julie & Julia), readers still expect cookbooks to be intelligible. That is, a recipe should have all the elements that enable a reader to understand it, and envision herself making it without outside help. Ingredients must all be listed, along with measurements. Directions must be step-by-step. If a recipe requires that other recipes also be prepared, for example, a steak with Bearnaise sauce, such other recipes must be provided, if not within the main recipe then by reference to a page in the text. When recipes are not clear, modern readers complain—targeting authors, publishers, or the blogosphere—and take down a recipe by proposing their own. Such complaining, however, would not always have jibed with readers’ expectations. Initially, cookbooks were not user-friendly, and their authors assumed that readers had, or had access to, more culinary information than their recipes provided, or they did not adequately consider the reader as a cognitive subject. In time, however, print culture learned to respond to the new, urban, solitary reader, who for lack

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of an instructional community, required the type of culinary selfsufficiency that a book, if well crafted, could provide.16 Detail became a source of authority, creating a metadiscourse in some texts as to which text best addresses the intended audience. Texts such as A Collection of above Three Hundred Receipts in Cookery (1724) touted their own pedagogic competence: The Directions relating to COOKERY are Palatable, Useful, and Intelligible, which is more than can be said of any now Publick in that kind; some great Masters having given us Rules in that Art so strangely odd and fanatical, that ’tis hard to say, Whether the Reading has given more Sport and Diversion, or the Practice more Vexation and Chagrin, in spoiling us many a good Dish, by following their Directions.17

Cookery went on to conjure an even more frightening scenario, designed to make a reader blanch as she considered some competing text at a book stall that she might haplessly carry home: But so it is, that a Poor Woman must be laugh’d at, for only Sugaring a Mess of Beans; whilst a Great Name must be had in Admiration, for contriving Relishes a thousand times more Distasteful to the Palate, provided they are but at the same time more Expensive to the Purse.

In the eighteenth-century cookbook, cognitive dilemma is depicted as domestic drama, that is, the befuddlement of having no one to explain things, including the author of a text one had relied on. Raising the fear of such dilemma became a marketing strategy, sowing distrust even of the very chefs—the Great Names—who had captured timorous readers’ trust. Throughout the century, cookbooks battled each other over pedagogic competence, casting doubt on the genre even as they claimed to transcend its limitations. Such constant sniping betrayed a self-consciousness among authors (or at least their publishers) regarding the ability to deliver instruction. Yet what matters is that readers of eighteenth-century cookbooks ultimately did acquire a level of competence, at least insofar as readers were able to understand the recipes, albeit after a few befuddling tries. COMPLEMENTARY MATERIAL While the earliest cookbooks contained scant material instructing cooks in basic techniques, marketing, table-setting, and avoiding

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household poisons, by the mid-eighteenth century, cookbooks learned to reassure readers that they would not be abandoned in a domestic vacuum. Such books situated themselves in the reader’s midst, anticipating and answering questions, defining concerns (will I be poisoned by a chipped pot?) and setting out rules of propriety (how do I set a table and arrange the guests?). These cookbooks offer encouragement. They intervene in defining gender roles; ways of serving the poor, the sick, and those on voyages at sea; how to stock a pantry; and how to resuscitate spoiled meat. They explain new spices and provide menus. If readers need to truss a goose, The Lady’s Companion (1753) demonstrates how, complete with an illustrated diagram. If the flour is possibly adulterated, The London Art of Cookery (1792) advises as follows: To detect the adulteration of flour with whiting or chalk, mix it with some juice of lemon or good vinegar. If the flour be pure, they will remain together at rest; but if there be a mixture of whiting or chalk, a fermentation, like the working of ye[a]st, will ensue. (439)

Cookbooks establish authority by becoming indispensable to households bereft of guidance. Like assurances of intelligibility, the provision of complementary material calms domestic jitters. Even the arrangement of some books—month by month, instead of by culinary category—offers readers a type of calming instruction, demonstrating the household’s connection to the garden and, ultimately, to nature’s ineluctable rhythms.18 Seasonal menus, which become commonplace along with month-by-month tables of seasonal ingredients, underscore this connection. As populations shift toward urban areas and become increasingly remote from food production, such instruction becomes increasingly important, guiding readers toward what to buy in large urban markets. While encyclopedic books of household management become less relevant to households in London, Leeds, or other urban centers, aspects of these books are reincorporated in cookbooks, making them more useful to urban dwellers no less puzzled by how to stay healthy or plan a monthly menu. CELEBRITY CHEFS Domestic manuscripts had no conventional ‘‘author’’ since they were handed down within families and were written in by members of the household and community known to the manuscripts’

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owners. They were noncommercial artifacts whose authority inhered in the mutual acquaintance of the parties who inscribed them. They were amateur texts. By contrast, print texts—produced by unknown experts, at a distance from readers—develop authority by foregrounding authors, allowing them to take over the authorizing function of manuscripts’ communal mode of inscription. Such texts allow authors to comment on recipes, talk about themselves, and make their presence immanent. Readers are made to feel that authors are guiding them, imparting the fruits of their years of experience. ‘‘Experience’’ becomes a touchstone, frequently touted on a book’s title page. The Celebrity Chef—Mrs. Raffald, Hannah Glasse—was born, taking over from one’s mother or aunt and doing her one better. Finely etched portraits adorned many texts— Mrs. Raffald grew older and younger, slimmer and fatter, as edition followed edition of The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769). Bewigged representations of Francis Collingwood and John Woolams graced the front pages of The Universal Cook (1792). Even where authors remained relatively unobtrusive, they touted their associations with famous personages, reassuring readers that what pleased these cooks’ patrons would serve readers as well. ‘‘Puffery’’ became a much-satirized practice, as supposedly disinterested third-party praise rained down on consumers. The eighteenthcentury publicity machine was celebrity’s eagerly complicit handmaiden: ‘‘Newspaper advertisements puffed [the] ‘latest’ books by those said to be the most skilful or up-to-date authors. No educated or polite of fashionable reader could afford to be without the new works, and yet, assured the advertisements, everyone could easily afford to buy them.’’19 Such ads glamorized the cookbook author and made their status seem achievable, as if the reader could—with practice—achieve an equal level of skill. Yet notwithstanding what others may have said about them, celebrity chefs brought a fascinating self-consciousness to culinary literature, in that they wrote at length in their texts about what ‘‘celebrity’’ actually means—could extreme ability (with which they credited themselves) transcend ‘‘experience’’ and be passed down through generations? The proclivity of celebrity chefs to think about their status was a singular development, one still profoundly in evidence in the long biographies and appended celebratory essays that appear in new high-end cookbooks that assume a devoted fan base. Parallel to the immanence cultivated by celebrity chefs was a discourse of unbreachable distance, of talent so extreme that no amount of

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practice by the general reader could ever overcome such distance. The juxtaposition of these two lines of thought created a complex discussion of celebrity that still drives cookbook sales. MARKETING STRATEGIES Twenty-first-century cookbooks are fiercely marketed, often capitalizing on authors’ names and television, magazine, restaurant, and even online fanzine tie-ins.20 Yet eighteenth-century cookbooks were at least as competitive. What strategies did eighteenth-century cookbooks use to convince readers that they had to have this book? Prefaces claimed that other books were ill-written, secretly infiltrated by French recipes, and unsuited to English constitutions. They touted special features (often identical to the ‘‘special’’ features of competing texts), and the authors’ unique experience. Book covers, as on Martha Bradley’s The British Housewife (1756), not-so-discreetly cited taverns and great houses where the author had worked. Yet notwithstanding their great similarity, cookbooks asserted that each was the only book that a reader needed or even could profitably use.21 Eighteenth-century cookbooks provide some of the earliest examples of blockbuster-type shamelessness. Even before novels were heavily promoted, cookbooks touted themselves in wordy book covers, prefaces, and authors’ biographies. Their tactics created an intensifying feedback loop, leading to yet more hype as well as to occasional innovation. It has been said of the eighteenth-century book trade, in general, that ‘‘competition forced greater attention to advertising, book design, the saleable value of the contents and the value of a work, and methods of attracting and retaining new readerships.’’22 Cookbooks—hundreds of titles in multiple editions— became part of the craze for self-help and improvement.23 They also offered come-ons: Any Gentleman or Lady, in or near Norwich, that chooses to have a proper set of stew-pans, sauce-pans, &c., in exchange for those that are old and of no use, by applying to the Author of this Book, may be furnish’d therewith, as he has an opportunity of having them made in the most serviceable manner, and as cheap as in London.24

Even apart from celebrating the author, cookbooks engaged in puffing, allowing apparently disinterested persons to praise them without apparent inducement.

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Front cover of Martha Bradley, The British Housewife (1756).

Above all, cookbooks promised modernity, cutting-edge instruction that outdid all their competitors. Early in the century, The Queen’s Royal Cookery (1713) already claimed that ‘‘It is not stuff’d with superfluous Trifles, as most of its nature are; or with old and antiquated Receipts; but with things wholly new and useful’’ (Preface). Cookbooks loved to explain how the Art of Cookery was constantly advancing, while paradoxically suggesting that few cookbooks displayed the advances. Thus, George Dalrymple’s The Practice of Modern Cookery (1781) denounced ‘‘half-bred gentry that affect to

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despise the knowledge’’ in his breakthrough text, noting that even though ‘‘there are several excellent Treatises published, wherein you see the Ancient Cookery in a very perfect degree,’’ his ‘‘Work will show the Modern Manner, with its improvements’’ (Preface). For more than a hundred years and through dozens of printings, Hannah Glasse’s tome proclaimed itself The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy; Which far exceeds any THING of the Kind ever yet Published (1747). The idea behind such rhetoric was that even while cookery constantly advanced, most cookbooks (all those except the one on offer) were hopelessly old hat. The unspoken corollary was that an aspiring hostess, ever concerned to seem au courant, needed to purchase this text. The love-hate relationship that cookbook authors had with their profession was an affectation, a ploy to engage readers and keep them slightly off-balance, always in the market. Cookbooks spoke to aspiration (with its flip-side, fear) and to the fantasies and cravings that novels sought to excite. They played on middle-class desire to emulate economically superior classes. In this regard, they did not shrink from producing spectacle. Cookbook authors attacked each other by name, turning on former mentors and elaborately demonstrating in their own texts how rivals’ recipes were at fault. Feuds such as that between Anthony Bourdain and Rachael Ray were born in the eighteenth century.

NICHE AND SPECIALTY COOKBOOKS Modern cookbooks are often highly specialized—fish cookery, barbecue, cooking for diabetics. The eighteenth century developed the first true niche cookbooks—confectionery, vegetarian, cooking for the poor. What is interesting is that these texts emerged amid encyclopedic texts that dominated the market, in which readers could have found at least some recipes of the type that the niche texts offered. So what was the impetus behind these texts? As always, it was marketing: publishers’ products that ‘‘were tailored for specific audiences’’ were intended to promote emulative buying.25 That is, by appealing to a self-identified segment of the populace, publishers encouraged a type of group-think, in which group members sought to keep abreast of each other, wishing not to miss out on the latest and coolest as defined by the consumption habits of others in the group. Such texts sought to provide a level of detail not always

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available in the more general texts, and to provide a sense that readers were in good, even expert, hands. These new specialty cookbooks sought to capitalize on nascent, but still unfocused, reader interest, making it easier to pursue specific skills or follow specific programs. They encouraged people to become vegetarians; appealed to readers who sought status by learning to cook with sugar (a challenging enterprise); and enabled the poor to consider new dietary regimes (even as they permitted the rich to feel that the poor were being helped). Indeed, cookbooks for the poor adumbrated the current ‘‘frugal chef’’ genre and mealstretching handbooks that got readers through two twentiethcentury World Wars. Where readers were already interested in a type of specialty cooking—especially confectionery—they provided an outlet, encouraging readers to learn more and justifying readers’ initial (potentially daunting) interest. Niche cookbooks often appeared in response to—or perhaps alongside of—crusading texts that did not focus on recipes. John Evelyn’s Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (1699) was primarily a plea for vegetarianism, and it relegated recipes to an appendix. Its featured ‘‘recipe’’ was an excursus on the perfect salad.26 However, Acetaria was an early example of what became an extensive antimeat discourse, accompanied by more comprehensive proto-vegetarian cookbooks: Adam’s Luxury, and Eve’s Cookery (1747) and Primitive Cookery: or the Kitchen Garden display’d (1767).27 The same type of discursive relationship is apparent between cookbooks and texts related to health, and especially those giving advice to the poor. Cookbooks were intimately related to wider discussions of social concerns. Confectionery books appeared despite and as a counterpoint to concerns over the politics of sugar, which swirled around the persistence of slavery. They were a testament to the power of marketing, functioning as a happy counterweight to negative images of sugar that presented a commodity soaked in the blood of fellow human beings.

POINT OF VIEW Eighteenth-century cookbooks reflected eighteenth-century circumstances—food was not refrigerated, servants took care of the drudge-work, and provisions at sea had to last for years. Such contemporaneity is always present, of course, but in the twenty-first

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century, it is invisible—readers just expect instructions to cite microwaves and bread machines because that is how everyone cooks. Yet another feature that has carried over from the eighteenth century— that is, point of view—now tends to be highly visible. Cookbooks are outspoken on issues such as limiting fat or seeking ingredients that are fresh, local, and seasonal. In the eighteenth century, authors had distinct points of view on an array of issues: the relative merits of English and French cuisines, whether meat-eating was acceptable, how best to become a good cook. The modern cookbook inherits from the eighteenth century a proclivity toward a point of view, a philosophy, a program. Yet even in the eighteenth century, it was acceptable for readers to be creative and follow a cookbook less-thanslavishly. Modern cookbooks invite cooks to adapt recipes to their own taste, and they try to establish—as eighteenth-century authors did—a relationship with readers that projects both reliability and flexibility, with room for the reader’s own creativity. Such cookbooks want readers to see them as instruments of a culturally attuned, albeit personal ‘‘lifestyle.’’ This book’s discussion of point of view considers two phenomena, both of which politicize the genre, setting a pattern for today’s ‘‘culinary advocacy.’’ The first such phenomenon is culinary nationalism, the elevation of British over French cuisine that began early in the century, and whose implications are evident in modern cookbooks’ engagement with issues beyond the merely technical. Cookbooks’ strategic put-down of France—all the better to prove their own ‘‘frugality’’—demonstrates how an outspoken cookbook culture got started, rippling through cookbook discourse as it developed. Indeed, cookbooks’ apparent comfort with polemic was at least as important as the polemic itself in shaping the rhetoric of modern texts. Of course, cookbooks then and now absorb cultural information even as they generate it; eighteenth-century cookbooks’ critique of French cuisine was authorized by the culture at large, which explains in part the ease with which cookbooks joined the fray. Whether, in following a tradition of politicized culinary discourse, modern cookbooks tend to be out front or merely one of a crowd is an interesting if still open question. Are vegan texts, for example, leading the charge, or are they piggybacking on an increased interest in allegedly detrimental effects of meat-eating? The second phenomenon considered here is the eighteenth century’s focus on a globalized alimentary economy. By the eighteenth century—during which local food supply still depended on the

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seasons—an array of specialty foods was being imported. Caviar, spices, and parmesan cheese, as well as pickled fish, olives, and mangoes, came from around the world, turning the kitchen into a node in the network of international commerce. Cookbooks, in particular Martha Bradley’s, raised readers’ consciousness about where food came from and how it was produced. Bradley turned readers into default activists, who could support or oppose such circumstances but could not remain merely neutral. The consequences of this turn in culinary discourse, which challenged the very definition of the genre as essentially technical and instrumental, cannot be overestimated. Books such as Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford’s Beyond the Great Wall (2008), which examines the cuisines of China’s minority and suppressed populations, are direct descendents of cookbooks’ eighteenth-century generic expansion, as well as their increased politicization. In examining point of view, Invention of the Modern Cookbook will consider how cookbooks are now challenging generic limitations in ways that critics find audacious. The big surprise is that cookbooks with data-laden headnotes that exceed the length of recipes, with long meta-narratives about how they were produced, and anecdotes and stories woven into the technical instruction are traceable to an eighteenth-century impulse to cram more information and more opinionated information into an ostensibly technical text. The blurring of generic lines, that is, the bleeding of other genres into the culinary, is perhaps the most interesting modern development in which an eighteenth-century inspiration is still apparent.28 *** Invention of the Modern Cookbook looks at these various aspects of cookbooks, sometimes as individual phenomena but usually as the warp and woof of developing, complex patterns. The outcrop of celebrity chefs, for example, was a marketing tool as much as a symptom of burgeoning egos. The emergence of print texts’ authority was tied to offering intelligible recipes, and to instructions on how to shop, as much as it was to the imitation of domestic manuscripts; point of view was often indistinguishable from soliciting some niche group of readers. Invention of the Modern Cookbook is not therefore an anatomy of cookbook discourse—showing how cookbooks attained ‘‘modern’’ characteristics as each somehow fell into place. That would be artificial and misrepresent cookbooks’ actual development. Rather, this book seeks to demonstrate how cookbooks approached the complex related problems associated with imparting

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culinary knowledge and treated them as a fugue, to be approached, if not entirely solved, harmoniously. Of course, in some texts, one problem or set of problems might be more prominently addressed than another. But eighteenth-century cookbooks were always competing, always seeking to gain recognition in a crowded market, so that as a whole—as a genre—their innovations over time emerge in stark relief when compared with earlier texts. Indeed, eighteenth-century cookbook authors were conscious of the genre’s potential and of the interwoven problems that would continually be addressed as the genre developed. In 1730, Charles Carter acknowledged in the Preface to The Compleat Practical Cook that cookbooks’ authority could not be dissociated from a marketbased proclivity to maintain cutting-edge expertise: But when ’tis consider’d, that Variety and Novelty are no small Parts of the Cook’s Art, and that no Occupation in the World is more oblig’d to Invention; every Year, and every ingenious Artist constantly producing New Experiments to gratify the Taste of that Part of Mankind, whose splendid Circumstances make them emulous to excel in the Delicacies of this Mystery, especially when they exert their Wealth and their Magnificence to entertain their Friends with grand and sumptuous Repasts; it will be allow’d that no Art can be said less to have reach’d Perfection than this, and that none is more capable of Improvement.

Carter envisioned a genre founded in ‘‘Art’’ (presumably perfected over time) but dependent on a readership demanding continual ‘‘Invention.’’ For Carter, cookbooks did not represent art for art’s sake, but rather art’s commodification, its need to excite and ‘‘gratify’’ readers’ tastes.29 In tracing cookbooks’ design and construction, any discussion must consider the relationship between the knowledge on offer and the way it is presented, that is, the way it is sold. Cookbooks are always operating on multiple levels—imparting knowledge (hence developing authority, refining pedagogy), competing in the market (hence touting their authors), and serving their authors’ objectives as arbiters or advocates. Invention of the Modern Cookbook, in its own structure, remains consistent with this multiplicity. NOTES 1. Literature on the eighteenth-century novel is vast. See generally, John Richetti, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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2. On one novelist’s effort to hold readers’ attention in the eighteenth century, see Sandra Sherman, ‘‘Fielding’s Contract with the Reader in Tom Jones,’’ Studies in the Novel 30 (1998): 232–45. Parallels between the evolution of cookbooks and novels are striking, since both replaced more communal experiences. See chapters 1 and 2. 3. Cookbooks are a ‘‘genre,’’ with distinct characteristics that, taken together, define certain types of texts. But there is no Platonic Form of a cookbook that determines what these characteristics are. Rather, the genre is an expression of literary/social factors that, conceivably, can evolve over time. As Sandra Zagarell observes, genres ‘‘connote the recognizable sets of possibilities on which writers—and specific texts—draw. They exist as they are realized within individual imaginative works and as readers encounter those works—all of which is inseparable from the circumstances, broadly conceived, of their creation, production, distribution and reception.’’ See ‘‘Conclusion’’ in Narratives of Community: Women’s Short Story Sequences (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 433–48, 438. 4. For the curious, Simmons’ text is easily available online and in a number of reprints. For a history of the strictly ‘‘American’’ cookbook, see Carol Fisher, The American Cookbook: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006). 5. Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (1747), circulated widely in America before its first American publication in 1805. Thomas Jefferson owned a copy, as did George Washington. Other popular British texts were Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife (1727), first published in America in 1742 (with certain deletions where the ingredients were ‘‘not to be had’’ in this country); Susannah Carter’s The Frugal Housewife (first American publication, 1772); Robert Briggs’ The New Art of Cookery (first American publication, 1792); and Charlotte Cartwright’s The Lady’s Best Companion (first American publication, 1798). 6. The history of English cookery books preceding 1660 includes numerous household management texts covering an array of subjects including cookery. Invention of the Modern Cookbook will touch on such books and examine in detail their eighteenth-century incarnations. 7. Authors of ‘‘self-help’’ texts have traditionally fretted over whether skills dependent on both art and manual dexterity can be imparted by a book. See, for example, Izaak Walton’s self-effacing comment in ‘‘The Epistle to the Reader’’ in The Compleat Angler (1653): ‘‘Now for the Art of catching fish; that is to say, how to make a man that was none, an Angler by a book; he that understands it, shall undertake a harder task than Hales, that in his printed book undertook by it to teach the Art of Fencing, and was laughed at for his labour.’’ In the same vein, Walton later observes that ‘‘angling is somewhat like poetry, men are born so; I mean with inclinations to it, though both may be heightened by discourse and practice’’ (London: Chatto and Windus, 1887), 3, 37.

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8. The True Way of Preserving and Candying (1681, 1695), ‘‘Epistle to the Reader.’’ 9. The History of the Book is a vast academic field. Two places to locate resources are the Web sites of SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing), http://www.sharpweb.org, and an encyclopedic Rutgers University site, http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/
jlynch/Lit/biblio.html. Cookbooks constitute a genre of their own, but they were part of the burgeoning trade in self-help books of all kinds. As J. Paul Hunter has shown, eighteenth-century readers avidly consumed instructional manuals, stirred by a need to adjust to rapid cultural change: ‘‘People in new circumstances . . . needed desperately to feel grounded, to gain basic information about how their new world worked and what was expected of them.’’ Such conditions created a ‘‘special receptivity to teaching,’’ a ‘‘receptivity to guidance from those who knew the world’s ways.’’ Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1990), 245–46. 10. Britain was already studying its own culinary history in the eighteenth century. See, for example, Richard Warner, Antiquitates Culinariae (1791). For an examination of this and other texts, see Sandra Sherman, ‘‘Gastronomic History in the Eighteenth Century,’’ Prose Studies 26, no. 3 (2003): 395–413. 11. On the book trade in England, see generally Michael Suarez and Michael Turner, eds., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. 5, 1695–1830 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009); John Feather, A History of British Publishing (London: Taylor & Francis, 1989); and Feather, The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985). On the book trade’s fierce competitiveness, see The Cambridge History and James Raven, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750—1800 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1992), chap. 3. On the technical aspects of the trade, and its growth during the eighteenth century, see Raven, ‘‘The Book Trades,’’ in Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays, ed. Isabel Rivers, 1–34 (London: Continuum, 2001). 12. Lydia Fisher’s The Prudent Housewife (1780) was hardly alone in claiming to offer ‘‘the newest Collection of the most Genteel, and least expensive Receipts.’’ The paradoxical formula of elegance and cheapness— standard fare for the period—reflected authors’ attempt to seem fashionable while avoiding French extravagance. 13. Preface. Chambers’ warning was part of a discourse aimed at servants and middle class women, depicting the contingency of respectability and, hence, of their social position. It evoked the dire fate of fallen women in eighteenth-century novels and that of their sisters in cautionary conduct books. The warning represents a not so subtle shift in emphasis towards social ostracism and economic distress relative to earlier, duty-based claims.

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See Gerard Markham’s The English Hus-Wife (1615), noting that the woman who cannot cook ‘‘may not by the laws of strict justice challenge the freedom of marriage; because she can then but perform half her vow; for she may love an obey, but she cannot serve and keep him with that true duty which is ever expected’’ (chapter 2, para. 1). 14. In the Personals section of the New York Review of Books, January 14, 2010, three women mentioned their love of cooking, and one suggested ‘‘let’s cook together.’’ 15. In Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), Susan Lanser defines ‘‘discursive authority’’ as ‘‘the intellectual credibility, ideological validity, and aesthetic value claimed by or conferred upon a work, author, narrator, character, or textual practice.’’ Such authority is ‘‘produced interactively; it must therefore be characterized with respect to specific receiving communities’’ (6). 16. Domestic manuscripts were almost exclusively artifacts of country houses, and can still be found in the libraries of such houses all over Britain. As new, smaller households developed in fast-growing urban areas, women and their servants usually had no such manuscripts to turn to or ready access to culinary instruction. On the growth and culture of eighteenth-century British cities, see Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660–1700 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1989); Peter Borsay, ed., The Eighteenth-Century Town: A Reader in English Urban History 1688–1820 (London: Longman, 1990); H. T. Dickinson, ed., A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Blackwell, 2002), esp. chapter 15; Peter Borsay, ‘‘Urban Life and Culture,’’ 196–208; Peter Clark, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. 2, 1540–1840 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 17. Preface. Compare to Mrs. Frazer’s The Practice of Cookery (1800), whose Preface pretends that cookbooks have still learned no pedagogical skills: ‘‘The generality of books of this kind, whether owing to ostentation, hurry, or bustle, of the persons who compiled them, or to the ignorance and inattention of those to whom the execution has been committed, are fraught with so many extravagant and useless receipts . . . being written with so little accuracy and attention to method, that it is not at all to be wondered, why they should be found so deficient, perplexing, and unintelligible.’’ Even as books claimed to be highly intelligible, they made the highly preposterous claim that most other books were not. 18. One could always be a little overambitious. Maximilian Hazlemore’s Domestic Economy (1794) provided ‘‘Directions for the Recovery of the Apparently Dead.’’ 19. Raven, Judging New Wealth, 44–45. 20. For a typical fanzine, see http://www.theinsider.com/celebrities/ Anthony_Bourdain, with an array of publicity for celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain.

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21. For example, Mary Cole’s The Lady’s Complete Guide (1789) states on the cover that the author is ‘‘Cook to the Right Hon. The Earl of Drogheda,’’ and that the text is ‘‘the most complete System of Cookery ever yet exhibited.’’ William Gelleroy’s The London Cook (1762) identifies the author as ‘‘Late cook to her Grace the Dutchess of ARGYLE. And now to the Right Hon. Sir SAMUEL FLUDDER, Bart. Lord Mayor of the City of LONDON.’’ 22. Raven, Judging New Wealth, 43. 23. On consumers’ attraction to self-help manuals of all sorts—from etiquette to penmanship and accounting—see Hunter, Before Novels. The actual number of cookbooks depends on what ‘‘counts’’ as part of the genre. It seems reasonable to count any text that is significantly (even if not primarily) concerned with cookery, since so many recipe-laden texts in the period had multiple concerns. In any case, the number far exceeds that published in France. Philip and Mary Hyman count ‘‘fifty distinct texts on culinary subjects’’ during the period 1480–1800. See ‘‘Printing the Kitchen: French Cookbooks, 1480–1800,’’ in Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari, 394–402, 394 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). In the eighteenth century, several French cookbooks were translated into English, and English authors adapted these recipes. 24. J. Skeat, Cook, The Art of Cookery and Pastery, made easy and familiar (1769), n.p. 25. Raven, Judging New Wealth, 43. 26. On Acetaria, perhaps the most brilliant vegetarian polemic ever penned, see Sandra Sherman, ‘‘An Eden on a Plate,’’ Petits Propos Culinaries 69 (2002): 70–91. 27. On the eighteenth-century discourse, see Anita Gerrini, ‘‘A Diet for a Sensitive Soul: Vegetarianism in the Eighteenth Century,’’ EighteenthCentury Life 23, no. 2 (1999): 34–42. 28. The continued formal evolution of cookbooks is a literary question, best addressed by means of genre theory. See, for example, John Frow, Genre (New York: Routledge, 2005); David Gorman, Modern Genre Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); and David Duff, Modern Genre Theory (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1999). 29. As subsequent chapters will demonstrate, cookbooks are always busy creating desire, suggesting to readers that ‘‘Improvements are still making therein which must be the Case of every Art depending on Fancy and Taste.’’ James Farley, The London Art of Cookery (1792), Preface.

TIMELINE

1346 and 1415

1500

1615

1642

1660

Battles of Agincourt and Crecy (sometimes Cressy), in which the English beat the French though heavily outnumbered. In the eighteenth century, both battles are celebrated as evidence of a superior English diet. Publication of This Is the Boke of Cokery, the first cookbook in English. It offers recipes for ‘‘festes royall . . . for a pryncis householde,’’ already appealing to emulation and the desire for upward mobility that would characterize seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cookbooks. Publication of The English Hus-Wife, Gervase Markham’s impressive book of household management. It sets the standard for such texts into the eighteenth century. Oliver Cromwell leads a Puritan revolution that topples King Charles I. A period of cultural austerity (the Interregnum) begins. The Restoration of the monarchy as King Charles II ascends the throne. A pleasure-loving court sets the tone for the entire country. Aristocrats who had fled to France return, bringing with them a fascination with French food and culture. They will be satirized mercilessly in Restoration comedy.

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1676 1681

1692

1699

1704

1709 1712

1714

1724–27

TIMELINE

Robert May publishes The Accomplisht Cook, hoping to restore the era of great hospitality that preceded the Interregnum. May had worked in France and claimed the expertise to select among French dishes without slavishly following the cuisine. May is the first of the male ‘‘court cooks,’’ representing a high style that female cookbook authors will adapt to homelier requirements. George Etherege’s hit play, The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter, satirizes the Frenchified ‘‘fop.’’ William Rabisha’s The Whole Body of Cookery suggests that readers will only partly learn from his book, a claim that periodically surfaces in cookbooks still unsure of their pedagogical competence. Thomas Tryon’s The Good Housewife Made a Doctor attacks foreign foods such as raisins. He claims sugar is harmful, especially to women and children, and recommends a vegetarian diet. Publication of John Evelyn’s Acetaria, a plea for vegetarianism and a brilliant meditation on achievable perfection. Evelyn suggests that if Eden cannot be reproduced, a smaller, but perfect version can be: the perfect salad. Like May, he writes for his peers, in his case members of the Royal Society. Louis Lemery’s A Treatise of Foods, translated from the French, is an influential treatise linking foodchoice and health. T. Hall’s The Queen’s Royal Cookery suggests that its recipes have a direct royal connection. Pierre Pomet’s A Compleat History of Druggs depicts slaves’ suffering in the Caribbean sugar industry and describes the exotic sources of spice. Several editions follow. George I is crowned king of England. He is the first of the Hanoverian Georges who reign until George IV’s death in 1830. Daniel Defoe publishes A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, describing the wealth of regional foods. Britons disparage fancy French cuisine,

TIMELINE

1727

1728 1729

1730

1731 1733 1735

1740

1744

1747

1750

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claiming that British provisions are superior to those of France. Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife is the first female-authored blockbuster. It is reprinted several times in Virginia and New York. John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera plays to packed houses of the rich while exposing their moral corruption. Jonathan Swift publishes A Modest Proposal, ironically suggesting that the Irish poor sell their babies as food. The essay, perhaps the most famous in English, is a fierce critique of British colonialism. Charles Carter’s The Compleat Practical Cook offers grand ‘‘court’’ cuisine in a style that female cookbook authors will domesticate and moderate. George Lillo’s smash-hit drama, The London Merchant, deals with the lives of apprentices. Dr. George Cheyne’s The English Malady blames the overconsumption of meat for British melancholia. Richard Leveridge composes ‘‘The Roast Beef of Old England,’’ which becomes the carnivore anthem. It is played on H.M.S. Titanic to call first-class passengers to dinner. Samuel Richardson’s wildly popular, much-parodied novel, Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded, inspires the fantasy that a servant can marry her master if she resists his advances. Adam’s Luxury and Eve’s Cookery offers a so-called vegetarian alternative to high-priced eating—except when it calls for pounds of meat buttressed by quantities of butter and eggs. Hannah Glasse publishes The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, the greatest culinary blockbuster of all time. Glasse attacks French extravagance but still offers French dishes. Unlike the court cooks, who wrote primarily for their peers, Glasse pitches her text to the minimally literate servant. William Ellis’ The County Housewife’s Family Companion suggests that only a country person can advise

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1754 1756

1759

1767 1767

1767 1769

1769

1772 1776

1783

1785

TIMELINE

country people, a marketing claim that attempts to one-up the city-based competition. In his heyday, Ellis was the most popular farming writer in Britain. Ann Cook issues a blistering attack on Hannah Glasse in The Professed Cook. Martha Bradley’s The British Housewife contains features of a household management text but, almost paradoxically, evinces a concern for alimentary geopolitics. Josiah Wedgwood founds Josiah Wedgwood & Sons, the great pottery that shapes English tastes for generations. He is one of the most brilliant marketers in history. Ann Shackleford’s The Modern Art of Cookery Improved claims to medicalize ordinary cooking. Primitive Cookery is an early cookbook for the poor, except that some of its cuisine is conspicuously expensive. Menon’s The Art of Modern Cookery Displayed is one of several French cookbooks published in English. Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experience’d English Housekeeper is published, with Raffald as the heroine—a kinder, gentler version of the celebrity chef. William Buchan’s huge best-seller, Domestic Medicine, attacks ‘‘the arts of cookery’’ as unhealthful, claiming that roasting and boiling are enough to sustain humans. Pierre Grosley’s A Tour to London criticizes English food as gross, much to the merriment of the English. The American Revolution. America is a major exporter of grain to the British, and a major importer of British cookbooks. John Farley publishes The London Art of Cookery, with strong warnings about verdigris poison, transmitted from poorly tinned pots. Elizabeth Moxon publishes English Housewifry, one of several female-authored blockbusters.

TIMELINE

1786

1788

1789

1790s 1795

1795

1796– 1812

1796

1797 2009

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John Trusler’s London Adviser and Guide, a guidebook to urban life, tells Londoners how to find fresh produce and avoid being cheated. It is a fascinating kaleidoscope of the late Georgian scene. John Trusler’s The Honours of the Table offers comprehensive instruction on how to carve, which is pirated by later texts. The French Revolution scares the British establishment—will it cross the channel? British propaganda claims that French food ‘‘stinks.’’ Virtually the entire decade is plagued by war with France and food shortages at home. The Reverend David Davies publishes Case of Labourers in Husbandry, demonstrating the high proportion of poor families’ budgets that goes for food. Hannah More publishes The Cottage Cook; Or, Mrs. Jones’ Cheap Dishes, offering arguments intended to persuade the poor to eat brown bread. Benjamin Count Rumford publishes Essays, Political, Economical, and Philosophical, which include studies of the poor. Rumford’s recipes for ‘‘cheap’’ soups are widely promoted by groups concerned that the poor may starve (or revolt). Publication of Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery, the first American cookbook. Some dishes are recognizably English, and some ingredients are uniquely American. It is leaner than the average English cookbook of the period, suggesting that is was written for women who own at least one cookbook already and are interested in native cuisine. Sir Frederick Eden issues The State of the Poor, a brilliant but merciless study of British poverty. Release of Julie & Julia, a blockbuster movie about Julie Powell’s cooking her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

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CHAPTER 1

CULINARY AUTHORITY

In the eighteenth century, English cookbooks begin to acquire authority and, hence, to appear reliable. Such apparent authority was crucial to their acceptance by women accustomed to relying on personalized domestic manuscripts. This chapter looks at the psychological processes that cookbook authors deployed to make women comfortable with texts sold for a profit by unknown authors and publishers. It examines as well the practical components of cookbooks’ reliability, and how these developed in the eighteenth century.

ANTECEDENTS IN DOMESTIC MANUSCRIPTS The Wellcome Institute in London holds a large collection of manuscripts, dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, dealing with ‘‘domestic medicine and receipt[s].’’1 Such manuscripts are far from rare and are kept at country houses, record offices, and libraries around Great Britain.2 Without exception, women initially created these texts as domestic commonplace books to record ‘‘receipts’’ acquired from relatives, friends, and members of the community whose experience—whose authority—could be trusted. Recipes for syllabub and ‘‘a good plumb cake’’ jostle with nostrums for a ‘‘scal[e]d head’’ or the ‘‘green sickness’’ or even cures for horses with ‘‘coughs or colds,’’ often credited to someone known personally or by reputation to the writer. A typical example in one manuscript reads ‘‘To make Lemon Cream the Lady Warwicke Way.’’3 The texts are

2

INVENTION OF THE MODERN COOKBOOK

Page 120 from Mary Bromehead’s cookbook. (Courtesy of Whitney Cookery Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.)

personal documents prepared for the writer’s own use (usually from a family original), or passed down to (or copied by) a relative who might add to and annotate the text. In the latter case, it is not surprising to find two, three, even four distinct handwritings, usually in

CULINARY AUTHORITY

3

successive sections of the bound text, and as many versions of the same recipe. Few are systematically organized, though in some cases culinary and ‘‘physick’’ entries are separated. Rarer still, a new owner has produced an alphabetized ‘‘fair’’ (clean) copy, appending an index. These are texts in process, open-ended and subject to the whims of successive owners. Many have blank pages, which a new owner could have—but did not—fill in. As each owner came into possession, she read and wrote the text idiosyncratically. The reader-writer’s relation to others via the text is to prior reader-writers, probably in her immediate or extended family, and through them to a community of contributors to whose roster she might add herself. The texts evoke a close-knit community in which domestic knowledge is shared and preserved among individuals who know, or know of, each other, and who can be trusted to know whereof they speak. Thus, while domestic manuscripts are personal property and are ‘‘personalized’’ as an owner inscribes herself into them, they reflect—indeed depend on—the owner’s confidence in a community that supports her and that expands only if she continues to augment the text. This is a controlled, ‘‘gated community’’: friends, relatives, and neighbors, whose knowledge—perhaps derived from someone notable—is presumably reliable because of their relation to the manuscript’s owner(s). The one thing this knowledge is not is commercial, a product detached from a known authority that someone wants to sell. Because no one is selling anything, the owner is insulated from hacks and mountebanks, an effect fostered by entries such as ‘‘A remedy to hinder the markes of the small pox being Recommended as a safe one By Mad. DeMurphy,’’ or an ale recipe from which ‘‘my mother Mrs. Lisle brews eight hogsheads’’ annually.4 The implied community in these texts derives from entries that abolish anonymity, that are authorized already or when the new owner inscribes them, and that may be changed based on the owner’s experience. As if to acknowledge this relation to authority, many entries in Mary Preston’s early eighteenth-century manuscript bear the annotation ‘‘M. P.,’’ while Abigail Smith’s manuscript states at the end of her entries ‘‘approved by Abigail Smith,’’ and in other places ‘‘probatum A.S.’’5 In this same spirit, a manuscript in the Whitney Cookery Collection of the New York Public Library, the Ladey Morton Booke of Receipts (1673), states of those recipes ‘‘most of which shee hath experimented her selfe and are uerey good.’’6 Implicitly, these early compilers accept, indeed promote, an idea that culinary success is not just a matter of following rules, but of

4

INVENTION OF THE MODERN COOKBOOK

following ‘‘receipts,’’ prescriptions that originate in a community, that are authorized by it and transmit its knowledge. Susan J. Leonardi has observed that: a cookbook that consisted of nothing but rules for various dishes would be an unpopular cookbook indeed. Even the root of recipe— the Latin recipere—implies an exchange, a giver and a receiver. Like a story, a recipe needs a recommendation, a context, a point, a reason to be.7

Women’s domestic manuscripts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries acknowledge the need for ‘‘a recommendation, a context,’’ presenting an authorizing community of voices. The idea of recipere—to give and receive, to act communally—organizes these texts as collective, gratefully received testimony; as such, each text imparts value to recipere in the domestic lives of its reader-writers. This value is sometimes dramatized, as when ‘‘Madd. DeMurphy had the experience of this [medicine] on her self, and it was recommended to her by a nunn as an Excellent remedy, who Employed her selfe in attending the sick.’’8 That the reader knows Madd. DeMurphy from other entries gives DeMurphy a sort of personality (she is good at curing smallpox and takes her own cures); repeating a relatively few names imparts vividness to the community in the text, foregrounding it as the basis of authority. This chapter argues that a vivid community, constituted through domestic exchange of information, is central to an eighteenth-century discourse in which such information is authorized by transmission in a community. The point is to demonstrate that printed books of household management that emerged parallel to domestic manuscripts, marketed themselves by adapting—indeed extending—ideas of community, imparting a sense that (like the manuscripts) they would insert readers into a community, ‘‘a context’’ relevant to readers’ lives.9 What is interesting is how these books, in a market in which authors and readers are strangers, formulate protocols of connection that comfort and encourage, and can induce in readers a sense of trust.10 Far from being an impersonal counterpart to domestic manuscripts, such books exemplify in their self-presentation a type of community that plausibly edifies readers. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DOMESTIC MANAGEMENT TEXTS Toward the middle of the eighteenth century, numerous books appeared that dealt with how to run a household. These were not

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5

barebones culinary texts, with recipes for foodstuffs and herbal remedies; indeed, even less ambitious texts rarely restricted themselves just to ‘‘cooking.’’ Most cookbooks fell somewhere on a spectrum between offering an assortment of culinary ‘‘receipts’’ and situating food preparation in a context in which the natural cycle of raising and provisions and putting them by was integrated into regular kitchen activities. Toward the more ambitious end of the spectrum (those texts addressed here), such books were programmatic, providing in some combination directions for cooking, gardening, preparing medicines, hunting and fishing, apiculture, and the raising, slaughtering, and preserving of animals. They offered marketing directions and directions for dealing with servants. The household was presented as part of an economy, derived from nature and disciplined by social mores.11 Such books—modeled on treatises of preceding centuries, but strikingly updated—were conscientiously interpretive, comparing and evaluating cuisines, demystifying exotic ingredients, and preaching a ‘‘lifestyle’’ calibrated to means, aspirations, and social responsibilities. (Subsequent chapters take up these various initiatives.) They were, in intention and in fact, encyclopedic, often claiming to be the ‘‘only’’ book that a household would need—more comprehensive, more current, than any other book on the market. It was as if everything left out of domestic manuscripts was collected, codified, and put into print. The issue that arises is how this quantum leap into print—into information on a large, more organized scale—dealt with the alienating factor of distance: what made readers resist feeling talked at or (worse still) querying the text’s authority? How did print engage readers in a congenial, authorizing community while bypassing manuscript culture? This chapter focuses on the strategies of these mid-century texts because they fully exemplify how eighteenthcentury culinary texts in general adapt familiar features of manuscripts while, simultaneously, pursuing print’s prerogatives. Thus, while no two culinary texts are identical, and no two display exactly the same adaptations to the same degree, this chapter cites exemplary texts to delineate patterns of adaptation, whose permutations will be explored in subsequent chapters. This chapter sets the stage, establishing the discursive relationship between manuscript and print texts, which (as later chapters will demonstrate) varied from context to context to reveal layers of complexity. The particular texts discussed here offer especially rich examples, but their counterparts across the genre bear study. The approach of culinary texts to domestic manuscripts is interesting because print did not minimize its alienating potential and

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pretend to be another (albeit mechanical) transcription of a handwritten text.12 It touted what it was, the product of people whom one did not know and who had something to sell. The Complete Family-Piece: And Country Gentleman, and Farmer’s, Best Guide (3rd ed., 1741) closes the door on hand-me-down transmission— this text circulates, subject to market forces of supply and demand: ‘‘The great Demand for the first Impression has occasion’d its being reprinted . . . [and] it is very much improved’’ (iii).13 The Complete Family-Piece is not the serendipitous product of an intimate circle. It is crafted by a committee: ‘‘several very eminent and ingenious Gentlemen,’’ who ‘‘when the Book was ready to be sent to the Press . . . carefully revised, and made such Amendments . . . as each judged proper’’ (iii–iv).14 An explicit discussion of price acknowledges the commercial intent, indeed an intent to saturate the market, since the editors ‘‘have caused [the text] to be sold as cheap as possible,’’ and ‘‘do not doubt, but that in a few Years, there will scarcely be a private Family without it’’ (x). Such claims distinguish the text’s mode of production from that of domestic manuscripts. Yet as the rest of this chapter will show, such willingness to speak of and theorize itself is engaging, drawing readers into a community of which the text is the agent. By ingratiating itself, the printed household management text seeks to make readers comfortable with the scale of the text and the scale of the enlarged community that it represents. Toward this end, the texts are punctiliously instructive. Martha Bradley’s The British Housewife: Or, the Cook, Housekeeper’s, and Gardiner’s Companion (1756) states: ‘‘To make our Reader perfectly acquainted with this Article [‘Of the different Kinds of Stills’], we shall shew what distilling is’’ (I:88).15 Domestic manuscripts assume that the reader grasps the basics, or that someone close by can demonstrate them. Effective print texts posit, and by their rhetoric promote, an idea that readers lack sufficient access to up-to-date information—basic or advanced—that now can be obtained only from the texts. The level of detail is as much commercial tactic as it is didactic protocol. The texts are out to impress; their breadth of detail suggests that care was taken to compensate readers for inadequate access to instruction. William Ellis’ The Country Housewife’s Family Companion (1750) revels in the rhetoric of detail, offering knowledge that is not only authorized but designed to leave nothing to chance: Sausages are generally made with sheeps guts, and to prepare them right is the chiefest part of the business: Many authors have wrote on

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making sausages, but not one of them has told his readers how to prepare skins for them; which deficiency I here undertake to supply, by giving a plain account of it, as it is now in practice.—take the fresh guts of a sheep, and cut them into fathom or six foot long pieces . . . stroke the dung out. (132)

Detail becomes a mode of reassurance, codifying established knowledge. Ellis not only tells readers how to prepare guts for stuffing ‘‘as it is now in practice,’’ but also is the reader’s proxy in a community of informed sausage-stuffers. Thus, the text not only provides a rule but also, in the mode of recipere, ‘‘a recommendation, a context.’’16 When readers learn to stuff sausage this way, they join a community that, as in manuscript culture, reflects the experience of real individuals whose knowledge is worth recording. But here in the realm of print, many individuals are represented as to the same practice. Their settled technique represents a consensus, not just personal habit, as would be the case in a manuscript entry.17 Moreover, unlike the community of domestic manuscripts, personal association plays no part in giving access to, or in valuing or transmitting information. By praising The Country Housewife as the first universal explicator of how to prepare guts, Ellis testifies to a knowledge-based community not only independent of personal association but also conceivably infinite. This community replicates the learning structure constituted by traditional, associational forms of domestic knowledge acquisition (reified in the domestic manuscript), even as it permits The Country Housewife as an artifact of the market to breach the associational limits that characterize that structure. As a result, the text enhances the traditional community, giving readers access to knowledge that they otherwise might not have. In this new configuration, the community in the text is fixed and verified—the authority for ‘‘what is now in practice’’—while the community that extends outward from the text is virtual and porous, admitting new sausage-stuffers to the same level of knowledge shared by the original practitioners.18 This new community— generated by the market—is congruent with and like the market, open and ideally edifying by virtue of the market’s circulation of texts. Thus, while the text preserves community as a mode of imparting knowledge (diffusing the anonymity of the market), it advances the possibilities of a community toward the nonexclusivity of the market, where anyone can learn by buying a book. The advantage of the print-based book implicit in Ellis’ praise for his text is that while it generates a community that expands by means of long-distance,

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anonymous knowledge acquisition, it can have at its core a traditionally configured group of practitioners, whose knowledge it can impart and whose skill an author can verify. Ellis positions himself in The Country Housewife as the impresario of this hybrid community, managing the original knowledge base through personal verification, as well as legitimating and producing its extension through the market: ‘‘To write a serviceable book of country housewifery, requires an author who lives amongst its practice; for without such an opportunity, it is not to be supposed it can be done to much purpose’’ (33). The presence of an authorial persona is alien to manuscript culture, and identifies The Country Housewife with the market, which of course can aggrandize the author (as the editors of The Complete Family-Piece cheerfully acknowledge). Yet as the print texts are at pains to show, the market ultimately benefits readers. In effect, the market’s circulatory momentum, which in large measure generated the eighteenth-century public sphere, generates as well a new type of community that in some ways is the domestic equivalent of that sphere, making knowledge available to anyone irrespective of status or personal associations.19 This process of assimilating readers into a knowledge-based community, irrespective of the reader’s location with respect to the community, also governs the disclosure of ‘‘secrets.’’ In discussing how to ‘‘feed a Butt of Beer,’’ Bradley’s British Housewife (1756) claims that the method is ‘‘a Secret kept very carefully by some People, but ’tis fit such useful Things should be published’’ (II:371). It asserts elsewhere that a ‘‘Receipt [is] being kept a Secret by the Faculty at Montpelier’’ (II:374); that an oleo ‘‘was the Secret of the old Spaniard who kept the House of that Name on Hampstead Heath’’ (II:437); that a Stiptick Water taken from Lady Hewit’s manuscript is virtually stolen: ‘‘N. B. Lady Hewit says she had this Receipt communicated to her, upon a Promise never to disclose it’’ (II:125). The text penetrates cliques (‘‘some People,’’ ‘‘the Faculty’’), opens files and manuscripts, and negates the means by which proprietors of ‘‘secrets’’ claim a status superior to the reader’s. Disclosure enforces community, leveling proprietary differentials that stratify and isolate.20 In a famous passage, Bradley boasts about the leveling efficacy of her instruction: Our Cook . . . will be able to shew that an English Girl, properly instructed at first, can equal the best French Gentleman in everything but Expence. It is only in the being better taught at first, that these

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Foreigners excel our own People; let them have the same Advantages, and they may defy them. It is this we have endeavoured to give them in the present Book, and we hope we have hitherto succeeded. (I:314)

The passage links the reader’s interests to the text’s objectives. Yet this obvious marketing ploy also encourages readers to contemplate a potential community of cooks who, like the open community of sausagestuffers, constitutes itself through shared expertise. The text demystifies difference, pointing out that readers—now given access—always have been potential members of a knowledge-based group. It reproduces on a larger scale the effect—without the fact—of association attributable to traditional communities, and through them to domestic manuscripts. In so doing, its ambitions go beyond such manuscripts’ ambitions, which never transgress in the public interest (there is, after all, no ‘‘public’’). The text offers itself as an agent not just for diffusing knowledge, but for equalizing status across class and gender lines by means of such diffusion. The reader’s ideal self—no longer isolated from knowledge— becomes a function of the ideal community proposed by the text. Expansion of the knowledge base is thus political, allowing readers to imagine a type of practical, techno-social equivalence presented to them as a right. To Roast Young Pigeons Ortolan Fashion, from Martha Bradley, The British Housewife ([1756] 1996) Chuse four very young tame Pigeons from the Nest before they have Feathers for flying, cut off the Heads, pick them, draw them, and blanch them; and let all this be done speedily, so that they may be upon the Table within an Hour after they are out of the Nest. Beat up the Yolks of four Eggs with a little Salt; cut off the Ends of the Feet, and then wrap every Pigeon quite round in a thin Slice of very fat Bacon. Round this wrap a Couple of fresh-gathered Vine Leaves, and then spit them, and lay them down to a good Fire, tying the leaves on when they are spitted. When they are near done take off the Leaves and the Bacon, sprinkle the Pigeons well several Times over with the beaten Eggs, and brown them up. Send them to Table hot without any Sauce, and they will be very much approved.

Community becomes a vehicle for self-enhancement by knowledge. Yet even more than extending access to knowledge-based communities, print texts encourage readers to apply their knowledge in uninstructed communities, further enhancing themselves through acts

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entailing social esteem. In contrast, domestic manuscripts are almost never metatextual and offer almost no rationale for their advice or for how it applies beyond the reader’s household. By applying domestic advice more generally, however, a reader inserts herself into communities whereby information received via the community created by the text enables participation in still more communities, which affirms the reader as instructed and the text as enhancing the reader’s status. In this connection, the most common metatextual reflection in the print texts turns ‘‘physick’’ recipes into instruments of charity, so that female caregivers can replace apothecaries and physicians in furnishing medicines to the community.21 N. Bailey’s Dictionarium Domesticum, Being a New and Compleat Household Dictionary For the Use of Both City and Country (1736), observes that with its medical prescriptions, ‘‘a well disposed and generous Gentlewoman may be enabled, not only to be her own Family Physician, but with a small charge render herself useful and gain the Affections and merit the Thanks of her poor afflicted Neighbors’’ (Preface).22 While domestic manuscripts give occasional examples of such enterprise (for example, the ‘‘nunn’’ of Madd. DeMurphy’s acquaintance), they offer no underlying rationale that assures a reader of benefit to her neighbors and herself. They rely on a domestic culture that transmits such assurance, an assurance that print texts codify, as if extratextual guidance had been superseded. By authorizing a reader to think in terms of social utility, with positive ramifications for her own position, the texts suggest not only opportunity, but also responsibility.23 They elevate their value by theorizing responsibility and ostensibly enabling the reader to fulfill it; via the text, she becomes part of an enhanced community, which in turn enhances her. The Complete Family-Piece (1741) observes that numerous women take this responsibility seriously: As there are many pious and charitable Gentlewomen in the Country that are blessed with Riches, and make it almost their constant Business and Study to prepare and give Physick to the Poor, for almost all Distempers, and would enlarge their Bounty had they proper Receipts; and as there are doubtless many more who would be as willing, had they also proper Receipts and Instructions for the making and preparing Physick for that Purpose; I say, in all such Cases, there cannot be a more useful Book than this. (v)

Here is empirical evidence (‘‘many pious and charitable Gentlewomen’’) on a large scale, bolstered by the assertion that ‘‘many more . . . would be as willing.’’ Scale is crucial to the reassuring

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Dedicatory note on Mary Bromehead’s cookbook: ‘‘Mary Bromehead her Book given her by Aunt 1761. Martha Crawford.’’ (Courtesy of Whitney Cookery Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.)

impact of this assertion, in that readers can deduce from it a pattern of practice that they legitimately can follow.24 They will not be out on a limb, offending some poor but proud family, but rather will be part of a community of Ladies Bountiful who minister to

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communities around them. The idea of community (or rather of interlocking communities) contemplated here is ideational, an ‘‘imagined community’’ not entirely seen or delineated but that invites affiliation and imparts a sense of belonging.25 The net effect is one of possibility, suggesting to readers that affiliating with some communities draws them toward others, satisfying a need for personal affirmation. As in Ellis’ Country Housewife (1750), the text projects community onto multiple levels, redesigning the concept to accommodate the text’s status as an extradomestic artifact ultimately for sale. The Country Housewife cites another cohort for whom readers have responsibility, explaining how to choose foodstuffs for hired laborers: ‘‘Now in victualling these men there are variety of ways practised by country housewives; and she that can do it cheapest, and most satisfactory, is the best housewife’’ (96). The text establishes itself as honest broker, sorting out advantages among ‘‘various ways,’’ suggesting that what works in one community may not in another. With Ellis as proxy, the reader gathers data as she would were she liberated from a text—from a manuscript—that offered no evaluative opportunities. Ellis talks with people from the standpoint of the text’s touchstones—cheapness, satisfactoriness—so that as the reader eavesdrops, she can evaluate the ‘‘various ways’’ relative to her own needs. Readers engage, albeit by proxy, with a community concerned with a common problem; its members are not coincidental associates, such as neighbors or friends, but people who actually have information relative to a common problem.26 This is a community of interest, which enables readers as drop-ins to acquire information. Reading the text, affiliating by means of instruction with more and more communities, incrementally enhances the reader’s position in her own community, or rather in as many communities of interest as she may belong to. By comparison, reading through a domestic manuscript barely changes a reader’s purview, which remains fixed on an immediate household. Even when Ellis describes the practice of one county, his concern is to provide access to a group of practitioners, rather than to replicate the type of intimate but nonpragmatic association characteristic of domestic manuscripts. As he cites various ‘‘victualling’’ practices in The Country Housewife (1750), he notes how in Hertfordshire, his own county, harvest-men are fed cheaply but effectively: In short, it is our notion in Hertfordshire, that gentleman, yeoman, or farmer, manages best, who victuals his harvest-men with beef,

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bacon, or pickled pork, beans, pease, puddings, pyes, pasties, cheese, milk, with other culinary preparations, and with well brew’d strong and small beer and ale; for such a one ranks the best chance of hiring the best hands, that will go on briskly with their work, and do a good deal of it in a day. (94)

In this passage, it is apparent that a good, varied diet is the ‘‘Hertfordshire notion’’ of cost-effectiveness—it is the practice of a whole area. Unlike domestic manuscripts, which reflect the experience of a family, its relatives, and acquaintances, this text speaks of community extensively: a community of interest. As a result of the reader’s admittance, she experiences a new type of confidence in information: instead of sentimental allegiance to her mother’s recipe for ale, she appreciates how practices endorsed by people with common concerns, discussed by competent texts, can help discharge responsibility. The reader is in a virtual discourse with a knowledge-based community having no arbitrary bounds. Its mode of inquiry, its admittance of readers as interested inquirers, is a domestic version of the Republic of Letters. As eighteenth-century philosophy and science crossed national borders irrespective of correspondents’ location, so does the process encouraged by The Country Housewife.27 As Ellis leaves off Hertfordshire practice, he notes, ‘‘not that I write this as a general rule,’’ giving several other, cheaper practices that serve in other locations. He concludes that because situations vary, readers must use knowledge that they have—that they have from his text—to gauge what will work for them: But as such oeconomy will not be agreeable to southern men, our housewife’s art lies in furnishing variety of eatables, and yet to do it in the most frugal manner. And that it may be done not only in harvesttime, but also at all other times throughout the year, is the main design of my writing this treatise of the Country Housewife. (95)

The protagonist of Ellis’ discussion is the Housewife, in whom the reader is meant to see herself. It is no coincidence therefore that the hypothetical reader is mentioned in the same paragraph and in such proximity with Ellis’ eponymous text. The text is designed to extinguish any sense in the reader-housewife that she is excluded from the communities of interest that the text explores. The text is written to her; it generates information that applies in her case. No domestic manuscript can deploy both a mind-expanding but still personalized, reassuring epistemology. Though a manuscript is

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open-ended and accommodates new information, it is not designed to provoke the reader to investigate, to try different regimes to see which works for her. Each example stands on its own. Community is not problem-specific. Indeed, in The Country Housewife, community is often constituted through coordinated, competing examples representing various approaches to problems. Such competition, reflecting variations in circumstance, draws readers toward a new, more edifying type of community, which does not produce empirical stasis but provokes—indeed endorses—thoughtful consideration. Ellis’ most effective means of constituting a community that invites participation as much as study is the rhetoric of immediacy. Ellis writes as if readers are not temporally distant—like legatees of a manuscript—but reading contemporaneously with the text’s inscription. He presents himself as alive, actively communicating ideas. He constantly suggests that no one has published on a subject until he has, implying that The Country Housewife is not just another compilation, but a critique hot off the press that must be considered at once. The text assumes the currency of a review: as to advantages in cows, ‘‘many of them have slipt the notice of most authors’’ (233), regarding pigs, they were ‘‘never taken notice by any author before’’ (182), and as to problems caused by mites, ‘‘this article has escaped the pen of most or all authors’’ (60). Ostensibly breaking new ground, The Country Housewife takes its place at the head of the queue as texts displace each other. It conveys a sense of discursive motion, as if the world of household management texts—like the market they inhabit—is a place of development and active challenge. In a brilliant aside that throws his energy into relief, Ellis notes that he sees the danger of eating mussels, but laments the ‘‘supine neglect of our English virtuosi, who study much the refined sublime parts of natural philosophy, and yet numerous matters . . . which ought to be made known to people, who for want of timely instruction may innocently eat poisonous things, and be killed by them’’ (208–9). ‘‘Supine’’ contrasts with the momentum of ‘‘timely instruction,’’ casting Ellis as quick on the uptake, one step ahead of potential risk. This rhetorical immediacy is reinforced by Ellis’ quoting contributors in the present tense. Hence the views of a Cheshire dairy maid: ‘‘she says they press the curd . . .,’’ ‘‘she says, that she skims off the cream’’ (412, 413). Ellis admits that ‘‘I hear that one of my neighbors cows has got the garget in her bag’’ (439), as if the news is too new to verify. He advertises his books and products as if The Country

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Housewife were a current catalogue: ‘‘For four other receits to cure this malady [‘bloody Water piss’d by a Cow’], see my Modern Husbandman, sold by Mr. Thomas Osborne, in Gray’s Inn, London’’ (233).28 He also writes, ‘‘I sell these most excellent grass seeds’’ (183). And, To avoid this evil [of a sow unable to digest hops] I have in my treatise on brewing malt liquors (intituled The London and Country Brewer, sold by Mr. Astley, bookseller, at the Rose in Pater-noster-row, London) showed a way how to make kettle-gallop small beer, and yet to feed a sow safely on the grains, free of the damage of all hops. (187)

In the domestic manuscripts, there is no present tense, no one inviting readers to ask questions, to get involved with their work, to get in touch. Ellis states with a charming candor: ‘‘That persons may know how to come by these four sorts of natural grass-seed, if any will send me a letter, I will answer it, provided postage is paid to my house at Little-Gaddesden’’ (396). This author has a local habitation and a name, permanently installed in his text as if he inhabited there, much as he does in Hertfordshire. He makes himself familiar, available, not just as an author but as a correspondent, entailing readers in a virtual Republic of Letters. Enacting this relationship, he reprints recently received letters, almost as icons of the Republic open to readers as well (letter series start at pages 193, 300, and 387). This openness, this permeability is absent in the domestic manuscripts, whose contributors merge into a flat surface that accommodates but does not invite response. VISIONS OF AN EXPANDED WORLD The concept of household management in print texts extends beyond kitchen, smokehouse, and stillroom to encompass earthy areas—the barnyard and garden—as well as an array of social relations, for example, among workers and farmers. Readers are drawn into this matrix by devices to make reading participatory, rather than merely a passive act for absorbing information. With rare exceptions, the manuscripts confine themselves to cookery, brewing, food preservation, and herbal medicine. They never address the reader except formulaically, as in ‘‘If you want to roast venison.’’ Once in a while, as in Mary Lisle’s manuscript, the writer ventures into broader considerations of household economy; on one occasion, Lisle opines

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that it is cheaper to live in London than in the country, noting that ‘‘a friend of mine had five and twenty load of peat brought in in one week.’’29 The revelation is arresting, leaving one to wonder why Lisle made this observation, that is, why she started treating a recipe book like a diary, or a treatise on economic advantage. Lisle even ventures into conduct book territory, commenting on servants’ eating habits, giving ‘‘advice to young housekeepers that have but a few servants’’ (one must tell them ‘‘never dip your hands in the liquor to take out any sort of pickle’’).30 One would not be puzzled had comments on economy and etiquette appeared in a print text, because the genre is capacious, concerned to engage every aspect of domesticity. This contrast between manuscript and print raises an inevitable question: how does print mediate the practice of such enlarged domesticity? This section argues that print texts draw readers into the natural world and its geopolitical infrastructure, such that they feel involved with—subject to—complex, networked communities that the texts can guide them through. Martha Bradley’s British Housewife (1756) was originally issued in twelve monthly installments, with directions for each month with regard to buying provisions, designing menus, and caring for the garden, one’s animals, and family. It is strikingly entwined with seasons, natural rhythms that provide asparagus in some months and potatoes from the cellar in another. Like all competent culinary texts of its day, it is designed to bring out the best in available provisions, and like such texts, it contains elaborate directions for putting foods by.31 What distinguishes Bradley’s text, and places it in the genre that concerns this chapter, is the way that it integrates food preparation with its production, that is, with gardening and raising animals. Urban readers might skip these sections, but even they must attend to directions for choosing provisions in local shops, because the offerings can be no better than what countrywomen raise or slaughter for themselves. Moreover, Bradley’s naturalistic rhetoric reminds readers that food preparation is not just a social construction, but an appropriation of natural resources subject to the economy of nature. Opening her discussion of October, Bradley begins ‘‘The Bill of Fare for the Month’’ with a review of available provisions: We have led our Housekeeper through the Summer, and she is now to consider that Season as past, Autumn has wasted its best Days, and Winter is coming on; the Provision for this Season and for Summer differ as much as Heat and Cold; and Nature, which is always careful

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of her Children, provides accordingly; she spreads out a vast Store, from which, when we have here enumerated the principal Heads, the Housekeeper is to chuse, adapting, as Nature has done first, every Article to the Season. (II:236)

The prose is consolatory, as if having to resign summer’s bounty and autumn’s harvest readers can still eat, provided they accept nature’s rhythms. This balance between promise and acceptance of ineluctable earthly conditions is biblical (‘‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven,’’ Ecclesiastes 3:1), and indeed Bradley is not averse to discussing food in context with religious teachings (‘‘God who gave Adam no Orders to eat Flesh, gave that Liberty in express Words to Noah . . . nor are we to suppose this an Indulgence without Reason, he who appointed it, acts only according to Wisdom’’ [I, 110]). In urging readers to make the most of ‘‘a vast Store’’ that nonetheless differs from the easy abundance of prior months, Bradley encourages readers to see their condition as one of flux, implicated in cosmic changes that affect basic physical processes. Her advice, like the structure of her text, integrates macro- and microcosmos. Even readers not concerned with sections on gardening or caring for cattle and poultry, may be moved to dip into them, feeling compelled to appreciate, if not actually to apply, the text’s complete vision of a well-managed life.32 Buttered Shrimps, from Martha Bradley, The British Housewife ([1756] 1996) Pick a Couple of Quarts of Shrimps in the nicest Manner, and see there be not the least Scrap of a Shell on any Part of them; put them in a Saucepan, pour to them a Pint of Mountain Wine, and set them to stew over a gentle Fire. Break eight Eggs, beat them up with a little white Wine, and grate in some Nutmeg. Melt half a Pound of Butter, and by Degrees mix it with the Egg, then pour all into a saucepan, shake it only one Way, till the whole is thoroughly well mixed and hot together: Then toast some Bread, cut it into Sippets, and having warmed a Dish, lay them round the Edges; pour in the whole out of the Saucepan. It is a very rich and very elegant Dish. Send it up hot.

Bradley emphasizes that all must adjust their diets to winter in accordance with nature’s pace, the way season passes into season, gradually: Beef, which had in a great Measure been banished the Table during the Summer Heats, now comes on again; the large Joint smoaks agreeably

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upon the Table when the cold gives Apetite, and the proper Caution of the Housekeeper is to be employed in bringing on the Change gradually as Nature does, not falling at once upon the Change. Beef, which comes now into good Season, should not be thrust upon the Course of every Meal, nor should the largest Pieces be brought on but by Degrees. (II:236–37)

If the transition to heavy foods occurs too quickly, it is unnatural, a violation of how nature makes transitions. Bradley does not explain why one cannot just devour a large piece of meat once the weather turns cold; she leaves readers to assume that what is sanctioned in nature (gradualness) must be good enough for them. Yet there is a certain tension in her admonition: in the first paragraph, she imagines ‘‘the large Joint’’ that ‘‘smoaks agreeably,’’ only to correct herself, to slow down greedy ‘‘Apetite’’ in the second, advising ‘‘nor should the largest Pieces be brought on but by Degrees’’ (II:236–37). Such tension catches the reader’s mood, conveying anticipation but also the conviction, absorbed from the previous discussion, that nature is above whims, ‘‘every Article to the Season’’ (II:236). By the time readers reach the chapter on October, having read nine previous chapters that integrate food with gardening, herbal medicine, menu planning, and the care of animals, the method in the text has cohered into ideology, an unspoken ideational structure that makes its advice seem consistent, accurate, and acceptable. This repetition of a model in which only specifics change promotes readers’ acquiescence in it. Readers become conditioned to principles that the text continually reinforces. The print texts assume readers’ involvement with the economy of nature; in some fashion, even if only in their menus and marketing instructions, they offer advice for the entire year’s garden/barnyard/ table operations.33 The Complete Family-Piece (1741) is typical in advertising on its title page culinary and physick ‘‘receipts,’’ ‘‘instructions’’ for hunting and fishing, ‘‘Practical Rules’’ for managing a farm, and ‘‘A full and complete Kalendar of all WORK necessary to be done in the FRUIT, FLOWER, and KITCHEN GARDENS, GREEN-HOUSE, &c. with the PRODUCE of each, in every Month throughout the whole Year.’’ The texts are highly prescriptive: to be in synchrony with nature does not imply a free, flowerchild prerogative, but a disciplined adherence to strict protocols. Receipts, Rules, Instructions, and Kalendars preempt the vagaries of oral tradition, the indulgent if supervisory presence of relatives, and the accrued background experience taken for granted in domestic

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manuscripts. In The British Housewife (1756), Bradley is typical in delivering obiter dicta: We shall here deliver Rules for making the most elegant as well as the most excellent Made Dishes, and shall endeavour to compose the most pompous within a moderate Expence. . . . Knowledge will go farther than Expence in all these Matters. (I:342)

These texts would have readers base their knowledge on the texts’ rules; they offer readers a relation to nature through a superimposition of rules, such that food production and preparation emerge as deliberately, minutely constructed through a textual regime. Bradley takes no knowledge base for granted and states that her first chapter ‘‘is to be considered as a Chapter of Remembrance rather than Instruction. It contains what everyone knows but none is ever to forget’’ (3). She lays down what readers must know, and since she does not know readers personally, she must assume that they need reminding, that their knowledge must be reinstalled correctly. In the section on September, she states in her discussion of roasting: This Knowledge which qualifies [the Cook] for the discharge of her Duty in a small Family, leads to the understanding what is to be done in the larger Kitchen; let her keep in constant Remembrance what she has been told already on this Head, and what is to come. (II:150–51)

In these texts, the world is available but mediated; The British Housewife and its peers are not passive, but insist on their own authority, hence on the necessity of our internalizing their rules. In the section on February, Bradley lists a few dozen roots and apples, noting, ‘‘There is some Care and Attention required to learn the Names of these; but, when once known, they are easily remembered, and nothing is more to the Housekeeper’s Credit than being thoroughly acquainted with them’’ (128). The housekeeper’s status is calibrated with how well she internalizes knowledge that Bradley prescribes as canonical. Nature’s regime is codified, and it is the job of the person conforming to nature to do so with knowledge of and respect for nature’s order. Under the month of June, Bradley tries to be reassuring in a funny discussion of ‘‘The Art of Tossing a Pancake’’: Practice is all; for as the Children play at Bilbecket till they can catch the Ball every Time for many Minutes together, in the same Manner

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the Cook will be able to toss a hundred Pancakes without missing once, when she is accustomed to the Method of it. (I:571)

One imagines a benighted cook, having studied the method, tossing a hundred pancakes in secret, hiding from her mistress the wasted eggs and milk. For Bradley, rules need vindication, and ‘‘practice’’— including the slow accrual of experience by working through each page of text—is one of her major preachments. Thus while readers encounter a monthly succession of gritty, earthy discussions (‘‘swelling of the Head in Turkeys’’ [I, 296], ‘‘the Meazles in Swine’’ [I, 623]), they are never allowed to forget that on top of nature’s rhythmic, oozing presence are rules that govern domestic management, that is, how people relate to, appropriate, and domesticate natural things. For Bradley and her peers, domestic management proceeds through a dialectic between nature, which insists on itself a hundred times a day without saying a word, and the prescriptions in texts, which would organize the household’s engagement with nature. The Complete Family-Piece exemplifies this dialectic in its ‘‘Cautions, Rules, and Directions to be taken and observed in FISHING; with the Manner of making and preserving of Rods, and for chusing and preserving several Sorts of curious BAITS’’ (329–350). At one end of the spectrum, the section is intensely earthy, linking the getting of food to intimate involvement with gritty, bloody natural phenomena. Under the heading ‘‘The way of throwing a Casting-Net is thus,’’ the authors observe: As the Business is very wet and dirty, you should have a leather Coat tied before with Strings, and them to lay even and close, for if you have Buttons, and the Meshes of the Net in the Swing should lay hold of them, it will go near to hawl you in. (337)

Here nature literally draws readers in, overtopping the genteel subjection to its rhythms envisioned by Bradley. Indeed, the section depicts even greater intimacy with nature when it advises ‘‘If you pull out the Eyes of such Fish as you catch, and fish with them, you will find them good Baits’’ (339). The physical bodies of fish decompose before readers’ eyes into the verb, fish, as the fisherman tears at his prey. Blood is on their hands as they read (compare Ellis’ directions in The Country Housewife [1750] for making hog’s brawn: ‘‘scald or burn off the hair or bristles . . . then take out the brains, and boil the head so tender, that all the bones may easily be taken out, then take

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the flesh from the skin, and mince it while it is hot’’ [178]). Yet at the same time as readers dismember living things, the process entails rules that organize engagement with nature. The Complete FamilyPiece (1741) cautions against too free mingling with the elements, as if doing so could destabilize the natural balance: You should never let your Shadow lie upon clear shallow Water; and be sure, as often as you can conveniently; to shelter yourself under some Bush or Tree, at a Distance from the River, that you can but just perceive your Float. (338)

All through ‘‘Cautions, Rules, and Directions’’ is a notion that the water and our bodies—in this case, even bodies’ emanations—must remain isolated, at least insulated from each other. Even one’s eyesight must just barely touch the float that signals that a fish is biting. ‘‘Always angle in black or dark-colour’d Cloaths’’ (338), so as to be invisible to the fish. As in The British Housewife, The Complete Family-Piece insists that readers internalize its rules: ‘‘As the Rules and Directions laid down are only to instruct Beginners; so they will, if carefully follow’d, soon make them complete Masters of the Art’’ (329). The rules are tied to months and seasons; the learning process is a progressive assimilation of natural rhythms, conformed to exactions through which the text translates such rhythms into practicalities. A Rod is the First Thing I shall treat of, which should be made of Red Sallow, Withe or Hazle, chosen when the Sap is out; that is, in October or November. . . . taking Care so to place your top Joints that they may not warp in drying, and about February pare off the Knots. (330)

Under the heading ‘‘To make Hair Lines for Angling,’’ readers are told how to produce hair of various colors and then how to use it, for example, ‘‘From March to September use the Green, from thence to December use the Yellow in all waters that are clear’’ (332). Under the heading ‘‘To make an artificial Fly,’’ the text states that ‘‘there are many Sorts of these Flies, which are generally used in the Months following,’’ and it lists the flies to be used from March through August. The text even directs how to make the most of atmospheric conditions: Cloudy cool Weather, in the hot Months, is the best to Angle in, especially if you have a South or West-Wind, for ’tis found by

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Experience to be vain to angle with an Easterly-wind: in short there is good Angling with a Ground Bait, from March or April to October, a lowering Day being better than a clear one, and a cool one better than a hot one; and the best Hours for Angling are from about Three in the Morning till about Nine, and from four or five in the Afternoon, till you cannot fairly see the Motion of your Float. (340–41)

Frontispiece from William Augustus Henderson, The Housekeeper’s Instructor (1795).

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Frontipiece from Mary Holland’s The Complete British Cook (1800).

The precision of these directions rivets a reader’s attention. She is expected to integrate the weather, wind direction, time of day, time of year, and visibility of tackle into a series of coordinates that determine when to venture to catch fish. Readers are reminded not to make ‘‘vain’’ judgments, since the directions are ‘‘found by Experience’’ to work. The text insists on itself. Its system of natural rhythms constrained by experts’ rules implicates readers in a domesticity that is both immersed in heaving, breathing, changing phenomena and constructed

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Frontispiece from Dictionarium Domesticum (1736).

by external impositions. As the reader-cook tears out eyes and brains from living things, she does so according to strictures, a regime that asserts submission to experts as well as to nature itself.34 The complexity of this notion—that is, of the dialectic between nature’s rhythms and the rules that readers (via experts) impose— has no equivalent in the manuscript texts and represents print culture’s attempt to address natural phenomena from a position that enforces its indispensability. The extraordinary level of detail, as well

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as the self-reflexivity complimenting its own grounding in experience, signals the reader that food production and preparation are complex and they do require proper guidance. It is no coincidence that The Complete Family-Piece remarks that its directions for fishing are, in the first instance, ‘‘to instruct Beginners’’; the text presents a ‘‘complete’’ system that supersedes everything one may know and asserts that readers do not need (and may not even have) another source of advice. The print texts do not present themselves as supplemental to hand-me-down, locally initiated knowledge. They involve readers in a renovated community of experience, which presents itself as the only alternative to an instructional anomie, wherein lack of information necessarily compels readers to rely on specialized texts.35 Forty years later, this situation is explicitly, literally illustrated in William Augustus Henderson’s The Housekeeper’s Instructor; Or, Universal Family Cook (1790), which in addition to the usual recipes, monthly bills of fare, and marketing directions, features instructions for carving and a monthly calendar for managing kitchen and fruit gardens. In the elaborate, brilliantly self-promotional frontispiece, the master of the house points to the carving instructions, while a male servant follows, carving up a fowl; presumably, the master (not sufficiently sure of himself?) cannot show the servant how to do it. Also unable or unwilling to teach, the mistress hands a copy of the text to a female servant, standing by a pile of provisions.36 The commentary is not on the servants, whom one would expect not to know the fine points of cooking, but on the master and mistress, who may have no one teaching them except William Augustus Henderson (and his contemporaries). The frontispiece to Mary Holland’s The Complete British Cook (1800) shows the cook basting a joint of meat, master and mistress missing entirely, while the text is open at her back. Likewise, Dictionarium Domesticum (1736) shows a woman alone in her stillroom, the text set firmly on her lap. The idea is that transmission of domestic knowledge is and must be impersonal, especially among the middle classes, unlikely to have inherited a family manuscript.37 Instead of relying on such a text by which to instruct one’s servants (recall Mary Lisle’s reflections in this regard), one must expect them, like oneself, to learn from a commercial product. As a fascinating counterpoint to Henderson, Holland, and their counterparts, the frontispiece to T. Hall’s early Queen’s Royal Cookery (1713) shows three women in a kitchen making pastry—facing

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each other, able to converse and provide advice. In another area of the frontispiece, two cooks work at a table, also able to converse. Apparently, the print text had not yet become sufficiently established to graphically illustrate its indispensability.38

MODELING THE WORLD The most exceptional discussion of nature in many print texts concerns bees, who by the eighteenth century were the subject of a long apicultural tradition.39 While it would be simplistic to read these discussions as homilies, urging readers to act like industrious insects, it is consistent with concerns in these texts to explore how such discussions portray a relation to nature bound by rules of communality. In the midst of texts that imply anomie and show readers how to compensate for it, this interest in bees’ social relations is striking. It suggests that while the discussions of apiculture are utilitarian, they also illuminate a way in which sociability is inherent in nature, and can be practiced—by humans—consistent with acquiring information impersonally. The discussions glance at ‘‘the world we have lost,’’ which can be restored—at the level of sharing, of generosity—notwithstanding our instructional anomie and the need for the market to furnish new modes of edifying communication.40 James Jenks’ The Complete Cook: Teaching the Art of Cookery . . . At All Seasons of the Year (1743) features sections on managing poultry and bees and is very clear about the latter’s mutual commitment: They gather honey with great industry: but they shut it up in their cells till winter, living upon wax, and such provisions as can be got abroad, till winter comes and obliges them to open their store-house. . . . They have every thing in common. If there be no gathering for a season, they starve all together. (356)

Frugality is a matter for the whole community, and all members suffer in a shortage. The getting and husbanding of food is a means by which the community experiences itself as knit together.41 The vision is one of conformity to nature—food is got while the weather is mild—but also of social adaptation, albeit instinctual, in the interest of universal sharing. The comforting message is that reliance on the market (our purchase of The Complete Cook) need not threaten

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reliance on each other. In this vein, Dictionarium Domesticum (1736) observes: It is observable that there is no creatures living, who Live with more unity than bees, all things being in common Among them, and the one is ready to revenge the injury done to another. (n.p.)

Bailey even rehabilitates the sour reputation of drones, whom he describes as pitching in to help hatch the young, rather than (as commonly supposed) merely laying about. In The Complete Family-Piece (1741), the bees’ industry is a form of communality—the community is one big household, where everyone works for everyone rather than for themselves: There is no Creature so industrious, and taketh such Great Pains as the Bee, going out early, and coming home late, never resting but in cold and wet Weather; for Idleness is so detestable a Vice amongst them, that none are tolerated thereunto but their Sovereign; every one being employed either abroad in gathering Food, or at Home in building Combs, feeding their Young, or some other Employ; and no Creatures live together in that Unity and Amity in one House or Habitation, as having no single property in any Thing they get or do, all being as it were in common amongst them. (513)

The passage is remarkable for calling into question the text’s bias toward economic individualism, represented in ‘‘Practical Rules and Methods for the Improving of LAND, and managing a FARM in all its BRANCHES.’’ In this long chapter, which includes the discussion of bees, the authors give extensive advice on ‘‘improvement,’’ and commend enclosure as ‘‘beneficial in many Respects’’ (415). In the seventeenth and particularly eighteenth centuries, ‘‘improvement’’ usually entailed enclosure, driving cottagers off the land, denying access to commons and hence the ability to produce cheap food.42 At the heart of the text, therefore, is a disjunction, a sort of remorse, a displaced, figurative remembrance of paternalist, less individualist times.43 As this chapter has suggested, this reflection probably has a self-serving element. Yet while the text does not explicitly endorse bee-like communality, the lingering, admiring commendation installs communal production of food as a value, to be considered perhaps as a tempering countermotive in the centrifugal rush toward economic gain. In other words, The Complete Family-Piece (1741) has a complexity, a tendency toward the literary that is absent in the domestic manuscripts.

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Strong Mead, from Eliza Smith, The Compleat Housewife (1742) Take of spring-water what quantity you please, and make it more than blood-warm, and dissolve honey in it till it is strong enough to bear an egg, the breadth of a shilling; then boil it gently; near an hour, taking off the scum as it rises; then put to about nine or ten gallons, seven or eight large blades of mace, three nutmegs quartered, twenty cloves, three or four sticks of cinamon, two or three roots of ginger, and a quarter ounce of Jamaica pepper; put these spices into the kettle to the honey and water, a whole lemon, with a sprig of sweet-brier, and a sprig of rosemary; tie the brier and rosemary together, and when they have boil’d a little while, take them out, and throw them away; but let your liquor stand on the spice in a clean earthen pot, till the next day; then strain it into a vessel that is fit for it, put the spice in a bag, and hang it in the vessel, stop it, and at three months draw it into bottles; be sure that it is fine when it is bottled; after it is bottled six weeks, it is fit to drink.

Despite their openness to additions and comments, domestic manuscripts are by comparison inbred and imploded. They present the world as a cluster of people one knows or knows of, who instruct by conventional means. Such texts put a tiny number of readers in touch with those people, rather than interposing themselves as mediators, interpreters, experts on everything domestic who allow everyone to think and make personal judgments. In this sense, they are quintessential artifacts of the market. That the world is expanding due to the market is the ultimate conclusion to be drawn from the print texts, which insist on the new, the emergent—the marketable— even as they invoke Experience, the recapitulation of what has been ‘‘found’’ to work. Bradley’s British Housewife (1756) is important in this regard, because it explains the links between the household and worldwide sources of food. The first section, for example, describes ‘‘foreign Articles,’’ starting with Anchovies. Who would not begin to imagine the exotic, based on this account of the fish’s capture? It does not appear [upon the coasts of Provence and Catalonia] before May, and toward the end of July it goes up the Streights of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, and is seen no more till the following summer. They are caught in the Night-time by Means of a Light. The Fishermen go out in small Vessels with Lanthorns at the stern. The flame brings the Anchovies about, and they take them in their Nets. (I:6–7)

After describing how the fish are salted and packed, Bradley arouses intense, consumerist desire, observing that the flesh ‘‘should be high

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Trade card of Ray & Lumley, Grocers and Confectioners. (From Ambrose Heal, Tradesmen’s Cards of the 18th Century. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1968.)

flavoured,’’ the pickle ‘‘redish and of a high Flavour also.’’ The taste is inimitable: ‘‘This will never suffer the Person who considers the true Taste of an Anchovy to be deceived. Sprats are made to taste like them by the Pickle, but that washes off this Way and the Cheat is seen’’ (I:7). Here is an exotic food, made irresistible to British cooks, all the

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more so because of local Cheats. In the same vein, Bradley compares ‘‘cayan pepper’’ to another exotic comestible, caviar: As we got the taste of Caviare from Russia, we imported this from the Negroes of or Plantations. The fruit is common in Africa, and they have been accustomed to eat it there, shewed our People the way in America, and they have taught us. (I:9)

The passage is a capsule of Britain’s colonial interests both in Africa and America and insinuates that the benefits of empire accrue to average people. In the first few pages of almost a thousand, food becomes an internationally traded commodity, linking the kitchen to the world.44 In the logic of trade—that is, in the logic of the market—the text is the appropriate vehicle to open readers’ eyes to the nature of food, since like food it is worldly, circulating in a market potentially as big as the world, which links readers to communities that otherwise would have remained remote. One cannot pick up The British Housewife (1756) and imagine that one knows enough, or could ever learn enough from a domestic manuscript— there is a whole world out there. Indeed, food is not only exotic but, like the bees it has a politics, in this case geopolitics. Bradley writes, ‘‘the Dutch supply us with Nutmegs and Mace, as they do with Cloves; the whole Spice Trade being in a Manner in their Hands’’ (I:13). Food, hence the household, is enmeshed in complex international relations, so that even when readers visit the market on market days, armed with Bradley’s marketing instructions, they are nonetheless implicated in ‘‘the market,’’ the abstract, networked configuration that gives them access to Bradley in the first place. The message in printed household management texts is that if a local market still looks like a community— ‘‘a social as well as economic nexus . . . where one-hundred-and-one social and personal transactions went on; where news was passed, rumour and gossip flew around’’—community is now best understood as an artifact of the market.45 The idea is stunning, both as insight and as a basis for commercial appeal. As the print texts discover, the best way to market a product that concerns the market is to talk about the market; show that it is omnipresent, unavoidable, but ultimately beneficial. Manuscript transmission of domestic knowledge died in the nineteenth century, no doubt of natural causes, but obviously helped by strategies that print texts pursued. Such strategies imbued these texts with a sense of authority that, in turn, authorized readers to leave behind traditional modes of

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acquiring and passing on domestic knowledge, and to enter a community that was both potentially infinite and apparently focused on them. That market-based knowledge was made to seem plausible, that is, personally edifying, was the singular accomplishment of the print text. A Mince Pye, from Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) Boil a Neat’s Tongue two Hours, then skin it, and chop it as small as possible, chop very small three Pounds of fresh Beef Suit, three Pounds of good baking Apples, four Pounds of Currants clean washed, picked, and well dryed before the Fire, one Pound of Jar Raisins stoned and chopped small, and one Pound of Powder Sugar, mix them all together, with half an ounce of Mace, the same of Nutmeg grated, Cloves and Cinnamon a quarter of an Ounce each, and one Pint of French Brandy, and make a rich puff Paste; as you fill the Pye up, put in a little candied Citron and Orange cut in little Pieces, what you have to spare, put close down in a Pot and cover it up, put no Citron nor Orange in ’till you use it.

NOTES 1. For a list of its ‘‘domestic medicine and receipt’’ manuscripts, contact the Wellcome Trust through http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/library. For complete bibliographical information, see S. A. J. Moorat, Catalogue of Western Manuscripts (London: Wellcome Historical Medical Library Publications, 1962). Comparable manuscripts are available in American libraries. See, for example collections at the University of Pennsylvania and in the New York Public Library’s Whitney Cookery Collection. 2. Britain’s National Register of Archives contains more than 43,000 unpublished lists and catalogues of historical archive collections. For information, contact the Historical Manuscripts Commission, London. For discussions of specific manuscripts, see Hilary Spurling, Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book: Elizabethan Country House Cooking (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1987); Alice and Frank Prochaska, eds., Margaretta Acworth’s Georgian Cookery Book (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); and Karen Hess, Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery (New York: Columbia, 1981), which in Appendix I includes a good discussion of manuscript production in well-to-do households. 3. See Wellcome Trust Ms. 2367, attributed to Lady Catherine Fitzgerald, early eighteenth century. 4. See Wellcome Trust Mss. 2367 and 2395, attributed to Anne (De)Lisle, 1748. 5. See Wellcome Trust Ms. 3995, which came into possession of Mary Preston’s daughter, and 4631, primarily a late-seventeenth-century manuscript that other hands have added to through the mid-eighteenth century.

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6. The Ladey Morton Booke of Receipts, Whitney Cookery Collection Ms. 4 (New York Public Library, seventeenth century). 7. Susan J. Leonardi, ‘‘Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster a la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie,’’ PMLA 104 (1989): 340–47, 340. In a brilliant elegy for the communal culinary experience, ‘‘What’s the Recipe?— Our Hunger for Cookbooks,’’ Adam Gopnik observes that the cookbook attempting to teach technique cannot really teach cooking: ‘‘Doesn’t it miss the social context—the dialogue of generations, the commonality of the family recipe—that makes cooking something more than just assembling calories and nutrients? It’s as if someone had written a book called ‘How to Play Catch.’ (‘Open your glove so that it faces the person throwing you the ball. As the ball arrives, squeeze the glove and shut.’) What it would tell you is not that we have figured out how to play catch but that we must now live in a culture without dads.’’ The New Yorker, November 23, 2009, 106–12, 111. 8. See Wellcome Trust Ms. 2367. 9. For another example of how print adapted manuscript culture, see Eve Tavor Bannet, ‘‘Printed Epistolary Manuals and the Transatlantic Rescripting of Manuscript Culture,’’ Studies in the Eighteenth Century 36 (2007): 13–34. 10. The importance of manuscript culture to cookbooks’ development cannot be overstated. Early in the century, The Queen’s Closet Opened. Being Incomparable Secrets in Physick, Surgery, Preserving, Candying, and Cookery (1710) emulated the structure of domestic manuscripts by including both medical and culinary entries (in the title, tied together by the stillacceptable notion that sugar was medicinal). The first page provided ‘‘A List of the Prescribers and Approvers of most of the Choice Remedies, whose Names are, in several Pages of this Book, inserted and annexed to their own experience’d Receipts.’’ That is, The Queen’s Closet sought to look like a manuscript, or rather like a composite of many manuscripts, attributing each ‘‘receipt’’ to a named individual. Much later in the century, Elizabeth Marshall’s Young Ladies’ Guide in the Art of Cookery (1777) still noted that her recipes were taken directly from manuscripts used in Marshall’s cooking school. Charlotte Mason’s Lady’s Assistant (1780) stated on the title page that it was published from her own manuscript collection. 11. On ‘‘economy’’ as an eighteenth-century idea, see Emma Spary, ‘‘Political, Natural and Bodily Economies,’’ in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine. J. A. Secord, E. Spary, 178–96 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For a discussion of earlier household texts, see Wendy Wall, Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), chap. 1. 12. On the alienation of authors and readers during the eighteenth century, see Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991). Stewart argues

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that in the early part of the century, ‘‘the classical public sphere of letters was beginning to disintegrate,’’ creating a gap between the ‘‘context of production’’ and the ‘‘context of reception’’ (37). As a result, authors and audience were becoming increasingly estranged. See also J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), noting that extended prefaces, dedicatory epistles, and modes of direct address sought to attenuate ‘‘the givens of mass print and the fact of an audience out of range’’ (238). Christine Ferdinand notes that dialogical techniques adopted by newspapers were ‘‘shaped by the literary currents of a century attempting to come to terms (in print) with the differences between speech, manuscript, and print.’’ See ‘‘Serial Conversations: The Dialogue of the Eighteenth-Century Country Newspaper,’’ in Compendious Conversations: The Method of Dialogue in the Early Enlightenment, ed. Kevin Cope, 115–28 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992), 119. Sandra Sherman examines this phenomenon in ‘‘Fielding’s Contract with the Reader in Tom Jones,’’ Studies in the Novel 30 (1998): 232–45. 13. Such formulations were commonplace. See, for example, the ‘‘Advertisement’’ to the seventh edition of John Farley’s The London Art of Cookery (1792), which declared ‘‘The very flattering Preference this Book has received, is an indisputable Proof of its Superiority over every one of its Kind; and we are justified in this Assertion, by the very rapid Sale of the six former numerous Editions.’’ The Preface to Mrs. Frazer’s The Arts of Cookery, Pastry, and Confectionary (1800) observes that ‘‘[T]he rapid and extensive sale of the two first large impressions is a convincing proof of the utility of it, and has induced her to print this Third edition.’’ T. Williams’ The Accomplished Housekeeper (1797) took a somewhat different tack, noting that ‘‘the very favourable reception’’ given to a preceding volume has prompted the editors to now print an abridgement ‘‘to accommodate it to those, who may not choose to be at the expence of the original and elegant octavo edition’’ (Preface). In each case, the text is unabashedly a marketable commodity, claiming to be already endorsed by the market. 14. In The House-Keeper’s Pocket Book, and Compleat Family Cook (1757), Sarah Henderson states in the Preface that ‘‘I have not only consulted all my Female Friends and Acquaintance, who have distinguished themselves by their good Oeconomy . . . but have made my Application likewise to some particular Gentlemen of indisputable Judgment, who make the Art of Cookery in general their daily Study, and publick Employment.’’ The statement looks both ways, that is, toward domestic manuscripts (‘‘all my Female Friends and Acquaintance’’) as well as toward the type of male professionals associated with The Complete Family-Piece. 15. Martha Bradley, The British Housewife: or, the Cook, Housekeeper’s, and Gardiner’s Companion (1756; Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 1996), Intro. Gilly Lehmann, 88. The text was originally issued in twelve monthly installments

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corresponding to the months of the year, and was then published as a twovolume set. Citations refer to Bradley’s two-volume republished set. 16. For Ellis, the informed community—the context of his knowledge— was not other writers, but rather actual people who stuffed sausages. Compare Richard Briggs’ comments in the Preface to The English Art of Cookery (1794): ‘‘The Errors and Imperfections of former Treatises first suggested to me that a performance like the following would be acceptable to the Public. In one Article, that of trussing Poultry, I have endeavoured to give particular and useful Directions, because no Book of this Kind had contained such, that Subject having been universally overlooked by them.’’ Briggs’ standard was likewise empirical, even though he too ultimately would point readers toward print. 17. With less fanfare—but no less effect—print texts provided detailed instructions for an array of food preparation techniques (see chapter 3 on Complementary Material). William Henderson’s Universal Family Cook (1790) provided several pages of diagrams on trussing and carving. The Lady’s Companion (1753) provided trussing instructions that included explanatory paragraphs keyed to ‘‘A,’’ ‘‘B,’’ ‘‘C,’’ and so forth in its detailed diagrams. 18. Notions of community traditionally depend on face-to-face, immediate association, or at least identification with others in a specific locale. Those who do not share such identifying characteristics are frequently excluded. See Iris Young, ‘‘The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference,’’ in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson, 300–23 (New York: Routledge, 1990). Compare notions of education in cyberspace, as in Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmervik, eds., High Wired: On the Design, Use, and Theory of Educational MOOs (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). The market (or cyberspace) as a vehicle of ‘‘recipere’’ simply extends the possibility of ‘‘recipere’’ toward infinity, even as it intensifies it through infinite potential networks. On the virtual community constituted through radio transmission of a cooking program, see Nelljean Rice, ‘‘A Tale of Three Cakes: On the Air and in Books,’’ in Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories, ed. Anne Bower, 173–88 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997). 19. On the role of the market in creating the eighteenth-century public sphere, see Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1989). 20. Bradley’s publisher buttressed the authority of her text by exhibiting its sources, which readers isolated from such sources otherwise never could verify. Thus when Bradley noted that certain distillery directions were ‘‘taken from the Family Book in Lady Hewet’s Hand Writing, which cannot be liable to any mistake’’ (I:369), the publisher added in a footnote: ‘‘This book being purchased among Mrs. Bradley’s Papers, is now in the Hands of the Publisher, where the Curious may see it’’ (I:369).

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21. On women’s considerable role in bringing medical remedies to the community, see Doreen Nagy, Popular Medicine in Seventeenth Century England (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1998). See also Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), chap. 4. ‘‘Lady Bountiful’’ in George Farquhar’s The Beaux Stratagem (London; 1707) is the classic embodiment of this type. 22. The statement was commonplace among culinary texts. See, for example, the Preface to Charles Carter’s The Compleat City and Country Cook (London: 1732), noting the text’s utility to ‘‘generously-disposed Gentlewomen that are charitably disposed to be serviceable to their poor and afflicted Neighbours’’ (viii). 23. In The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (London: 1747; facsimile repr., Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 1995), Hannah Glasse provided chapters not only for feeding the sick, but also for provisioning men at sea (the latter, of course, being an explicit engagement with a vastly larger world). 24. For a vivid modern demonstration of this principle, see Rita Charon, ‘‘Narrative House Calls and Cultural Memory: Communities of Women, Communities of Presence,’’ in Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies, ed. Sayantani DasGupta and Marsha Hurst, 300–13 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007). Charon describes a visit to an old, ailing woman, noting that ‘‘Here we all were, a community of women . . . affiliated by virtue of our mutual care of Mrs. Nelson, enriched by one another’s expertise, buoyed up by one another’s presence’’ (301). 25. On this form of abstract affiliation, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 26. Counterparts to Ellis’ peripatetic canvass are all over the literature. In The Art of Cookery, for example, Hannah Glasse offered three different ways to stew ‘‘muscles,’’ three ‘‘cheap rice puddings,’’ three types of ‘‘potatoe’’ pudding, and four orange puddings. 27. On the spread of Enlightenment learning through letters, smuggled books, and other means of licit and illicit communication, see Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1660–1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 28. On Ellis’ Modern Husbandman, see Sandra Sherman, ‘‘Advertisements for Myself: William Ellis and the Reinvention of the Puff,’’ Prose Studies 24, no. 2 (2001): 65–86. 29. Wellcome Trust Ms. 2367 (1748), n.p. 30. Id. 31. By the end of the eighteenth century, the importance of providing monthly menus and month-by-month marketing directions needed no explanation. See, for example, Richard Briggs’ The English Art of Cookery (London: 1788, 1794), which offered ‘‘A Catalogue of Fish, Game,

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Poultry, Fruit, and Garden Vegetables, in Season every Month of the Year.’’ The cover page trumpeted ‘‘Bills of Fare for Every Month of the Year.’’ 32. Gilly Lehmann’s introduction to the Prospect Books facsimile edition speculates on Bradley’s potential audience, noting that the focus is not always clear—mistresses, servants, and professional cooks are all addressed at various times, and the text obviously offers the country-dweller material of little practical use to her urban counterpart. Yet, when read as a book that would explain and make the most of one’s situation in the world, the text has an appeal across professions and demographic status. 33. These books are worth studying just for the level of detail in their instructions. For example, Elizabeth Moxon’s English Housewifery (Leeds: 1741, 1785) contains elaborate advice on when various fish are in season— complete with a month-by-month chart. Cookbooks had to provide such detail, as they competed with texts such as the John Trusler’s London Adviser and Guide (London: 1790), which offered down-to-earth guidance on how to shop, and with the numerous gardening manuals that advised readers how to use and preserve each month’s bounty. 34. An early culinary text, Hannah Woolley’s The Accomplisht Ladys Delight (London: 1675), demonstrates that fishing was not limited to men. The text included a chapter on ‘‘New and Excellent Experiments and Secrets in the Art of Angling. Being directions for the whole art,’’ and showed a woman hauling in a fish while, on the other side of a stream, a man still has his line in the water. 35. In Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Naomi Tadmor demonstrates how parental death, household breakup, and servants’ mobility led to ‘‘significant fluidity in household composition’’ (34), often destroying continuity in adult supervision. As young people formed new households, they needed domestic instruction. The need for culinary experts, due to urbanization, the shrinkage of households, and the waning influence of community, is parallel to the increased authority of experts in setting Poor Law policy. See Sandra Sherman, Imagining Poverty: Quantification and the Decline of Paternalism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001). In both cases, authority resided at a distance instead of being local, accessible, and familiar. 36. On the resistance of middle- and upper-class women to supervising servants, see Lehmann’s introduction to Bradley, The British Housewife. See also Lehmann, ‘‘The Birth of a New Profession: The Housekeeper and Her Status in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,’’ in ed. Isabelle Baudino et al., The Invisible Woman: Aspects of Women’s Work in Eighteenth Century Britain, 9–26 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 37. In Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), Karen Hess points out that the occupants of country houses primarily kept domestic manuscripts. They were not an urban phenomenon or the product of farming families.

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38. Two texts from 1675, The Queen-Like Closet and The Accomplisht Ladys Delight showed scenes with both individual and paired servants. 39. See Timothy Raylor, ‘‘Samuel Hartlib and the Commonwealth of Bees,’’ in Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing the Land, ed. Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor, 91–129 (Leicester, UK: University of Leicester Press, 1992). 40. On forms of community in Britain, see Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1979). The entire issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 36, no. 3 (1995) concerns various expressions of women’s community in eighteenth-century print culture. Perhaps the most famous contemporary novelization of women’s community is Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (London: 1762). 41. Household management texts reflected a common agricultural ideology, such as in John Laurence’s A New System of Agriculture (London: 1726), which stated that ‘‘there are no Creatures that live at more Unity among themselves than Bees. They seem to have all things in common, and one is always ready to revenge the Injuries of another’’ (156). 42. On the effects of enclosure in the eighteenth century, see George Boyer, An Economic History of the English Poor Law, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Jane Humphries, ‘‘Enclosure, Common Rights, and Women: The Proletarianization of Families in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,’’ Journal of Economic History 1 (1990): 17–42; K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985); M. J. Daunton, Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1700–1850 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995); and J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 43. In the late eighteenth century, paternalism was not that easy to overthrow, as evinced by the intense efforts of self-appointed experts to draw the Poor Laws more firmly into their own hands. See Sherman, Imagining Poverty. 44. On the relation between early cookbooks and trade, see Kim Hall, ‘‘Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces: the Gendering of Sugar in the Seventeenth Century,’’ in Feminist Readings in Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan, 168–90 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 45. See E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press, 1993), 256, discussing the traditional eighteenth-century market.

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CHAPTER 2

INTELLIGIBLE RECIPES AND COMPETENT INSTRUCTION

Arnold Whitaker Oxford’s English Cookery Books to the Year 1850— the first bibliography in English of an amazing genre—starts with a charmingly named entry for the year 1500: This Is The Boke of Cokery.1 While Oxford recounts some bibliographical fuss surrounding the name, that which has survived is bluntly assertive, ready to claim that this is ‘‘the’’ book of cookery. For a while, indeed, it is the only book of cookery, but the collateral implication is that readers need this book. Moreover, in old-style black-letter, the first paragraph solicits readers with the further assurance that everything will be plainly displayed: Here begynneth a noble boke of festes royalle and Cokery a boke for a pryncis housholde or any other estates; and the makynge therof as ye shall fynde more playnly within this boke.

From the very founding of the genre in England, cookbooks congratulate themselves. The Boke’s title and first sentence formulate a classic cookbook promise: this is a necessary text, it will teach ‘‘playnly.’’ But The Boke does not stop there and allow readers to imagine immediate success. It complicates the prospect of ‘‘cokery,’’ citing royal feasts and princes’ households where fancy, difficult recipes are the likely norm. ‘‘Playnely’’ disclosing such recipes, therefore, may not be tantamount to easy preparation. Any cook who follows The Boke will have to work hard; the saving grace (or so the reader is assured) is a reliable, intelligible text.

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From the beginning of print culture, cooking is presented as a challenge worthy of trepidation on the reader’s part, but not so hard that it cannot be taught. In that ‘‘but’’ is a justification for why (as The Boke suggests) readers need the book. Of course, although a book can promise anything, this chapter discusses how cookbooks actually learned to fulfill (or try to fulfill) their pedagogical claims. It examines how they sought to acquire techniques to teach effectively and to provide intelligible instruction to the intended audience. Most particularly, it investigates how they developed a rhetoric of responsiveness that did not merely promise, but actually reflected readers’ needs and invited them into the design of the learning process. Although this chapter cannot trace every increment in pedagogic clarity, it highlights cookbooks’ increasing awareness that clarity and responsiveness are crucial to their success with readers. Such increased orientation toward readers is a psychological advance, as every advance in pedagogy (and hence marketing) ultimately is. The eighteenth-century cookbook figured out how to address readers in context with learning to cook, so that they would not quit or feel abandoned (which is at least half the battle). Even if instructions were never exactly perfect, cookbooks learned how to give readers enough encouragement—as well as enough literal clarity—so that they would keep on cooking with the text. *** The post-Restoration seventeenth century, more than 160 years beyond The Boke, still represents cookbooks’ pedagogical antiquity. In terms of self-presentation, not much had changed in almost two centuries. Recipes are still hard to fathom, but promises abound. Texts of the period, and many more in the eighteenth century, envelop themselves in a disposable mystique, as if what they have to teach is rare but ultimately attainable through their demystifying candor. The question is: how candid are they? In The Accomplisht Cook (1660, 1685), for example, Robert May asserts that he ‘‘plainly and profitably discovers the Mystery and whole Art’’ of cooking, as if art is reducible to printed instructions that equip readers to cook like May himself. In case anyone misses the point, May suggests that his text is so concerned to disclose the fine points of culinary Art that professional cooks may resent him: As to those who make it their business to hide their Candor under a Bushel, to do only good to themselves, and not to others, such as will curse me for revealing the Secrets of this Art, I value the discharge of my Conscience, in doing Good, above all their malice; protesting to

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the whole world, that I have not concealed any material Secret of above my fifty and five years Experience. (Preface)

May claims that The Accomplisht Cook facilitates a brisk, uncompromised transfer of arcane knowledge, as if the text were so transparent that no obscurities could impede its apprehension: ‘‘The diligent Peruser of this Volume gains that in a small time (as to the Theory) which an Apprenticeship with some Masters could never have taught them’’ (Preface). All that remains for the reader is to apply acquired ‘‘Theory,’’ perfecting practical techniques without need of extratextual guidance. To make this claim plausible, the text sublimates art— an idiosyncratic, chancy, hands-on phenomenon—into theory, a body of abstract principles translatable to and transmissible by a text.2 The reader (‘‘the diligent Peruser’’) acquires this art by reading, presumably augmented by practice but with no on-site Master as in an apprenticeship. The Accomplisht Cook is for the person alone in the kitchen, or rather alone in a library, who when he has studied enough can prepare distinguished, if not yet distinctive cuisine. Behind the commonplace claim that the text is transgressive, disclosing closely held ‘‘Secrets,’’ is a more original suggestion that the text (hence the reader) is self-sufficient; the reader can absorb culinary data without anyone around to make practical sense of it.3 This chapter argues that such claimed sufficiency represents a challenge not just to the system of apprenticeship (which May had in mind) but more fundamentally to traditional ways of training anyone who would cook—servant, mistress, or professional. May’s claim implicates the nature of culinary knowledge transmitted in print, depicting it as unlike counterpart knowledge obtained from other sources. For May, print is liberating, enabling readers to learn to cook without auxiliary instruction. It eliminates engagement with advice-givers—including Masters, home tutors, and manuscripts inscribed by family and friends; media whose accessibility, commitment, or expertise can vary. To explore this touted difference—in which the potential for self-teaching, indeed for self-perfection justifies the value of the print text—this chapter examines how late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cookbooks seek to assure readers of access to comprehensive self-help irrespective of learning opportunities in a household, community, or apprenticeship setting. This inquiry raises questions regarding the degree to which cookbooks delivered on their representations: what ideas did they formulate concerning the nature of expertise and, concomitantly, the amount

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of prior knowledge required of readers who would benefit from expert teaching? As a corollary, this chapter raises questions concerning texts’ strategies for exculpating themselves should readers find that they have not been sufficiently edified. Ultimately, it asks how texts justified the notion of transmitting culinary art as theory, when (like all art) cooking was obviously dependent on satisfying the senses of producer and consumer. PEDAGOGICAL BRAVADO As scholars have noted, old recipes are imprecise.4 The issue is how such imprecision reflects on the relation of text to reader when the text touts its clarity and, hence, pedagogic efficiency. Consider for example Robert May’s recipe ‘‘To roast a Hen or Pullet’’ in The Accomplisht Cook: Take a Pullet or Hen full of eggs, draw it and roast it; being roasted break it up, and mince the brauns in thin slices, save the wings whole, or not mince the brauns, and leave the rump with the legs whole; stew all in the gravy with a little salt. Then have a minced lemon, and put it into the gravy, dish the minced meat in the midst of the dish, and the thighs, wings, and rumps, about it. Garnish the dish, with oranges and lemons quartered, and serve them up covered. (149)

May claims to explain how ‘‘to roast’’ a chicken, but after directing readers to eviscerate (‘‘draw’’) the bird, he describes what to do when it has been roasted. Missing is the very process for which readers would have sought the recipe—the step between drawing the bird and its ‘‘being roasted.’’ In the recipe, ‘‘to roast’’ seems to mean dressing a roasted bird, and in fact the chapter is entitled ‘‘The rarest Ways of dressing all manner of Roast Meats.’’ But if ‘‘dressing’’ is May’s generic concern, why does the recipe’s title point elsewhere? Such slippage, which has counterparts for example in a recipe ‘‘To boil . . . small Fowls’’ that does not explain an instruction to ‘‘stew’’ (72), leads one to wonder what May meant by ‘‘the Mystery and whole Art’’ of cooking. The text does not even give a ‘‘Theory’’ of how to roast chicken, which the reader might apply ad hoc to the bird in hand. Thus while May theorizes his text—citing its self-sufficiency—he has not thought the theory through to the literal particulars of potentially seminal recipes,

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possibly because he assumes that readers know how to roast or stew. Of course, any such assumption would confute the idea that one can skip apprenticeship (or any extratextual source of culinary advice) and learn directly from The Accomplisht Cook.5 May’s idea of comprehensive disclosure is hedged around with unstated, unlikely limitations that he does not acknowledge, let alone apologize for or try to explain. His text’s self-promotion is in this sense naive: it denies the need for extratextual aid, but offers no practical or moral support to readers puzzling over lacunae. Either May does not think that his recipes could be insufficient or, more likely, he feels no obligation to anticipate—and then address—reader disappointment. He leaves the reader alone with an unresponsive text and, by implication, inscribes himself as remote, an expert whose teaching is irredeemably imperfect (just like his promises).6 The Accomplisht Cook emerges as unaware that expertise, insofar as it is embodied in print, must anticipate the reader to be credibly, entirely accessible, since readers vary in competence. In effect, May is still thinking in an apprenticeship mode, in which teachers know the skills of those working under them. He does not accommodate the idea that print has finality, a silence that obliterates spontaneous exchange; a print manual must be pedagogically complete, or else point readers toward (practical, even psychological) ways of compensating for its incompleteness.7 ‘‘To roast a Hen or Pullet’’ has a conversational spottiness out of place in a print text, an irresolution that an apprentice could resolve with the Master but that a reader has no way to broach. Compounding the likelihood of reader frustration, the first paragraph allows the brauns to be minced or not, while the second assumes that they have been. Italian Tortelleti, from Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook (1660) Take a rost or boil’d capon, and a calves udder, or veal, mince it and stamp it with some marrow, mint, or sweet marjoram, put a pound of fat parmisan grated to it, half a pound of sugar, and a quarter of a pound of currans, some chopped sweet herbs, pepper, saffron, nutmeg, cinnamon, four or five yolks of eggs, and two whites; mingle all together and make a piece of paste of warm or boiling liquor, and some rose-water, sugar, butter; make some great and some very little, rouls or stars, according to the judgment of the Cook; boil them in broth, milk, or cream. Thus also fish. Serve them with grated fat cheese or parmisan, sugar, and beaten cinamon on them in a dish, &c.

Modern readers will ask why early culinary texts are obscure when they promise pedagogical clarity. One reason, perhaps, is that such

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texts generally had not accommodated cognitive models adapted to teach cooking in a print environment (can an art of complex secrets be reduced to compact, practicable recipes?). In the world of formal apprenticeship, as well as in the domestic environment, cooks learned by trial and error, observation, question, and revision.8 Even domestic manuscripts are characterized by open-ended exchange, as recipes are written down, accumulated in variant forms, renovated, and personalized in the mode of an interactive, evolving commonplace book. A typical manuscript bore the hands of several writers, who often went back over former writers’ inscriptions to make additions or corrections.9 In the print text, by contrast, the teacher is a book that could not spontaneously respond. Because it could not engage the reader’s personal experience of actually trying to follow a recipe, the culinary text was challenged by how to teach practical, hands-on ‘‘art’’ in a two-dimensional setting, outside the give-and-take of real-time demonstration.10 Some texts—more candid or perhaps self-aware than May’s—acknowledged as much, as in the case of The True Way of Preserving and Candying (1681, 1695): No Person can do with a Pen, that your seeing and observing shall do; for, if so, then all arts would be easily obtained, and, What needed Seven Years Apprenticeship? (‘‘Epistle to the Reader’’)

Pedagogical innovation was required so that an author’s personal, subjective notes could be tailored to the capacities of a range of hypothetical readers.11 The need for such innovation was not, however, always apparent. The Queen’s Royal Cookery (1713), for example, boasts that its explication of culinary procedures ‘‘is so easie and instructive, that those who have read it, may go as readily about the Thing, as though they had actually seen it done before their eyes’’ (Preface). Yet consider the ‘‘easie-ness’’ of the first recipe, ‘‘To make a Shoulder of Mutton like Venison’’: Save the blood of your Sheep, and strain it; take grated Bread, almost the quantity of a penny Loaf, Pepper, Thyme chopt small, mingle these Ingredients with a little of the Blood, and stuff the Mutton, and lay it in the Blood twenty four Hours: prick the Shoulder with your Knife, to let the Blood into the Flesh; and so serve it with Venison Sauce.

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Did the reader know how to stuff a shoulder of mutton? Would she prick it before or after cooking? How would she cook it—on a spit, in an oven, by boiling? How long? The recipe does not even mention cooking. How would she make a venison sauce? The disjunction between the text’s pedagogical claims and its actual pedagogy raises a question: how did the author imagine that this recipe would be used—as an aide-memoire to cooks familiar with similar recipes, or as basic instruction? The author seems to acknowledge that three-dimensional, real-time instruction underlies the experience of learning to cook (‘‘they had actually seen it done before their eyes’’), which suggests that the recipe is not meant just for readers who know how to cook.12 The text’s problem lies in failing to imagine an unsophisticated reader who is not on the scene to make her needs known. As this chapter will argue, an ability to imagine such a reader as if she were cooking in real time—trying to interpret a recipe with bird and spit in hand—characterizes the reader-friendly text, invoking the responsiveness of a Master or an interlineated, personalized manuscript.13 Notably, the frontispiece to Mary Holland’s The Complete British Cook (1800) shows a cook alone at her work basting a joint of meat, the text open at her back. Eliza Haywood’s A New Present for a Servant Maid (1771) shows an equivalent scene: a servant studies the text and holds a pan, while others are absorbed in their own chores. Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (5th ed., 1755) depicts a lady who has copied a recipe from The Art, handing it to a servant who goes off to prepare it. The pictures evoke cooks in the midst of cooking or about to set out, with no time to consult or to search another text.14 They are meant to signify that the texts’ recipes are not full of ‘‘Theory,’’ but rather offer practical advice that leaves nothing to chance or guesswork. The recipes can be made now, by anyone who can read. In fact, Glasse states that ‘‘If I have not wrote in the high, polite Stile, I hope I shall be forgiven; for my Intention is to instruct the lower Sort, and therefore must treat them in their own Way’’ (‘‘To the Reader’’). Whether or not the recipes fulfill this promise, the text firmly establishes a type of reader, one who must follow (comprehensible) directions in real time, taking all her cues from the printed source. The text invites an immediate connection to itself, extending itself beyond the fixity of print, projecting the type of empathy that consists in acknowledging the reader’s spontaneous needs. Ideally, the

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Frontispiece from Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery (1775, 5th ed.).

reader feels empowered by the text, not overawed by ‘‘Secrets’’ imperfectly disclosed. To Butter Crabs, or Lobsters, from Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (1756) Take two Crabs, or Lobsters, being boiled, and cold, take all the Meat out of the Shells and Bodies, mince it small, and put it all together in a Saucepan; add to it a Glass of White Wine, two Spoonfuls of Vinegar, a Nutmeg grated, then let it boil up till it is thorough hot; then have ready half a Pound of fresh Butter, melted with an Anchovy, and the Yolks of two Eggs beat up and mixed with the Butter; then mix Crab and Butter all together,

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shaking the Sauce-pan constantly round till it is quite hot; then have ready the great Shell, either of the Crab or Lobster, lay it in the Middle of your Dish, pour some into the Shell, and the rest in little Saucers around the Shell, sticking three Corner Toasts between the Saucers, and round the Shell. This is a fine Side-dish at a second Course.

The cognitive advance implied in this appeal to the reader represents a reversion to older forms, to the open-endedness of supervised instruction and to its textualized equivalent in domestic manuscripts. When such manuscripts are conscientiously annotated or compiled to give variant versions of the same dish, they simulate pedagogic conversation, as if information had been sought and recorded based on the needs of a specific person. They do not feel aimed at some hypothetical, necessarily general reader, but rather seem tailored to an individual’s needs as elaborated—as discovered— in real time. To the degree that a cookbook is like such a manuscript, the reader can imagine that it was composed for a reader like herself. Domestic manuscripts convey a sense of open-ended development; cookbooks either duplicate this or seek to compensate readers when they cannot.

MANUSCRIPTS, INFORMATION, ANNOTATION While many domestic manuscripts appear to be fair copies of discarded, scruffier versions, and display none of their own textual history, other such texts display at least traces of their compilation.15 These traces suggest that one or a few readers developed the data in the manuscript according to their own needs. For example, there is Manuscript Codex 780 owned by the University of Pennsylvania once belonging to a Mrs. Baker and Lady Gainsborough, with recipes dated 1739–41. The manuscript contains culinary and medical recipes, but what is interesting is the annotation. After several recipes, another reader-writer recorded her experience. Thus after one recipe for treating a child who has scurvy, the note states ‘‘most admirable,’’ and gives further directions providing that ‘‘If the child has any Breakings out the Child must be Anoynted with Cappons Grease.’’ This same hand inserted notes complimenting an earlier recipe for a postpartum pain remedy, and its return suggests that the annotator—who also records recipes—continually recurs to the manuscript, making it her own through updates, comments, and further related instructions. This continual revision is empowering,

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Page 121 from Mary Bromehead’s cookbook. (Courtesy of Whitney Cookery Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.)

confirming the reader-writer’s pedagogic relation to the text through acts that tailor it to her needs.16 She marks the text as intended for herself and for those in privity with her, rather than for

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the generality. In this sense, she converses with the text, teaching herself as she goes along, building on the text’s pedagogical cues while constituting what she needs to know. A note in the same hand observes that after a certain Mrs. Hale followed the recipe for a Dyet Drink after surgery, ‘‘she lived 30 years afterwards in perfect health.’’ Apart from increasing the recipe’s credibility, the note personalizes the text, affirming the reader-writer’s confidence in it. The abundance of notes in domestic manuscripts suggests that readers feel more comfortable writing in these texts than in their printed counterparts. The medium—script—is less formal, less rigid than print; margins usually are less defined and seem like spaces amenable to appropriation. More to the point, annotation does not feel transgressive because the manuscripts are not ‘‘by’’ anyone; they are serially personalized, as each person’s experience is inscribed into the text and testifies to her applying it. As the manuscript is amplified by the addition of notes, revisions, and further recipes, its openness—its ability to edify spontaneously over time—is affirmed.17 The manuscript radiates edifying potential, drawing reader-writers into using it, perpetuating its utility as regards themselves. Several manuscripts, for example, contain overlapping recipes, each somewhat different, each an implicit revision, supplement, or alternative to an initial recipe. Ms. Codex 645 owned by the University of Pennsylvania, with recipes dating from the later eighteenth century, has several recipes for ‘‘Currie,’’ ‘‘Curry powder,’’ and ‘‘Rich Curry.’’ The recipes feature variant proportions of coriander, fenugreek, pepper, and mustard and are credited to different sources. Ms. Codex 214, dating from the late seventeenth century and once the property of Catherine Cotton, is inscribed by several hands and contains numerous recipes for gingerbread. Both texts cumulate knowledge on a favorite dish, encouraging others to inscribe favorite versions in recognition of the owner’s interest. The serial inscriptions not only manifest the owner’s taste—thus personalizing the text—but also establish a genre of dishes that acts like a magnet, attracting more additions to a fund of knowledge and exemplifying the text’s receptiveness to recording edifying experience. The texts are a perpetual mirror of the reader-writers’ education, even as such texts become better able to satisfy and promote such education. Readers’ pedagogic intimacy with domestic manuscripts is evinced in their recording of recipes identified specifically as their own, to which they can return with confidence as need arises. In Ms. Codex 214, the reader-writer inscribed a recipe entitled ‘‘To dress a dish of

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eggs for my cos: Morden.’’ This is as specific as a recipe can be: by a particular person for a particular person. The recipe, a sort of tansy (halfway between omelet and custard), is no doubt Cousin Morden’s favorite, so when he visits the reader-writer can prepare it for him; she does not have to fuss with tansy recipes that may or may not suit, nor need she ask Morden for his preferences. Ms. Codex 626, a seventeenth-century manuscript that once belonged to Hopestill Brett, displays similar proprietary impulses. Hopestill identifies ‘‘my cake,’’ ‘‘my pastry,’’ ‘‘my brown bread,’’ and with only minimal degrees of separation ‘‘my own mother’s way for hogs pudding’’ as well as ‘‘my sister’s’’ various dishes. The possessive ‘‘my’’ suggests that the recipe has been incorporated into a personal repertoire that is tested and approved (if not by oneself, then by a trusted authority). The reader-writer can rely on it. Thus entries in Abigail Smith’s manuscript bear the annotation ‘‘approved by Abigail Smith’’ or ‘‘probatum A.S.’’18 The goal is to create a repertoire of recipes that one knows in advance will work without needing to consult anyone. As chapter 1 suggested, the convention of credit-giving in domestic manuscripts, whereby members of a community are cited as sources for particular recipes, underwrites the recipes’ authority, in effect assuring the user that they are proven. An ale recipe from which ‘‘my mother Mrs. Lisle brews eight hogsheads’’ annually, was proven several years running.19 Nor need a reader-writer worry that ‘‘To make Lemon Cream the Lady Warwicke Way’’ is a shot in the dark.20 Sometimes the weight of a community testifies to an entry’s reliability, as in ‘‘Madd. De Murphy had the experience of this [medicine] on her self, and it was recommended to her by a nunn as an Excellent remedy, who employed her selfe in attending the sick.’’21 As if Madd. De Murphy is not evidence enough, who could doubt the claims of ‘‘a nunn’’? To credit someone—especially someone of note—asserts one’s own interest in having reliable recipes. It is like appending ‘‘my,’’ which in context is a virtual form of adoption, since recipes ultimately derive from myriad sources. To annotate a recipe is another form of ‘‘my,’’ as when in Ms. Codex 645, a familiar hand inserts the word ‘‘hot’’ after the word ‘‘boiling,’’ to ensure that water for lemonade is scalding. The annotation is presumed useful (rather than suspect or out of place) because manuscripts depend on manual inscription, and accommodate (indeed invite) spontaneous afterthoughts in a way that printed books do not. In a more extreme instance of annotation, someone felt

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sufficient proprietorship toward Codex 645 to cross out ‘‘A recipe for Pickle for Ham’’ and another for rusks. One note reads ‘‘wrong Receipt vid. yellow book’’ next to a recipe for Pillau, telling the reader to skip this dish for a version appearing elsewhere. Such frank revisions, which amount to exclusions, remain in the text as testimony to its having been vetted for reliability. Such reliability is coordinate with acts that personalize the text. Visitors who write in one’s manuscript, almost like leaving a calling card, take responsibility for the recipe (or note) that they inscribe, allowing what’s theirs to be accepted as one’s own. The most extreme act of personalizing a domestic manuscript is to doodle in it, as if the text were an open invitation to one’s own

Cookmaid with cookbook, late eighteenth century. (From 1800 Woodcuts by Thomas Bewick and His School. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1962.)

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spontaneous performance. As a type of off-the-cuff, not fully deliberated performance, the doodle acknowledges the text’s power to induce spontaneity, and claims that empowerment. Ms. Codex 753, owned by the University of Pennsylvania with entries dating from 1715–75, is a compilation in at least seven hands that includes accounts, business notes, letters, recipes, and doodles. The name of a certain Caroline is turned into a doodle, and there are doodles on the back of a scurvy remedy. Though doodling is a parody of the text’s utility, an act of conspicuous idleness, it is also an objective correlative of how one can visit the text, using the text to suit one’s impulse. If one can doodle in the text, one can take from it a recipe on the spur of the moment. Recipes will be there ready to go, able to enable an ad hoc performance. The issue is whether one would invade a printed book in this way. Such action is unlikely because books have no empty pages to fill up, and a book’s graphic uniformity—unlike the riot of seven distinct hands—discourages spontaneous performance. The manuscript, however, imparts a sense to the reader-writer of her own pending possibility, contingent on transaction with the manuscript text. ADAPTING THE MANUSCRIPT STYLE AND INSTILLING CONFIDENCE In the eighteenth century, the printed culinary text succeeds by adapting the style of the domestic manuscript, making the reader comfortable with solitary learning by inducing a sense of pedagogic transaction. It could hardly do otherwise, for as has been noted, commercial cookbooks must operate as if they are not mere vehicles to sell recipes, so that the exchange of culinary knowledge has some independent rationale: A cookbook that consisted of nothing but rules for various dishes would be an unpopular cookbook indeed. Even the root of recipe— the Latin recipere—implies an exchange, a giver and a receiver. Like a story, a recipe needs a recommendation, a context, a point, a reason to be.22

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century domestic manuscripts visibly embody the exchange between giver and receiver, crediting donors and recording donees’ annotations. Such manuscripts, artifacts of a

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knowledge collective, are also repositories of personalized resources; the authorizations attached to recipes generate the reader’s need, its ‘‘context,’’ ‘‘point,’’ and ‘‘reason to be.’’ Cookbooks cannot so explicitly, and with such particularity, write the reader into the text— the reader is a hypothetical, general reader, never actually erupting into the text, let alone achieving equal footing with it. A cookbook reader’s interpolation is always obviously extratextual, whereas manuscripts make room for a parade of new reader-writers, whose entries are assimilated because the serial nature of inscriptions (the text’s open-endedness) affords equal footing even to interpolators in another hand. Even the fair copy is more forgiving of annotations and additions, because the manuscript is more obviously a human artifact that cannot presume to be perfect. The issue then is how printed cookbooks adapt this radically inclusive style, foregrounding the reader. William Ellis’ The Country Housewife’s Family Companion (1750) begins almost at once to posit a relationship between author and reader based on shared quotidian experience: ‘‘To write a serviceable book of country housewifery, requires an author who lives amongst its practice, for without such an opportunity, it is not to be supposed it can be done to much purpose.’’23 The text encourages the reader to imagine that Ellis knows what she needs to know. His persona is that of someone who interacts with country housewives, who can assess what they know and supply what they lack. Its perspective is disconnected from associations with the advice industry and made to seem functionally similar to one that country housewives can associate with informal knowledge-sharers: If books of this nature are wrote in a London chamber . . . then, in course, their authors must be deprived of that necessary country knowledge, as is requisite for enabling them to write those full and genuine instructions, which are perfectly wanted to assist a country housewife, in carrying on a true economy in managing her domestic affairs in the cheapest and most housewifely manner. (51)

This author is not a conventional expert who (literally) caters to households remote from the Country Housewife’s. His knowledge is relevant ‘‘country knowledge,’’ near to his readers’ experience and to their immediate concerns. His environment, if not his exact location, conduce to his developing such knowledge. Much like any member of a community, Ellis shares his address—he lives in

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Hertfordshire—inviting requests for advice; as proof that he engages readers, he prints their letters (letter series start at pages 193, 300, and 387). Such obvious discursive porosity breaches the fixity of print, converting The Country Housewife into a focus of informed, spontaneous exchange.24 Readers are inserted literally into the text, the same way that Ellis positions himself in their midst; in this sense, the text constitutes an association of voices, much as a manuscript does.25 The sense is amplified repeatedly as Ellis records local news (‘‘I hear that one of my neighbors cows has got the garget in her bag’’ [439]) relevant to some cure that he offers, and edifying advice from practitioners with whom he has talked (‘‘she says that they press the curd’’ [412], ‘‘she says that they press the cream’’ [413]). At the same time, Ellis never lets readers feel overwhelmed by other readers’ needs and constantly adjusts his rhetoric to suggest that individual housewives—individual readers—are the text’s basic concern. This delicate balance, which simulates the personalization of a manuscript by the reader-writer, is effected through repeated references to the eponymous Housewife, with whom each reader is expected to identify: ‘‘it concerns our country housewife to make a nice inspection’’ (48), ‘‘the right management of oatmeal ought to be one of the chiefest parts of our housewife’s study’’ (270), and ‘‘the inspection and management of cows belongs to the country housewife’’ (439). Information in the text feels crafted for a particular type of person, a feeling reinforced by references to ‘‘housewives’’ whose examples inform the text: ‘‘The Hertfordshire Housewife’s Way to make Pork Pyes’’ (114), ‘‘It was the saying of a notable housewife’’ (121), ‘‘One of our country housewives pickles sprats in the following manner’’ (206), and ‘‘Mrs. Bad housewife let the cream stand so long’’ (402). Ellis’ references reproduce the dialectic between inscription and personal adaptation basic to production and apprehension of domestic manuscripts. The reader is drawn toward an informed virtual community, even as its practices are qualified to address her own needs. For example, Ellis canvasses local ways of feeding hired laborers but notes that the Hertfordshire method will not always work: As such oeconomy will not be agreeable to southern men, our housewife’s art lies in furnishing variety of eatables, and yet to do it in the most frugal manner. And that it may be done not only in harvest time, but also at all other times throughout the year, is the main design of my writing this treatise of the Country Housewife. (95)

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The reader learns how practiced housewives feed the men and then learns to exclude certain practices depending on her situation. What she ultimately receives is expert advice tailored to her, available for her immediate, spontaneous application. In delivering and revising this advice, the only departure from the open-endedness of manuscript protocols is that, in this case, Ellis performs the personalization that a reader-writer otherwise would have performed for herself. In both cases, the reader learns from a text that permits her to identify the advice as backed up by authority, even as she can apply it on her own. In a related gesture, Ellis uses The Country Housewife as a vehicle for renovating the information in other texts, as if all domestic advice literature were a type of palimpsest available to later authors who (like writers in manuscripts) overwrite their errors and supply their omissions. In a recipe to repair ‘‘Wheat-meal damaged by mites,’’ he notes that ‘‘this article has escaped the pen of most or all authors’’ (260). In effect, he implies that where prior authors offer ‘‘Theory,’’ he provides art, that is, practical, complete advice that is useful the first time someone applies it.26 He deploys a rhetoric of detail, offering knowledge that is not only authorized—any fancy cookbook can do that—but designed to leave nothing to chance, providing ‘‘a plain account’’ of how to stuff sausages ‘‘as it is now in practice’’: ‘‘Take the fresh guts of a sheep, and cut them into fathom or six foot long pieces . . . stroke the dung out’’ (132). Detail becomes a mode of reassurance, codifying established knowledge (the method of preparing guts ‘‘as it is now in practice’’). Ellis would persuade readers that The Country Housewife codifies conscientiously. As is his standard practice, he claims to gauge the needs of readers disappointed by other texts’ inexplicitness, and to deliver commensurately comprehensive advice. His data reflect an assumption that readers have no prior knowledge concerning sausagestuffing and need to be guided through every step (‘‘take the fresh guts . . . cut them . . . stroke out the dung’’) so that they will be confident not seeking extratextual advice. By detailing actual operations in a community of informed sausage-stuffers, Ellis supplies an authorizing consensus in the mode of recipere: ‘‘a recommendation, a context.’’27 Thus, when he describes ‘‘The Hertfordshire (or this Author’s) Way of baking Pickled Pork,’’ he observes that ‘‘This is much practised in my own family, and many other families in Hertfordshire, as a valuable piece of good housewifery’’ (115), providing the imprimatur of personal and communal experience. In

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describing how ‘‘To make Bread more substantial than ordinary,’’ he notes that ‘‘This and the following one are two old printed receits handed down from one author to another,’’ recalibrating the mechanics of print culture ‘‘reprints’’ so that it becomes personalized, the solicitous handing off of one author’s recipe to another author (255). Such rhetoric ingratiates the text to the reader by invoking transactions that she can understand. Moreover, Ellis continually reminds readers that authority is not manifest in high theory, but underlies instead the provision of useful, practical information about what to eat and how to prepare it.28 In an aside that throws into relief his separation from the class of alimentary speculators, Ellis notes that while he explains the danger of eating mussels, the ‘‘supine neglect of the English virtuosi’’ deprives regular people ‘‘of timely instruction,’’ permitting them to ‘‘innocently eat poisonous things, and be killed by them’’ (208–9).29 Gulliver’s Travels has nothing on Ellis when it comes to aligning natural philosophy (‘‘the English virtuosi’’) with alimentary habits out of joint with reality.30 Ellis emphasizes that his context encompasses the reader’s and draws the reader and text into a spatial, synchronic relation facilitating the exchange of useful knowledge. Through carefully delineated familiarity, The Country Housewife endeavors to make the scene of reading comfortable, as if to say that Ellis—expert by virtue of his situation on the ground, and mastery of pertinent detail—has taken care of everything, even for the novicesolo reader. Martha Bradley’s The British Housewife (1756) pursues the same strategy with a slightly disciplinary edge, assuring readers that she knows what they need to know and intends to make sure that they learn it. Accordingly, Bradley states that her first chapter ‘‘is to be considered as a Chapter of Remembrance rather than Instruction. It contains what everyone knows but none is ever to forget.’’31 She lays down what readers must know and conveys that as she does not know each reader individually, she assumes that they all need reminding, that their knowledge must be reinstalled correctly. Faced with the classic print dilemma, she finds that nothing is too obvious to include. In the section on February, for example, she lists dozens of roots and apples, noting ‘‘There is some Care and Attention required to learn the Names of these; but, when once known, they are easily remembered, and nothing is more to the Housekeeper’s Credit than being thoroughly acquainted with them’’ (I:128). The text is in charge, postulating a distinct corpus of knowledge that (reassuringly) it will transmit. Readers are encouraged to feel that

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with application, progress is inevitable because recipes are laid out for maximum pedagogical effect. Bradley’s deliberate, reinforcing logic carries the reader along, creating a process in which attentiveness produces results: This Knowledge which qualifies [the Cook] for the discharge of her Duty in a small Family, leads to the understanding what is to be done in the larger Kitchen; let her keep in constant Remembrance what she has been told already on this Head, and what is to come. (I:149–50)

The formula combines admonition with reassurance, a stick and a carrot that creates anticipation: readers look toward ‘‘what is to come’’ in the text and hence in their performance. Correlative to this pedagogic momentum is the text’s insistence that practice promotes progress. The notion is commonsensical but also exculpatory—if the reader fails, then the fault is not the text’s but her own: Practice is all; for as the Children play at Bilbecket till they can catch the Ball every Time for many Minutes together, in the same Manner the Cook will be able to toss a hundred Pancakes without missing once, when she is accustomed to the Method of it. (I:571)

Practice comports with a print ideology that posits autonomous texts and autodidact readers. Yet such insistence on practice transfers a substantial pedagogic burden to readers, requiring that they correct their mistakes as they learn to cook. In this mode, the text is not just a conduit of immediately useful knowledge but, when imparting complex procedures, more like a coach who presses novices to get things right. The novices, of course, must keep trying. ‘‘Method’’ emerges into perfection over time, not as ‘‘Theory’’— unaffected by real-time development—but as art, valenced to individual effort and concrete application. More than a few pancakes will land on the floor before the Method is realized. Implicitly, the dissatisfied reader must try harder, pursuing the Method until (as Bradley suggests) it becomes child’s play.32 This reader need not turn elsewhere for guidance, but neither are there grounds to complain when tossing pancakes proves tricky. Practice—as part of Bradley’s disciplinary regime—mediates between text and reader, keeping the reader at a respectful distance, even as it preserves print’s basic claim that no reader need look past the text to acquire

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culinary knowledge. The text remains reassuring—all-inclusive and effective—but only contingently, making the reader work to realize its benefits. But what prods the reader to keep working, apart from the promise that art is attainable? Bradley ties the reader’s progress to a fantasy that fine cooking depends solely on proper instruction, which if duly absorbed and applied elevates even a servant to the status of Clouet or Estienne: Our Cook . . . will be able to shew that an English Girl, properly instructed at first, can equal the best French Gentleman in everything but Expence. It is only in the being better taught at first, that these Foreigners excel our own People; let them have the same Advantages, and they may defy them. It is this we have endeavoured to give them in the present Book, and we hope we have hitherto succeeded. (I:314)

Lurking in Bradley’s claim is the Richardsonian tease that the servant always has been a potential member of the elite. All she needs is a chance, which in culinary—as opposed to amatory—terms, depends on just the sort of methodical instruction that Bradley hopes to have furnished ‘‘hitherto.’’33 The message: stay with The British Housewife, follow each volume as it comes out, and it will be possible to ‘‘equal’’ the best. The risible confusion of pronouns perversely reinforces this fantasy (the French and the English are both ‘‘they’’ and ‘‘them,’’ as opposites merge in a culinary cohort). In this upbeat send-off, talent is repressed as a determinant, and access to the right cookbook levels instructional disparities. More than any text of the period, The British Housewife recognizes that what print can offer readers—given its deliberate, palpable organization—is a metatextual rationale, an articulable reason to work through the text. For Bradley, the rationale is the psychologically satisfying claim that, through the agency of the text and one’s own hard work, one can legitimately embark on an impressive and well-deserved trajectory. The print text converts the idea of a constantly augmented relationship between manuscript and reader— where personal progress is possible but toward no defined end—to one in which trial and error is part of a larger, scripted ascent toward assured competence.34 In Bradley’s hands, the print text resonates with the mechanics of manuscript-reader relations, but rationalizes them, providing the reader with an outcome that is also highly

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attractive. Right on the cover, Bradley declares ‘‘The whole (which is deduc’d from Practice) compleating the careful Reader, from the highest to the lowest Degree, in every Article of English Housewifery.’’ The claim of ‘‘compleating’’ the reader is extraordinary, suggesting that all that is lacking is instruction from Bradley—the rest is already in place, awaiting its complement. Yet perhaps the most significant print adaptation of the conversational mode endemic to manuscript and apprenticeship is the cookbook author’s repeated eruption into the text as a personality, commenting on recipes as if annotating them. In a recipe for roast pig, Martha Bradley opines, ‘‘The Germans whip him to Death, but they deserve the same Fate for their Cruelty; there is no Occasion for such Barbarity to make a dainty Dish’’ (II:151). Writing of plum porridge, an old-fashioned comfort food, Bradley defines the bounds of its acceptability: This is a famous English Dish, and though at present disused in London, yet as there are many Families in the Country who still keep the Custom of Hospitality, and admit this among the Entertainments of the Season, we shall not leave the Cook at a loss how to make it. (II:441–42)

In The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (1747), Hannah Glasse repeatedly follows a recipe with further, amplifying instructions under the rubric ‘‘Note.’’ These little points add an air of spontaneity, as if the primary recipe had been further developed based on Glasse’s experience. A recipe for veal knuckle, for example, bears the annotation ‘‘It is very well done as the Turky, before directed’’ (19), indicating that the veal is tasty prepared in an alternative mode—who would know, had not Glasse made the discovery, and added it (manuscript-style) to augment her recipe? Glasse appears to polish the recipe, as if to personalize it, though of course her readers benefit. Likewise, in a recipe ‘‘To keep Venison or Hares sweet,’’ Glasse counsels ‘‘Never do any Thing else to Venison, for all other Things spoil your Venison, and take away the fine Flavour, and this preserves it better than any Thing you can do’’ (8). This type of comment could be made only after several experiments with the original; there is a sense in which Glasse has revisited the original, marking it as the best possible way to go about preserving game. Such commentary is so common in The Art of Cookery, at times so personal (‘‘this is a delicious Dish’’ [77]), so idiosyncratic

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(‘‘This Dish I do not recommend; for I think it an odd Jumble of Trash’’ [53]), even so tendentious (‘‘here is enough to shew the Folly of these fine French Cooks’’ [54]), that the reader never drifts into the print-induced despair that the text isolates her from a real, breathing author. Glasse is immanent in her text, perversely comforting: the reader senses that she is somehow there, ready to converse if need be. The pedagogical implications are clearly impressive. In the erotically titled Nigella Bites, television’s sultriest, most flagrantly self-dramatizing chef coos, ‘‘I want to be there in the kitchen with you; my words are merely my side of the conversation I imagined we might have.’’35 The print text desublimates the author so as to suggest that (like a manuscript) it is designed around us, while (like an apprenticeship) it embodies an expert, real-time teacher.36 The Art of Cookery makes room for the reader as well, inviting her to vary dishes according to the family’s tastes and tolerance. In a recipe for a type of solidified roux, for example, Glasse notes that ‘‘A little Piece is what the Cooks use to thicken and brown their Sauce; but there are few Stomachs it agrees with, therefore seldom make use of it’’ (12). The text does not present the rigid aspect of print, and maintains an informal, homely malleability. Even Bradley, who is much more the disciplinarian, acknowledges that individual taste must be a factor (‘‘if you please, you may add a little Orange and Citron Peel’’ [II:105]). As in a manuscript, recipes may have an implicit refinement or alternative, local variation. The reader retains a sense of power over the text, in that while she cannot change its directions in print—that is, in a medium equivalent to the original— she is specifically authorized to change it in practice, without feeling inferior or transgressive. By extension, she is authorized to record her changes, to write in the margins of the text and muddle its generic integrity for her own purposes. As the print text allows the reader to use the recipes critically, the reader becomes a partner in the text, not unlike her status in manuscript production.37 She is encouraged to stay with the text, the common experience of readers whose only resource is handwritten, and much like the career of an apprentice who completes his training with a Master. The point is to induce readers to overcome resistance to advice not explicitly authorized by endorsements from friends and family. Indeed, numerous cookbooks hint at their recipes’ prior life among friends, family, and subscribers, all of whom urged the author to commit them to print.38

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Because domestic manuscripts are not as available today as their printed counterparts, it is not immediately apparent that pedagogic strategies developed by old cookbooks adapt the spontaneous giveand-take characteristic of such manuscripts. This chapter argues, however, that by reading these texts in parallel, pedagogic initiatives in old cookbooks can be seen as rooted in forms of learning that were essentially social and that barely contemplated a cook with no one to ask for advice. As households became smaller and less stable during the eighteenth century, leaving fewer people at home to offer culinary instruction, cookbooks took up the slack, adapting the social techniques of such instruction to the cook alone in the kitchen.39 Such books offered psychological support that sought to stand in for actual, real-time personal support. All things considered, they did so ingeniously. ACHIEVING CLARITY This chapter began by citing recipes from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries which, to one unpracticed in the art, were almost impossible to follow. Such recipes lacked both precision and pedagogical logic. Indeed, a certain defensiveness persisted well into the eighteenth century, with authors claiming, for example, that their own texts partook of a mathematical rigor that the authors of other texts overlooked: Cookery, like most other arts, has its theory, which is of effectual use to a workman who knows how to work by rules laid down to him. There is a harmony of composition (if I may be allowed the expression) in Cookery throughout, that the intelligent Cook immediately perceives; nor can he be blinded by the many patched-work pieces which have appeared on that subject. Good books on his art are a repository to him, to which he can apply at all times when deficient or doubtful: and it is to be wished that Cooks in general would pay more attention to this circumstance.40

This statement, which jibes with Bradley’s insistence on the importance of Method, betrays an impatience with the lack of pedagogical rigor found in texts such as Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook. Such impatience was not uniform and certainly did not transform cookbooks overnight into transparent sources of culinary enlightenment. Nevertheless, its emergence indicates authors’ growing sensitivity to

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the pedagogical demands of the genre, as well as an increasingly practical orientation that was crucial to the genre’s development.41 Indeed, during the eighteenth century, cookbooks began to display not merely a sense of how to communicate with readers on a psychological level, that is, how to make them feel comfortable with a text, but a workmanlike awareness of how to write recipes that were effective as teaching tools.42

Front cover of Hannah Glasse’s blockbuster, The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (1796).

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An Onion Pie, from Martha Bradley, The British Housewife (1756) This, though we commonly call it an Onion Pie, is made of a Mixture of Potatoes, onions, and Apples, and they ought to be in equal Quantities to give it a good Taste. It is to be made thus: Boil about a Pound and half of Potatoes, and when they are pretty well done, peel them and cut them into Slices, peel the same Quantity of Onions, and cut them also into Slices, and pare some Apples, cut them in the same Manner into Slices, taking out the Cores. When the Ingredients are thus ready make a good Crust, and cover a Dish with it; break a Quarter of a Pound of Butter into small Pieces, and distribute this over the Crust; and then make the following Seasoning: Grate down a whole Nutmeg, bruise a Quarter of an Ounce of Mce, mix these together, and add a Tea Spoonful of beaten Pepper, and three Tea Spoonfuls of Basket Salt; mix all these together, and strew some of it over the Bottom. Then lay in a Covering of Potatoes, Onions, and Apples interchangeably, a Slice of one and a Sliced of another. Then lay in the Yolks of four Eggs boiled hard. Upon these lay in some Potatoes by themselves, then some Onions, and at Top some Apples. Dust in some of the Seasoning as every Parcel is put in. Mix half a Dozen more hard Yolks of Eggs in different Parts of the Pie, and also half a Pound of Butter broken into Scraps. When all is thus in, spread over the upper Layer some Butter, and scatter on the Remainder of the Spices. Cover up the Pie, and send it to the oven, first pouring in a Quarter of a Pint of Water. As the Potatoes are boiled before they are put in, half an Hour in a moderately hot Oven will do the Pie. It is to be sent up hot, and is a very good Dish.

In The Art of Cookery, Hannah Glasse clarified the instructions in several recipes that she lifted from earlier cookbooks. Such lifting was common in the eighteenth century, and it is easy to follow recipes as they meander from one cookbook to another (each claiming to be ‘‘new’’ and ‘‘modern’’).43 But just as Glasse was a conscientious appropriator, she also analyzed recipes, reworking them so that her intended audience—inexperienced, minimally literate servants— could reproduce them without external guidance. One example is a recipe for ‘‘A Pig in Jelly,’’ originally from two earlier texts. Where those old texts instruct ‘‘stove it gently two Hours, let stand till cold, and send it up in its Jelly,’’ Glasse advises stove it, or do it over a slow Fire two Hours, then take it up, lay the Pig into a Dish you intend it for, then strain the Liquor, and when the jelly is cold, skim off the Fat, and leave the Settling at bottom;

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warm the jelly again, and pour over the Pig, and then serve it up cold in the Jelly. (xvii)44

Where the old texts assume that servants understand the rules of aspic, Glasse makes no such assumption. She describes how to handle aspic, leaving nothing to chance. In several instances, Glasse converts other authors’ shorthand into explicit, easy-to-follow steps. To say that such steps must have been a revelation is an understatement. An example from Martha Bradley is equally instructive as to how cookbook authors developed a reader-friendly explicitness. Bradley’s instructions for making sauces are revealing. Whereas The Queen’s Royal Cookery merely assumed that the reader could make Venison Sauce, and May demands vague ‘‘gravy’’ for his roast chicken, Bradley describes exactly what is required for an array of sauces in a chapter entitled ‘‘Of Sauces.’’ Melted butter was the most common sauce in eighteenth-century cuisine, a topping for everything from vegetables to meat.45 Yet Bradley does not simply state, ‘‘Melt some Butter.’’ Instead, she writes this in a recipe entitled ‘‘To melt Butter’’: There is more Nicety in melting Butter well, than is Commonly imagined, and nothing is more vexatious than to have it ill done. Cleanliness and Care are the two great Articles. A Silver Sauce-pan is fittest for this Purpose: When the Cook has not that, let her take Care what she uses be well tinned. Then put into it a Spoonful of cold Water; shake in a little Dust of Flour, and add the Butter cut in Slices that they may melt readily; shake it round frequently, but always one Way, otherwise it will oil: When the Butter is melted let it stand quietly and boil up: This will make it smooth and fine. Fresh Butter melts better than salt; and the less Flour the better, so it just thicken the Water. (47)46

This is an extraordinary recipe. It describes what sort of utensils to use, how to handle the ingredients, which ingredients work best and in what quantity, and what may happen if the directions are ignored. To gauge the tremendous care lavished on this truly simple recipe, one might compare the instructions in the classic 1964 edition of Joy of Cooking, which read in their entirety: ‘‘Melt over low heat: Butter.’’47 Unlike Bradley, the authors of Joy—who take very little for granted—just assume that butter will melt when heated (which indeed it will). But such an assumption only takes account of the ingredient’s physical properties, and not of the whole process

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(which naturally includes the reader). Bradley’s holistic approach, giving reasons why things are done just so, is a brilliant pedagogical advance, turning even the production of this basic recipe into a teaching moment. Bradley emphasizes that the recipes in ‘‘Of Sauces’’ are part of an ongoing pedagogic enterprise, to be pursued by herself and her readers through each volume of the text as it appears: It is to little Purpose that a Servant knows how to roast and boil if she cannot make the common Sauce that is to be sent up with her Meat and Fowls. We shall here give the several Kinds most generally used; and, in succeeding Numbers, we shall enlarge greatly upon this Head. (I:45)

It would be a disservice to herself, therefore, and to the enterprise into which she would conscript readers, if her recipes did not encourage them to think they were learning new skills. Bradley continually holds out the promise of such skills, which each recipe must fulfill.48 She imposes a logic on her text, apparent both in individual recipes and in a perspective that is relentlessly cumulative. Thus, in a later ‘‘Number,’’ Bradley observes: We have in our several preceding Numbers given the Cook so ample Instruction for the roasting all plain Joints of Meat, and other familiar Articles, that she cannot be at a loss in any of them. This Knowledge which qualifies her for the discharge of her Duty in a small Family, leads to the understanding what is to be done in a larger Kitchen; let her keep in constant Remembrance what has been told already on this Head, and what is to come, tho’ it leads her to the highest Perfection of the Art, will be very easy. (II:150)

Though Hannah Glasse was the blockbuster author, going through more than twenty editions (not including piracies) before the turn of the nineteenth century, it was Bradley who developed the first true culinary pedagogy, one in which detail was tied to a rationale for continued application. She was the breakthrough author, perhaps the most pedagogically astute of her century. Though she was self-interested, constantly integrating her pedagogy into a marketing plan for succeeding ‘‘Numbers,’’ it is undeniable that she understood how to teach cooking. Half the job was just to keep readers involved, practicing skills as they acquired them; the other half was following through with her promise to impart those skills.

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Her spirit can be felt today. In the 2009 movie Julie & Julia, Julie sets off to master Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, registering on her blog a growing confidence (albeit with some pratfalls). Two hundred fifty years earlier, Martha Bradley positions readers to do likewise, seeking to give them practical information they need to actually make her recipes. Moreover, like Julia Child avant la lettre, Bradley continually assured readers that if they learn to make a dish—which they can!—such learning will stand them in good stead. ‘‘To draw Gravy,’’ for example, ends with this reminder: We shall frequently mention Gravy in the made Dishes of this and Succeeding Numbers, and this Way [i.e., the way given in the recipe] it is to be made from any Kind of Meat, according as directed in the particular Dish. (I:47)

Bradley assures readers that recipes can be formulae, useful not only in themselves but as potential variants, depending on the context (‘‘any Kind of Meat’’). She justifies all the detail that she offers, allowing readers to see that they are acquiring a repertoire of skills, rather than just recipes for random dishes. As the eighteenth century proceeds, cookbooks begin to develop—and flaunt—their internal logic, citing protocols that allow readers to use the text more efficiently. Charles Carter’s The Complete Practical Cook (1730) assures readers that a system of crossreferences makes it easy to find what they are seeking: To render the whole intelligible to the most Unskilful in this Noble Art, I have given, at the latter End of the Book, a brief Explanation of the Foreign or Technical Terms that occur throughout the Work; and as I have also added in Alphabetical Order a Table of the Contents of the Book, pointing to the Pages where each Recipe may be found, the Reader will easily be able to refer, by means of said Table, to any Dish mentioned in the [illustrated] Plates, which renders the whole Performance so complete, that all manner of Embarrass or Difficulty is prevented. (‘‘To the Reader’’)

If Carter’s recipes are challenging, one should not also be challenged by the text’s organization. Indeed, organizational integrity becomes a key for a number of authors. For example, Mrs. Mary Eales’ Receipts ([1718] 1767) set out in advance the terms and processes associated with sugar cookery, since ‘‘when thoroughly

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comprehended, [this] will prevent the unnecessary Repetitions of them, which would encumber the Work and confound the Practitioner, were they to be explained in every Article’’ (1). Eales foregrounds what readers must know before they attempt a pot of boiling sugar. Several of these preliminary entries include amplifying little notes; with respect to clarifying sugar, she observes: If the Sugar doth not appear very fine, you must boil it again before you strain it; otherwise in boiling it to an Height, it will rise over the Pan, and give the Artist a great deal of Trouble. (2)

The text throws up necessary cautions. But at another level, readers are helped to navigate Mrs. Mary Eales’ Receipts more easily, because they are unlikely to attempt any of the recipes until the preliminaries have been ‘‘thoroughly comprehended.’’ In this same spirit, Susannah Carter’s The Frugal Housewife (1795) announces, in a note ‘‘To the Reader,’’ that gravies and sauces are moved to the front of the book, where a number has been affixed to each recipe. This way, ‘‘when the young Cook consults any Receipt she may want, she will not only be informed what sauce she is to serve it up with, but will be referred to the Number and Page where that Sauce may be found.’’ Such cross-referencing is a true time-saver, putting frequently consulted recipes in one place and making them easy to find. Pullets with Chestnuts, from Charles Carter, The Compleat City and Country Cook (1732) Truss them to boil and singe them, and soak them in warm Water; then take them out and dry them with a Cloth, and fill the Bellies with Chestnuts, Oysters and Lumps of Marrow rolled in Yolks of Eggs; season with Nutmeg and Salt, and put one in a Bladder and tie it up close and boil it; two will make a Dish; then sauce them with melted Butter, Gravy and Juice of an Orange.

Toward the end of the century, organization (not one of Glasse’s strong points) is vastly improved, and instructive detail becomes commonplace. In a recipe for ‘‘Soup and Bouille,’’ The Universal Cook (1792) advises, ‘‘About an hour before dinner, strain the soup through a piece of dimity that has been dipped in cold water, putting the rough side upwards’’ (192). Those little details about cloth—what kind, what temperature, which side upward—are perfect, suggesting the sort of close observation one might expect from

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a novelist. In a recipe for ‘‘English Bread the London Way,’’ The English Art of Cookery (1794) reminds readers that the temperature of the water should vary according to the season: [I]n summer time your liquor must be just blood-warm; in winter, a little warmer; and in hard frosty weather as hot as you can bear your hand in it, but not so hot as to scald the yeast, for should that be the case, the whole batch of bread will be spoiled. (561)

A novice might have no idea that yeast is sensitive to temperature.49 The Housekeeper’s Valuable Present (1790) offers a recipe for Coffee Ice Cream that is reproducible today without any difficulty: To four whites of eggs, put three ounces of sugar, three quarters of a pint of cream, and an ounce of whole coffee; boil it all till it thickens, then pass it through a sieve for freezing. (86)

The recipe provides measurements for every ingredient, and tells the reader exactly what to do. When it was recently reprinted beside a ‘‘modernized’’ version, the only real changes were driven by technology: the temperature of the custard could be measured (it needed to be at least 170° F); the mixture could be refrigerated until chilled, then frozen in an ice-cream maker.50 Pedagogically, it was all there in the original. Such recipes, like thousands of others, had become reader-friendly. While recipes still made assumptions, they were narrower. While cookbooks still made outsize claims of being better than the competition, they were nonetheless vastly better—in the sense of being more reader-friendly—than cookbooks had been in the preceding century. NOTES 1. Arnold Whitaker Oxford, English Cookery Books to the Year 1850 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1913), 1. 2. The practicality and idiosyncrasy of art are commonplaces. In Across the Open Field: Essays Drawn from English Landscapes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), Laurie Olin observes: ‘‘Whatever training or study [artists] may have had, whether formal or not, within or without institutions or workshops, they must learn their craft through individual trial and error, putting together for themselves those elements that suit their emerging understanding and imagination. This cannot be done for them by somebody else, whether teacher or institution, because it has to do with personal development and the construction of a unique

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individual. The strongest and most original, of course, are engaged in creating both themselves and work that hasn’t existed before, is fresh or more highly developed in ways that they will discover or invent’’ (21). 3. Culinary texts regularly purported to disclose ‘‘secrets.’’ See, for example, The Ladies Cabinet Opened (1639), A Precious Treasury of Twenty Rare Secrets (1649), The Queens Closet Opened: Incomparable Secrets . . . Which were presented to the Queen By the most Experienced Persons of the Times (1662), The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelm Digbie Opened (1669), and The Queen-Like Closet (1670). For background, see William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 4. In The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 2003), Gilly Lehmann examines male cooks’ imprecision when writing for professional counterparts who already had substantial knowledge. In Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), Karen Hess goes to extraordinary lengths to interpret a seventeenth-century culinary manuscript. See also Hilary Spurling, Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Booke: Elizabethan Country House Cooking (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1987). 5. The Accomplisht Cook was not addressed only to accomplished cooks. The Preface addressed ‘‘all honest well intending Men of our Profession, or others.’’ In the twenty-first century, of course, cookbook authors are instructed never to assume anything and to understand the reader’s level of experience. See Barbara Gibbs Ostmann and Jane L. Baker, The Recipe Writer’s Handbook (New York: Wiley, 2001), 2–3. 6. Compare Izaak Walton’s self-effacing comment in ‘‘The Epistle to the Reader’’ in The Complete Angler (1653): ‘‘Now for the Art of catching fish; that is to say, how to make a man that was none, an Angler by a book; he that undertakes it, shall undertake a harder task than Hales, that in his printed book undertook by it to teach the Art of Fencing, and was laughed at for his labour.’’ In the same vein, Walton later observes that ‘‘angling is somewhat like poetry, men are to be born so; I mean with inclinations to it, though both may be heightened by discourse and practice.’’ See Walton, The Complete Angler (London: Chatto and Windus, 1887), 3, 37. 7. For a discussion of differential cognitive reactions to orality and print in the seventeenth century, see D. F. McKenzie, ‘‘Speech-ManuscriptPrint,’’ in New Directions in Textual Studies, ed. Dave Oliphant and Robin Bradford, 87–109 (Austin, TX: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, 1990). See also H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), comparing reading to conversation, and observing in the former ‘‘the frustration of one partner’s being insensate and unchangeable’’ (85). 8. George Lillo’s smash-hit play, The London Merchant (1731), turns on the close supervisory relationship between an apprentice and his master.

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9. See Janet Theophano, Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote (New York: Palgrave, 2002) on the epistemology of women’s domestic manuscripts. 10. Compare Adam Gopnik in ‘‘What’s the Recipe?—Our Hunger for Cookbooks,’’ The New Yorker, November 23, 2009, 106–112, 106: ‘‘What kids make depends on what moms know: skills, implicit knowledge, inherited craft, buried assumptions, finger know-how that no recipe can sum up. The recipe is a blueprint but also a red herring, a way to do something and a false summing up of a living process that can be handed on only by experience, a knack posing as knowledge.’’ 11. Print texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries regularly faced the estrangement of author and reader, owing to ‘‘the givens of mass print and the fact of an audience out of range.’’ See J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: the Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), 238. See also Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990), citing a gap between ‘‘the context of production’’ and ‘‘the context of reception’’ owing to a breakdown in the classical public sphere of letters (37). Christine Ferdinand notes that dialogical techniques adopted by newspapers were ‘‘shaped by literary currents of a century attempting to come to terms (in print) with the differences between speech, manuscript, and print.’’ See ‘‘Serial Conversations: The Dialogue of the EighteenthCentury Country Newspaper,’’ in Compendious Conversations: The Method of Dialogue in the Early Enlightenment, ed. Kevin Cope, 116–28 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992), 119. Sandra Sherman examines this phenomenon in ‘‘Reading at Arm’s Length: Fielding’s Contract with the Reader in Tom Jones,’’ Studies in the Novel 30 (1998): 232–45. In ‘‘Speech-ManuscriptPrint,’’ McKenzie notes that the early modern manuscript reader had ‘‘a sense of privilege at being close to the writer, at being one of a more select community than the amorphous readership of print’’ (97). 12. In The British Housewife, Lehmann argues that early cookbooks, primarily written by men, targeted professional male cooks and were therefore sketchier than later texts, written by women for women readers who needed basic instruction. The argument in this chapter starts from the position that early culinary texts sought to reach wider audiences, and that what changes is not so much the readership as authors’ ability to overcome deficiencies of teaching cooking in a print environment. 13. In ‘‘Speech-Manuscript-Print,’’ McKenzie argues that orality, writing, and print are complementary, and that each makes ‘‘adjustments’’ to the other. Thus as print develops, it seeks to ‘‘limit the difference of print by devising ways to suggest its affinities with speaking and writing’’ (101). See also William Slights, Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), noting that early printed books sought to recall the visual features of manuscripts.

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14. As early as 1690, the cover of The Gentlewoman’s Delight in Cookery shows three scenes in which a woman is working alone in the kitchen or still room, albeit no text is displayed. 15. Manuscripts discussed here are from two important sources: the Wellcome Institute in London and the Esther B. Aresty Collection of Rare Books on the Culinary Arts, Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. For complete bibliographical information, see, respectively, S. A. J. Moorat, Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in Medicine and Science in the Wellcome Historical Medical Library, Vols. II and III (London: Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine, 1973) and the online catalog of the University of Pennsylvania Library. 16. On the empowering nature of annotation, see Laurent Mayali, ‘‘For a Political Economy of Annotation,’’ in Annotation and Its Texts, ed. Stephen A. Barney, 185–91 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991). Mayali states that annotation is ‘‘a procedure of political appropriation of the power of the text . . . an apparatus for reproducing knowledge in a form that legitimates the annotator’’ (186). 17. In ‘‘The Marginal Gloss,’’ Critical Inquiry 3 (1977), 609–55, Lawrence Lipking cites the potential infinity of annotation, in that ‘‘even the gloss requires in turn a gloss’’ (611). The gloss, he observes, ‘‘fans out toward fuller and fuller explanations’’ (648). 18. See Wellcome Ms. 4631, primarily compiled in the late seventeenth century, augmented by other hands through the mid-eighteenth. 19. See Wellcome Ms. 2395, attributed to Anne (De)Lisle, 1748. 20. See Wellcome Ms. 2367, attributed to Lady Catherine Fitzgerald, early eighteenth century. 21. See Wellcome Ms. 2367. 22. Susan J. Leonardi, ‘‘Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster a la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie,’’ PMLA 104, no. 3 (1989): 340–47, 340. 23. William Ellis, The Country Housewife’s Family Companion (1750; Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 2000), 132. 24. In an astonishing parallel, Grant Achatz’ Alinea (2008) states on the dust jacket that ‘‘Buyers of the book receive access to the Alinea Mosaic website featuring extensive video demonstrations, interviews with chef Achatz and his collaborators, a sourcing guide for specialized ingredients, and an online forum from which readers can interact with the Alinea kitchen.’’ Ellis was way ahead of his time. 25. Compare David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), which argues that print and manuscript culture developed in parallel during much of print culture’s history, with books exhibiting many qualities associated with manuscript. This chapter argues that cookbooks exhibited and sought to exploit this porosity, blurring manuscript and print where it suited authors’ objectives.

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26. In The Modern Husbandman, Complete in Eight Volumes (1750), Ellis dismissed as inexperienced the ‘‘Theory Author, who takes verbal Relations from I know not who . . . not having Judgment enough in Agriculture to chuse the better part and leave out the rest’’ (VIII:Preface). 27. Consensus is a selling point with inexperienced readers. An advertisement in The Bath Book of Cookery (1780) noted that ‘‘it has ever been the practice to give two and often three receipts for the same article, which must necessarily confuse the person who searches for the one most approved.’’ 28. Ellis’ The Modern Husbandman (1750), The Country Housewife’s gendered counterpart, emphasized practical approaches to farming that addressed specific problems. He dismissed classical, academic knowledge, which he considered never really to have been tried. 29. Compare Ellis’ comments in The Modern Husbandman: ‘‘I am not, nor never was Master of any Book capable of informing me so far as to give a Botanical Account. . . . I write in the main from the Field of Practice’’ (II:149). 30. See Book Three of Gulliver’s Travels ([1726] 1735), where a group of the science-obsessed carve their food into bizarre shapes. 31. Martha Bradley, The British Housewife: Or, the Cook, Housekeeper’s, and Gardiner’s Companion (1756; Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 1996), 3. The text was originally issued in twelve monthly installments corresponding to the months of the year and was then published as a two-volume set. Citations refer to the two-volume republished set. 32. Bradley’s advice was as much behavioral as culinary and resonates with common conduct-book admonitions. Eliza Haywood’s A Present for a Serving Maid (1744) inveighed against sloth, noting that when afflicted with it, ‘‘the best Prescription is a willing Mind’’ (9). Just as cookbooks overlap with books on gardening (see chapter 1), they tend to colonize the conduct book genre as well, encouraging readers toward energetic perfectionism. Hannah Wooley’s The Gentlewoman’s Companion (1675), as much conduct book as cookbook, instructed the under Cook-Maid to ‘‘put that in practice which you have observed: this course will advance you from a drudg[e] to be a Cook another day’’ (209). Compare Hannah Glasse’s less rigorous standard in The Art of Cookery, that is, her claim that ‘‘every Servant who can but read will be capable of making a tolerable good Cook’’ (Preface). 33. Compare Samuel Richardson’s wish-fulfillment fantasy Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded (1740), where a servant succeeded in marrying her rich master by withholding sexual favors under near-irresistible pressure. 34. Compare such testing, both of the recipe and of the self, to the cavalier attitude recently attributed to the French by one of their compatriots remarking on Julia Child’s precision. Citing a ‘‘combination of scientific and empirical virtues’’ as the reason why Americans write better cookbooks than the French, the author observed: ‘‘The French think that they are

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natural-born cooks; they prepare a dish off the top of their heads, without testing it. In France, we rush over explanations.’’ See ‘‘‘A French Chef’ Whose Appeal Doesn’t Translate Well in France,’’ New York Times, September 17, 2009, A6. 35. Nigella Lawson, Nigella Bites (London: Chatto and Windus, 2001), Preface. Much has been written on the sexuality of television cooks. See, for example, ‘‘Nigella Bites the Naked Chef: The Sexual and the Sensual in Television Cookery Programs,’’ in Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster, eds., The Recipe Reader: Narratives—Contexts—Traditions (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 187–204. The original Joy of Cooking (1931) was famously conversational. See Anne Mendelson, Stand Facing the Stove: The Story of the Women who Gave America The Joy of Cooking (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996): ‘‘American women in their new centralized, unexpectedly isolated kitchens, facing the solitary task of meal making with no more of the old communal knowledge than Irma [Rombauer] possessed on her wedding day, wanted nothing more than just such a radiant presence at their sides’’ (146). 36. The desublimated author, present in the text and addressing the reader, is a novelistic device employed in eighteenth-century texts such as Tom Jones (1749). In cookbooks, the author’s commentary on the text, as well as on the reader’s relation to it, is much more encouraging than assertions in the Preface of ‘‘intelligibility’’ or superiority to the competition. Indeed, compare the liveliness of Bradley and Glasse with the wan passivity of The Accomplished Housekeeper (1797), which states in the Preface that: ‘‘The Editors do not presume to arrogate to themselves the reputation of having ushered into the world a Work entirely new, which indeed could not be expected, but they flatter themselves, that the alterations they have made [from a prior edition] will, in some degree, entitle them to the patronage of the Public.’’ Would a novice cook have any confidence in such claims? 37. Print has whole-heartedly adopted the idea that readers are partners in adapting recipes. The Food section of the New York Times for September 16, 2009 contains a green tomato soup with optional cr
eme fraiche; a kasha-stuffed chicken with optional mushrooms; a spiced chicken liver mousse where a topping of solidified fat could be removed or stirred back into the chilled mouse; and Thai-style crab cakes where mayonnaise was dismissed as inauthentic but then suggested anyway for the sauce. Perhaps because newspapers are less permanent than books, and their recipes more likely to be made on a whim based on what is in the fridge, the editors are less invested in the sanctity of recipes and recommendations. The fixity of print is in this sense tempered by the disposability of the newspaper medium. 38. See for example Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769), Preface.

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39. In Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, Patronage (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Naomi Tadmor demonstrates how parental death, household breakup, and servants’ mobility led to ‘‘significant fluidity in household composition,’’ often destroying continuity in adult supervision (34). As young people formed new households, they suddenly needed domestic instruction. 40. George Dalrymple, The Practice of Modern Cookery (1781), Preface. 41. As David Duff remarks in Modern Genre Theory (Harlow, UK: Longmans, 2000), ‘‘the problem of genre is always liable to open up into larger questions about the organisation and transmission of knowledge’’ (2). 42. Modern cookbook authors follow an array of conventions. See, for example, Ostmann and Baker, The Recipe Writer’s Handbook. 43. In the dozens of eighteenth-century cookbooks researched for this book, only one copyright notice appeared, most likely because such notices were futile. Almost everyone copied from everyone. See J. Skeat, The Art of Cookery (1769), which declared ‘‘This Book is entered at Stationers Hall, therefore whoever prints or pirates it will be prosecuted.’’ 44. See Jennifer Stead, ‘‘Quizzing Glasse: Or Hannah Scrutinized,’’ in the reprint edition of Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 1995), xv–xxxiv, xvii. 45. In Observations Concerning the Diet of the Common People (1797), William Buchan observed in a chapter entitled ‘‘Of Butter,’’ that ‘‘It has been said, that the English have a thousand religions and but one sauce. It must be allowed that they use butter with every kind of food’’ (24). 46. Bradley’s recipe is taken from Glasse in The Art of Cookery, but offers improvements, for example, in advising cooks to use as little flour as possible. 47. Irma Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, Joy of Cooking (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 338, in a recipe for ‘‘Drawn or Clarified Butter.’’ Not even Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (New York: Scribner, 2004)—the bible of kitchen science—is as explicit as Bradley on the simple process of melting butter. See McGee’s entry on Butter and Margarine, 33–39. 48. With regard to retaining readers in a marketplace filled with competition, fiction and nonfiction employed similar strategies. Henry Fielding, for example, sought to keep readers involved in Tom Jones by holding out promises of new revelations. See Sherman, ‘‘Reading at Arm’s Length.’’ 49. Glasse had given virtually identical advice two generations earlier, but it has clearly gained currency, becoming more of a standard admonition than mere plagiarism. 50. See Sandra Sherman, Fresh From the Past: Recipes and Revelations from Moll Flanders’ Kitchen (Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2004), 288–89.

CHAPTER 3

COMPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

Cookbooks are not just bare collections of recipes. They are about the recipes—how to judge ingredients, how to master required techniques. Yet such pedagogical generosity, now taken for granted, was not always the case. This chapter explores how the provision of complementary material increased and became virtually conventional in the eighteenth century.

THE COMPENDIOUS TEXT The Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook, first published in 1948 and now a collector’s item, is like one of those dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History.1 It is not only astonishing for its immense size, but deeply interesting as an anatomy of everything that preceded it. To dissect this monster is to lay bare the very soul of cookbook history. In its almost 1,000 pages, the Cookbook recapitulates almost every feature developed by its eighteenthcentury English counterparts, as if somehow one or another might escape if not held fast between its covers. Like its predecessors, the Cookbook sought to convince readers that all its vast detail was nonetheless tailored to a specific reader— the one who had just picked it up. The Contents page includes ‘‘Your Menus,’’ ‘‘Your Soups and Chowders,’’ ‘‘Your Breads, Biscuits & Rolls,’’ ‘‘Your Sandwiches,’’ ‘‘Your Snacks and Appetizers,’’ and on and on towards ‘‘Your Fine Art of Carving,’’ ‘‘Your Table Setting and Entertaining,’’ and finally ‘‘Your Index.’’ You are the object of all this information. The author (or actually, compiler), Ruth Berolzheimer,

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conveys by her rhetoric (and scrupulous completeness) that she ‘‘gets’’ you in all your culinary neediness. You want help, wall-towall guidance in everything food related. Before the recipes even begin, Berolzheimer channels Martha Bradley, offering copious sections like Definitions (‘‘Aspic—a transparent jelly usually made of meat stock’’); Food Ingredients; Varieties of Food (fourteen kinds of oranges, thirty-four different apples); Care of Foods (‘‘Store eggs in closed container in refrigerator, small side down’’); Requirements for Good Nutrition; Purchasing Guides (one pound of tea ¼ sixty cups); Tables of Equivalents; Kitchen Hints (‘‘to divide an egg’’); Equipment and Its Care; Time, Temperatures, & Tests; and most Bradleyan of all, Some Rules and Advice (what, for example, happens when pastry is rolled too thin?). There are 700 menus for every day of the year. There are thousands of recipes. Such abundance, the Introduction insists, will impart ‘‘a comforting feeling of confidence in the final product.’’ Like an eighteenth-century text, the Cookbook is about you—what you need to know, how best you can learn it—while it is also self-reflexive, avowing its desire to ‘‘comfort.’’ The Cookbook wants to be your source when you want advice. Only somewhat more subtly, the current crop of encyclopedic cookbooks (with a small ‘‘c,’’) takes much the same position in relation to readers’ needs. Susan Westmoreland’s All New Good Housekeeping Cookbook (2003), for example, explains kitchen equipment, food safety and storage, and setting a table. Joy of Cooking has massive summaries of scientific data on food and personal nutrition. Ruth Reichl’s Gourmet Cookbook (2004) has sections on Basics and Tips & Techniques. Modern cookbooks tend to surround their recipes. Even nonencyclopedic books, which focus on one chef’s repertoire or on a unique cuisine, provide information to help readers understand the recipes and how to prepare them.2 Because the provision of complementary material is so much a factor in constructing the modern culinary text, this chapter investigates the origin of this practice in the eighteenth century.

COOKING THROUGH THE YEAR Seasonality informs the Encyclopedic Cookbook with daily menus and with charts on available fruits and vegetables. In a modern cookbook (albeit a collector’s item), the reasons for offering seasonal data are

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primarily cultural, as ingredients can be found year-round provided one is willing to pay. Yet it is precisely because the culture is changing in favor of sustainability, that attempts to coordinate the modern kitchen with Nature are becoming a cookbook staple: urban gardening is practiced even on New York City rooftops, and the ‘‘fresh, local, seasonal’’ mantra has captured conscious cookery.3 Popular titles advertise seasonality—consider, for example, John Bishop’s Fresh: Seasonal Recipes Made with Local Foods (2007) and Simply Bishop’s Easy Seasonal Recipes (2002); Terry Walters’ Clean Food: A Seasonal Guide to Eating Close to the Source (2009); Keith Snow’s The Harvest Eating Cookbook: More than 200 Recipes for Cooking with Seasonal Local Ingredients (2009), Fine Cooking Fresh: 350 Recipes that Celebrate the Seasons (2009) from Fine Cooking magazine, and Devra Gartenstein’s Local Bounty: Seasonal Vegan Recipes (2008). Seasonality is now a selling point, not a compromise. Alinea (2008), named for Grant Anchatz’ temple of fine cuisine, pivots around the seasons, and instructs readers to follow them in ‘‘How to Use This Book.’’ Jeff Croup and Bettina Schormann’s Earth to Table: Seasonal Recipes from an Organic Farm (2009), with an introduction by food activist Michael Pollan, has beautiful pictures and long discussions of natural ingredients. The extravagant but also meticulous design of these texts assumes that if readers plan to shop organically and cook consciously, they will seek out enlightening information before preparing their food. Famously, Alice Waters’ culinary crusade is based on seasonality, and seasonality structures the array of ‘‘garden-to-table’’ books that have followed Helen Witty and Burton Woolf’s classic, The Garden to Table Cookbook: How to Grow Your Own Food, Put It Up, and Serve It in over 300 Savory Ways (1976).4 In the next several years, seasonality may be a central feature of cookbooks, so much so that it is taken for granted. The construction of cookbooks around seasonality became prominent in the eighteenth century, which, in effect, had little choice but to follow nature.5 Martha Bradley’s The British Housewife (1756) is divided into monthly installments so that readers can learn what is in season and how best to use it. January, for example, has a lengthy chapter on ‘‘The Art of Marketing and chusing Fresh Provisions’’ (I:19–28). How does one select beef, mutton, or veal at this chilly time of year? Winter months are treated as less abundant and, hence, more demanding of the conscientious housewife. There are chapters

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‘‘Fish Flesh Fowl’’ (Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.)

on ‘‘chusing’’ store-bought products (pickled salmon, salt cod) and on maintaining the garden and orchard. In other months, chapters treat ‘‘cyder-making,’’ brewing, and distilling, each keyed to the season (cider, for example, is made in the fall). Appealing ‘‘Bills of Fare’’ correspond to the season, so that one’s table is happily in sync with Nature (which Bradley capitalizes). Each month Bradley provides comparable instructions, not just for using what is available but for ensuring an ongoing food supply. In March, for example, when there is a hint of spring, one must start preparing for summer: About the Middle of the Month let the Gardiner look to his Strawberry-beds, and, if he has not yet done it, let him go to work immediately. (I:300)

The British Housewife is organized around natural rhythms; its structure promotes readers’ consciousness of what is available and should be consumed each month, and explains how to cultivate one’s garden and put food by for the coming months. While Bradley’s text aimed at an urban readership around the town of Bath, she preserves the country-house ethos of a self-sustaining household. Her urban

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readers, like modern readers of Earth to Table or one of the vast array of ‘‘seasonal’’ texts, are enabled to take from this ethos what they can and to go into the markets with a clearer sense of where food came from, what to choose, and why such decisions matter. Richard Briggs’ The English Art of Cookery (1794) contains ‘‘bills of fare for every month of the year’’ plus a ‘‘Catalogue of Fish, Game, Poultry, Fruit, and Garden Vegetables in Season every Month of the Year.’’ John Farley’s The London Art of Cookery (1783, 1792) has similar features as do Collingwood and Woolams’ The Universal Cook (1792) and James Jenks’ The Complete Cook (1768). Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747) has a chapter on ‘‘How to market, and the Seasons of the Year for Butcher’s Meat, Poultry, Fish.’’ Fish is the particular study of Elizabeth Moxon’s English Housewifry (1785), which notes of dace, for example: [They] spawn about the middle of March, are in season about three weeks after; they are not very good till Michaelmas, and are the best in February. (vii)

In one sentence, Moxon confers on this fish a culinary life cycle. Indeed, starting early in the century, one can hardly avoid such seasonally attuned material, partly because there is so much nonculinary writing on how to raise and shop for food. Such writing, to the extent that it overlaps with cookbooks, competes with cookbooks. Yet since eighteenth-century cookbooks are rarely blind-sided by potential competition, they expand into areas addressed by the competition, which then become cookbook standards, bolstering primary offerings. Indeed, as this and subsequent chapters will show, cookbooks are an aggrandizing genre; they pick up ideas from adjacent genres and suit them to culinary objectives. They also tend to recycle and update ideas from earlier, related texts. Thus insofar as seasonality was a feature of seventeenth-century household manuals, it turns up again in eighteenth-century cookbooks in renovated form. Contemporary, adjacent genres were, however, the greatest potential sources of complementary data. There were endless books on gentleman farming and the seasonal management of gardens and fish ponds. John Laurence’s A New System of Agriculture (1727), for example, contained long sections on all three, providing an integrated plan of resource management. Amateur gardening books—with a much smaller compass—provided monthly ‘‘calendars’’ showing how to manage kitchen gardens and orchards; many

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such books also explain how to use and preserve produce, as well as how to make wines and cordials (all of which were cookbook staples).6 John Trusler’s London Adviser and Guide (1786)—a manual for urban living—provided instructions on how to tell when meat, fish, and other comestibles were fresh and in season; like all such guides, it preaches wariness.7 Cookbooks display elements of such texts, making of seasonality an organizing, instrumental principle that is nonetheless shaped to support kitchen-based activities. This absorptive, shaping process is apparent in William Henderson’s The Housekeeper’s Instructor (1790). Primarily a culinary text, the Instructor contains extensive material on managing the kitchen garden. While it could be a gardening manual on its own, the Instructor integrates garden management into the book’s particular, culinary objectives, and suggests that attentive gardening is crucial to a good year-round diet: Though the management of the Kitchen-Garden is not to be considered as the direct province of the housekeeper, yet, as the productions are so essential in a family, by their great addition to cookery, it cannot be thought improper for the principals of that family to be informed of the necessary steps that should be taken, in order to furnish the table with all sorts of plants and roots according to their respective seasons. (415)

Nothing could be more modern. Books such as Adam’s Luxury and Eve’s Cookery (1744) and Primitive Cookery (1767) were equally cookbooks and gardening manuals, focused on promoting seasonal cuisine. Like many twenty-first-century garden-to-table offerings, these texts were partly ideological, partly practical. They made a virtue of necessity, encouraging readers to enjoy what was at hand. Such books rarely mentioned the ‘‘hot-house’’ manuals flooding the market with advice on producing food out of season, with pineapples (among other exotica) available all year long.8 Palpable in such books’ detailed instructions was an impetus to grow one’s own and buy fresh, such that true ‘‘luxury’’ was natural.9 It appears that what goes around comes around in the growing number of twenty-first-century texts that encourage seasonal cuisine. Spinage Toasts, from Adam’s Luxury, and Eve’s Cookery (1744) Pick it, boil it, and blanch it off in boiling Water for a quarter of an Hour; then strain it, squeeze it, mince it, and put it in a Mortar, with three

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Spoonfuls of Apples boiled to a Marmalade, the Yolk of four Eggs boil’d hard, three raw, and a Couple of coarse Biskets soak’d in Cream, and seasoned with Salt and Sugar; beat them together and put them in a Dish, and mix with them an Handful of Currants picked and washed, and three or four Spoonfuls of melted Butter; then make small Toasts, and spread your Spinage on them, wet it over with the White of an Egg, butter the Bottom of a Mazarine Dish, lay your Toasts on, and bake them; they will be done in half an Hour; scrape a little Nutmeg, and squeeze a little Orange on them, so to serve.

When garden books taught readers how to put food by and make table wines, the ethos, again, was that of an integrated household. Cookbooks that taught gardening came out in virtually the same place, that is, teaching readers how to garden so that food preparation was integral to the household economy. In view of this striking overlap of genres, it is difficult to define either genre—that is, in the eighteenth century, where do cookbooks end and garden books begin? The ‘‘where’’ was a matter of emphasis, which was often but not always clear, with enough in-between so as to vex the question. Indeed, the eighteenth-century emergence of the novel (from genres ranging from romance to news) offers fascinating parallels in terms of generic blur and demonstrates—if any such demonstration were needed—that cookbooks are complex, and in their history as complex in some ways as the novel. Both genres perversely defied delineation (or rather, confinement), conforming to what critics see as the inherent instability of generic norms. It has been observed that ‘‘genres hardly do anything except mix, and . . . theorists are well aware of this.’’10 To trace the expression of seasonality in cookbooks through generic borrowings and recycling just bears this point out. AVOIDING TROUBLE Modern cookbooks are full of advice on purchasing and storing food, the use of nonreactive utensils, and what to do if custard curdles. For example, Eugenia Bone’s Well-Preserved: Recipes and Techniques for Putting Up Small Batches of Seasonal Foods (2009) warns home-canners to avoid botulism. Yet this kind of advice was nothing new to the eighteenth century: meat was easily spoiled, especially in summer; flour was wormy; salt was sodden; pots never quite got clean. A direct link, therefore, exists between twenty-first-century

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advice-laden texts and their eighteenth-century counterparts. While the problems are usually different, the spirit is the same. The object is to avoid trouble by taking adequate precautions. John Evelyn’s Acetaria, for example, warns salad makers to use knives made of ‘‘silver, and by no steel, which all acids are apt to corrode, and retain a metallic relish of.’’ Salad dishes must be ‘‘of porcelane,’’ since pewter and even silver do not agree with ‘‘oyl and vinegar.’’11 As a scientist, and founder of the Royal Society, Evelyn was a student of food chemistry, much in the mold of Harold McGee.12 Eighteenth-century cookbooks buttressed their culinary advice with science, especially to ward off disease. As an Appendix to The Modern Art of Cookery Improved (1767), Ann Shackleford includes a ‘‘Dissertation on the different Kinds of Food, their Nature, Quality, and various Uses. By a Physician.’’ The Preface hints at a system of food compatibility that might pass for trendy today, and that is justified by citation to medical authority: She has avoided the errors which those people give into who are unacquainted with the nature and affinities of the materials they have in hand namely, that of using ingredients that counteract each other, and thereby increase the expence of the dish without improving its flavor. But errors of this sort not only make dishes expensive, they are also by that means frequently rendered unwholesome: to remove any evil of that kind which ought above all things to be guarded against, the whole of this book has been submitted to the inspection of a physician of eminence, who has kindly added a concise dissertation on aliments. (iv)

Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Cookbook (2000) would be at home in this company. Shackleford’s claim to exceptional prudence was of a piece with the deluge of medical and diet advice inundating the English and constitutes yet another instance of cookbooks’ seeking to co-opt collateral, potentially competing segments of the advice industry.13 There was really no end to such attempts—if a food scare surfaced in print (along with a remedy), cookbooks were not far behind. In 1757, for example, an inflammatory text appeared entitled Poison Detected; or Frightful Truths; And Alarming to the British Metropolis. In a Treatise on Bread; and the Abuses Practiced in Making that Food, As Occasioning the Decrease and Degeneracy of the People; Destroying Infants; and Producing Innumerable Diseases . . . By My Friend, A Physician. In excruciating detail, Poison explained how the

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Cover of Poison Detected (1757).

addition of lime, chalk, and alum—all used to whiten bread—was killing the British people. The uproar reached Parliament, with some claiming that the bones of dead people were ground up and added to dough.14 Allegations of adulteration appeared throughout the century. Concise Observations on Our Common Food (1787), for example, insisted that ‘‘there is no doubt but bakers use allum, or

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some other ingredient, to make their bread white,’’ adding that the practice was especially harmful to children (17). A Rich Seed Cake, from Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) Take a Pound of Flour well dried, a Pound of Butter, a Pound of Loaf-Sugar beat and sifted, eight Eggs, two ounces of Carriway Seeds, one Nutmeg grated, and its Weight of Cinnamon; first beat your Butter to a Cream, then put in your Sugar, beat the Whites of your Eggs half an Hour, mix them with your Sugar and Butter, then beat the Yolks half an Hour, put it to the Whites, beat in your Flour, Spices, and Seeds, a little before it goes to the Oven, put it in the Hoop and bake it two Hours in a quick Oven, and let it stand two Hours.—it will take two Hours beating.

Cookbooks took up the campaign, explaining how to detect adulterated flour. An Appendix to John Farley’s The London Art of Cookery (1792), ‘‘Considerations on the Adulteration of Bread and Flour,’’ warned that while ‘‘some people may suppose, that these horrid iniquities [i.e., the addition of alum, chalk, slaked lime ‘and even ashes of bones’] are only imaginary, or at least exaggerated, and that such mixtures must be discovered by the most ordinary taste,’’ they could only be detected by various ‘‘experiments.’’ One of these required that those without scientific equipment take at least these modest steps: Slice the crumb of a loaf [into very thin slices], and put it with a great deal of water into a large pipkin. Set this over a gentle fire, and keep it going a long time moderately hot. Then pour off the pap, and the bone-ashes, or other ingredients, will be found at the bottom. (439)

The prospect of dead men’s bones at the bottom of one’s pot surely must have raised horrid specters. But this never stopped even genteel Charlotte Mason, who deployed much the same language in The Lady’s Assistant (1773). Another, more serious concern, was verdigris—a poison that leached into foods from copper pots—which was one of an array of potentially lethal culinary poisons. In The British Housewife, Martha Bradley complained of confectioners’ coloring apples with a greenish tint extracted from copper: ‘‘a light Kind of Verdigrease which gets into the Apple; this gives it the Colour, but it is a sort of Poison’’ (I:267). Kitchen poisons were terrifying, and Bradley promised that her recipes would exclude them. In 1781, Joseph Robertson produced An Essay on Culinary Poisons. Containing Cautions Relative to the Use

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Trade card of Robert Howard, Tin-plate-worker and Brazier. (From Ambrose Heal, London Tradesmen’s Cards of the 18th Century. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1968.)

of Laurel-leaves, hemlock, mushrooms, copper-vessels, etc., which grouped verdigris together with several well-known botanicals known to be deadly. Both Farley and Charlotte Mason had extensive sections on verdigris, which would have scared even the dullest servant into ensuring

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Trade card of Benjamin Whittow, Copper and Brass Plate. (From Ambrose Heal, London Tradesmen’s Cards of the 18th Century. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1968.)

that her master’s pots were well tinned.15 Both cite a 1755 text with the ominous title Serious Reflections on the Manifold Dangers Attending the Use of Copper Vessels . . . in the Preparations of all such Solids and Liquids as are Designed for Food to Human Bodies. A Hare Pye, from Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) Cut a large Hare in Pieces, season it well with Mace, Nutmeg, Pepper, and Salt, put it in a Jug, with half a Pound of Butter, cover it close up with Paste

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or Cloth, set it in a Copper of boiling Water, and let it stew one Hour and a half, then take it out to cool, and make a rich Force-meat of a quarter of a Pound of scraped bacon, two Onions, a Glass of Red Wine, the Crumb of a Penny Loaf, a little Winter Savory, the Liver cut small, a little Nutmeg, season it high with Pepper, and Salt, mix it up with the Yolks of three Eggs, raise the Pye and lay the Force-meat in the Bottom, lay in the Hare, with the Gravy that came out of the Hare, lay the Lid on it; it will take an Hour and a half to bake it. It is a handsome Dish for a large Table.

The verdigris scare has a particularly modern ring—the poison is seemingly everywhere, like mercury, and nobody can escape it without vigilance. In Farley’s words: Verdigrise is one of the most violent poisons in nature; and yet, rather than quit an old custom, the greater part of mankind are content to swallow some of this poison every day. Our food receives its quantity of poison in the kitchen, by the use of copper pans and dishes; the brewer mingles poison in your beer, by boiling it in a copper; salt is distributed to the people from copper scales, covered with verdigrise; our pickles are rendered green by an infusion of copper, the pastrycook bakes our tarts in copper pans; but confections and syrups have greater powers of destruction, as they are set over a fire in copper vessels which have not been tinned, and the verdigrise is plentifully extracted by the acidity of the composition. After all, though we do not swallow death in a single dose, yet it is certain that a quantity of poison, however small, which is repeated with every meal, must produce more fatal effects than is generally believed. (433)

This is extraordinary language for a cookbook and demonstrates how far the genre had progressed (albeit breathlessly) toward seeking to regulate the kitchen. In this vein, Charlotte Mason not only warns cooks to be ‘‘particularly careful in keeping [pots] clean and well tinned’’ (Appendix, 29), but she cites the ubiquitous ‘‘Dr. Mead’’ (Richard Mead, author of A Mechanical Account of Poisons in Several Essays [1702]) for a ‘‘common cure’’ for poison.16 Farley and Mason also tackle the dangers of mushrooms, laurel, and hemlock, and Mason has a long discussion on water quality that could fit right into a modern, forward-looking cookbook promoting ‘‘natural’’ lifestyles. During the eighteenth century, cookbooks began to critique the culture (‘‘the greater part of mankind are content to swallow . . . poison every day’’) and to advocate a type of lifestyle management pivoting on food. This enterprise, designed to sell books and aggrandize

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collateral, competing texts was astonishingly modern, vividly anticipating the impulses of twenty-first-century texts. Crucially, it reflects the way that cookbooks participated in larger cultural conversations: if the purity and safety of food were matters of public concern, cookbooks both contributed to that concern and to the dissemination of ideas about how to cope. When cookbooks were not attempting to keep readers from dying of poison, they tried to forestall waste.17 This often took the form of instructions on how to recover spoiled meat. William Ellis’ Country Housewife’s Family Companion gave as an example a woman who made pies out of rancid meat that had been cleaned, spiced, and minced. Hannah Glasse offered a recipe ‘‘To keep Venison or Hares sweet; or to make them fresh, when they stink’’ (8). As yeast was another commodity likely to go bad, several books suggested how to revive it. Martha Bradley called for adding sugar, brandy, salt, flour, and beer (I:369). William Ellis went on for pages with an array of country methods. He also had advice for curing damaged wheat meal; preserving potatoes; preserving eggs; and destroying worms, weevils, and maggots. All the cookbooks had extensive directions on putting food by— pickling, salting, drying, smoking, preserving in brandy, or preserving in sugar. Anti-French rhetoric in these books was as much antiwaste as it was rank chauvinism. Even opulent books conveyed the sense that where food was not consumed, it should be saved for the poor.

TRUSSING AND CARVING Seventeenth-century cookbooks struggled to convey the how-to’s of even basic techniques such as roasting, and rarely thought to demonstrate how to truss a roast beforehand, and carve it afterward. Although Robert May took a stab at carving in The Accomplisht Cook (1660), his directions were limited to fowl and fish and could have been hard to follow if one were unfamiliar with the anatomies of either.18 The eighteenth century’s innovation was to teach cooks how to truss and hosts how to carve with reference to diagrams and keyed instructions. Such directions eliminated any excuses. Trussing became a measure of culinary skill; carving became a social grace, especially for women. Moreover, in providing such guidance, cookbooks enhanced their status as arbiters of culinary standards, as well as of the associated aspects of social performance. They further consolidated their position as prescribers of the Right Way to do things in the realm of keeping

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Trussing instructions from The Lady’s Companion (1753).

house, thereby representing not just local practices but the uniform, ‘‘British’’ practice touted in so many cookbook titles (indeed, Collingwood and Woolams had ‘‘Universal’’ aspirations).19 Trussing became the first important instructional area in which cookbooks utilized illustrations and keyed diagrams. While earlier texts, such as May’s, had used fanciful drawings of pies and molds to suggest a finished product, these were actually more decorative than useful, concerned with a dish’s presentation rather than with the technical side of its preparation. This changed in the eighteenth century, as authors realized that readers needed graphic demonstrations of how to truss birds and game for different types of procedures. (Drawings in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking

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demonstrate how to truss a chicken, still aware that readers may be puzzled.) Martha Bradley offers illustrations of ‘‘A Rabbit truss’d for Boiling,’’ and ‘‘A Hare truss’d for Roasting,’’ as well as several trussed birds. Mrs. Frazer’s The Practice of Cookery (1800) offers similar schematic drawings; in both instances, the drawings look like teaching tools, and graphically signal the reader that they convey selected data necessary to perform a singular back-end procedure—trussing.20 Capons in Pottage in the French Fashion, from Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook (1660) Draw and truss the Capons, set them, and fill their bellies with marrow; then put them in a pipkin with a knuckle of veal, a neck of mutton, a marrow bone, and some sweet breads of veal, season the broth with cloves mace, and a little salt, and set it to the fire; let it boil gently till the capons be enough, but have a care you boil them not too much; as your capons boil, make ready the bottoms and tops of eight or ten rowls of French bread, put them dried into a fair silver dish, wherein you serve the capons; set it on the fire, and put to the bread two ladle-full of broth wherein the capons are boil’d, & a ladleful of mutton gravy; cover the dish and let it stand till you dish up the capons; if need require, add now and then a ladle-full of broth or gravy: when you are ready to serve it, first lay on the marrow-bone, then the capons on each side; then fill up the dish with gravy of mutton, and wring on the juyce of a lemon or two; then with a spoon take off all the fat that swimmeth on the pottage; garnish the capons with the sweetbreads, and some carved lemon, and serve it hot.

This was nothing short of a cookbook revolution, literally acknowledging that pictures can easily, efficiently convey ideas that might seem difficult because they are unfamiliar.21 It is the direct antecedent of books such as Jacques Pepin’s Complete Techniques—Featuring More than 1000 Cooking Methods and Recipes all Demonstrated in Thousands of Step-by-Step Photographs (2001), and Le Cordon Bleu Cooking Techniques—Over 700 Illustrated Techniques, 2000 Photos, 200 Recipes (1996). The Lady’s Companion (1753) is even more pedagogically sophisticated than its peers; it provides not just a picture, but a description of the trussing process coordinated with the picture. The extensive section on trussing thus includes detailed diagrams with lettered keys tied to specific, sequential instructions. Under a diagram entitled ‘‘The Manner of Trussing a Pheasant or Partridge,’’ the directions walk a reader through each step, so that even if she has never trussed a bird in her life she can make a credible attempt: Both the Pheasant and the Partridge are truss’d in the same Way, only the Neck of the Partridge is cut off, and the Head of the Pheasant is

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Carving instructions from William Augusts Henderson, The Housekeeper’s Instructor (1795).

left on: The Cut [i.e., woodcut] above shews the Pheasant truss’d. When it is drawn [i.e., eviscerated], cut off the Pinions, leaving only the Stump-bone next the Breast, and pass a Skewer through its Point, and through the Body near the Back; and then give the neck a turn; and passing it by the Back, bring the Head on the outside of the other Wing-bone, as at A, and run the Skewer through both, with the Head standing towards the Neck, or the Rump, which you please: B is where the Neck runs. Then take the Legs, with their Claws on, and press them by the Joints together, So as to press the lower Part

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of the breast; then press them down Between the Sideman, and pass a Skewer through all, as at C. Remember a Partridge must have its neck cut off, or else in every Thing is trussed like a Pheasant. (368)

This passage is not unlike that in which Farley warns readers about verdigris: each is highly specific, leaving readers little excuse not to grasp the author’s intent. Such passages, in their detail and obvious concern that readers get the point, both prescribe standards and enable readers to meet them (a person could tick off items in Farley’s catalogue of risks and carefully avoid each one). In the Companion’s case, the reader can mentally review the process before she tries it, allowing her to ponder points along the way that seem particularly knotty. Such intermittent focus is, of course, how people actually learn—rather than taking in a subject all at once, the process is broken down into manageable steps. Modern ‘‘illustrated’’ cookbooks provide just this type of instruction, showing how each step in making a souffle, for example, leads to the next.22 The graphic presentation of trussing, therefore, was not only a major advance, but a major insight. Cookbooks focused on creating learning protocols that seemed natural, rather than forced, artificial, or elitist, such that instruction could be seen as laying down comprehensible standards in which readers could readily acquiesce.23 William Augustus Henderson’s The Housekeeper’s Instructor . . . To which is added, The Complete Art of Carving (1795) does for carving what The Lady’s Companion, and books like it, does for trussing: it demystifies the process, graphically illustrating how each step is performed. Hares, pheasants, geese, partridges, and pigeons are laid out with striations corresponding to letters that correspond to keyed instructions. The instructions are absolutely clear. In cutting up a partridge, for example, represented in Plate I, ‘‘the wings must be taken off in lines a, b, and the merry-thought in the line c, d’’ (364). Regarding pigeons, the text is even more specific, adding upto-date social practice to a precise description of knife skills: Here are the representations of two [pigeons], the one with the back uppermost, and the other with the breast.—That with the back uppermost is marked No. 1, and that with the breast, No. 2. Pigeons are sometimes cut up in the same manner as chickens. But as the lower part, with the thigh is in general the most preferred, and as, from its small size, half a one is not too much for most appetites, they are seldom carved now, otherwise than by fixing the fork at point a, entering

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Diagram for carving a hare from John Trusler, The Honours of the Table (1788).

the knife just before it, and dividing the pigeon into two, cutting away in the lines a, b, and a, c, No. 1, at the same time bringing the knife out at the back, in the direction a, b, and a, c, No. 2. (364)

The description sounds like an exercise in geometry, a sort of proof that two straight lines drawn with a knife will, at proper angles, produce a well-carved bird. No more guessing or tugging at cartilage. No more public humiliation as pieces fly off the platter into somebody’s lap. It also provides related advice on how much is appropriate to serve. Humiliation was a serious risk for those who would undertake disjointing a chicken. Unlike trussing, which was performed in the kitchen away from prying eyes, carving was public, a test of skill and dexterity that could be assessed by everyone at table. Henderson homes in on the social consequences of not knowing how to carve: Nothing is more disagreeable to a person who is placed at the head of a table, and whose business it is to pay the necessary honours to guests invited, than to be defective in not being able to carve the different articles provided. From the want of knowledge in this particular, it must naturally become no less painful to the person who undertakes the task, than uncomfortable to those who are waiting for the compliment to be served. (362)

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Words like ‘‘disagreeable,’’ ‘‘painful,’’ ‘‘uncomfortable’’ suggest that failure to measure up will have personal consequences resulting in reduced self-esteem. It will cause embarrassment and seem like negligence toward friends and family. Fortunately, the cookbook offers a way past such a catastrophe. In its explanation of carving (as a skill and as a social requirement), the cookbook demonstrates why the reader desperately needs it, providing instruction that is ancillary to ‘‘cooking’’ but central to the service of food in a social setting. The cookbook defines a set of integrated food practices that readers need to know, while it also makes possible their acquisition. Anyone reading The Housekeeper’s Instructor, however, would not have been surprised that it pirated this information from a collateral, competing text, John Trusler’s The Honours of the Table, or, Rules for Behavior During Meals; with the Whole Art of Carving, Illustrated by a Variety of Cuts (1787). Virtually all the Housekeeper’s graphics and explanations concerning the art of carving first appear in The Honours. Such wholesale lifting is a classic instance of eighteenth-century cookbooks’ assimilating (without apology) existing, related material.24 Yet it is also, and more importantly, an example of how cookbooks gave further currency to cultural information by creating alternative sources for its acquisition. Not everyone would have bought The Honours; it devotes more than seventy pages to carving, preceded by a long discussion of the intricate niceties of table service. This is followed by marketing advice and behavioral tips for children. Not everyone needs all of this. Cookbooks, however, select information from other texts based on what suits a wider audience, and edit out the rest; hence they promote circulation of information among audiences who otherwise might be remote from each other. The most serious carvers will still read Trusler, as will those obsessed with who sits where at a formal dinner. However, those who need information in a variety of fields—but do not want to be inundated—will go with Henderson. The bottom line is that by providing an array of collateral data, cookbooks allowed a greater portion of the population, who might buy one general book rather than several specialized texts, to receive a rounded alimentary education. In a related gesture, some cookbooks reorganized material that was scattered among other texts, creating new relationships among practices that otherwise might not have been apparent. For example, by situating her discussion of carving in the same chapter that examines how to set a table and how to serve guests, Martha Bradley

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draws readers’ attention to functionally related concerns that other cookbooks scatter.25 Many cookbooks offer a seasonal menu accompanied by the display of dishes lined up on a table, but Bradley theorizes how dishes should be placed, creating an aesthetic of table setting that carries over into the aesthetics of carving; this leads readers to appreciate that civilized dining is aesthetic—indeed, a complex aesthetic composed of related elements. Bradley writes of the art of cookery that ‘‘To please the Palate is one Design of this Branch of Study, and to please the Eye is the other’’ (I:69). Thus, where Henderson emphasizes the nice clean lines of a well-carved bird, Bradley takes a more holistic approach, integrating the entire experience of accommodating guests (setting the table, through carving and serving) into one that surrounds those at a table with elegant refinement. This wonderful passage is characteristic of Bradley’s reimagination of the dinner table: A great Painter has lately wrote to prove that there cannot be Beauty in strait Lines: The Tables we use are composed of such, and the Example was never more fully illustrated. The Form of the Table compels us to set the Dishes in the same Manner, that People may have Room for their Plates, and thus all becomes ungraceful. But something may be done to avoid the necessity, even in this Case, of setting Things in Rows, tho’ it has not yet been thought of. (I:70)

Bradley encourages the reader to think holistically, so that even while she describes methodically dismembering turkeys, woodcocks, ducks, and geese, she presents a wider vision in which cut-up birds become part of a beautified table. In this regard, Martha Bradley was the Martha Stewart of her day. One of Stewart’s earliest books, Entertaining (1982), emphasizes the beauty of the table, the entire atmosphere of a meal that ‘‘made food far more than filling’’ (3). She has a long section on Setting the Table, and another on Making Food Look Beautiful. Dozens of photos of table settings each provide arresting details and a different character. Stewart integrates a variety of carefully chosen elements into a total presentation, a total overall effect—which is just what Bradley does. Like Stewart, Bradley is not just into food, but also into creating an ambience in which food is consciously (not just conventionally) presented. Carving becomes an element in a thought-out dinner exemplifying one’s good taste.

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ENTERTAINING Modern cookbooks recognize that even where the cook prepares everyday recipes, a different protocol prevails when food is served to company. The host must be concerned for guests’ comfort and must literally cater to what they expect. For example, in Cooking for Company—All the Recipes You Need for Simple Elegant Entertaining at Home (2003), Nicole Aloni reminds readers that ‘‘If a cocktail party is called for 7 to 9 PM, your guests will rightly expect to be provided with enough food to replace dinner’’ (2). In the Introduction to Bite Size—Elegant Recipes for Entertaining (2006), Francois Payard makes a similar, though Gallically more precise observation: If the party is a pre-dinner cocktail party, six to eight bites per person is enough, but if it is scheduled between 7 and 9 P.M., guests will usually eat ten to fifteen hors d’oeuvres in lieu of dinner.

One of the earliest insights into cookbook writing is that readers do not simply ‘‘cook,’’ but rather cook for a purpose, whether it be feeding a family or entertaining a crowd. Cookbooks advised home cooks on preparing incredibly complicated party fare, such as the multiple dishes to be made from West Indian turtles. Richard Briggs’ recipe for turtle in The English Art of Cookery, in which a fricassee, stuffed shells, and fins are presented separately, runs to almost a thousand words. Specialized caterers helped to kill and prepare 250-pound specimens shipped to London in the ballast of slave ships.26 Yet considerably more modest entertaining still called for preparation, and cookbooks stood ready with advice. Martha Bradley, for example, describes a certain French style of table setting that she favorably contrasts with a British style: Nothing can be more familiar than this Disposition, Yet there is a Freedom, Ease, and Prettyness in it that greatly excels our Method: There is no disagreeable Line, no crowding; the Food is placed conveniently for the Company, and they sit at their Ease, without discommoding their Dishes, or having their Plates half in their Laps. They usually set down six People to this Dinner, and allow Table-room. (I:200)

Bradley here combines aesthetics (‘‘Prettyness,’’ ‘‘no disagreeable Line’’) with ensuring guests’ ‘‘Ease’’ (they do not have ‘‘their Plates half in their Laps’’). She ventures beyond recipes into social relations. In eighteenth-century parlance, she advocates ‘‘politeness’’—that is,

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Bill of Fare from Charles Carter, The Complete Practical Cook (1730).

good manners, elegance, and consideration.27 Indeed, Bradley mentions ‘‘politeness’’ several times in the discussion of serving that follows table setting. It is polite, she suggests, for the hostess to ask guests unaccustomed to company whether she can help them to a particular dish (201). It is ‘‘polite’’ to moderately praise one’s own cooking by way of recommending (202). Such guidance, while not necessary in

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a cookbook, creates a reading environment that puts inexperienced readers at ‘‘Ease,’’ not just guests, allowing them to feel self-assured in presenting food. It makes up for the lack of local advice, which would have been available in country settings but was lacking in the urban environments that young families increasingly inhabited. To say the least, Bradley’s directions are an expansion of those in earlier texts, such as May’s, which were meant to impress and indeed astonish guests without contemplating their comfort or that of the host. An Egg Pie, from Martha Bradley, The British Housewife (1756) Boil a Dozen Eggs hard, take out the Yolks, shred them fine, and then shred in the same Manner a Pound of Suet; when these are mixed well together season them with Pepper and Salt, and add a little beaten Cinnamon. Mix together a Quarter of a Pint of rich Cream, a Glass of Sack, and two Spoonfuls of Rose Water: Mix these well, and then stir in among them a Pound of Currants picked and washed; mix the Egg and Suet with this, and then cover a Dish with very rich Puff paste Crust; put in the Ingredients, cover it up, and send it to a moderate Oven. When it comes home take off the upper Crust, and stir in Half a Pound of Butter; squeeze in the Juice of a moderate Lemon, and then cover up the Pie again, and send it in hot. It is a very rich and well-tasted Pie.

Bradley wants women to enjoy entertaining. She declares it acceptable for the hostess of a large dinner to sit and eat with her guests, rather than constantly looking after everyone: When there are but two or three at Table, and but two or three Dishes, the Mistress of the House should help every body once, and desire them afterwards to take Care of themselves. When there are a great many Dishes and a great deal of Company, she should tell them she leaves them to the French Ease, the Dinner is before them, and they are expected to take Care of themselves and one another. (I:75)

Bradley wants women to take time to eat, and assures them that no law will be broken if they do. In recommending ‘‘French Ease,’’ therefore, she foreshadows modern cookbooks that advise the hostess to prepare dishes in advance so that she can join her guests. Bradley compromises between the hostess not serving guests at all—which ‘‘takes from her the opportunity of serving her Friends’’—and the onerous duty of serving everyone continually. Ultimately, Bradley allows the hostess to judge when there are ‘‘a great many dishes,’’ that is, too much to serve, and when service is

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more a pleasure than a burden. In this sense, the cookbook becomes liberating, allowing readers to draw reasonable lines between politeness and total exhaustion. In The Complete Practical Cook (1730), Charles Carter cleverly ties seasonality to entertaining. He emphasizes the utility of his many illustrated ‘‘Plates’’ that, he suggests, ‘‘exhibit, at one easy and clear View, all that’s necessary and can be procur’d in every Month throughout the Year, to adorn and embellish, and even constitute the Essence of the grandest Entertainment.’’ He goes so far as to state that entertaining—even on the grandest scale—will now be a snap, eliminating the need for a majordomo: They [the Plates] begin with the Month of March . . . and all is perform’d in so exact a Manner, that infallible Methods are thereby pointed out for settling a Table in the most beautiful and elegant Manner, beyond the Power of Mistake; so that all other Direction and Assistance, which at great Entertainments, is generally the Business of a particular Officer deputed for that Purpose, is thereby render’d unnecessary. (‘‘To the Reader’’)

Carter appeals to every host’s dream: no fuss, no ‘‘Mistake,’’ even at the fanciest event. The book does all the planning. Even the servants can go home. In this sense, Carter anticipates Aloni in suggesting that much can be done in advance—except in this case the book does the work instead of the host. Though such a vision is fantasy, it is still potent. Indeed, through various rhetorical strategies, the eighteenth-century cookbook sought to suggest that entertaining was not to be feared since it need not be daunting (if the reader is daunted, then it is her own fault). The message is alive and well in the twenty-first century and is still as much fantasy as it was then. As Martha Stewart declares in Entertaining: ‘‘Think of the pleasure of treating yourself to a favorite meal; multiply this by a guest list and you begin to calculate the pleasures of entertaining’’ (29). What Stewart neglects to mention is that such multiplication is precisely what makes everything a challenge. To Spin a Silver Web for Covering Sweet-meats, from Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) Take a quarter of a Pound of treble-refined Sugar, in one Lump, and set it before a moderate Fire, on the middle of a Silver Salver, or Pewter Plate, set it a little aslant, and when it begins to run like clear Water to the Edge of the

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Plate or Salver, have ready a Tin Cover, or China Bowl set on a Stool, with the Mouth downward, close to your Sugar, that it may not cool by carrying too far, then take a clean Knife, and take up as much of the Syrup as the Point will hold, and a fine Thread will come from the Point, which you must draw as quick as possible backwards and forwards, and also around the Mould, as long as it will spin from the Knife; be very careful you do not drop the Syrup on the Web, if you do, it will spoil it, then dip your Knife into the Syrup again, and take up more, and so keep spinning ’till your Sugar is done, or your Web is thick enough; be sure you do not let the Knife touch the Lump on the Plate that is not melted, it will make it brittle, and not spin at all, if your Sugar is spent before your Web is done, put fresh Sugar on a clean Plate or Salver, and not spin from the same Plate again, if you don’t want the Web to cover the Sweetmeats immediately, set it in a deep Pewter Dish, and cover it with a Tin Cover, and lay a Cloth over it, to prevent the Air from getting to it, and set it before the Fire, (it requires to be kept warm, or it will fall) when your Dinner or Supper is dished, have ready a Plate or Dish, of the size of your Web, filled with different coloured Sweetmeats, and set your Web over it. It is pretty for a Middle, where the Dishes are few, or Corner where the Number is large.

In The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769), Elizabeth Raffald plays fantasy differently, offering excruciatingly difficult recipes for spun sugar decorations in ‘‘Observations on Making Decorations for a Table.’’ Such creations (‘‘A Silver Web for covering Sweetmeats,’’ ‘‘A Gold Web for covering Sweet-meats’’) probably never could be made except by a professional, but they elevate Raffald’s book and convey to readers that entertainments are fun to read about regardless of one’s capability or willingness to go all out. In this sense, Raffald anticipates by some 240 years texts like The Opera Lover’s Cookbook: Menus for Elegant Entertaining (2007), which is almost entirely fantasy (strewn with images of Pavarotti). Perversely, one reason that people read cookbooks is that they cannot make what the books offer, but feel inspired by the instructions to create knockoffs. TECHNIQUES, INGREDIENTS, AND BASIC RECIPES Perhaps no aspect of cooking is harder to pin down than technique, that is, the kind of basic cooking-school skills that make a recipe succeed and that in many cases underlie whole classes of recipes. For example, cookbooks provide hints for how to keep custards from curdling (whether for ice cream or a Boston Cream Pie), how to braise, knead dough, or keep frosting from hardening while it is being

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spread. A cookbook might define ‘‘brown butter’’ and explain why cr
eme fraiche is not fresh cream. It might indicate if a press is required to ‘‘crush’’ garlic. Serious contemporary cookbooks offer endless variations on this type of information, which most readers could not do without. It is why readers buy such cookbooks (knowing the basics, one can be creative). Indeed, Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking (2009) is a sort of anticookbook: it explains the theoretical basis of basic recipes, toward the end of ‘‘liberating’’ cooks from recipes altogether. The idea that rules matter less than understanding is just a modern update of the earlier notion that apprenticeship was the route to true ability. For example, when home bread-making became popular in the 1970s and 1980s (before bread machines), a flurry of books set out to explain what seemed like a mystery, the province of hippies and professional bakers. One text that became a classic, The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book (1984), contained dozens of pages devoted to each step in the process: preparing the yeast, mixing the ingredients, adjusting consistency, kneading, the first rise, deflating the dough, the second rise . . . and on and on. It featured a section on frequently asked questions and explained the quirks in particular recipes (‘‘Troubleshooting English Muffins’’). Special chapters, such as one on using beans in bread, had still more information (‘‘If the soymilk is not first-day fresh . . . it can make a truly weighty loaf’’ [157]). Discussions of kitchen equipment (warming boxes, convection ovens, tin cans suitable for baking) and the ratios of yeast, temperatures, and rising times vaulted the text into a chemistry manual. By the time one read all of this, one dared feel competent. But Laurel’s Kitchen went beyond technique. It also contained precise discussions of ingredients—yeast, water, sweeteners, fats, nuts, seeds, and fruit. Milk products. Starters. Weak flours, strong flours. The mysterious ‘‘desem,’’ central to sourdough bread but probably unknown to most readers. One way that readers knew which bread to try was by studying these discussions—some ingredients seemed exotic, while others were comfortable and prosaic. For Health Nut Bread, one would have to hunt up a store that had ‘‘large-crack raw soy grits’’ (but at least the reader knew what they were and why raw was better than toasted). The Kitchen, aware that readers were new to bread-making and on a mission to excite them, took nothing for granted.28 Indeed, in a remarkable evocation of

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manuscript culture reminiscent of William Ellis, it sought to reassure readers that they were not alone: The very best way to learn to bake bread is to bake often, alongside someone who is really good at it, with lots of leisure for questions. This section is meant to be as much like that as we can get without being in your kitchen with you. (33)29

The discussion of techniques and ingredients in Laurel’s Kitchen reflects the teaching role that serious modern cookbooks naturally assume. It is a good example to consider because, like eighteenthcentury cookbooks, it arrived to fill a fast-growing need; it thus provides a model against which to measure eighteenth-century texts’ ability to teach techniques and explain ingredients.30 Indeed, an array of models is spread across the spectrum of modern cookbooks that demonstrates the perceived incremental value of teaching techniques and, hence, the marketing savvy of eighteenth-century texts that made this assessment so early in the genre’s development. Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook: Strategies, Recipes, and Techniques (2004) acknowledges in its title that ‘‘recipes’’ and ‘‘techniques’’ are inseparable, reflecting Bourdain’s training at the Culinary Institute of America. Williams-Sonoma’s Tools and Techniques, which accompanies The Williams-Sonoma Cookbook (2008), focuses on the basic how-to of knife skills, sauces, stocks, and pastry (for example, pie dough by hand or in a food processor). The Cookbook has a section on ‘‘Basic Recipes,’’ including sourdough starter, tart dough (sweet and savory), a range of stocks (chicken, turkey, beef, vegetable, shellfish), and frostings and fillings. Such ‘‘basics’’ are required in the Cookbook’s featured recipes. James Peterson’s Baking: 350 Recipes and Techniques, 1,500 Photographs, One Baking Education (2009) is a mine of illustrated information. In The Complete Robuchon: French Home Cooking for the Way We Live Now (2008), Paul Robuchon describes methods and equipment without which ‘‘French’’ cooking would be impossible. Eugenia Bone’s Well-Preserved: Recipes and Techniques for Putting Up Small Batches of Seasonal Foods (2009) offers advice on water-bath canning, pickling, pressure canning, freezing, preserving in oil, and curing and smoking. A whole shelf in Barnes & Noble is called ‘‘Essential Cookbooks,’’ full of pedagogical warhorses like Joy of Cooking. But individual entrepreneurs of the kitchen are just as full of information.

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Stove, from Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769).

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Description of stove from Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769).

Martha Stewart’s Cooking School: Lessons and Recipes for the Home Cook (2008) is serious about equipment, knives, and fresh herbs, and labels every technique ‘‘How to’’ (for example, How to Make White Stock), an affectation that nonetheless conveys that these are more road maps than recipes. Then there is Julia Child’s The Way to Cook ([1989] 2009), which declares on the front cover: ‘‘In this best-selling cookbook Julia takes you inside her kitchen and tells you—and shows you—everything she knows about the essentials of Good Cooking today.’’ Where Martha offers lessons, Julia offers rules—The Way—albeit each provides specific technical guidance that supports but also transcends the mere provision of recipes. Cookbooks on a mission—frequently to educate Americans on exotic cuisines—routinely discuss techniques and ingredients. Bobby Flay’s Mexican-oriented Mesa Grill Cookbook (2007) has a ‘‘Guide to Fresh and Dried Chiles’’ as well as a ‘‘Tequila Guide’’ (there are five main kinds). His techniques—how to roast corn and garlic, make a chile puree, and toast nuts, seeds, and spices—typify the cuisine. Similarly, Madhur Jaffrey’s Quick and Easy Indian Cooking (2007) has a section on local techniques and another on ‘‘An Indian Pantry.’’ Nancie

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McDermott’s Quick and Easy Thai (2004) has a section on techniques and—predictably—on ‘‘A Thai Pantry.’’ Indeed, Eileen Yin-Fei Lo asserts right in the title, The Chinese Kitchen: Recipes, Techniques, Ingredients, History, and Memories from America’s Leading Authority on Chinese Cooking (1999), that hers is a comprehensive text. When presenting exotic cuisines, authors recognize that obvious, systematic demystification is crucial. Modern readers, willing to be adventurous, still need reassurance that a cookbook will be practical, not just a collector’s item with gorgeous photos. Yin-Fei Lo’s strategy, offering reassurance right in the title, has become commonplace wherever the authors suspect that readers may consider the subject ‘‘hard.’’31 In the era of domestic manuscripts, the assumption—reflected in the Laurel’s Kitchen evocation of companionate cooking—was that someone was always around to provide advice, even a demonstration. But as this changed, cookbooks took up the slack. They discussed technique along with providing recipes. In this regard, Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy lived up to its name, breaking new ground in terms of explaining how to perform basic kitchen operations.32 Chapter 1 of The Art, ‘‘Of Roasting, Boiling, &c,’’ explains exactly how to roast beef, veal, pork, and a variety of meats on the assumption that readers did not know even the simplest techniques: That profess’d Cooks will find Fault with touching upon a Branch of Cookery which they never thought worth their Notice, is what I expect: However, this I know, it is the most necessary Part of it; and few Servants there are, that know how to Roast and Boil to Perfection. . . . I shall first begin with Roast and Boil’d of all Sorts, and must desire the Cook to order her Fire according to what she is to dress; if any Thing very little or thin, then a pretty little brisk Fire, that it may be done quick and nice: If a very large Joint, then be sure a good Fire be laid to cake. Let it be clear at the Bottom; and when your Meat is Half done, move the Dripping-pan and Spit a little from the Fire, and stir up a good brisk Fire; for according to the Goodness of your Fire, your Meat will be done sooner or later. (3)

Glasse’s instructions for managing a fire apply to roasting any meat. They seem so simple as to be common sense. But Glasse takes no chances, and it is her thoroughness that reassures readers as they take up succeeding recipes; if Glasse seems condescending, she nonetheless appreciates a reader’s need for specific technical instruction.

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Indeed, while she pitches her language to ill-educated servants, she understands that readers will include newly minted housewives without a clue when it comes to the kitchen. These readers must seem like they know something if they are to manage servants effectively. Responding to readers’ varied needs, Glasse offers a long list of ‘‘Rules to be observ’d in Roasting’’ that cover everything from how to clean a spit (‘‘with nothing but Sand and Water . . . Oil, Brickdust, and such Things will spoil your Meat’’) to how long a pig should roast (‘‘when the Eyes drop out, and the Skin is grown very hard’’). She does not just say roast ‘‘’til it is enough,’’ a favorite formulation. Though she gives empirical tests, such as that for the eyeless pig, she gives specific times—pigs will take different times depending on size and when they were killed. She tells readers how to keep meat hot without reducing the gravy; the company, after all, might be late, and paying a little attention is ‘‘better than over roasting and spoiling the meat’’ (8–9). By ‘‘Rules’’ Glasse really means ‘‘techniques’’ that save the cook embarrassment and a lot of trouble. Glasse’s directions for roasting beef assume that the reader does not know how to tell when the meat is almost done, or when to baste the meat, cover and remove protective paper, apply salt, and prevent spoilage: [B]e sure to Paper the Top, and baste it well all the Time it is roasting, and throw a Handful of Salt on it. When you see the Smoke draw the Fire, it is near enough; then take off the Paper, baste it well, and drudge it with a little Flour to make a fine Froth. (Never salt your roast Meat before you lay it on the Fire, for that draws out all the Gravy. If you would keep it a few Days before you dress it, dry it very well with a clean Cloth, then flour it all over, and hang it where the Air will come to it; but be sure always to mind that there is no damp Place about it, if there is you must dry it well with a Cloth.) Take up your Meat, and garnish your Dish with nothing but Horse-raddish. (3)

Had the cook failed on any of these points—had she salted the meat too soon or basted it infrequently—the roast would have been less appealing. It might even have spoiled had she hung it incorrectly. The instruction that Glasse provides, therefore, is crucial to successfully roasting beef. It anticipates the possible points where a cook might fail and specifies what is to be done preventively. Glasse’s prescience is apparent when compared to Robert May’s recipe ‘‘To roast a Fillet of

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Beef’’ in The Accomplisht Cook, published almost ninety years before. May notes only ‘‘roast it leisurely, & baste it with sweet butter, set a dish to save the gravy while it roasts, then prepare sauce for it’’ (113). He does not provide general instruction as to how to manage a fire and offers nothing specific regarding when the roast is done or when it should be salted. Glasse has learned, perhaps from trying May’s recipes, that imparting technique is an intrinsic part of culinary instruction.33 Glasse’s rules for dressing greens and roots are equally specific, but what is important is her advice concerning the use of proper utensils: Always be very careful that your Greens be nicely pick’d and wash’d. You should lay them in a clean Pan for fear of Sand or Dust, which is apt to hang round wooden Vessels. Boil all your Greens in a Copper Sauce-pan by themselves with a great Quantity of Water. Boil no Meat with them, for that discolours them. Use no Iron Pans, &c., for they are not proper; but let them be Copper, Brass, or Silver. (10)

This is technical information, not part of any recipe but still crucial to proper culinary practice. Moreover, what Glasse really instills—here, for example, and when she tells readers how to clean a spit—is attentiveness to the reactions of metals and chemicals with food. She emphasizes the need to prevent contamination. In her recipe for Hartshorn jelly, she requires ‘‘a very clean China Bason’’ and that readers ‘‘have your Glasses as clean as possible’’ and use a ‘‘clean Spoon’’ (145). It never hurts to be reminded.34 While Martha Bradley did not pitch her text to clueless servants, she nonetheless provides substantial technical advice. Much might be regarded as simple, but it is better characterized as fundamental. As in other areas, Bradley copies advice from Hannah Glasse—the information on cleanliness, roasting, and managing a fire sound familiar. Bradley is more particular than Glasse, however, when it comes to the vessels used for pickling: ‘‘Glass is too brittle, therefore Stone Jars are the only proper convenience’’ (I:76). Glasse accepts glass unquestioningly. What is especially notable about Bradley, however, is her description of foreign ingredients, which goes beyond seasonality or the indicia of quality to evoke their unique, often exotic character, even touching the geopolitics that controls their accessibility (or inaccessibility). Much like Yin-Fei Lo, Bradley demystifies these ingredients—anchovies, capers, ‘‘caviare,’’ ‘‘cayan pepper,’’ cloves, mace, nutmeg, cinnamon, mangoes, olives, soy, various oils, truffles, morels, ginger, pepper,

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allspice, and sugar.35 As twenty-first-century readers, it is hard to imagine that such ingredients were relatively unknown. It is a measure of Bradley’s canniness that, in describing them, she is also encouraging desire for them, raising readers’ interest in what they may barely know about but which The British Housewife enables them to use. Coming early in her text (January, February), these descriptions make one want to keep reading, to keep buying succeeding ‘‘Numbers’’ in which Bradley gives recipes that will satisfy desires that she raised for the new, different, and exotic. For Bradley, teaching is a form of marketing. Her description of anchovies, for example, conjures up the conditions under which they are caught: at night when they are lured by ships’ ‘‘Lanthorns at the stern.’’ The image is romantic. However, she couples her Catalonian vision with good advice on how not to be fooled ‘‘at the Oil Shops’’ by pickled sprats deceptively made up to seem like anchovies: The true Way to judge of [anchovies] is to wash one and open it, and then taste the pure Flesh. This should be high flavoured; and the Pickle redish and of a high Flavour also; if watery and poor, it is not the original Pickle. (I:7)

Making her way through all the exotics on her list, Bradley provides picturesque information regarding their provenance, as well as advice on how to buy carefully. At times, she veers into geopolitical spleen—under ‘‘Mace and Nutmeg,’’ for example, she declares: ‘‘The Dutch supply us with Nutmegs and Mace, as they do with Cloves; the whole Spice Trade being in a Manner in their Hands’’ (12–13). In discussing another sweet spice, she opines: ‘‘The Dutch supply all Europe with Cinnamon, which they have in the Islands of Ceylon in such Abundance that they burn a great deal annually to keep up the Price’’ (13). Suddenly the cookbook is open to the world. The household is revealed as enmeshed in the world, like it or not. If this produces in the reader a certain frisson—perhaps a sense that her kitchen is not unrelated to colonial ambitions of great powers—it is also deeply instructive. The eighteenth century was fascinated by expanding globalization, and here, in a cookbook, the reader is accorded a chance to see how trade affects her. In discussing the origins and politics of spices, Bradley assimilates information from pharmacopoeia, travel literature, and similar sources that readers otherwise might not generally read.36 She extends the usefulness of the cookbook (making it more broadly instructive), but also alters

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its character fundamentally, demonstrating that thinking about food raises complex questions that go beyond preparing dinner or dessert.37 (In chapter 7, this aspect of Bradley is addressed in detail.) Related to the discussion of unfamiliar ingredients (which go into familiar recipes) is the discussion by Bradley and others of basic recipes, that is, recipes that are constituents of many familiar dishes. Thus, where The Queen’s Closet Opened just assumed that readers could make sauces, gravies, and stocks, the advanced eighteenthcentury cookbook spells out the details of making kitchen basics. This is now standard, of course, in that cookbooks calling for basics are expected to explain them. Bradley’s thoughts on the matter of one basic ingredient, cullis (a rich reduction made from meat, fish, or vegetables), could be a road map for how cookbooks have described and used such basics since the eighteenth century: These are a particular Article of the French Cookery . . . essential to Made [i.e., complex] Dishes, and will be found useful on many other Occasions; they are Things that should be kept in the House ready for different Purposes. If any of the Sauces described in the last Chapter are too Thin, a little Cullis of the proper Sort thickens them up; and in General it is an Addition to any of them to add Cullis, more or less, according to their Consistence. They are useful in the same Way in all Raggoos and in Soups, and as there are many Kinds of these, there are in the Same Manner Cullisses of the same Variety and Sorts for them. This being sufficient to explain the Nature of Cullisses in general, and their Use, we shall proceed to give the several Kinds; and it will be the more proper to introduce them here, because in the next Chapter we shall treat of some rich Soups, in which these are very proper Ingredients, as well as in the succeeding Made Dishes. (I:331)

Bradley understands that foundational recipes, which are ‘‘useful’’ in many dishes on many occasions, should appear together so that readers can refer to them easily. She also understands that such recipes—which cannot stand alone—need a certain context: why readers need to know about them (to have them handy, ready for use); what they are good for (to add texture and flavor); and how her text will use them (in subsequent chapters, in rich soups and ‘‘made dishes’’). By providing these recipes, Bradley encourages readers to think about cooking as a process, carried out in stages (some of which can be completed in advance by preparing and storing

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basics). She anticipates the creation of a ‘‘pantry,’’ literally a supply of necessaries, in the mode of Jaffrey or McDermott. Indeed, many of Jaffrey’s and McDermott’s pantry items are sauces and condiments that can be purchased in the twenty-first century; in Bradley’s day, most sophisticated flavor enhancers would have been homemade, so that the cook had to be provident if she were not to run out on short notice. As Bradley points out, one never knows when a sauce will be ‘‘too Thin’’ and need to be beefed up. Indeed, the eighteenth-century pantry included a variety of basic ingredients: lemon pickle, mushroom pickle, walnut and mushroom ketchups, oyster ketchups, and various pungent sauces. Cookbooks showed readers how to prepare and store these items, which would then go into soups, ragouts, and a range of complicated dishes. Some authors, such as Martha Raffald, debated whether particularly rich basics—such as cullis—should be used at all.38 However, these authors had their own favorites. Raffald, for example, recommended ‘‘browning’’ (a sort of wine-infused caramelized sugar), which ironically included yet another basic ingredient, lemon pickle. The fact is that providing basic recipes became an eighteenth-century commonplace, a practice that has descended to twenty-first-century cookbooks. Along with discussions of ingredients and techniques, the provision of basic recipes allowed home cooks to tackle complicated dishes with considerably less fear. From a larger perspective, the creation of compendious texts full of data on seasonality, troubleshooting, entertaining, and an array of technical subjects allowed eighteenth-century cookbooks to work together with readers in a practical sense. Such practicality aimed at how readers actually lived, and reflected the continuing attempt by cookbooks to imagine an actual reader and speak to her needs. Such efforts made these books marketable. It made them appealing, establishing a pattern that readers still cannot resist. NOTES 1. Notwithstanding its ‘‘collectability,’’ the 1988 edition is available in paperback. 2. For an example of how far new, cutting-edge cookbooks will go in providing complementary information, see ‘‘After Microsoft, Bringing a High-Tech Eye to Professional Kitchens,’’ New York Times Food Section, November 17, 2009, D3, noting that a cookbook planned by Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft engineer, will cover ‘‘microbiology, food safety, the physics of heat transfer on the stove and in the oven, formulas

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for turning fruit and vegetables juices into gels, and more.’’ See chapter 7 for Myhrvold’s potential impact on the genre. 3. For a college graduate’s odyssey to a one-acre farm in Brooklyn, see the New York Times, November 17, 2009, at http://www.nytimes.com/ 2009/11/17/nyregion/17entry.html?_r¼1&ref¼todayspaper. 4. See, for example, Dennis Greville and Jill Brewis, The Grower’s Cookbook—From Garden to Table (2008); Michel Nischan and Mary Goodbody, Homegrown Pure and Simple: Healthy Food from Garden to Table (2005); Steve Meyerowitz and Michael Parma, Sproutman’s Kitchen Garden Cookbook (1999); Ann Lovejoy, From the Garden Cookbook (2008); and Magdiale Wolmark, The Seed to Table Cookbook (2010). 5. Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook (1660) contains monthly bills of fare, but they are tied only inferentially to marketing directions or to a consideration of what foods are in season. 6. See, for example, John Reid, The Gard’ners Kalendar, Directing What is to be Done in Every Month . . . With a Catalogue of Such Dishes and Drinks as a Compleat Garden can Afford in their Seasons (1721); Thomas Ellis, The Gardener’s Pocket Calendar (1776); Samuel Fullmer, The Young Gardener’s Best Companion (1781); John Fallowland, The Husbandman and Tradesman’s Gardening Calendar (1791); The English Pocket Gardener . . . To Which is Added, The Art of Preserving Fruits, and Directions for Making English Wines (1794). 7. The Adviser suggests that when buying mackerel, ‘‘put your nose to the gills, and you will soon find if it is stale’’ (32). The London Tradesman states of fishmongers that their ‘‘knowledge consists in finding out the cheapest Market, and selling at the greatest Price’’ (279). See also Jasper Arnaud, An Alarm to All Persons Touching Their Health and Lives (1740), suggesting that ‘‘Fish that is grown stale is usually soaked in a little water, and washed by some, and then laid on the shop board for sale’’ (5). 8. See, for example, William Speechly, A Treatise on the Culture of the Pine Apple and the Management of the Hot-House (1784); John Kennedy, A Treatise Upon Planting, Gardening, and the Management of the HotHouse (1777); and James Garton, The Practical Gardener (1770). 9. Indeed, John Evelyn’s Acetaria (1699) railed against ‘‘forced’’ vegetables grown out of season. In The Complete Practical Cook (1730), Charles Carter went half-way toward overcoming the seasons, observing that where they ‘‘may at some Times be so unpropitious for celebrating some wish’dfor Occasions,’’ the good cook ‘‘by his Invention can supply the Deficiency of the Season . . . and by that means, as it were, Create New Dishes to gratify the Palate.’’ Such a cook, said Carter, would use ‘‘almost-unknown Vegetables,’’ though a search in the text for such prodigies turned up none (‘‘To the Reader’’). 10. David Gorman, reviewing David Duff’s Modern Genre Theory, in Poetics Today 22, no. 4 (2001): 853–61, 857.

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11. Acetaria ([1699] 1706), 106. 12. On Acetaria’s relation to the Royal Society’s aspirations, see Sandra Sherman, ‘‘John Evelyn’s Acetaria: Eden on a Plate,’’ Petits Propose Culinaires 69 (2002): 70–91. 13. The most famous text on food and its relation to health was George Cheyne’s Essay of Health and Long Life (1724), which was reprinted through the nineteenth century. Cheyne decried the tendency of ‘‘gobbling down the richest and strongest Food’’ (115). See also John Woodward, The State of Physick: And of Diseases (1718). Like Cheyne, Woodward was a physician adamantly set against rich foods. Other texts—to name but a few—include Health’s Preservative (1750), The Old Man’s Guide to Longer Life (1748), The Best and Easiest Method of Preserving uninterrupted Health (1748), and William Buchan’s Observations Concerning the Diet of the Common People (1797). 14. Charges of adulteration had been around for a long time. In 1740, Arnaud’s An Alarm to All Persons claimed that ‘‘Leather boiled to a Jelly,’’ as well as alum, was added to bread as a whitener (12). In 1750, William Ellis’ Country Housewife’s Family Companion cited a well-known pharmacopoeia to the effect that alum causes vomiting. He related the story of a baker who added alum to his bread in secret, and quoted an advertisement pleading with Parliament to prohibit any use of alum in bread. 15. Servants’ manuals continually emphasized the cook- and scullerymaid’s duty to ensure that the family did not suffer verdigris poisoning. See, for example, Domestic Management (1800) and Anne Barker, The Complete Servant Maid (1770). Ellis railed at servants who allowed food to spoil. 16. Mead was frequently cited even in cookbooks with regard to treating dog bites. See, for example, Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery (1747). This may be because dogs frequently hung around the kitchen; they begged for scraps and operated dog-wheels that turned roasting spits. See the frontispiece to Elizabeth Price’s New Book of Cookery (1760), showing a dog and cat just behind the cook. 17. Avoiding waste is yet another example of cookbooks’ following collateral texts, in this case servants’ manuals. The waste of coals was considered profligate. 18. The Boke of Kervynge (1508) was primarily concerned with ceremony and vocabulary at large dinners and was not intended for the average household meal. John Murrel’s Murrel’s Two Books of Cookerie and Carving (1638) was an early effort to fuse the two. The anonymous The Genteel House-keepers Pastime: Or, the Mode of Carving at the Table Represented in a Pack of Playing Cards (1693) was an idiosyncratic but good manual, but not tied to actual cooking instructions. 19. Indeed, William Augustus Henderson’s The Housekeeper’s Instructor (1790, 1795) set a cosmopolitan standard, observing that instruction in

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the art of trussing was necessary for ‘‘county’’ families who do not have access to a professional poulterer: ‘‘In London every article is generally trussed by the p[o]ulterer of whom it is bought; but it frequently happens that either from inexperience or negligence of the servants, and want of knowledge in the cook, the article appears on table with disgrace. Another very substantial reason for the cook having this knowledge is, that the families in which they serve are frequently in counties where there are no poulterers, and consequently they are under the necessity of killing and trussing their own poultry’’ (340–41). To the same effect, see Richard Briggs, The English Art of Cookery (1794), 15. 20. These schematic birds and hares were, so to speak, creatures of their time. During the late eighteenth century, William Playfair introduced graphical methods—line, bar, and pie charts—to represent statistical information, permitting greater quantities of information to be perceived more efficiently. See, for example, his Statistical and Political Atlas (1786). 21. The Housekeeper’s Instructor did not provide graphics but included extensive descriptions of how to truss birds. The same is true of Briggs’ The English Art of Cookery, though Briggs’ claim that the subject had been ‘‘universally overlooked’’ by other authors (‘‘To the Reader’’) is a typical example of marketing disinformation. 22. The Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook (1980), for example, has a well-risen souffle on the cover. Just above the title is the message ‘‘America’s best-selling step-by-step cookbook.’’ An online ad for The Children’s Illustrated Cookbook (2004) states that kids ‘‘learn to mix, blend, baste, roast, steam and bake. . . . Color photos make each step simple, allowing kids a feeling of instant accomplishment.’’ See http://members.peak. org/
bonwritr/illustrcookbook.htm. 23. The first edition of Sarah Jackson’s The Director: Or, Young Woman’s Companion (1754) did not contain keyed, illustrated directions for trussing; the 1770 edition did contain such directions, and this improvement— obviously a major selling point—was touted on the cover. 24. Trusler must have perceived a certain irony in the theft, since Henderson’s text featured a gorgeously engraved frontispiece showing the master of the house, using the text to explain to a servant how to carve. 25. Bradley entitled this multifaceted section ‘‘The Oeconomy of a Table,’’ implying a relationship among many complementary operations. See Section V in both the January and February volumes. 26. For a discussion of eighteenth-century turtle eating and its role in male bonding, see Sandra Sherman, ‘‘Dining on Turtle,’’ Petits Propos Culinaires 77 (2004): 104–19. 27. See, for example, The Lady’s Preceptor or, a Letter to a Young Lady of Distinction upon Politeness (1743), and Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son: On Becoming a Man of the World, the famous series of mid-eighteenth-century letters defining ‘‘polite’’ deportment. See also Paul Langford, A Polite and

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Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1989), esp. chap. 3, ‘‘The Progress of Politeness.’’ 28. In a direct appeal to the uninitiated, the Kitchen declared: ‘‘Beginners: don’t be intimidated! Perhaps you’ll feel there’s an awful lot to read here, a lot to understand, but plunge right in anyway, and get your hands on the dough. It all makes much more sense much more easily when you’re doing, rather than staring at the pages’’ (33–34). One cannot help but hear Martha Bradley urging Practice, Practice! 29. While the Kitchen’s statement is meant to encourage, it contains a whiff of despair, a sense that directions must be anally precise because readers have no prior, communally based knowledge. In Stand Facing the Stove: The Story of the Women Who Gave America The Joy of Cooking (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), Anne Mendelson laments that the detailed modern cookbook ‘‘is an improvement only in a society where cookbooks are replacing cooking’’ (106). Although Mendelson is concerned with the twentieth century, she could be citing the eighteenth, during which time authors like Martha Bradley urged constant practice. The Kitchen, however, faces a distinctly modern problem, in that unlike previous eras, people do not cook on a regular basis and want instant total expertise. Such expectations are misplaced, according to Mendelson, who argues that the ideal cook ultimately outgrows a cookbook: ‘‘Cookbooks are the feeblest of substitutes for the true spurs to cuilinary understanding, which are long hours spent daily in handling the tools of the trade and constant reinforcement from other people engaged in the same work on the same spot’’ (106). Mendelson’s view does not, however, account for the desire to acquire a new repertoire of skills, unknown to one’s immediate community—most people are without a vegan grandmother. In the eighteenth century, cookbooks’ emphasis on the ‘‘modern’’ was a way of finessing their detachment from traditional learning communities. 30. The next generation of bread books still implies that the best learning takes place in an apprenticeship, with a teacher at one’s elbow. Consider the title of Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread (2001). 31. Consider Edward Espe Brown’s The Complete Tassajara Cookbook: Recipes, Techniques and Reflections from the Famed Zen Kitchen; Jacques Pepin’s The Complete Pepin: Techniques and Recipes; Gail Sher’s A Baker’s Kitchen: Techniques and Recipes for Professional Quality Baking; and Jeffrey Hamilton’s Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes. While these books feature ‘‘technique’’ in the title, hundreds more actually include technique. 32. During the eighteenth century, ‘‘Plain and Easy’’ was a commonplace formulation, part of the title on literally hundreds of pedagogical texts. There was, for example, The Psalm Singer’s Choice Companion: or a Plain and Easy Introduction to Musick (1711); The Measurer’s Guide Enlarg’d, or: the Whole Art of Measuring made Short, Plain and Easy

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(1718); A Treatise concerning the Small-pox, in which a Plain and Easy Method of Curing that Disease . . . is Discover’d (1721); Annet’s Shorthand Perfected, Containing Plain and Easy Examples and Instructions for Learning It (1761); Country Dancing Made Plain and Easy to Every Capacity (1764); and Plain and Easy Directions for the Use of Harrogate Waters (1773). The authors of such texts apparently sought to deflect resistance by consumers to unknown, potentially difficult material. 33. Plenty in The Art of Cookery is not specifically explained—as, for example, Glasse’s instruction to skin a pig (how does one skin a pig?). Nevertheless, Glasse represents a huge pedagogical advance. 34. In ‘‘‘Pots and Pans History’: The Material Culture of the Kitchen in Early Modern England,’’ Journal of Design History 11, no. 3 (1998): 201– 16, Sara Pennell suggests that ‘‘[e]ven with the proliferation of didactic culinary texts, much kitchen know-how remained intuitive and implicit. A recipe would provide only partial insight into process, and little information at all as to what utensils to employ, how they worked, how they were to be cleaned, maintained and replaced’’ (212). By Glasse’s time, however, this was clearly changing, especially since authors could assume less and less access on readers’ part to traditional sources of on-site knowledge. 35. Bradley noted that while some of these have been domesticated, their qualities were still sufficiently complex—and substitutes still sufficiently misleading—as to require substantial discussion. 36. See, for example, Pierre Pomet’s A Compleat History of Druggs (1714), which contained long discussions of the origins and associated politics of spices. For more on this amazing text, see Sandra Sherman, ‘‘The Exotic World of Pierre Pomet’s Compleat History of Druggs,’’ Endeavour 28, no. 4 (2004): 156–60. 37. Insofar as The British Housewife presents food in a globalized, cultural context, it shares an approach typical of works by Naomi Duguid and Timothy Alford, for example, The Seductions of Rice (1998). 38. See The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769): ‘‘I have given no Directions for Cullis, as I have found by Experience, that Lemon Pickle and Browning answers both for Beauty and Taste, (at a trifling Expence) better than Cullis, which is extravagant’’ (iii).

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CHAPTER 4

CELEBRITY CHEFS

Readers are drawn to some cookbooks by the author’s personality— perhaps it excites them or perhaps the author is so familiar that it inspires a surge of trust. Readers often know these authors from media other than cookbooks: most likely from their television programs, but also from their magazines and restaurants, shameless ads for donuts or salad oil, and personal lines of cookware and spices. Such authors represent an array of enterprises under their own name, which in merchandizing terms is called branding. When consumers choose a cookbook by such an author, this is because the brand has captured their attention, ideally their loyalty, converting a foray into culinary education into something involved with market capitalism. As Invention of the Modern Cookbook has suggested, this development is rooted in the mid-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when high-profile cookbook authors—who in the twenty-first century would be called celebrity chefs—began promoting themselves and their texts. This chapter traces this development, considering first the self-promotional processes by which modern chefs turn themselves into brands—how chefs step out of the kitchen to become marketable commodities. In a nutshell, chefs accomplish this as celebrities always have: by exhibiting themselves. This chapter argues that notwithstanding the radical difference between twentyfirst-century media and that of three hundred years ago, the modern celebrity chef (exploiting an array of outlets) is the direct descendent of his (or her!) seventeenth- and eighteenth-century peers.1

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DEFINING THE CELEBRITY CHEF Since the degree of self-exhibition required of the modern celebrity is so demanding, the terms ‘‘celebrity’’ and ‘‘chef’’ (where they combine to indicate a kitchen-bound celebrity) are often contradictory. Many celebrity chefs only rarely inhabit a kitchen. For example, on his Travel Channel show, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, Bourdain explores indigenous cuisines. He was formerly executive chef at the New York bistro Les Halles and still cooked there occasionally; now he is chef-at-large and never cooks—though his name, of course, is the draw. As a celebrity, he writes, travels, and helps his fans live vicariously. He could have remained a working chef, known to the cognoscenti. But he became a brand, adored by millions who follow him on stage and off. Bourdain’s marriage and remarriage, his fights with Rachael Ray, even sightings in Greenwich Village are grist for breathless bloggers. His brand—a heady mix of media savvy, virility, and taste—generates more excitement than when he was cooking. His 2010 book, The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchen is one of many estimable books that, thanks to the ‘‘buzz’’ around its author, is ensured a breakout success.2 A classic example of how celebrity drives publication is Alton Brown, one of the Food Network’s biggest stars. His Good Eats: The Early Years (2009) bills itself as an encyclopedic work encompassing the show’s first eighty episodes. Each show has its own chapter, featuring remastered recipes, behind-the-scenes photos, and portions of the script. Like a hardcover fanzine, the book is for devotees, viewerreaders who are culinary Trekkies and would relive every episode. They are committed to Good Eats (the show and the celebrity who embodies it); hence they are eager to purchase Good Eats (the text), a reconstituted trove of the show’s memorabilia. The feedback loop in this relationship— as in the endless reruns of Star Trek—is obvious: the show sells the book, while the book sustains interest in the show. Brown, who even interviews himself in the book, is on exhibit, revealing facts and factoids that viewer-readers literally crave. The book’s self-reflexivity, though audacious, epitomizes the involvement of the modern celebrity chef with the multiple media that reinforce his brand. There are few limits, in fact, on the personal revelations in celebrity chefs’ cookbooks. While Paula Deen’s Kitchen Classics (2005) features the usual sticker ‘‘AS SEEN ON FOOD NETWORK,’’ the real draw is the breathless announcement of ‘‘Photographs from Her Unforgettable Wedding.’’ Hello!, People, and OK! watch out. Indeed, in this cookbook-as-tabloid, Deen describes how she ‘‘met

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and married her fabulous Michael,’’ and in the Grand Ol’ Opry style that her fans lap up, she avows how he rescued her from a lonely funk: ‘‘In the next three years my life went from unhealthy and unbalanced, with nothing but work and solitude, to healthy and balanced, with work, play, and a fabulous companion.’’3 Kitchen Classics is as much about Deen as it is about cooking, and there are recipes from the wedding and details of its planning. Thus, while the Food Network Web site features Deen as it does Alton Brown, the cross-pollination from their personalized cookbooks connects these chefs with viewers in a leisurely, unscripted fashion that the Web site (designed by a committee) cannot match. In their books, they seem to let their hair down and act spontaneously, connecting with readers on their own terms. Fans come back for their stories as much as the food, and for the illusion of being up-close-andpersonal with celebrities. Jamie Oliver is a master at creating this sort of easy, immediate connection. One of several British chefs successfully to have crossed the Atlantic (Nigella Lawson is perhaps the most popular), he has done so because of an unbuttoned, whimsical style pitched perfectly to readers’ comfort level. Some of his books feature Oliver in clownface; virtually all display his boyish good looks. Yet Oliver is one of the most enterprising celebrity chefs in the world, selling housewares, opening restaurants, and helping disadvantaged youth to develop professional skills.4 Cook with Jamie: My Guide to Making You a Better Cook (2007) takes the reader into his communitarian efforts, exhibiting a side of him not readily apparent from his other cookbooks and television appearances. It expounds his belief that the world faces a nutritional crisis, and must return to more natural eating. It features not just the happy-go-lucky Oliver of television (the famous Naked Chef), but the serious Oliver who promotes sustainable living and is committed to community outreach. Cook with Jamie, which promises to reveal skills that everyone wishes they had, draws readers into the chef’s mature social concerns. Though undoubtedly sincere, the revelation is brilliant. It inspires readers to keep up with Oliver on his Web site (featuring his other books, products, tours and shows) and balances personal revelation—personal campaigning—with a pitch for Oliver’s businesses: Welcome to my seventh book. . . . As I’ve been writing this book, we’ve taken on more students at our Fifteen restaurants in London and Amsterdam, opened a restaurant in Cornwall and are about to open another in Melbourne.

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The cookbook-as-infomercial foregrounds the author’s business along with the rest of his persona. Here it provides a history of the business, imparting to the author a trajectory of successful activity culminating in the book—even as it advertises those activities with the implicit invitation to patronize them. Reading Oliver, one is reminded of William Ellis’ pitch that if readers want to make his cherry pies, he can supply cherry trees5 This type of business-cum-personal history is common in celebritychef self-presentations. Early in Martha Stewart’s career—before Martha Stewart Living, the television shows, Kmart, and Omni Media— Entertaining (1982) offered a history of Stewart’s life, how she came to be interested in cooking and started her catering business. It describes how she developed her philosophy of cooking (‘‘I began with pretentious items. . . . Then, as I grew more confident, I turned to simpler peasant dishes’’), and it gives the impression of someone thoughtful, likable, and chic.6 Indeed, where chefs own restaurants they talk about founding and running them, exhibiting fabulous pictures of their ambience. Chef Daniel Boulud Cooking in New York City (2002) is unreservedly fabulous, a collage of breath-taking images interspersed with recipes. Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry Cookbook (1999), set in California, leaves the reader awed by the setting, even as it presents Keller as a philosopher of the kitchen.7 JeanGeorges: Cooking at Home with a Four-Star Chef (1998) presents the ‘‘softer’’ side of this restaurant mogul in a long introduction by celebrity food writer, Mark Bittman. Once this humanization is complete, however, Asian Flavors of Jean-Georges: Featuring More than 175 Recipes from Spice Market, Vong, and 66 (2007) returns Vongerichten to his accustomed turf, his connection to storied restaurants. The point—which could be endlessly drawn out—is that modern celebrity chefs display themselves in an array of media for an array of purposes, all of which leverage each other’s potential to reinforce the brand. Such chefs are performers, so much so that they are known as performers—as celebrities; most people will never have contact with them as chefs.8 Whole industries have emerged around celebrity chefs’ performances, which create symbiotic relationships that promote still other brands. The 2009 New York City Wine and Food Festival featured more than one hundred events with headliner chefs. Its producer, New York’s Karlitz & Company, is unabashed about the commercial potency of these celebrities: Preparing a gourmet meal requires a melange of creativity, elegance, quality ingredients and experience. We approach the creation of our

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culinary events the same way. Tapping a vast network of solid relationships in the culinary world, including celebrity chefs, wine experts, and winemakers, we produce innovative experiences to help our clients build their brands. What’s on the menu? Integrating celebrity chefs into marketing campaigns, producing food and wine festivals, creating exclusive epicurean events and so much more.9

At the festival, celebrity chefs performed. They hosted events and provided demonstrations. They served as iconic figures, whose presence promoted an array of foods and wine. Gabriel Kreuther, the wunderkind chef at The Modern (in the Museum of Modern Art) anchored the ‘‘Alsatian Oktoberfest’’ because, not coincidentally, he is Alsatian. In a near simultaneous event, the Taste of The New York Times Style Magazine (a luxury display of kitchen ideas and home furnishings set in the Architects and Designers Building) featured more than a dozen fabulous chefs. The more these chefs perform and are sought after, the more their brand—their star power—is enhanced. They become news. They could be famous for being famous, even though they are hugely talented. In some cases, they become chefs-on-demand, willing to perform for whoever hires them. In New York City, for example, the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE) acts as a speakers’ bureau for celebrity chefs. The Corporate and Private Events page on its Web site lists some of the city’s most famous chefs who will speak to any group willing to pay: ICE can arrange a culinary extravaganza for you and your clients or friends. We’ll bring in one of the country’s hottest chefs to prepare a fabulous dinner especially for your group. You’ll learn secrets, get a chance to ask the questions you’ve always wanted to ask, and enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime meal.10

ICE promises ‘‘secrets,’’ just as chefs do when they invite readers behind the scenes of their lives, television shows, and restaurants. Guests are up-close-and-personal; they can ask questions; they watch chefs cook in front of them in demonstration kitchens with overhead mirrors. Such on-site performances shatter the distance between television chefs and viewers, even more so than dining in a restaurant (where the chef is hidden in the kitchen, assuming that in fact he is there).11 Whatever style is associated with a celebrity chef, publicity is associated with them just as much. Everyone knows Mario Batali’s name, and not just because he writes cookbooks.12 Everyone knows Rachael

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Ray, Nigella Lawson, and Giada de Laurentis, whose diets, endorsements, and marriages are staples of women’s magazines. Everyone worships Julia Child, the putative founder of America’s culinary renaissance. Even before Julie & Julia, Julia was a superstar—Mastering the Art of French Cooking (her breakthrough book), The French Chef (her PBS series), the Smithsonian’s installation of her kitchen, and My Life in France (2006) kept her (always dignified) in the public eye.13 Julia was the quintessential natural performer, setting the standard for elegant showmanship. Yet each of these chefs, more buoyed than overshadowed by Julia, has established a brand; when readers seek cookbooks, they know what to expect since the brand is an instrument of efficient marketing.14 Batali’s The Babbo Cookbook (2002) vows that ‘‘the recipes that follow present the dishes precisely as they are served at the restaurant’’ (11). Batali is true to his brand.15 The next section considers the origin of such branding and argues that starting with Robert May in 1660, chefs embarked on a mission of self-creation and exhibition that—except for obvious differences in media—would be recognizable among twenty-first-century celebrity chefs. Thus, while powerful multimedia are new, the power of celebrity—of the charismatic actor—emerged ages ago. The seventeenth century launched a sophisticated discourse of culinary celebrity, which changed over the next hundred years but consistently sought to theorize what celebrity meant—how it was acquired, what it entailed. This discourse adumbrates many twenty-first-century claims, from those of an Olympian Thomas Keller to the more approachable Naked Chef. It is self-consciously commercial as it emerges from older forms of literary production and adjusts to the burgeoning market.16 In this sense, it bears an uncanny similarity to what twenty-first-century celebrity chefs say about themselves as they calibrate their art with media appearances. THINKING LIKE A CELEBRITY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY The Progenitor: Robert May The first great celebrity chef to write a cookbook in England, Robert May, was a master of self-promotion, clearly assisted by able handlers. He was the first of his cohort to present himself as important and to theorize his importance both to England and the progress of culinary art.17 The Accomplisht Cook (1660, improved 1665 and 1685) projects May’s ‘‘accomplisht’’ persona, starting with the

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Frontispiece from Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook (1665 ed.).

handsome frontispiece of May in three-quarter profile. Under the portrait, a verse praises May and his book, one of three poetic tributes in the text: What wouldst thou view but in one face / all hospitalitie, the race / of those that for the GUSTO stand, / whose tables a whole Ark comand / of Natures plentie, wouldst thou see / this sight, peruse May’s booke, ’tis hee.

In the poem’s conceit, May and his ‘‘booke’’ are fused.18 The idea is that his book embodies May’s immense experience and authority, a notion announced as well on the title page: ‘‘Approved by the

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fifty five Years Experience and Industry of ROBERT MAY, in his Attendance on several Persons of great Honour.’’ Indeed, the book stakes its credibility on that of its venerable author, who constructs himself at every turn as deeply practiced in his art. In the dedication to his noble patrons, May pioneers a tactic that bolsters his standing even as it uses the conventional rhetoric of gratitude: [F]or my own part my more particular tyes of service to you my Honoured Lords, have built me up to the height of Experience, for which this Book now at last dares appear to the World.

Obsequious gratitude, which in May’s world of noble patronage was obligatory, here becomes self-reflexive, a pat on the back for May. May served some of the greatest grandees of his day, whom the dedication identifies as great party-givers, ‘‘so well known to this Nation for their Admired Hospitalities.’’ Thus by the time one has read the dedication (ostensibly full of praise for others) one knows that May worked for men who took food seriously—including Sir Kenelm Digby, who wrote his own cookbook—and that May acquired his experience subject to these men’s exacting standards.19 Such indirect self-praise is masterful. But more to the point, it evokes modern cookbook discussions of the chef’s experience—the chef’s provenance— intended to justify the trust that the text solicits. May’s Preface is more of the same. After relating the extravagance of his patrons, which allowed him to practice without being ‘‘confined and limited to the narrowness of a Purse,’’ May declares ‘‘I have laid open these Experiences, as I was unwilling to hide my Talent, but have ever endeavoured to do good to others.’’ Not only is generosity his motivation, but it is notable (in his view) because he has so much to give, the fruit of unfettered labor in rich patrons’ kitchens. Moreover, in case anyone skipped the recital on the cover, May concludes by asserting that ‘‘I have not concealed any material Secret of above my fifty and five years Experience; my Father being a Cook under whom in my Child-hood I was bred up to this Art.’’ The Preface is by and about May, introducing readers to him in his own terms, suggesting that he was born cooking.20 When it discusses The Accomplisht Cook it is like the preceding poem, fusing the book and its author, each emanating ‘‘Experience’’: Nor is there any Book except The Queens Closet . . . as yet I ever saw in any Language, that ever contained so many profitable Experiences, as in this Volume.

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‘‘Experience’’ applies both to May’s personal experience, and—in the usage of the time—to the record of that work, set down in recipes. The slippage between these two applications, though comprehensible in context, still envelops the reader in rhetoric that entails an inescapable conclusion: May is a very ‘‘Experienced,’’ accomplished cook, and The Accomplisht Cook embodies that experience. This equation, in which the book reveals everything known to the chef (no ‘‘material Secret’’ withheld) is now standard operating procedure for cookbooks promising wisdom—Julia Child’s offer (‘‘everything she knows about the essentials of Good Cooking’’) in The Way to Cook is an obvious example. The book-chef equation is reflected as well in such extravagant productions as Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry Cookbook, whose Preface (with a long discussion of the Laundry’s genesis and of Keller’s culinary philosophy) is meant to suggest that the book (like the Laundry) embodies the chef’s being. Pudding in a Breast of Veal, from Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook (1660) Open the lower end with a sharp knife close between the skin and the ribs, leave hold enough of the flesh on both sides, that you may put in your hand between the ribs, and the skin; then make a pudding of grated white bread, two or three yolks of eggs, a little cream, clean washt currans pick’d and dried, rose-water, cloves, and mace fine beaten, a little saffron, salt, beef-suet minced fine, some slic’t dates and sugar; mingle all together, and stuff the breast with it, make the pudding pretty stiff, and prick on the sweetbread wrapped in the caul, spit it and roast it; then make sauce with some claretwine, grated nutmeg, vinegar, butter, and two or three slices of orange, and boil it up, &c.

In the seventeenth century, books were often full of prefatory material: dedications, poems, and prefaces ‘‘To the Reader.’’ Overkill was no impediment. Thus, after the Preface, one W. W. writes ‘‘A Short Narrative of some Passages of the Authors Life.’’ Like the Preface, it recounts May’s experience and connects this experience with the book’s quality: ‘‘for as the growth of Children argue the strength of the Parents, so doth the judgment and abilities of the Artist conduce to the making and goodness of the Work.’’21 Yet where May describes his illustrious provenance—naming the greats whom he served—W. W. extends May’s nominal provenance back to Greece and Rome, connecting it to renowned connoisseurs like Lucullus. May, according to W. W., represents a formidable tradition of serving the most discriminating palates. Were the seventeenth century less steeped in the classics, such praise might seem forced,

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an asparagus out of season. But given May’s emphasis on serving the wealthy, the gesture goes right along with the tone that May has set for the text. Finally, there are two more poems, the titles of which convey their purpose: ‘‘On the Unparallell’d Piece of Mr. May His Cookery,’’ and ‘‘To the Reader of (my very loving Friend) Mr. Robert May his incomparable Book of Cookery.’’ In the grand tradition of British food poetry, these are marvelous efforts, full of gastronomic gusto.22 But the last two lines of the last poem are riveting, revealing the poem’s—hence the book’s—commercial objective: Reader, read on, for I have done; farewell, / The Book’s so good, it cannot chuse but sell.

Reader, this is the primal scene of celebrity chef-dom, attaching celebrity to sales. After praising May’s cookery, He is so universal, he’l not miss, / The Pudding, nor Bolonian Sausages—

the poet has a revelation, recalling why he was asked to contrive such praise: to ‘‘sell’’ The Accomplisht Cook. The realization elicits a further realization, so powerful that it has counterparts today: the book, embodying this ‘‘Experienced’’ author, will sell itself, irrespective of a poet’s reciting its virtues. The author—this special author—is the force behind the text’s commercial momentum. The poem’s identification of May as a culinary and commercial force explains why May dismisses would-be celebrities lacking his Experience. He defines himself against these posturing phonies because they challenge and potentially corrupt the authority that lies at the heart of his appeal: I acknowledge that there hath already been several Books publisht . . . for ought I could perceive to very little purpose, empty and unprofitable Treatises, of as little use as some Niggards Kitchens, which the Reader in respect of the confusion of the Method or barrenness of those Authors experience, hath rather been puzzled than profited by; as those already extant Authors have trac’t but one common beaten Road, repeating for the main what others have in the same homely manner done before them: It hath been my task to denote some new Faculty or Science, that others have not yet discovered.

May set the standard in celebrity chefs’ self-definition, extending it to a type of bald, invidious comparison with authors whose books

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he disdains. He launches what becomes the commonplace rhetoric of eighteenth-century culinary celebrity, which arrogates to itself the authority to save readers from false ‘‘Treatises’’ and (by necessary implication) rescue the profession from authors of ‘‘barren’’ Experience. According to May, readers need his book as a counterweight to old, unprofitable nonsense that they might unwittingly have imbibed. May offers the reader what is new (‘‘some new Faculty or Science’’) but also authentic, grounded in Experience. He seeks to give heft to his experience—that is, to his authority—by demonstrating that it is the product of reflection. He has a philosophy: As I live in France, and had the Language and have been an eyewitness of their Cookeries as well, as a Peruser of their Manuscripts, and printed Authors whatsoever I found good in them, I have inserted in this Volume, I do acknowledg my self not to be a little beholding to the Italian and Spanish Treatises; though without my fosterage, and bringing up under the Generosities and Bounties of my Noble Patrons and Masters, I could never have arrived to this Experience.

It is impossible to overstate the endurance of the template laid down in this statement. May made it central to the celebrity chef’s authority to be able to expound a culinary philosophy—in this case, a judicious eclecticism, burnished by years of unfettered practice in rich men’s kitchens. May-the-philosopher echoes in the prefaces of Thomas Keller and Martha Stewart, and in Mark Bittman’s exposition of Jean-George Vongerichten’s style. It is all over Alice Waters and Julia Child. Even less serious celebrities, like Jamie Oliver and Rachael Ray, explain to the reader their culinary visions. This is how one celebrity chef distinguishes him- or herself from another (apart from outright insult). The only reason to buy one more cookbook is because of its distinctiveness, its unique authority reflecting its author’s authority; The Accomplisht Cook establishes a rhetoric of distinctiveness and attaches it to the idea of the brand attached to celebrity chefs. The multiple addresses to the reader in The Accomplisht Cook encompass a celebrity chef’s first great performance, complete with paid entourage. After Robert May: William Rabisha William Rabisha’s The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected was issued four times between 1661 and 1682. It is not as grand as May’s Accomplisht Cook, and its pedagogical claims are also less grand. Yet

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for this very reason, it advances the notion of celebrity, drawing a sharper distinction between the celebrity and the aspirant who tries to learn from a text. According to Rabisha, novices have little hope of a quick, easy ascent by means of his own (or anyone else’s) written instructions. He sets himself apart by means of empirical knowledge, long bouts of trial and error during which he was selfinstructed. As one scholar notes, for Rabisha ‘‘a cookery book can only supplement, not substitute for practical experience in the kitchen.’’23 Rabisha states that ‘‘they are mistaken that think a Tract of this kind can be very beneficial unto any, but such as have been in some measure Practitioners, and understand the nature of the ingredients proposed for the performances of any one thing’’ (‘‘To the Reader’’). Rabisha’s modest claims for his text elevate his own claims as a chef. The gambit contradicts May’s assertion that his own book will produce an ‘‘accomplisht cook.’’ At the expense of his ‘‘Tract’’ and hence of learning from a book, Rabisha privileges experience, what his biography refers to as the ‘‘Traditions and my constant practical experience in this long progress of my life.’’ He dismisses the idea that The Whole Body of Cookery ‘‘may teach every Kitchenwench, and such as never served their times, and so be prejudicial to the Fraternity of Cooks.’’ He offers the book more as a testament to his experience than a guide. Accordingly, Rabisha does not boast about ‘‘easie’’ recipes or intelligible instructions. The implicit message is that Rabisha did it the hard way (burnt roasts, tough pastry) and so must the reader. Yet incredibly, the author of the celebratory poem (which follows ‘‘To the Reader’’) seems not to have absorbed the cautionary message. Instead he asserts—contrary to Rabisha—that anyone can learn to cook from The Whole Body: Cooks burn your Books, and vail your empty brains; / Put off your feigned Aprons; / view the strains Of this new piece, whose Author doth display / The bravest dish, and shew the nearest way / T’inform the lowest Cook how he may dress, / And make the meanest meat the highest mess.

Apparently, the publisher hired some hack to write a conventional poem to sell the book, not realizing that it might contradict Rabisha’s own (candid, if self-serving) sentiments. The mismatch is funny, but at a deeper level it reveals the tensions in trying to reconcile ‘‘celebrity’’ and ‘‘chef.’’ In the late seventeenth century (when ‘‘celebrity chef’’ was taking shape as a concept, if not yet as a term),

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it is unclear whether ‘‘celebrity’’ predominated, indicating a performer remote from his readers, or ‘‘chef,’’ indicating a working professional who teaches and connects with readers through a book. From a marketing perspective, the latter is obviously preferable. But Rabisha’s own words, not focused on marketing, tend toward the former. This tension persists as the notion of ‘‘celebrity chef’’ develops and entails a characteristic dialectic: aspirants (in search of a competent teacher) encounter celebrities (aloof but offering instruction). Early celebrity chefs expounded on their place in this process with varying degrees of self-awareness. A Cheese Tart, from William Rabisha, The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected (1673) Take about three quarters of a pound of old Cheese of Parmyzant, and grate it: put it into a stone mortar; with about a dozen eggs; casting away six of the Whites; put therein half a pound of sweet butter melted, with some Ginger, Cinamon, grated Nutmeg, and Salt: with a penny Manchet grated: season it with Sugar, and Rose water then beat into it so much Cream, that it may be as thin or thinner, then batter for Fretters, you may make it in a dish on a sheet of paste, otherwise you may dry your Coffins and put it in with your Ladle; and put over it cross bars of puff paste, so bake it, and garnish it.

Amusingly, as the poem that introduces The Whole Body winds down, the author—perhaps an aspiring chef himself—admits to being flummoxed by one group of Rabisha’s recipes: With tarts so delicate, ’s new invention, / Doth far surpass my apprehension.

The poet may mean that he cannot understand how Rabisha invented such new tarts, though he may also mean that these new tarts are beyond his apprehension to recreate. The two meanings are not mutually exclusive, and it is likely that the latter surfaced somewhat accidentally, as the poet neared the end of his allotted number of lines. In such a case, he would have affirmed the actual purport of Rabisha’s address ‘‘To the Reader,’’ namely, that Rabisha is a celebrity who has deigned to write a book, a remote figure whom the average reader can approach (if at all) only after years of assimilating information not immediately apprehensible from The Whole Body. It is interesting to speculate (as we do in chapter 7) on why chefs write books that they present as less than entirely useful; the question has a psychological component bearing directly on the notion of such chefs’ need to present themselves as unapproachable.

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Charles Carter The next great chef to theorize celebrity was Charles Carter, whose The Complete Practical Cook (1730) aimed at the same elite who attracted May and Rabisha.24 What is interesting, however, is how Carter’s self-promotional rhetoric registers the impact of burgeoning print culture on his elite assumptions—that is, on his reaction to the hack subculture that print culture spawned. By 1730, as the patronage system had begun to wane, desperate authors tried their hand at writing for the market. Much of this writing was hack-work, poorly paid and of little value (perhaps like the poem in Rabisha’s text). Nonetheless, it vastly expanded the public sphere and the supply of accessible trash. In Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (1972), the teeming underworld of authors who wrote what they could for what they could get comes vividly to life.25 Carter resented these Grub Street men as inferior rivals—just as May had resentments— and positioned himself as art’s defender against such proliferating crudeness: But so much I think I owe to Justice, and to my own Character, as to declare, that this is almost the only Book that has of late Years been publish’d, the Recipes whereof are the Result of the Author’s Practice, and to which the Name of the Writer has been put without any other Consideration than the Publick Service: And the little low Arts used by Persons who have wanted to vamp up Old Books, and pass them upon the World for New, with the Name of a Modern Artist prefix’d, who has had no other Hand in the whole, than the extending of it to receive Five or ten Guineas for the Credit of his Name, are so well known, that I need not defend the Particulars on this Head. (‘‘To the READER’’)

Opportunistically decrying Grub Street’s mean reputation, Carter claims that hack cookbooks are published under great men’s names, but that he stands apart from the practice.26 He presents The Complete Practical Cook as authentic and inventive, as against ‘‘Old Books’’ with fallacious new names.27 In this paradoxical formulation, he is both truly Modern—not just a fraud with a modern name— and a stalwart from before the time when the presses proliferated trash. Thus where May disdains the work of lesser men and claims that his is better, Carter cites shiftier rivals: Grub Street publishers who employ hack writers and pay chefs to betray their calling. He assumes a very eighteenth-century pose, the result of an expanding

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market. That is, while he opposes this market—or what he claims to be its abuses—he acts as a creature of the market, promoting his work to readers in search of polite instruction. Such readers, anxious to elevate their standards, study vehicles like The Spectator for authoritative lifestyle advice.28 Carter positions himself as another sure guide, free of the taint of hack writing. As his first piece of instruction, he exposes the book trade, casting his own efforts (in contradistinction) as ‘‘Publick Service.’’ He is so intent on attacking frauds, that he warns readers that a sham cook may be squandering their money: If Gentlemen were made a little acquainted with some of the Sovereign Rules of this Noble Art, they would the less depend upon the unartful Management of a dark-proceeding, and often ignorant Juggler, who, under the Cloak of reserving to himself the Secrets of his Profession, is only affecting a sullen, and, perhaps, sawcy Pre-eminence in his Way, to conceal his Ignorance; which, were it once discover’d, his Noble Master would not, for the Sake of saving a few Pounds per Annum, reject a thorough-pac’d Artist, and suffer a Raw, and perhaps Tavern-bred Dabbler in the Science, to waste and destroy the most costly Ingredients to no manner of Purpose; and so, of Consequence, a due Value would be put upon the thorough-bred Artist. (‘‘To the READER’’)

In what is hardly a feel-good approach, Carter amplifies his appeal to readers’ good taste by challenging their competence to manage a household. Such challenge is designed to illustrate how Carter’s expertise is out of the ordinary, worth the price of The Complete Practical Cook, and able to save readers from ‘‘ignorant Jugglers.’’29 Carter not only appeals to readers’ anxieties, but also creates anxiety where it may not yet exist. He suggests that while readers may be satisfied with their cook, perhaps they should not be—and that they will not know whether to be satisfied except by reading The Complete Practical Cook. To Stew Carp White, from Charles Carter, The Compleat City and Country Cook (1732) First scale them, gut them and cleanse them; save the Rows and Melts; then stove them in some good white Broth, and season them with Cloves and Mace, Salt and a Faggot of Herbs; put in a little White-wine, and when stewed enough, thicken your Sauce with the Yolks of five Eggs, and pass off the Rows and dip them in Yolks of Eggs, and flower and fry them with some

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Sippets of French bread; then fry some Parsly, and when you dish them, garnish with the Rows, Parsly and Sippets, to serve away hot.

For Carter, celebrity entails condescension. His is not a friendly, Jamie Oliver type of celebrity, or even a Thomas Keller type full of deep reflection. But it is very much in the mode of celebrity chefs insofar as they offer inside scoop from a privileged perspective, what he terms ‘‘Sovereign Rules.’’ Rather than ‘‘reserving to himself the Secrets of his Profession’’—the way a phony or a hack would do— Carter validates his perspective by offering to tell all: ‘‘indeed, ’twas always my Opinion . . . that in all Occupations that pursue an honest and fair Intention, the less the Mystery the Operator assumes, the more Pleasure he gives his Principal.’’ As the discourse develops, the celebrity chef walks a fine line between distance and approachability. If he is remote, he still claims to reduce the barriers between himself and everyone else, offering tips, secrets, recipes, and techniques that might draw readers closer to his orbit, making them feel nearer the essence of celebrity. (This is an illusion of course, but readers revel in illusions of approaching greatness). Of course, May promised to disclose ‘‘secrets,’’ even at the risk of angering his peers. But Carter’s riff on the strategy is to suggest that disclosure will provide readers the wherewithal to appreciate him in preference to the ‘‘Dabbler.’’ The disclosure serves his own purpose, burnishing his brand as much as it may increase readers’ competence. The secrets, like a performance orchestrated by Karlitz & Company, redound to Carter’s greater credibility, his greater celebrity. Also like May, Carter cites the great households that he served. They constitute a pedigree, a provenance that speaks for itself and justifies his claimed Experience. The Preface to his second book, The Compleat City and Country Cook (1736), leads off with his provenance, asserting that his culinary excellence is inherited: The Art and Mystery of COOKERY, having been, as it were Hereditary, descending to me from my Father, who was excellent in his Profession, having extracted the Quintessence of the Art from a long Race of Predecessors, all of them practical Cooks of some Eminence.

Carter suggests that while culinary ability requires dedication, it is also dynastic. This latter requirement sets Carter apart from most everyone else—even if one trained in a Lord’s kitchen, the je ne sais quoi of heredity will always be elusive. Whether it should be is indifferent to Carter. In offering no rationale for his assertion, he claims celebrity

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ab initio, an inherent superiority that few can aspire to. In his formulation, real celebrity (irrespective of what one has done) is an apartness that almost no one can match. Such apartness is the essence of celebrity, and by his second book, Carter figures this out. After all the complaints against print culture, the condescension and invidious comparisons, Carter falls back on the argument of kings. Thus, while The Compleat City and Country Cook still decries print culture, the lead argument is new. Perhaps it reflects Carter’s greater self-confidence. In any case, it is a bald assertion that readers can never equal him insofar as his talent is innate. The disclosure of secrets—and its moral justification—is a tease, calculated to draw readers nearer his aura; his real appeal, perversely, is to let readers know that they will never get there. Blockbusters: The Beginnings During the eighteenth century, several female-authored cookbooks went through multiple editions, in part because they moderated the complex, elitist cuisine of male-authored texts. Lydia Fisher’s The Prudent Housewife (1750) was published twenty-five times before the turn of the century; Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife (1727) was published eighteen times, including American editions; Elizabeth Moxon’s English Housewifry (1741) had fourteen editions; Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) saw more than a dozen; Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747) had too many editions to count and was still going strong in the mid-nineteenth century.30 These texts demonstrate that, apart from presenting a more accessible cuisine, women’s culinary writing had a credibility that generated vast market appeal. Housewives could relate to authors who, not surprisingly, often put ‘‘housewife’’ in the title. Yet such authors also began to theorize celebrity, flaunting their experience and detailing their motivations. Unlike lady novelists, bound by convention to hide behind their texts, cookbook authors could articulate their virtues, provided they did not overstep the bounds of modesty.31 Although these authors attained celebrity as their texts were issued and reissued, they began—right from the start, before their fame—to think publicly about their place in culinary discourse. Such forthrightness helped make them celebrities. As their initial statements were addressed by later readers who knew their reputations, their meanings took on a curious echo, a redundancy that nonetheless reinforced their initial claims.

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Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife affected a wry attitude toward such personal commentaries, dismissing them as a type of decoration that merely filled out space: It being grown as unfashionable for a Book now to appear in Publick without a Preface, as for a Lady to appear at a Ball without a HoopPetticoat, I shall conform to Custom for Fashion-sake, and not through any Necessity.

Nonetheless, she proceeded with an upbeat self-assessment.32 Going beyond ‘‘Fashion-sake,’’ Smith’s discussion set the standard for female cookbook authors’ address to potential readers. May had taken the leap fifty years before, and Carter followed May’s model, but these were such outsize, overweening statements as to be practically intimidating (and off limits) to women. Women, however successful, were still subject to conduct-book rules of modesty; female celebrity chefs had to find their own, gender-appropriate style of self-presentation. Such calibration with male norms was not easy. In some respects, Smith recapitulates May and is unmerciful toward ‘‘Books that treat on this Subject, and bear great Names, as Cooks to Kings, Princes, and Noblemen, and from which one might justly expect something more than many, if not most of those I have read, perform’’ (Preface). Also like May—and without a whiff of irony—she asserts that she has been just such a highly placed cook: [W]hat I here present the World with is the Product of my own Experience, and that for the Space of Thirty Years and upwards; during which Time I have been constantly employed in fashionable and noble Families, in which the Provisions ordered according to the following Directions, have had the general Approbation of such as have been at many noble Entertainments.

Yet here is where the mimicry ends. Smith is the first major cookbook author to broach the idea that foods should be suitable to the physiology of local inhabitants: ‘‘The Receipts are all suitable to English Constitutions, and English Palates,’’ a notion that would become hugely important as English culinary nationalism became a near-obsession.33 In this passage, Smith takes on the role, suitable to an important chef, of culinary arbiter. She points out that her recipes use ‘‘Provisions as are the Product of our own Country, [dressed] in such a Manner as is most agreeable to English Palates’’

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with a few French dishes as ‘‘may not be disagreeable to English Palates.’’ Though May ridiculed the French (while still commending some of their dishes), Smith takes the next logical leap, theorizing a national cuisine tied to local tastes and produce. Such theorizing, delineating a unique cuisine that their work represents, is precisely how celebrity chefs distinguish themselves. A Plumb-cake, from Eliza Smith, The Compleat Housewife (1742) Take six pounds of currants, five pounds of flour, an ounce of cloves and mace, a little cinamon, half an ounce of nutmegs, half a pound of pounded and blanched almonds, half a pound of sugar, three quarters of a pound of sliced citron, lemon and orange-peel, half a pint of sack; a little honey-water, and a quart of ale-yeast, a quart of cream, a pound and a half of butter melted and poured into the middle thereof; then strew a little flour thereon, and let it lie to rise; then work it well together, and lay it before the fire to rise; then work it up till it is very smooth; then put it in a hoop, with a paper floured at the bottom.

Moreover, where several authors would expand on the inevitable progress of culinary art—and hence on the need for their versions of it—Smith speculates on culinary decadence, the result of overrefinement: This Art being of universal Use, and in constant Practice, has been ever since upon the Improvement; and we may, I think, with good Reason believe is arrived at its greatest Height and Perfection, if it is not got beyond it, even to its Declension; for whatever new, upstart, out-of-the-way Messes some Humorists have invented . . . are only the sallies of a capricious Appetite, and debauching, rather than improving, the Art itself. (Preface)

The thought perversely dismisses ‘‘modern’’ cuisine, and hence virtually every contemporary culinary theorist. It makes the reader take notice and consider Smith’s proposition that food should be anchored to a place and the people who inhabit it, not just invented and reinvented for art’s sake. Smith stayed in print for the next fifty years (and is now available in reprint), by which time she would be perceived as ahead of her time, that is, as a classic. She clearly set her own course and her readers understood that. Her Preface closed with what became a typically female turn, a request for approbation that continues even into the latest editions: As the Whole of this Collection has cost me much Pains, and a thirty Years diligent Application, and I have had Experience of their Use

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and Efficacy, I hope they will be kindly accepted, as by they are generously offered to the Publick; and if they prove to the Advantage of many, the End will be answered that is proposed by her that is ready to serve the Publick in what she may.

The tone is far less assertive than May’s. Moreover, the suggestion that the work ‘‘cost me much Pains’’ is an admission of frustration and sheer drudgery—known to every author—that for May would have been inconceivable. The small, though resonant personal note represents an early outcrop of the type of revelation that later celebrity chefs would turn into an art form of its own. The Preface to Elizabeth Moxon’s English Housewifry, though much shorter, is for that reason another interesting attempt to present one’s efforts with a becoming modesty. Unlike Smith, who was apparently self-initiating, Moxon states that she wrote English Housewifry in response to the urgings of others, and that her friends can vouch for her competence: As the compiler of it engaged in the Undertaking at the the Instance and Importunity of many Persons of eminent Account and Distinction, so she can truly assure them, and the World, that she has acquitted herself with the utmost Care and Fidelity. And she entertains the greater Hope that her Performance will meet with the kinder Acceptance, because of the good Opinion she has been held in by those, her ever honoured Friends, who first excited her to the Publication of her BOOK, and who have been long Eye-Witnesses of her Skill and Behaviour in the Business of her Calling. (Preface)

Like Smith, Moxon seeks acceptance, rather than assuming it as her due. However, unlike Smith, she displays a classic female passivity, displacing onto others the initiative for this commercial venture. Remarkably, this self-justification—first penned in 1741—still appears in the thirteenth edition (1790), when she no longer needs to reassure readers. They know she is competent. Yet the repetition reinforces Moxon’s persona as not commercially driven. Moreover, she hopes that her friends, who also encouraged her, will approve her efforts. Although by 1790 any question of approval is moot, she (or more likely her publisher) includes the statement anyway, signaling a type of attractive (and continuing) modesty. Within the conventions laid down for women, Moxon behaves by the book. Peeking though such conventions, however, is a hint of May-like self-adulation, evident in Moxon’s choice of terms: not just anyone,

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but ‘‘Persons of eminent Account and Distinction’’ encouraged her, and ‘‘Eye-Witnesses’’ can attest to her professional performance. Reading between the lines, one can detect the outlines of celebrity, albeit calibrated to behavioral requirements for women. A French Cake to Eat Hot, from Eliza Smith, The Compleat Housewife (1742) Take a dozen eggs, and a quart of cream, and as much flour as will make it into a thick batter; put to it a pound of melted butter, half a pint of sack, one nutmeg grated, mix it well, and let it stand three or four hours; then bake it in a quick oven, and when you take it out, slit it in two, and pour a pound of butter on it melted with rosewater; cover it with the other half, and serve it up hot.

Hannah Glasse makes no pretense about being asked to write The Art of Cookery. It was not her first commercial venture; she had sold something called Daffy’s Elixir and produced The Compleat Confectioner (1742). By all accounts she needed the money.34 The address ‘‘To the Reader’’ in the twentieth edition of her text, like that in the first, is an in-your-face refutation of pompous French chefs, which sets out the terms under which Glasse seeks to be understood: I doubt I shall not gain the Esteem of those Gentlemen: However, let that be as it will, it little concerns me; but should I be so happy as to gain the good Opinion of my own Sex I desire no more, that will be Recompense for all my Trouble: And I only beg the Favour of every Lady to read my Book throughout before they censure me, and then I flatter myself I shall have their Approbation.

Gone are the claims about eminent and distinguished personages. Gone are the solicitous friends. Glasse is a tub who stands on her own bottom, a female celebrity chef with the courage of her convictions. She wants no one’s approbation except the reader’s, and she would impress that reader only with the quality of her work (not with the famous people behind her). To encounter this passage, therefore, is to sense that the air has cleared, albeit so many other cookbooks would still attempt to square the circle, avoiding the harsher implications of commerce even while courting the market. In view of what might be taken for the bravado of this passage, its most intriguing aspect is Glasse’s hope for ‘‘Recompense for all my Trouble.’’ She does not explain what this trouble is. But like a sudden flash, the phrase opens a window onto Glasse’s personal life and challenges publicprivate distinctions that women were supposed to observe. Face to face with a celebrity chef, the passage triggers in the reader a tiny frisson.

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Though Glasse denounces previous texts, and the ‘‘great Cooks [who] have such a high way of expressing themselves,’’ her jibe is not the reverse chauvinism of a female chef. Rather, in dismissing ‘‘high’’ rhetoric she sets up a comparison to her own plain-spoken usage, explaining what is new in her pedagogy and what justifies Plain and Easy in her title: I Believe I have attempted a Branch of Cookery which Nobody has yet thought worth their while to write upon: But as I have both seen, and found by Experience that the Generality of Servants are greatly wanting in that Point, therefore I have taken upon me to instruct them in the best Manner I am capable. (‘‘To the Reader’’)

Glasse is eminently practical. She has spotted a problem—the abysmal education level of most servants—that she intends to address. She approaches it by adjusting her language: ‘‘If I have not wrote in the high, polite Stile, I hope I shall be forgiven; for my Intention is to instruct the lower Sort, and therefore must treat them in their own Way.’’ Glasse is a celebrity chef with a pedagogical agenda, not unlike like Jamie Oliver or Alice Waters. Lacking their flair, she is nonetheless as forthright. She sums up her awareness of readers’ needs in one pithy sentence: ‘‘I shall say no more, only hope my Book will answer the ends I intend it for; which is to improve the Servants, and save the Ladies a great deal of Trouble.’’ The appeal is brilliant, at once affiliating with the higher classes, while acknowledging the servant fearful of chastisement if she ruins the soup. More than any celebrity chef of the period, Glasse is the arbiter of kitchen politics. She is less concerned to command readers’ respect, than to promote the idea that through her intervention they can comfortably inhabit their separate spheres. She posits her text as the instrument of an urban ideal, composed of a minimally supervising lady able to depend on an autonomous servant. Unlike her male predecessors, Glasse speaks directly to women, making great claims for her text as a labor-saving device. Gingerbread, from Hannah Glasse, The Compleat Confectioner (1742) Take a pound and a half of London treacle, two eggs beat, half a pound of brown sugar, one ounce of ginger beat and sifted, of cloves, mace, and nutmeg, altogether, half an ounce; of very fine coriander and caraway seeds, half an ounce each; two pounds of butter melted, and mixed together; add as much flour as will knead it into a very stiff paste, and roll it out; cut it into

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what form you please, bake it in a quick oven on tin plates, and a little time will be sufficient.

Elizabeth Raffald, however, is an entirely more comprehensive theorist of celebrity, a blockbuster author whose riffs on conventions are stunning. While projecting an appropriately modest persona, she is more engaging—more forthcoming—than Glasse or Moxon. As much as she has learned from the rhetoric of female counterparts, she must be measured as well against her male forebears, May and Carter, who laid down a template that she works both with and against. She develops her own voice, recognizable in twenty-first century chefs whose personal and culinary revelations are inseparable. Elizabeth Raffald’s Drama While impregnably remote celebrities such as May and Rabisha were not unique, neither did they set the standard. Glasse had her outbursts; Bradley, her long excurses; and Ellis, his homely invitations. During the eighteenth century, several prominent culinary authors displayed at least glimmers of a human side. Elizabeth Raffald, ‘‘after Hannah Glasse, the most celebrated English cookery writer of the eighteenth century,’’ was determinedly human, revealing a whole mental world and, thereby, creating a more intimate mode of celebrity self-presentation.35 Raffald’s book, The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769), was reprinted more than a dozen times before the turn of the century, imprinting on her readership the drama of its creation. Where May’s Dedication is a thinly disguised pat on his own back, Raffald’s— though it also showcases her former employment—is more diffident, a plea for recognition rather than a claim of success tout court. The success that she cites evokes the reaction within her community, not a history of noble patronage. In addressing Lady Elizabeth Warburton, therefore, she proffers her book on its own terms without any sense of entitlement: Permit me honoured Madam to lay before you, a Book, for which I am ambitious of obtaining your Ladyship’s Approbation, as much as to oblige a great Number of my Friends, who are well acquainted with the Practice I have had in the Art of Cookery, ever since I left your Ladyship’s Family, and have often sollicted me to publish for the Instruction of House-keepers.

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Frontispiece, Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769).

While Raffald cites her elevated employment, she does not assume (or require readers to assume) that The Experienced English Housekeeper is therefore worthy. No one knows whether Lady Warburton approves, and in fact it does not matter. Raffald seeks readers’ approval on other grounds, based on her friends’ acquaintance with and encouragement of her cookery.36 Harking back to the protocols of manuscript culture, Raffald would have readers see in her local experience the exchanges that cemented her local reputation. Without claiming that The Experienced English Housekeeper is a communal production, she conveys nonetheless that communality underlies her motive for producing it. Her friends (whose housekeepers need instruction) were her primary market.37 Thus, while there is

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nothing comfortable about May or Carter, and perhaps a glimpse of good feeling in Moxon, Raffald initiates the kind of credibly warm celebrity that seriously attracts readers. To Pot Salmon, from Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) Let your Salmon be quite fresh, scale, and wash it well, and dry it with a Cloth, split it up the Back and take out the Bone, season it well with White Pepper and Salt, a little Nutmeg and Mace, let it lie two or three Hours, then put it in your Pot, with half a Pound of Butter, tie it down, put it in the Oven and bake it an Hour, when it comes out, lay it on a flat Dish that the Oil may run from it, cut it to the size of your Pots, lay it in layers ’till you fill the Pot, with the Skin upward, put a Board over it, lay on a Weight to press it ’till cold, then pour over it clarified Butter; when you cut it, the Skin makes it look ribbed, you may send it to the Table either cut in Slices, or in the Pot.

Raffald’s friends play an outsize role in shaping her text, which she confesses to Lady Warburton: I rely on your Ladyship’s Candour, and whatever Ladies favour this Book with reading it, to excuse the plainness of the Style, as in Compliance with the desire of my Friends, I have studied to express myself so as to be understood by the meanest Capacity. (Dedication)

Unlike May and Carter, who are unqualifiedly deferential to their noble employers, Raffald stakes out terrain in which her friends’ requirements overrule Lady Warburton’s taste in prose. With this gesture—putting her friends first—Raffald signals her status as a new kind of celebrity, more concerned with the practical needs of ordinary people than with business-as-usual among the great. The change in perspective is significant, no doubt encouraged by Glasse’s successful ‘‘Plain and Easy’’ approach. Both May and Carter had emphasized how their employers’ extravagance allowed them to develop outsize skills; Raffald shifts away from such selfcongratulation, urging instead that her accomplishments while in service be honored for the help she can give to others of her sex: As I flatter myself I had the Happiness to giving Satisfaction during my Service, Madam, in your Family, it would be a still greater Encouragement, should my Endeavours for the Service of my Sex, be honoured with the favorable Opinion of so good a Judge of Propriety and Elegance as your Ladyship. (Dedication)

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Such generosity cleverly acknowledges Raffald’s professional success but situates its instrumental value among the ‘‘friends’’ whose housekeepers need instruction. The move reflects Raffald’s more intimate, more readily approachable celebrity status. The community that she invokes is a specific community, rather than the general Publick implicit in Carter’s claim to Publick Service. Raffald wants readers to see her as the eponymous housekeeper in The Experienced English Housekeeper but also wants them to join a virtual circle of friends who can share the benefits of her experience. Raffald’s address ‘‘To the Reader’’ follows the same pattern as her dedication to Lady Warburton—it seeks approval rather than assuming it. But what is arresting about Raffald’s humility is her negotiation of print culture, that is, her treatment of rival texts. Instead of denouncing lesser authors (of whom by then there were many), she refers to readers’ own attitudes toward the market and asks that they suspend judgment pending actual trial of her text: When I reflect upon the Number of Books already in print upon this Subject, and with what contempt they are read, I cannot but be apprehensive that this may meet the same Fate, from some who will censure it before they either see it or try its Value. Therefore, the only Favour I have to beg of the Public, is not to censure my Work before they have made some trial of some one Receipt, which I am persuaded, if carefully followed, will answer their Expectation.

Again, Raffald displays a gentler mode of self-assertion, implying that her book is better than the mass of books while not explicitly condemning any. The balancing act is deft, and in her softening of the typical marketplace putdown, she reinforces her persona as less selfimpressed, less intimidating than other celebrities’ personae. In some editions, the frontispiece portrait of Elizabeth Raffald is unique among eighteenth-century cookbooks in that it depicts a bonneted woman handing the reader a book by reaching beyond the portrait’s frame. In this image, Raffald is literally in one’s space, rather than aloof and stuck-up. She really wants readers to make ‘‘some trial’’ of one of her recipes and is willing to breach artistic convention to demonstrate her forthcomingness. As The Experienced English Housekeeper goes through printing after printing during the eighteenth century, and the bonnet and facial expression vary depending on the artist, Raffald’s right-hand gesture sometimes changes. But her

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hand’s extension (when it is present) functions as a signature gesture, denoting an understanding that she is in her readers’ world—in their community—writing in a way that is not beholden to any criterion except readers’ ‘‘Expectations.’’ A Savory Chicken Pye, from Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) Let your Chickens be small, season them with Mace, Pepper and Salt, put a Lump of Butter into every one of them, lay them in the Dish with the Breasts up, and lay a thin Slice of Bacon over them, it will give them a pleasant Flavour, then put in a Pint of strong Gravy, and make a good puff Paste, lid it and bake it in a moderate Oven; French Cooks generally put Morels and Yolks of Eggs chopped small.

Raffald’s address ‘‘To the Reader’’ is a little drama of personal engagement with the text, not just in transcribing the recipes but in seeing The Experienced English Housekeeper through the press: ‘‘[E]very Sheet [was] carefully perused as it came from the Press, having an Opportunity of having it printed by a Neighbour, whom I can rely on doing it the strictest Justice, without the least Alteration.’’ Type was set by hand in the eighteenth century, and mistakes were common. It was usual to insert a list of errata, printed either before or after the numbered pages. Raffald, however, proofread every page before the text was bound, and she personally vouches for the printer. The astute reader picks up a sense of Raffald as a potential control freak, but also someone who, like many readers, has a workaday life and is not above admitting to necessary chores. This chef got her hands dirty. Moreover, this ‘‘Neighbor,’’ like the bevy of ‘‘Friends,’’ is part of an extended community solicitous of Raffald and her project. Yet perhaps Raffald’s most affecting, most humanizing revelation is the account of risking her health. Even as she revels in her numerous subscriptions, demonstrating that readers can trust a text so heavily underwritten, she describes the personal toll taken by the book on her well-being.38 In 1769, Raffald had several young children (she went on to have fifteen), and it is likely that her efforts, combined with her family responsibilities, produced extreme exhaustion: The whole Work now being completed to my Wishes, I think it my duty to render my most sincere and grateful Thanks to my most noble and worthy Friends, who have already shewn their good Opinion of my Endeavours to serve my Sex, by raising me so large a

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Subscription, which far excels my Expectations. I have not only been honoured by having above eight hundred of their Names inserted in my Subscription, but also have had all their Interest in this laborious Undertaking, which I have at last arrived to the Happiness of compleating, though at the expence of my Health, by being too studious, and giving too close an Application. (‘‘To the Reader’’)

Raffald becomes the heroine of her own text, the self-sacrificing author in service of her friends; her friends, however, are somewhat ambiguous, supporting her ‘‘Endeavours’’ with subscriptions, but urging her to publish notwithstanding her declining health. Perhaps Raffald is not conscious of this ambiguous portrayal, but the reader perceives it, as she does Raffald’s potential lack of awareness. Wittingly or not, therefore, Raffald opens the door to celebrity chef selfrevelation. She situates herself in a personal drama. She invites readers to care about her by means of a complex self-presentation that demonstrates her culinary bona fides but establishes as well her vulnerability, her desire for approval, the delicacy of a being that nearly gave way in striving for approval. As in the eighteenth-century novel and contemporary life studies such as James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, Raffald begins to break down public-private barriers more than does Glasse (who never let readers in on her ‘‘Trouble’’). Since it is the private that ordinary people wish to penetrate when confronting celebrity, Raffald is, in this sense, on the trajectory toward Paula Deen. By the end of her address ‘‘To the Reader,’’ it is possible to glimpse Raffald as a working woman—which she emphatically is— and to as well sense a personality more fleshed out and immediate than either Glasse’s or Bradley’s. Like William Ellis, Raffald is both cleverly commercial and personally vivid (or at least more vivid than most of her peers). Also like Ellis, her writing leverages her other businesses, which, in turn, offer readers the chance to engage with her again in a personal, immediate context: The Receipts, for the Confectionary, are such as I daily sell in my own Shop, which any Lady may examine at pleasure, as I still continue my Endeavours to give Satisfaction to all who are pleased to favour me with their Custom.

The passage echoes Mario Batali’s assuring readers that dishes in his book are presented exactly as they are at Babbo. Both Raffald and Batali are reinforcing their brand and, concomitantly, inviting readers to meet them in person. They want readers to envision all of

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their enterprises—their books and other establishments—as a continuum, so that readers are comfortable moving among them. In this regard, it is no anachronism to suggest that in fusing her book with her shop, her writing with her real-time persona, Raffald anticipates Batali by 240 years.

THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY’S CELEBRITY TAKEDOWN Unlike its relative ‘‘fame,’’ celebrity is transitory, a market phenomenon that, over time, fades as new trends emerge. This is obviously true of celebrity chefs, whose disappearance can be especially sudden, the result of some new trend or obscure culinary dispute. Besides, celebrity chefs retire. Not so long ago, Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey created culinary waves with their New York Times columns and best-selling books. But not anymore. Nor does anyone remember Duncan Hines’ Adventures in Good Cooking, vintage 1960. These arbiters of taste have gone the way of Gourmet, killed in favor of Bon Appetit, leaving serious cooks to seek a new touchstone. The eighteenth century, notoriously unkind to cookbook authors, was no less so to celebrity chefs. This section examines how the eighteenth century, whose burgeoning market gave currency to celebrity chefs, also perfected their takedown. Robert Smith was perhaps the century’s first great culinary ingrate. His book, Court Cookery: Or, the Compleat English Cook (three printings, 1723–25), advertised on the cover that Smith was the cook ‘‘(under Mr. Lamb) to King William,’’ as well as to ‘‘others of the Nobility and Gentry.’’ One might expect, therefore, that he would have high praise for Lamb, if only to reflect well on himself. But Smith obviously bore some grudge against Lamb, risking his own reputation to lay into Lamb unmercifully: I was near eight years with Mr. Lamb, in his Majesty’s (King William) Reign, and therefore knew most of His Receipts and Methods of Dressing; yet several of those Receipts, as they are now printed in his Royal Cookery, were never made or practis’d by him; and others are extreme defective and imperfect, and made up of Ingredients unknown to him; and several of them more calculated at the Purses than the Gout of the Guests, that it is impossible for a Cook to serve up a Dish, if they were only to follow the Receipts now in Being.

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Since two printings of Lamb’s text (1726, 1731) followed this outburst, it most likely had little effect. Nonetheless, its nastiness is extraordinary.39 But this was only the beginning of a trend. Not long after Charles Carter published his second book, The Compleat City and Country Cook (1732), the hatchet fell. Carter’s reputation took up a potentially ambiguous afterlife in The London and Country Cook (1749), which states that while it is ‘‘by’’ him, it is ‘‘Revised and much improved by a Gentlewoman.’’ In the Preface, this gentlewoman states that although she received many recipes from Carter, I have been just to the public, and free with my author, as to reject in him what even I found upon experience would not answer his recommendation and their expectation; always supplying his defects with what I can warrant to be genuine: So that, without doing any injustice to his character . . . I have greatly improved his book.

The question is whether Carter’s celebrity was tarnished by this publication or enhanced by recipes that were made even better. Clearly, Carter aspired to become a classic, and it is unlikely that an unnamed upstart author could seriously undermine that goal. She may not even have set out to hurt him, since she obviously seeks to trade on his renown. But in view of Carter’s large claims, The London and Country Cook attests at the very least to the fact that by the eighteenth century, no celebrity chef was above being hoist by his own petard—recipes. Cookbook authors did not shrink from naming names. Francis Collingwood and John Woollams’ The Universal Cook (1792) notes that as a result of the authors’ experimentation with various received recipes, they came to regard all recipes as subject to change and improvement—with consequences not just for themselves but for the greatest chefs: It will from hence follow, that we do not presume to arrogate to ourselves the Reputation of having ushered into the World a Work entirely new . . . Glasse, Mason, Raffald and Farley are, like us, equally indebted to the Labours of our Predecessors. (Preface)

This is an amazing statement, not actually intended to diminish reputations but clearly having that potential. None of the named authors gives credit to any ‘‘Predecessors,’’ and by avoiding the issue, the possibility is left open that recipes are new. Charlotte

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Mason states that her recipes came straight from the ‘‘manuscript of an experienced housekeeper’’; in that posture they would not have had previous substantial currency unless the housekeeper had copied them from a best-seller (in which case Mason likely would have recognized them and been too embarrassed to recycle them). At a deeper level, Collingwood and Woollams are driving at the fact that recipes are rarely entirely new. But that is still not what they wrote; they leave the impression that if they are primarily revisionists, so are greater chefs. In fact, Glasse did copy numerous recipes, but as chapter 2 explains, her contributions were often significant. So readers are left with an assertion that tends to tarnish. It is gratuitous and meant to make Collingwood and Woollams look a little better. The fact that they thought they could make such an assertion without seeming petulant, or at the risk of alienating readers, demonstrates how vulnerable celebrity chefs had become. The real attack, however, had no precedent in British culinary literature, either in scope or vitriol. As high-profile sparring between two chefs, it rises to Missy Lapine’s very public challenge to Jessica Seinfeld (comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s wife) over Seinfeld’s Deceptively Simple (2007) or, for sheer directness, Anthony Bourdain’s branding Rachael Ray a ‘‘bobblehead’’ ‘‘freakazoid’’ whose pitch for Dunkin’ Donuts was ‘‘evil.’’ Plowing back into this attack after 250 years leads one to wonder whether a modern publisher would ever underwrite it, since malicious libel is still a punishable offense. The attack was launched, moreover, against best-selling Hannah Glasse—a difficult icon to dislodge. Ann Cook took up her truncheon with all teeth bared in The Professed Art of Cookery . . . With an Essay Upon the Lady’s Art of Cookery (1754).40 Cook saw Glasse as a fraud and styled herself ‘‘Ann Cook, Teacher of the True Art of Cookery’’ (obviously disparaging Glasse’s false art). Short of diagnosing some deep festering animus, it is impossible to imagine why Cook expended so much energy launching the attack, especially since The Art of Cookery was already in its fourth edition. Indeed, riding a wave of popularity, Glasse published The Servant’s Directory (1760), while The Compleat Confectioner (not to mention The Whole of Art) went through multiple editions. Perhaps Cook believed that she could profit off of exposing Glasse; perhaps she fancied that she could replace Glasse in celebrity. A hint at her motivation appears in a footnote in Virginia Maclean’s Short-Title Catalogue, which states: ‘‘Ann Cook, a teacher of cookery, had a very troubled life, and she used her book partly to attack Hannah

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Glasse . . . but mainly (in the last 100 pages under the misnamed ‘A Plan of Housekeeping’) as an autobiography.’’41 Actually, the attack on Glasse takes up a substantial portion of Cook’s text. It begins with a parody of the commendatory verse, a ten-page poem (or rather ten pages of doggerel) that excoriates Glasse. Here are some sample lines: Look and behold the Lady’s Introduction, / Her noble Progress promis’d by Instruction, / The lower Sort makes Choice of, for to sway And says, / will treat them in their own Way, For such a Teacher’s Reformation pray: / To fleece the poor low Servants to get Wealth, Act collect Surfeits to destroy all Health, / Can this be honesty or pelf’ring Stealth; Robbers on the Highway may take a Purse, / But who steals away Health is ten Times worse, / Good Cooks are Blessings and bad Cooks a Curse. (iii–iv)

It is an amazing effort, followed by a near-seventy-page deconstruction of Glasse’s recipes. If a reader thinks Glasse knows how to roast a pig, wait until Cook begs to differ. Every detail of Glasse’s recipe is contradicted, until the recipe emerges as its mirror image. Multiply this by pages and pages, and the idea is clear. Ann Cook apparently has no respect for Glasse, and she let whatever she does feel all hang out. Glasse clearly survived, but not for Cook’s lack of trying to discredit her. It was precisely because Glasse was such a celebrity that Cook bothered at all. *** As this chapter suggests, celebrity chefs had a great deal to say about themselves and others in the eighteenth century. Celebrity was a form of self-marketing, a projection of the self into a competitive space that became more competitive as print culture advanced. The next chapter examines an array of marketing techniques that extend beyond the exploitation of personality. NOTES 1. This chapter defines celebrity as it tends to be expressed in culinary personalities. For an excellent discussion of modern celebrity culture in general, including numerous references to further studies, see Kristine Harmon’s bibliographical review in the Hedgehog Review (2005), http:// www.virginia.edu/iasc/HHR_Archives/Celebrity/7.1LBibliography.pdf. 2. Bourdain, an astute observer of celebrity-chef culture, acknowledges that ‘‘branding’’—and hence brand extension—makes possible the extension of celebrity chefs’ appeal. In the New York Times’ review of the decade,

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he observed that in 2007 ‘‘celebrity chefs who’d made their reputations on the haute side moved to capture the middle ground as well, expanding into branded burger joints. As with haute couture, those who couldn’t afford the full ride could now at least buy the T-shirt’’ (December 27, 2009, ‘‘Sunday Opinion,’’ 12). 3. Paula Deen’s Kitchen Classics (New York: Random House, 2005), iii. 4. Oliver is news. Just ahead of his tenth book, Jamie’s Food Revolution: Rediscover How to Cook Simple, Delicious, Affordable Meals (2009), the New York Times Magazine ran a feature on his life, businesses, and aspirations. See ‘‘The Minister of Food: Can the British Superchef Jamie Oliver America’s Diet in one of the Country’s Unhealthiest Towns?’’ October 11, 2009. 5. On Ellis, see Sandra Sherman, ‘‘Advertisements for Myself: William Ellis and the Reinvention of the Puff,’’ Prose Studies 24, no. 2 (2001): 65–86. 6. Stewart, Entertaining (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1982), 3. 7. The ‘‘Dining’’ section of the New York Times for October 28, 2009, ran a front-page article on Keller, examining his culinary philosophy and personal life. It also announced Keller’s latest book, Ad Hoc at Home (2009) and discussed his previous books. 8. In a New York Times Magazine article of July 29, 2009, ‘‘Out of the Kitchen Onto the Couch,’’ Michael Pollan laments that television food shows seduce viewers into watching instead of cooking for themselves. 9. See Karlitz & Company Web site, www.karlitz.com. 10. See ICE Web site at www.iceculinary.com/events/celebrity_ chefs.shtml. The British have their own version of this service. See the UK Celebrity and Endorsement Booking Agents—Keynote Speaker Bureau Web site, www.cmmol.net/celebrity_chefs.htm. The site lists dozens of famous chefs, noting that ‘‘This list of celebrity chefs & cooks can be used as a guide to who may be available from CMM for your cuisine driven activity or demonstration.’’ 11. In a similar vein, the Twelfth Annual Beaver Creek Master Chef Classic, co-sponsored by Bon Appetit and a Colorado skiing lodge, offers a three-day skiing vacation combined with tastings, seminars, dinners, and ‘‘celebrity chef meet and greets.’’ See the Travel section of the New York Times, January 3, 2010, p. 5. 12. The Wikipedia article on Batali runs to several pages, recounting his exploits even at a reception for the King and Queen of Spain. Besides having written several cookbooks, Batali appears on the Food Network; he sells a line of house wares, has an interest in several restaurants in New York and Las Vegas, and started a foundation to help children. Bill Buford, an editor at The New Yorker, wrote a book about working with Batali, Heat (2006), which became a best-seller. 13. On February 14, 2007, the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) celebrated Child’s life and legacy. The IACP has

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honored Child repeatedly, since her support of its initiatives added luster to the organization. 14. For a theoretical discussion of branding as an instrument of marketing efficiency, see ‘‘Brand Efficiency and Brand Relevance—Introducing and Linking Both Concepts,’’ http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id ¼962240. 15. In The Fat Duck Cookbook (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), Heston Blumenthal declares ‘‘This book . . . holds nothing back. The recipes in the following pages are faithful to how the dishes are prepared at the Fat Duck, using the same equipment, the same techniques and the same ingredients’’ (126). 16. There has been considerable academic work on the eighteenthcentury approach to celebrity. As Cheryl Wanko states in Roles of Authority: Thespian Biography and Celebrity in the Eighteenth Century (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2003), ‘‘celebrity refigures fame and heroism for a more commercial society’’ (7). See also Matthew J. Kinservik, Sex, Scandal and Celebrity in Late Eighteenth Century England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Stella Tillyard, ‘‘Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century London,’’ History Today 55 (2005): 20–27; and Elizabeth Barry, ‘‘From Epitaph to Obituary: Death and Celebrity in Eighteenth Century Britain,’’ International Journal of Cultural Studies 11, no. 3 (2008): 259–75. 17. In All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1985), Stephen Mennell examines a group of ‘‘courtly’’ chefs whose books were ‘‘written by professional chefs and addressed primarily to other professional chefs rather than to housewives’’ (89). May is among this group, which is entirely male. It is challenged early on, however, by Eliza Smith, discussed later in this chapter. 18. The fusion of author and book was a seventeenth-century commonplace. In Areopagitica (1644) John Milton declares ‘‘Almost kill a man as kill a good book . . . he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.’’ 19. The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened (1669) was published after Digby died in 1665. 20. For an excellent discussion of the role of autobiography in culinary and household texts, and in related conduct manuals, see Caterina Albano’s introduction to a reprint of Hannah Wooley’s The Gentlewoman’s Companion (1675; Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 2001). Albano notes that ‘‘In these authors’ autobiographical references . . . we see an attempt to present a coherent picture which conforms to a modern attitude of self-improvement and progress. Wooley’s life is indicative of her ability to learn and put into practice her knowledge as a means of social advancement. Consequently her life not only validates her enterprise, but represents an example for her readers’’ (12). Wooley is not included in this chapter on celebrity chefs because May offers a more copious example of the conventional rhetoric and because Wooley’s text is closer to a conduct book than a cookbook.

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21. During the seventeenth century, literary works were commonly referred to as the author’s children. See, for example, Margaret Cavendish’s ‘‘To the Reader’’ in Poems and Fancies (1653), stating that she is ‘‘so fond of my Book as if to make it as if it were my child,’’ noting further that it took her nine months to write. John Milton’s Areopagitica stated that before licensing, ‘‘books were ever more freely admitted into the world as any other birth.’’ 22. On British food poetry, see Sandra Sherman, ‘‘English Nationalism,’’ Petits Propos Culinaires 78 (2005): 66–88. 23. Mennell, All Manners of Food, 91. 24. For a discussion of Carter’s cuisine, see Gilly Lehmann, The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Totnes, UK: Propect Books, 2003). 25. Pat Rogers, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (London: Methuen, 1972). See also Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. chap. 2. As an example of the Grub Street ethos, consider Defoe’s A Vindication of the Press (1718), where he suggests that ‘‘booksellers and authors should be permitted the Liberty of Writing and Printing of either Side for bread, free of Ignominy; and as getting Money is the chief Business of the World, so these measures cannot by any means be esteem’d Unjust or Disreputable’’ (21). 26. Later in his address ‘‘To the READER,’’ Carter even claimed that one famous chef acknowledged that he had lent his name to a bogus text, which he ‘‘often declar’d to me and others, on reproaching him with giving his Approbation to Compositions unworthy of it.’’ The practice of publishing hackwork under famous culinary names is alive and well in the twentyfirst century. See http://www.frpbooks.com/about/news.aspx?section¼ details&type¼default&iid¼1424, which warns readers that such books often contain untested recipes. 27. Despite Carter’s claims, the standard bibliography of eighteenthcentury cookbooks reveals that in the years leading up to The Complete Practical Cook, there were no such publications. See Virginia Maclean, A Short-Title Catalogue of Household and Cookery Books Published in the English Tongue 1701–1800 (Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 1981). Of course, hack publications might have been so slight and ephemeral as to have escaped bibliographical notice. 28. On the role of The Spectator (1711–12, constantly reprinted) in forming polite tastes, see Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From the Spectator to Post-Structuralsim (London: Verso, 2005). See also Erin Mackie, Market a la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in the Tatler and The Spectator (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Paul Langford notes that in the eighteenth century, ‘‘there seemed no shortage of Englishmen, or, as it was often said, of Englishwomen, whose

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prime ambition in life was to rise higher up the social ladder.’’ See A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1989), 65. 29. While several texts, notably Glasse’s Art of Cookery, made fun of the French for extravagance, Carter pinned wastefulness on prideful domestic cooks who did not know what they were doing. In seeking to distinguish himself, Carter attacked phoniness irrespective of nationality. 30. Glasse was ‘‘certainly the best-known cookery writer of the 18th century. . . . Her works were best-sellers for nearly a hundred years . . . and remained popular until Mrs. Beeton took over her mantle.’’ See Virginia Maclean, A Short-Title Catalogue, 60, n. 1. 31. For an illuminating study of the ‘‘modesty’’ (that is, lack of selfassertion) demanded of women in the late seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, see Ruth Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). See, for example, ‘‘Of Modesty,’’ the first chapter of Richard Allestree’s much-reprinted The Ladies Calling (11th ed., 1720). The second chapter was entitled ‘‘Of Meekness.’’ Texts such as Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their Interest (1701), however, provided encouragement in a new direction. 32. Compare the Preface to an early text, The Queen’s Royal Cookery (1713): A Preface might indeed seem unnecessary to recommend this small, but useful Treatise, to the World, since the Title were sufficient to do that of it self: But in regard it has a singular Advantage over most books of this kind, we think fit to say something in its behalf.

The authors, with less irony, clearly saw advantage in introducing the text in their own terms. 33. On the development of English culinary nationalism, see Sandra Sherman, ‘‘English Nationalism,’’ Petits Propos Culinaires 78 (2005): 66–88. 34. See Jennifer Stead’s Introduction to the facsimile edition of The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 1995). 35. Maclean, A Short-Title Catalogue, 123, n. 1. Raffald was a Manchester confectioner who ran a cooking school. She also ran two prominent taverns, founded and ran newspapers, and compiled Manchester’s first business directory. 36. As in all of these dedications to third persons, for example, noble patrons, it would be na€ve to assume that they were directed only at the patron, rather than at the general reader. 37. Compare, for example, the Advertisement to the Seventh Edition of John Farley’s The London Art of Cookery (1792), which situated the reason

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for reprinting firmly in the market at large: ‘‘The very flattering Preference this Book has received, is an indisputable Proof of its Superiority over every one of the Kind; and we are justified in this Assertion, by the very rapid Sale of the six former numerous Editions.’’ 38. Subscriptions helped eighteenth-century publishers finance the publication. Often, subscribers paid half of a book’s cost up front, and the other half upon publication. For discussions of the practice in a variety of contexts, see Isabel Rivers, ed., Books and Their Readers in EighteenthCentury England: New Essays (London: Continuum, 2001). 39. Smith appears to have been angry at everyone. He followed his diatribe against Lamb with yet more spleen: ‘‘I was the more inclin’d to print this Book, before I left the Kingdom, by finding that several of my Receipts, which I had given to satisfy the importunity of Friends had been publish’d to the World, as the Labours of other People; and besides that, the material Ingredients, proper to some of them, had been left out. All which Defects I have in the ensuing Receipts supply’d.’’ Where Raffald and others thank their friends, Smith has only recriminations. 40. Glasse did not identify herself as the author of the Art of Cookery until its fourth edition in 1751. In previous editions, she styled herself ‘‘A Lady,’’ and indeed, many eighteenth-century texts were initially published anonymously. 41. Maclean, A Short-Title Catalogue, 35, n. 1. For citations to further discussions of this fascinating feud, see n. 1–3.

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CHAPTER 5

MARKETING STRATEGIES

In 2006, Americans spent more than half a billion dollars on cookbooks. More than 38,000 titles were in print, with almost two thousand published in that year alone. Twenty-five hit the best-seller list.1 As the economy weakened in 2008, and general book sales tumbled, cookbooks bucked the trend; people flocked to homecooking because it is cheaper, potentially healthier, and (as they discovered) fun.2 Old standbys like Joy of Cooking offered comfort, and less storied texts kept selling. As market research revealed, cookbooks have staying power; the backlist still promotes sales.3 Yet with so many cookbooks jostling for attention—including those with outsize names—the question is how anyone knew what to buy, or even when to stop buying; people have no apparent limit regarding how many cookbooks they seem to need. To a substantial degree, people collect cookbooks, responding to sales pitches as they did in the eighteenth century. Indeed, from a marketing perspective, the parallels between then and now are startling: the name of the game for cookbooks has always been self-promotion. And as always, the question has been: how? The formulation of effective marketing strategies, like the formulation of intelligible recipes, did not happen all at once. It was, however, an obsession from the very start of print culture, which enabled cookbooks—like novels, pamphlets, and conduct books—to be reproduced on a potentially infinite scale. After the Restoration (1660), culinary texts exploded into print in response to rising literacy, growth in demand from an aspiring middle class, and demographic shifts that left women bereft of

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on-site sources of culinary know-how.4 This explosion of texts— along with all manner of self-help instruction—entailed a classic print-culture challenge: how to convince readers that a new text, similar to ones they might already own, was different, useful, and worth the price.5 That these texts were similar is a commonplace of culinary scholarship, such that modern editors feel obliged to track down the provenance of copied recipes.6 Yet even apart from chronic copying, the genre was so focused on routine cooking and homemaking (broadly construed to include gardening, ‘‘physick,’’ and animal care) that ‘‘new’’ ideas were often just hype, trivialities lost in the blur of kitchen-related discourse.7 There were a few real innovations—like illustrated, keyed carving instructions—but for the most part, authors were defensive about texts with ‘‘Cookery’’ and ‘‘New’’ in the title. At the same time, they realized that some rationale was required to convince readers to buy yet another look-alike.8 Thus, while prefaces acknowledged the crowded market, they derided earlier texts. This chapter examines how such prefaces formulated aggressive marketing strategies, targeting readers who probably never heard of any particular text.9 It demonstrates the lineage of selfpromotional patterns taken for granted in the twenty-first century. PRELIMINARY RHETORICAL FLOURISHES Robert May’s declaration in The Accomplisht Cook (1660) typifies what became formulaic invective, leaving one to wonder how so many texts dealing with similar material over such a long period could level charges of incompetence at every other text: I acknowledge that there hath already been several Books publisht, and among the rest some out of the French, for ought I could perceive to very little purpose, empty and unprofitable Treatises, of as little use as some Niggards Kitchens, which the Reader in respect of the confusion of the Method, or barrenness of those Authors experience, hath rather been puzzled then profited by; as those already extant have trac’t but one common beaten Road, repeating for the main what others have in the same homely manner done before them: It hath been my task to denote some new Faculty or Science, that others have not yet discovered. (Preface)

On his own authority, May asserts that prior texts are pedagogically deficient, their authors untrained, their contents dull and old hat.

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In one form or another, later authors similarly wipe the slate clean, disallowing even the possibility of ‘‘classics.’’ During this relatively early phase of print capitalism, readers may just have ignored such claims, though a raft of culinary authors seemed to think they did not—or at least they thought it prudent to denounce rival texts as a means to promote their own. In The Accomplish’t Ladies Delight (1670), Hannah Wooley declared ‘‘Though there have been many Books Extant of this kind, yet I think something hath been deficient in them all’’ (‘‘To the Ladies and Gentlewomen’’); in A Perfect School of Instructions for the Officers of the Mouth (1682), Giles Rose hoped to be secure ‘‘from the assaults of those envious Detractors, who love not to speak well of any, but of themselves, and the insipid Off-spring of their own sterril Inventions’’ (‘‘The Dedication’’); and The Court and Country Cook (1702), translated from the French, opined ‘‘[T]he reader will here meet with many sorts of different Messes, not so much as mention’d in any other Treatises of Cookery formerly printed, and others of a better Relish, prepar’d with a great deal more Art, as well as explained after a more clear and intelligible manner’’ (‘‘The Preface to the Reader’’). Disdain was de riguer. T. Hall’s The Queen’s Royal Cookery (1713) ‘‘outted’’ the commercial logic of such claims. The Preface begins conventionally enough, asserting that the text ‘‘is not stuff’d with superfluous Trifles, as most of its Nature are; or with old and antiquated Receipts; but with Things wholly new and useful,’’ making it ‘‘the most intelligible and useful Book of its kind that ever was Printed.’’ At the end of the Preface, however, the ‘‘Reader,’’ who is initially addressed, gives way to the ‘‘Buyer,’’ the object of a commercial pitch: the Benefits and Experience the Buyers will reap . . . will undoubtedly equal any Thing that can be said.

The (calculated?) slippage from Reader to Buyer suggests that whoever wrote the Preface had marketing uppermost in his mind. Apparently unconcerned that his claims of superiority (‘‘undoubtedly’’) echo everyone else’s, he may have assumed that new buyers enter the market all the time unaware of the usual posturing, and that even repeat buyers do not read or remember claims in other texts.10 In any case, he is impressed by the idea—enough to try it again— that fashion cannot be marketed without dismissing rivals as ‘‘old and antiquated.’’

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Cover of A Collection of Above Three Hundred Receipts (1714).

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Even in cases in which new texts have no fashionable pretensions, they still denounce prior texts, attempting to arouse mistrust in well-known works, such as May’s, to which inexperienced readers might instinctively turn. The Preface to A Collection of Above Three Hundred Recipts in Cookery, Physick and Surgery; For the Use of All Good Wives, Tender Mothers, and Careful Nurses (1714), authored ‘‘By Several Hands,’’ dismisses predecessors and singles out the famous for special derision: The Directions relating to COOKERY are Palatable, Useful, and Intelligible, which is more than can be said of any now Publick in that kind; some great Masters having given us Rules in that Art so strangely odd and fantastical, that ’tis hard to say Whether the Reading has given more Sport and Diversion, or the Practice more Vexation and Chagrin, in spoiling us many a good Dish, by following their Directions.

Such outbursts evince a skittishness toward competition, a fear that consumers—puzzled by the plethora of texts—have no criteria by which to discriminate and will gravitate toward recognizable authors. However crudely, marketing strategies such as that in A Collection attempt to redress a competitive imbalance among similar texts where the only major distinctions involve visibility. Most immediately, they seek to deter readers from relying on texts’ reputation or endurance, casting doubt on such texts’ utility. Secondarily, they offer readers criteria (‘‘Palatable, Useful, Intelligible’’) that reflect well on the text in hand, albeit such criteria are mostly commonsense catchwords. To the discerning strategist, however, this barrage of invective backed up by banal, unsupported claims could have seemed selfdefeating, likely to send readers back to old standbys. Competent strategies therefore develop more complex rationales for why readers need a specific text, and it is on this basis that rhetoric—more prominently than textual content—tended to individuate texts in the market. In exploring the commercial strategies of early culinary texts, this chapter examines how their rhetoric appeals to readers. It focuses on prefaces because they are ‘‘theoretical,’’ much more so than contemporary ads, and because they exhibit interesting rhetorical patterns. The chapter looks at how, on a generic basis, prefaces engage with texts that they introduce. It also looks at how prefatorial invective during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sought to deter readers’ acceptance of well-reputed and even merely extant culinary texts. Finally, and most important, it examines how such prefaces invited readers to identify their needs with the text in

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hand, tipping the balance in favor of a sale. In this context, the chapter suggests that culinary prefaces as a genre, including the very latest, deploy characteristic representations about how texts teach. THE PURPOSE OF PREFACES: A THEORY In Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997) literary theorist Gerard Genette argues that elements surrounding the text proper, including prefaces and related introductory material, constitute [A] zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that—whether well or poorly understood and achieved—is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it (more pertinent, of course, in the eyes of the author and his allies).11

The preface is where the author (or his proxy) demonstrates the text’s ‘‘usefulness’’ and ‘‘originality,’’ and ‘‘definitely consists of forcing on the reader an indigenous theory defined by the author’s intention, which is presented as the most reliable interpretive key; and in this respect the preface clearly constitutes one of the instruments of authorial control.’’12 It tells readers how to read, hence how to value the text, and the readings in this chapter reflect this perception. Nevertheless, and fundamentally, there seems little reason to support Genette’s claim that a preface cannot be a commercial artifact and, by necessary implication, that attempts to ‘‘control’’ a reader are unrelated to a text’s commercial aspirations. According to Genette, the ‘‘reader’’ addressed in the Preface already has acquired the text: Determining the addressee of a preface . . . all boils down to this truism; the addressee of the preface is the reader of the text—the reader, and not simply a member of the public. . . . And this is so not only de facto—because the reader of the preface already necessarily has the book (it is harder to read a preface than a [dust jacket] while one is standing in the aisle of a bookstore). (194)

Going further, Genette claims that ‘‘it is no longer precisely a matter of attracting the reader—who has already made the considerable effort to procure a copy of the book by buying, borrowing, or stealing it—but of hanging onto him with a typically rhetorical apparatus of persuasion’’

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(198). On their face, the commercial tenor of prefaces cited here undermines Genette’s limited criteria, as does the sheer interest in money of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century booksellers.13 Moreover, without dust-jacket blurbs (without dust-jackets!) to make a quick impression, let alone the multimedia promotion of twenty-firstcentury culinary blockbusters, a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century reader naturally would study a preface if one were provided. Even if she had seen a catalog, she would learn little of the differences among texts, and the same would have been true had she read the ads.14 A text might come recommended by a friend or journal, but this would not have deterred her going deeper, since, as English author Daniel Defoe testifies, eighteenth-century shoppers loved to inspect goods minutely, lingering for ages.15 It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that they would do so at a bookstore, where no element of surface appeal could quickly determine one’s choice. One had to look carefully into books, and because it was cumbersome to compare similar sections on soups, preserves, and ragouts, the preface was a practical desideratum. The resolution of the issue raised by Genette turns, therefore, on what seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors could have assumed to be common reading practices, rather than on abstract or anachronistic notions that might seem reasonable in the twenty-first century.16 As one scholar has observed regarding the contingency of reading practices: The history of reading is not merely a history of ideas about reading, constructing ideal models of reading as predictable from the ‘‘intentions’’ of texts; it is a history of real, material readers, men and women, and of the complex social formations that produced them as readers. Just as texts are written within particular social formations, so they are read within what [has been termed] ‘‘reading formations,’’ a selection or repertoire of assumptions, attitudes, material practices about how and to what ends to read, who should read, and for what purposes, as coded by institutional, class or gender, or other social factors. Reading is always culture specific, and in fact culturally produced, and so always a site of cultural struggle.17

Because many modern professionals—men and women—treat cooking as a hobby and read cookbooks for ‘‘ideas,’’ their choice of a text is idiosyncratic, a personal decision fueled more by curiosity than the need to feed a family. Such readers, free to respond impulsively, can judge a text without needing a preface to tell them what to look for. Indeed, many cookbook owners have never read the

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prefaces. When they shop for cookbooks, they try to get a ‘‘feel’’ for the text—the pictures, the formality, the skills demanded (cake decoration is out of the question). Many buy specialty texts once they have a workhorse (perhaps Joy of Cooking) they always can fall back on. Yet for an eighteenth-century woman (always a woman), a supervisor of servants or perhaps a servant herself, cooking was not entertainment. As Amelia Chambers warned in the Preface to The Ladies Best Companion (1780), It is well known, that the woman who is ignorant of cookery is neither qualified to be a mistress or a servant; for the dressing of victuals . . . is so essential a part of female education, that those who neglect to acquire some knowledge of it, labour under many difficulties in their advanced years.

Such scare tactics, while commercial, reflect and perpetuate ideology.18 To find out whether she can ‘‘acquire some knowledge,’’ Chambers’ addressee might reasonably study a preface. She might ask how a text meets her particular needs—what is its attitude toward French cuisine? Does it rely heavily on complex, expensive cullises? Have the recipes been tested in kitchens like her own? Does the text have organizational features that are not immediately obvious? If one cooks or supervises a cook, such issues matter; if one is selfconsciously a novice, one needs to learn that such issues matter. Thus even if a woman were inured to hype, she might hope for— and look for—guidance, an explicit outline of skills she might gain and the manner in which they would help in her duties. Prefaces cited what the text would teach, and touted indexes, cross-references, and other elements of arrangement that helped readers navigate. One can argue, therefore, that just because modern readers may not need a preface to help choose a cookbook, this may not have been so in preceding periods. One can argue, as this chapter does, that prefaces in early culinary texts were commercial artifacts, intent on defining needs (and hence raising desires) that, ostensibly, the texts would fulfill. REASONING BACK TOWARD THE OBVIOUS: SOME MODERN EXAMPLES Another reason to consider these old prefaces commercial is the gratuitous commercialism of their modern counterparts, larded with sales pitches despite upscale readers’ inclination to choose texts based on their

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spontaneous reactions to content. Even texts by celebrity chefs, boosted by media tie-ins, in-store demonstrations, and massive ad campaigns, tout themselves in prefaces. Thus, it is reasonable to argue, homologically, that cookbook prefaces incline toward self-promotion even in mass-promotional environments. Put generically, the argument might be that as food preparation always implicates the preparer’s persona— whether gender-bound wife and mother, social aspirant, or yuppie connoisseur—cookbooks attempt to address the reader-preparer through that persona, to arouse desires, and to speak to needs however marginally this enhances sales potential.19 If this observation is true, or apparently true, then even if Genette is right as a general matter (which he seems not to be), there is probably an exception for culinary prefaces, perhaps a broad exception for prefaces to any type of text where competition is fierce, distinctions minor, and authors claim special expertise. But this inquiry is limited to cookbooks. The introduction to the revised edition of Delia Smith’s Complete Illustrated Cookery Course (2000) states: ‘‘What I like about you, Delia, is that all your recipes work, even for idiots like me!’’ . . . Millions of copies—and I have to say thousands of appreciative letters—later, it would seem the book has largely achieved its objective [of being ‘‘an all-round basic cookery book’’] and I count it a great privilege to have been, as it were, ‘‘adopted’’ on Christian name terms in so many families day-to-day cooking.20

Smith lets others endorse her—first one, then ‘‘thousands’’—then claims that the book has achieved its aims, making ‘‘Delia’’ a household word. But such third-person attributions, a convention of modesty, support claims that are not at all modest. As shall become apparent, Smith’s strategy resonates with that used by old preface writers, who cite multiple editions and praise themselves in the third person.21 But before eliciting rhetorical parallels, this discussion will establish just how commercial modern prefaces are, albeit somewhat gratuitously so. One example is Nigel Slater, food columnist for The Observer newspaper in England, in the Preface to Real Good Food (1995): I am flattered by Fourth Estate’s idea to publish my recipes and ruminations in a more permanent form. At least it may stem the continual demands to supply back-copies of recipes. . . . Now you know why I am not in the phone book.22

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Apparently, Slater’s recipes are in such demand that like all celebrities pursued by the public, he is off-directory. Indeed, he is pursued by a publisher—Good Food was not his idea!—as proxy for adoring fans. He sequesters himself on account of his stature. Yet despite such winning modesty, he pales in the fan-wars beside Nigella Lawson, television’s sultriest chef, so famous, so omnipresent that no points are gained by hiding. In the erotically titled Nigella Bites, the author coos, ‘‘I want to be there in the kitchen with you; my words are merely my side of the conversation I imagined we might have.’’23 It is debatable whether this is cooking or soft custard porn. Jill Norman may have an opinion. In The New Penguin Cookery Book (2001), she sniffs that ‘‘the cult of the chef and the television personality may have somewhat glamorized food but cooking as a spectator sport is no substitute for the real thing.’’24 Her ‘‘real thing,’’ of course, is its own come-on. With an even cooler perspective on the sexual-rhetorical heat wave in British cookery, The River Caf e Cookbook Green (2000) insinuates that greens offer pleasure: ‘‘We thought the moment was ripe for a book of this kind.’’25 A reader might wonder whether this is just good timing or whether ripeness is deliciously suggestive. Jamie Oliver mocks everyone, however, by selling fun. In Happy Days with the Naked Chef (2001), amid fun-wear pictures (he keeps his clothes on) of universal play, he writes (sort of), ‘‘Foodwise, this year has been very creative for me and, as you’ll see in the book, I’ve come up with loads of new recipes, as well as some really cool new chapters that I’m very excited about.’’26 Food is volleyball . . . or whatever. Like a preface-fatigued eighteenth-century reader recurring to Robert May, the twenty-first-century reader reaches for Joy of Cooking, her mother’s cookbook updated yet again. Yet it too is commercial, bearing its genealogy as an implied dismissal of the rest of the field. Ethan Becker, the original authors’ son and grandson and now editor-impresario of this culinary institution, explains: [O]ur dream was to base the 2006 edition on the best-selling Joy ever published—the 1975 edition—the apex of the culinary knowledge that had been compiled and communicated by my mother and grandmother since 1931. On the dust jacket of the 1975 edition, Julia [Child] herself was quoted, ‘‘. . . it is number one on my list . . . the one book of all cookbooks in English that I would have on my shelf if I could have but one.’’

This is a brilliant paragraph, alerting readers that the new Joy brings back the old (after having lost much folksy charm); embodies the

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wisdom of the franchise’s founders; and inherits the approval of Julia Child, America’s number-one cooking authority who made Joy ‘‘number one on [her] list.’’27 Without seeming to praise itself, Joy does just that. Indeed, in the next paragraph, Joy is not merely Child’s ‘‘number one,’’ but it embodies her spirit, almost as a living legacy: A few days later [that is, after requesting Julia’s critique of the proposed new Joy], we received a note from her that said ‘‘Thanks for putting the joy back in Joy.’’ We were thrilled. In the coming weeks, Julia reviewed revisions of some of the chapters and blessed our work with her approval. Our friendship with her was short-lived because of her failing health and eventual death, but knowing her and working with her was an honor and a privilege. We thank her for loving the Joy of Cooking enough to give some of her precious time.28

While thanking her, Joy bootstraps itself onto Julia’s reputation— the same turn that was discussed in chapter 4, where eighteenthcentury dedications praise noblemen’s taste to arrogate their luster to the text. Indeed, Joy’s Preface cites an array of experts (including the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health) who updated the text. The theme is that Joy is venerable but cutting-edge. Its newness is part of a process of sustained contemporaneity (eight revisions, 1931–2006) in context with a family proprietorship that ensures continuous care.29 In other words, if tradition is one half the equation, keeping up is the other. The Preface uses ‘‘expert,’’ ‘‘expertise,’’ ‘‘revise,’’ ‘‘revision,’’ ‘‘update,’’ and ‘‘updated’’ as counterpoints to ‘‘family’’ and ‘‘friends.’’ An exacting type of newness permeates Becker’s rhetoric; while family is the guarantor of quality, and the old good feeling is back, Joy takes ostentatious pride in its professional recipe testers and collaborators. Readers can rest assured that this book has no quirks; everything has been tested, tasted, vetted, and measured by a committee. The Preface situates the text in opposition to those such as Oliver’s, which are boisterously casual and flaunt personality. The unmistakable message is that ‘‘if you buy one cookbook in your life. . .’’ Although Joy’s Preface is unabashedly commercial, this is not because Joy is middle-brow. The toniest cookbooks display similar impulses. Gordon Ramsay’s Maze—Recipes by Jason Atherton (2008) observes in ‘‘A Word from Gordon Ramsay’’ that ‘‘[i]t became clear

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to me soon after Jason joined us that he was an immensely talented chef with something entirely new to offer. His terrific imagination, ambition, and determination to succeed—combined with energy and sheer hard graft—gave him the edge over so many contemporaries.’’ Here one celebrity chef praises his peer, not coincidentally, the chef at his own restaurant. Anthony Bourdain, another celebrity chef, introduces Martin Picard’s Au Pied de Cochon—A Cookbook from the Celebrated Restaurant (2006), a phantasmagorical celebration of blood and guts, by observing that while many modern chefs have forsaken real food for trends, ‘‘Martin Picard has not forgotten. His restaurant, Au Pied de Cochon in Montreal is a celebration, an ode to all things porky, ducky, fatty, and wonderful.’’ Alinea (2008) by Grant Anchatz is the most amazing, most Robert May–like experience, in its multiple introductions. Serious essays by major food personalities (‘‘Experiencing Alinea,’’ ‘‘Postmodern Pantry,’’ ‘‘Black Truffle Explosion’’) speculate on the nature of culinary creativity and on the chef’s relation to these ideas. In a biography of Anchatz, the great Thomas Keller states that Anchatz has ‘‘extraordinary desire to achieve. . . . People ask me what does it mean to be a chef, a great chef: that’s it, the passionate desire to achieve. . . . Grant has it.’’ Keller is part of Anchatz’ genealogy: The French Laundry [Keller’s restaurant] becomes Grant’s home for the next four years, and Chef Thomas Keller becomes his culinary father as he learns to replicate near perfect dishes that are celebrated throughout the world. By the end of his tenure, his culinary fundamentals will be at the highest level and he will have absorbed into his spine the qualities of food and service that go into creating one of the world’s great restaurants.

Where May and Carter cite their fathers, Alinea links Anchatz to a spiritual father. The reasoning in each case is the same: if readers are to spend lots of money on a glorious book, it helps that the author comes by his skill gloriously. The essays in Alinea create an aura around Anchatz. The first essay, by Michael Ruhlman, observes that ‘‘[a] feature article in Food & Wine magazine heralded Alinea as perhaps the country’s most exciting restaurant two months before it even served its first meal. The Chicago press was abuzz as construction progressed . . . calling its chef, Grant Anchatz, a gastronomic wunderkind.’’ This information, unnecessary as a technical matter, is of great help to selling the book.

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EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STRATEGIES The rhetorical, strategic continuity between old and modern prefaces suggests that, despite differing social contexts, one can read seventeenth- and eighteenth-century culinary prefaces with the assurance that if they seem to solicit customers, they almost certainly do. The issue, rather, should be how they solicit. As this chapter has suggested, one valence of their commercial strategy consists in denouncing other texts. The lengthy Preface to Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife (3rd ed., ‘‘corrected and improved,’’ 1729), though written in the first person, is so splenetic in parts that one wonders whether some bookseller’s hack had a hand in it: There are indeed already in the World various Books, that treat on this Subject, and which bear great Names, as Cooks to Kings, Princes, and Noblemen, and from which one might justly expect something more than many, if not most of these I have read, perform, but found myself deceived in my Expectations; for many of them are impracticable, others whimsical, others unpalatable, unless to depraved Palates, some unwholesome, many things copied from old Authors, and recommended without (as I am persuaded) the Copiers ever having had any Experience of the Palatableness, or had any Regard to the Wholesomeness of them.

This implies that ‘‘great Names’’ are no assurance of serviceability. Rather, they are simulacra, signs that circulate through discourse with no reference to sources of value.30 Indeed, ‘‘great Names’’ perpetuate nonvalue, copied and recopied recipes that do not work and may be unhealthful. In The Compleat City and Country Cook: or, Accomplish’d Housewife (2nd ed., ‘‘with large Additions,’’ 1736) Charles Carter takes this idea a step further, suggesting that ‘‘Names’’ represent no cook, but just a hack in disguise: ‘‘For tho’ very few eminent practical Cooks have ever cared to publish what they knew of the Art, yet some have been prevailed upon for a small Premium from a Bookseller to lend their Names to Performances in this Art unworthy their owning’’ (iv). Carter raises the possibility that the market in cookbooks is so commercial that respectable cooks, uninterested in disclosing their own art, conspire with booksellers to defraud the public. The later, adoptive version of Carter’s text, The London and Country Cook, ‘‘Revised and much improved by a Gentlewoman’’ (1749), continues this theme,

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scaring potential buyers of other texts by claiming in its Preface that cookbook merchants lack integrity: Perchance there has never any subject been worse handled, nor the public more imposed upon, than by the publishers of receipts in cookery and housewifery: whose design in general seems rather, how they might scrape together a great number, than to oblige the public with such receipts and directions as are really valuable and practicable.

Yet texts such as Smith’s, Carter’s, and the Gentlewoman’s play a dangerous game, assimilating an unidentified but large mass of competitors to a hyped, plagiarizing, even fraudulent market, while seeking to exempt themselves. As this chapter has suggested, strategically competent texts offer rationales as to why they should be exempt and thus be purchased. But what is interesting is that most texts do not limit themselves to self-recommendation, but fire off generalized invective as well. It may be that whoever actually wrote prefaces thought that lowering the perceived quality of competitors’ texts to the level of Grub Street would frighten aspirants to gentility, an opportunity too good to miss. Besides questioning the integrity of other texts, rivals scorned their alleged lack of utility, the disjunction between what they claimed to teach—good cookery—and what they produced. Hannah Glasse, for example, who pitches The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747) to the education level of servants, complains that [T]he great Cooks have such a high Way of expressing themselves that the poor Girls are a Loss to know what they mean: And in all Receipt Books yet printed there are such an odd Jumble of Things as would quite spoil a good Dish; and indeed some Things so extravagant, that it would be almost a shame to make Use of them, when a Dish can be made full as good, or better without them.

That is, most cookbooks are worse than useless—incomprehensible, eccentric, running up expense.31 Their departure from vernacular, commonly understood language correlates to the use of foreign, particularly French cuisine, which tosses around wine and fancy ingredients: ‘‘You may leave out the Wine . . . So that really one might have a genteel Entertainment for the Price the Sauce of one Dish comes to. But if Gentlemen will have French Cooks, they must pay for French Tricks’’ (‘‘To the Reader’’). Glasse’s connection of simple language and down-to-earth, affordable cookery is a psychologically powerful critique, testing middle-class aspirations against a growing sense of national identity defined by anti-French

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sentiment.32 Though Glasse suggests that aspiration is a matter of personal discretion (‘‘Nor shall I take upon me to direct a Lady in the Oeconomy of her Family, for every Mistress does, or at least ought to know what is most proper to be done there’’), she draws the line at ‘‘French’’ decadence, unavoidable when its cuisine is ‘‘impos’d’’ on England by cooks or by the texts that she attacks: I have heard of a Cook that used six Pounds of Butter to fry twelve Eggs; when every Body knows, that understands Cooking, that Half a Pound is full enough, or more than need be used: But then it would not be French. So much is the blind Folly of this Age, that would rather be impos’d on by a French Booby, then give Encouragement to a good English Cook. (‘‘To The Reader’’)

In Glasse’s logic, it is English to avoid extravagance. It is hard for a rival to gainsay such claims without seeming unpatriotic. As noted in chapter 4, Ann Cook’s Professed Cookery . . . With An Essay Upon the Lady’s Art of Cookery (1753) takes up the challenge in a minutely detailed sixty-eight page Preface (‘‘An Essay on the Lady’s Art of Cookery’’) that claims that while Glasse touts intelligible, English cooking, her recipes are unintelligible, useless, and Gallic in extravagance. For example, after microcriticizing Glasse’s method for Essence of Ham, Cook concludes: ‘‘Here the Lady leaves her Pupils in a Wood, and to their own wild Imaginations; so that their Cookery may as probably be vitiated as made wholsome, by young Beginners in the Art of Cookery; and as to the judicious Cook, she might as well have remained silent’’ (37). Glasse, according to Cook, is the mirror-image of what she claims. Glasse’s diatribes reflect on her, that is, her recipes spoil food. ‘‘Wild Imaginations’’ is thus a cunning thrust, turning against Glasse the common marketing pitch that cookery is a matter of rules, such that if readers follow instructions they should get results. (Glasse asserts that any servant girl can cook, and Raffald observes that her recipes ‘‘if carefully followed, will answer . . . expectations.’’)33 Cook hits hard at Glasse’s supposed pretensions, picking apart dozens of recipes all with the imputation of extravagance. Citing a chapter in which Glasse purports to show the extravagance of French sauces, Cook caricatures Glasse’s ‘‘Aspersions’’ on ‘‘French Tricks’’ and a ‘‘French Booby’’ by remarking that [T]he Lady builds her Monument of Fame upon the Ruins she makes of the French Cooks Characters: I don’t like the Foundation she has

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chosen; for notwithstanding all her great Bravadoes of Thrift, she has tenfold more extravagant French Cookery in her Book, then in the Chapter she bids you read. (37)

Indeed, Cook’s introductory poem (‘‘To the Reader’’) suggests that Glasse stole recipes from authors she condemns: She steals from ev’ry Author to her Book, / Infamously branding the pillag’d Cook, / With trick, Booby, Juggler, Legerdemain. (iv)34

This calls into question Glasse’s explanation of why many of her dishes have French names: I have indeed given some of my Dishes French Names to distinguish them, because they are known by those Names . . . and it matters not whether they be call’d by a French, Dutch or English Name, so they are good, and done with as little Expence as the Dish will allow of. (‘‘To the Reader’’)

In Cook’s logic, Glasse cannot hide her French extravagance by claiming that names do not matter. Glasse confuses language, not just as regards intelligibility, but also with regard to the provenance of dishes and therefore their expense. A Cullis for All Sorts of Ragoo, from Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (1756) Having cut three Pounds of lean Veal, and half a Pound of Ham, into Slices, lay it into the Bottom of a Stew-pan, put in Carrots and Parsnips, and an Onion sliced; cover it, and set it a stewing over a Stove: When it has a good Colour, and begins to stick, put to it a little melted Bacon, and shake in a little Flour, keeping it moving a little while till the Flour is fried; then moisten it with Gravy, and Broth, of each a like Quantity, then put in some Parsley and Basil, a whole Leek, a Bay-leaf, some Mushrooms, and Truffles minced small, three or four Cloves, and a Crust or two of French Rolls: Let all this simmer together for three Quarters of an Hour; then take out your Slices of veal; strain it, and keep it for all Sorts of Ragoos. Now compute the Expence, and see if this Dish cannot be dressed full as well without this Expence.

Yet while Cook aims only at Glasse, calling her more French than the French, the Preface to John Thacker’s The Art of Cookery (1758) claims that ‘‘French’’ dishes barely even exist except as booksellers’ tricks: The Names of Dishes that have French Terms to them are supposed to be the Names of the Cooks that invented them, or the Names of

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the Persons that first took a Liking to them; though, I believe, there are a great many of them invented by the English; and the French Names have, I believe, been given them to excite Curiosity, and make them by that Artifice better liked.

The charge implies that even if readers would be extravagant, English books barely offer French cuisine, but mainly only English creations pretending to be French. The whole issue of extravagant French cuisine is thereby rendered irrelevant because its very existence is cast into doubt. But at a deeper level—here Thacker and Cook coincide—the accusation, joined to others, encourages the perception that culinary texts are a tissue of commercialism, even if their scams vary. The ‘‘intelligibility’’ of words, the ‘‘Names’’ of cooks, the ‘‘Names’’ of dishes start becoming wobbly, uncertain emanations of the market rather than intrinsically meaningful tokens of value. Such insinuation was risky and could have left no text exempt as conflicting claims mount in preface after preface. Moreover, the whole subject of booksellers’ scams was already folklore. Daniel Defoe raised it earlier in the century, claiming that hacks churned out sham disputations on both sides of issues to incite people’s interest and sell more books.35 Faced with prefaces like Cook’s and Thacker’s, and also ironically Glasse’s, the searching reader would question whether any culinary text could be trusted. Texts that foreground others’ commercialism naturally reflect on themselves and make their own commercial ambitions that much harder to achieve. Such texts must generate rationales that clear space in the disillusion that they promulgate. To modern readers, therefore, they evince a certain analytic insufficiency, a desire to smother competing texts that fails to account for the rebound effect of their own invective. As a corollary to claims that rival texts do not communicate ‘‘useful’’ or even real knowledge, some authors insinuate that culinary ‘‘secrets’’—what May calls ‘‘the Mystery of the whole Art’’ of cooking—have been deliberately concealed. Readers obtain only throwaway knowledge, never penetrating to the heart of what makes great cooks great. The Preface to A Collection of Above Three Hundred Receipts thanks contributors who ‘‘have Exposed to the World such invaluable Secrets, as Others of a less generous Temper would have taken a Pride, and made almost a Merit of Concealing.’’ In the Preface to The Compleat Housewife, Eliza Smith condemns ‘‘those celebrated Performers, [who] notwithstanding all their Professions of having ingenuously communicated their Art, industriously concealed their best Receipts from the Publick.’’ May himself states in his

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Preface that ‘‘though I may be envied by some that only value their private Interests above Posterity, and the publick good, yet God and my own Conscience would not permit me to bury these my Experiences with my Silver Hairs in the Grave.’’ Such texts tread a thin line between claiming that cookery is arcane, a matter of ‘‘secrets’’ shared by a restricted guild, and a body of learning that can intelligibly be conveyed. They raise the ultimate issue of what cookery is—a matter of long apprenticeship combined with personal flair, or the type of knowledge that a book can represent? If cookery is a matter of following directions then it should be the latter, but talk of ‘‘Art,’’ ‘‘Mystery,’’ and ‘‘Secrets’’ raises epistemological issues that throw doubt on the textual enterprise. The quandary, touching on the capacity of print and the ability of authors, is whether art, mystery, and potentially complex secrets can be reduced to compact, intelligible recipes. Carp Pye a Most Excellent Way, from Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook (1660) Take carp, scale it and scrape off the slime, wipe it with a dry clean cloth, and split it down the back, then cut it in quarters or six pieces, three of each, and take out the milt or spawn, and also the gall; season it with nutmeg, pepper, salt, and beaten ginger, lay some butter in the pye bottom, then the carp upon it, and upon the carp two or three bay-leaves, four or five blades of large mace, four or five whole cloves, some blanched chesnuts, slices of orange, and some sweet butter, close it up and bake it, being baked liquor it with beaten butter, the blood of the carp, and a little claret wine. For variety, in place of chestnuts, use pine apple seeds, or bottoms of artichocks, gooseberries, grapes, or barberries. Sometimes bake great oysters with the carp, and a great onion or two; sometimes sweet herbs chopped, or spargus boiled. Or bake it in a dish as you do the pye. To make paste for the pie, take two quarts and a pint of fine flour, four or five yolks of raw eggs, and half a pound of fine flour, four or five yolks of raw eggs [sic], and half a pound of sweet butter, boil the butter till it be melted, and make the paste with it.

As noted in chapter 2, cookbook authors worked hard to develop effective pedagogical protocols and to convince readers of their effectiveness. As this chapter shows, all that effort was subject to a countervailing rhetoric generated to cripple competitors, but capable as well of subverting the market at large. Accordingly, the massive critique launched against rivals entailed culinary authors in heroic attempts to justify their own projects, in effect to break free of an epistemological undertow they created for themselves.

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SOME STRATEGIC ARGUMENTS The Queen’s Closet Opened (‘‘Corrected and Reviewed, with many Additions,’’ 1662) is a template of one of the basic, one might say generic, rationales of culinary commercialism: the claim to be a response to others’ enthusiasm, a testament to the encouragement of friends or the sell-out performance of prior editions. Third-party approval is the endorsement of choice. According to W. M., who signs the address to the reader, The Queen’s Closet ‘‘hath had a general Reception, travelling up and down the Kingdoms, and like the good Samaritane giving comfort to all it met; neither have we known of any that have bought it, who have not testified their high Esteem thereof.’’ The text has stood the test of readers’ experience. Indeed, empirical validation has changed the nature of the recipes, endowing them with the weight of readers’ experience, authorizing the text’s reissue: ‘‘we could not chuse but . . . give it a new Birth; especially when we heard that we had so well attain’d what we sought, in regard of the Benefit so many have receiv’d from these, which we shall now rather call Experiments than Receipts.’’36 Reissue is cast as a response to demand, a service that validates future demand. The text would be the center of an expandable community, readers who interact with the text by buying it and ‘‘testi[fying] their high Esteem thereof.’’ W. M. elicits an ongoing relationship with the text, loyalty typical of a community. He invites commitment—to buy the text, work with it, and perpetuate the community: ’Tis true there may be some faults, and those may justly cause us to be blamed: but now we hope your Ingenuity will the rather forgive us and them, and with more diligence seek to amend what is amiss, if not for our sakes, yet out of Charity to a Work which is so charitable to your selves. (‘‘To the Reader’’)

The effect of this apparent modesty—to deter purchasers—is balanced by the obligation that W. M. would impose. That is, despite the experience embedded in these Receipts/Experiments, they require readers’ experience to make the text fully useful. Readers are warned not to expect instant perfection; this text’s usefulness is measured as a trajectory, an ascending repertoire of skills that compensate for what the text does not fully impart. Thus while expectations are raised (‘‘neither have we known of any that have bought it, who have not testified their high Esteem’’), they are also

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postponed, throwing readers back on their own devices, holding them jointly responsible in a project to reproduce knowledge. Yet such postponement is perversely encouraging; it implies that the recipes constitute penetrable mystery, which, with application, is within the reader’s grasp. Other readers’ success ‘‘testifie[s]’’ to this prospect; the recipes offer liminal knowledge. The text’s full title, The Queens Closet Opened: Incomparable Secrets . . . Which were presented to the Queen By the most Experienced Persons of the Times, many whereof were had in esteem, when she pleased to descend to private Recreations, underpins this mystification cum promised disclosure. The title promises ‘‘secrets,’’ the Queen’s secrets, to any aspirant.37 Such promises characterize seventeenthcentury culinary texts, with titles like The Ladies Cabinet Opened (1639), A Precious Treasury of Twenty Rare Secrets (1649), The Gentlewoman’s Cabinet Unlocked (1664), The Queen-Like Closet (1670), and The Accomplished Ladies Rich Closet of Rarities (1687), to cite a few. In The Queen’s Closet, ‘‘secrets’’ implicates a type of knowledge worth aspiring to—adding to mystery a connotation of the precious. The text’s acknowledgment of difficulty comports with—and reinforces the value of—such information, because nothing of value can just be given away. Yet readers’ testimony of ‘‘esteem’’ for the text assures new readers that this high-order knowledge is ultimately attainable.38 As this early Preface indicates, promotion of culinary texts virtually starts with delineating the nature of culinary knowledge, the means of acquiring it, and the ability of some particular text to furnish such knowledge. In this respect, Robert May’s Preface to The Accomplisht Cook is a bravura example of the genre. May highlights his experience and, in so doing, establishes a credibly right relation to French cuisine, neither sycophantic nor dismissive: The French by their Insinuations, not without enough of Ignorance, have bewicht some of the Gallants of our Nation with Epigram Dishes, smoakt rather than drest, so strangely to captivate the Gusto, their Mushroom’d Experiences for Sauce rather than Diet, for the generality howsoever called A-la-mode, not worthy of being taken notice on. As I live in France, and had the Language and have been an eye-witness of their Cookeries as well, as a Peruser of their Manuscripts, and Printed Authors whatsoever I found good in them, I have inserted in this Volume.

The passage puts a nonideological spin on French cuisine that works to May’s advantage. Since May has first-hand experience of

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French cuisine, he need not denounce it wholesale but can claim to include ‘‘good’’ recipes based on personal, empirical investigation. The claim says as much about May as it does about the French: May has the authority to vouch for his own text, even with regard to foreign recipes. He offers a theory of culinary knowledge in which the author’s direct experience justifies the text and the reader’s trust. The Accomplisht Cook transmits experience. It is not just a collection of untried, copied recipes, but the embodiment of its author, his lived experience fixed in a text: I have not concealed any material Secret of above my fifty and five years Experience; my father being a Cook under whom in my Childhood I was bred up to this Art. . . . The diligent Peruser of this Volume gains that in a small time (as to Theory) which an Apprenticeship with some Masters could never have taught them. (Preface)

In support of May’s own testimony, one W. W. appends ‘‘A Short Narrative of Some Passages of the Authors Life,’’ giving details of May’s career and reflecting on their epistemological relevance to the text: For the better knowledge of the worth of this Book . . . it will not be amiss to acquaint the Reader with a brief account of some passages of [the Author’s] Life, as also the eminent Persons (renowned for their House-keeping) whom he hath served through the whole series of his Life; for as the growth of Children argue the strength of the Parents, so doth the judgment and abilities of the Artist conduce to the making and goodness of the Work. (n.p.)

W. W. suggests that a cookbook, like a work of art, depends on the skill of the ‘‘Artist,’’ which in turn depends on his acquiring experience. Robert May’s professional life story is thus the prehistory of The Accomplisht Cook, the making of the Artist antecedent to the making of the text that facilitates the making of new cooks. Mario Batali, Rachael Ray, Anthony Bourdain—personalities whose faces are television staples—appear on the covers of their books for reasons set out by W. W.: potential purchasers are meant to identify recipes with cooks whose style and experience are evident, and that readers can accommodate in their own cooking. As a corollary, readers are meant to dismiss the idea (favorable to less famous authors) that recipes are cultural artifacts that anyone can transcribe—by implication, recipes not attached to incarnate authors would impart no style to anyone using them.39 In the twenty-first

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century, Batali and his peers are known from the media; readers and viewers instinctively link their performances, hence their experience, to texts that they write (albeit the prefaces remind readers to do so). But because seventeenth-century readers could not so easily know about May and may not so readily connect an artist’s life to cuisine, W. W. obligingly provides enabling instruction. Readers are taught how to evaluate a cookbook and on what grounds to buy it. The ‘‘Narrative’’ is didactic, therefore, because it is commercial. As chapter 4 noted, in case anyone is still puzzled, John Town’s prefatory poem closes with a pitch: ‘‘Reader, read on, for I have done; farewell; / The Book’s so good, it cannot chuse but sell’’ (n.p.). May’s embodiment in a text that subsumes his experience implies that without the author’s permeating presence—guiding the reader, demystifying mystery—the bare text would present a cognitive problem: reductive and abstract, it would pose a barrier that readers could not penetrate to acquire knowledge (‘‘Mystery and Art’’) equivalent to the author’s. The Preface to The Queen’s Royal Cookery acknowledges the problem: ‘‘the Expressing of [the receipts] is so easie and instructive, that those who have read [the text], may go about the Thing, as tho’ they had actually seen it done before their Eyes.’’ The text is in effect T. Hall’s instruction in real time—not merely ‘‘intelligible’’ but active, it simulates a person. Delineation of a competent authorial persona, allowing readers to imagine the author present in the text and actively teaching, is a common prefatorial trope designed to assure readers that recipes—like the author—are reliable, an expression of how he would ‘‘go about the Thing.’’ (Whether such assurances are pedagogically effective is a separate question.) The Preface to A Collection of Above Three Hundred Receipts insists that a culinary text is no better than its author(s), whose care in producing a text translates directly to the reader’s success or lack thereof: Nothing can be more Self-evident than that the Usefulness and consequently the Value of Books of this kind, depend upon the Integrity and Care of the Writers, the Pains they take Themselves, and the good Help and Assistance they can procure from Others. If any of these Requirements be wanting, they must necessarily deceive the Reader, be deceived Themselves, or at best, produce nothing but what’s Mean and Trifling, and unworthy a Publick Reception.

The Preface details the authors’ efforts, linking their personal involvement to the quality of the text and—so the formula urges—to

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a deserved ‘‘Publick Reception.’’ In The Compleat Housewife, Eliza Smith follows the same logic, declaring that ‘‘what I here present the World with, is the Product of my own Experience, and that for the space of thirty Years and upwards’’ (Preface). Charles Carter’s Preface to The Compleat City and Country Cook recites his genealogy as a cook in noble houses and observes that ‘‘what I have published, are almost the only Books . . . which of late Years have come into the World, that have been the Result of the Author’s own Practice and Experience.’’ The professional genealogy of the author and the process of compiling a text (‘‘the Care of the Writers, the Pains they take’’) are meant to be seen as coordinate factors that vouch for the quality of the text. The process of compilation is a major selling point of The Complete Family-Piece (‘‘third edition improved,’’ 1741), which credits an impersonal, but highly competent committee with fastidious attention to detail. The Preface makes a virtue of collecting, rather than personally developing knowledge, foregrounding the committee’s rigorous editorial process. Everything is vetted and reviewed by ‘‘very eminent and ingenious’’ gentlemen ‘‘well skill’d in each Art’’ (iii, iv). The Preface, an ancestor of Joy of Cooking’s, conveys the sense that experience compounds each time an editor refines the text. It attributes a quality-enhancing ability to modern print culture—experts, editors bustling about, a publisher not unlike Simon & Schuster, whose editorial staff is credited with sustaining and improving Joy. Thus, instead of the textuality posing a problem (that is, over personal transmission and supervision), it ostensibly reduces cognitive static. It gives readers access to protocols that are objectively correlative to the committee’s strict reliability: ‘‘Receipts, Rules, Methods, Directions, Observations, and Instructions, on so many useful Occasions . . . divided into Three Parts, and each Part into different Chapters, and each of them on a different Subject; together with the Help of a complete Alphabetical Index’’ (ix). As in A Collection, the message is that readers can defer to the text because the process of production, like the contributors’ ability, is superb. In The Complete Family-Piece, the process heightens contributors’ ability with cross-checks; it allows the text to transcend (and synergize) their individual abilities. If a recipe does not work, then it must be the reader’s fault: ‘‘it cannot be supposed that every Receipt . . . can suit every one’s Constitution, or Palate’’ (iv). Yet while The Complete Family-Piece acknowledges and seeks to exploit corporate impersonality, it emphasizes that a fail-safe production

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method ultimately reflects individuals’ hard work: editors ‘‘carefully revised, and made such Amendments . . . as each judged proper’’ (vi). Such work is part of the text’s genealogy, which The Complete FamilyPiece substitutes for the professional genealogy of an author such as May. Even Elizabeth Raffald’s Experienced English Housekeeper, much more modest in its self-presentation, cites the author’s involvement with print culture, as if no longer is it enough to have penned an unexceptionable manuscript—one must ensure that the print text reflects one’s fastidious attentiveness up to the point of publication: ‘‘I can faithfully assure my friends, that . . . every sheet [was] carefully perused as it came from the press, having an opportunity of having it printed by a neighbour, whom I can rely on doing it the strictest justice, without the least alteration’’ (Preface). Following Raffald’s claims, the reader must conclude that the material text instantiates an authorial involvement with the reader that extends beyond merely incorporating ‘‘experience’’ into supervisory recipes. Even the dry, mechanical concerns of the print shop are the author’s province, and she materializes through their meticulous execution. Presenting the text as an artifact of print culture affiliates it with the concern of casting a text as an embodied author, actively showing readers how to cook. The integration of mechanical, print shop concerns into a comprehensive concept of authorship, in which the genealogy of production merges with—and substantiates—the author’s visceral reality, informs Raffald’s exhausted if calculated admission: I have not only been honoured by having above eight hundred of [my friends’] names inserted in my subscription, but also have had all their interest in this laborious undertaking, which I have at last arrived to the happiness of completing, though at the expence of my health, by being too studious, and giving too close application. (i–ii)

Raffald materializes not just as the sum of her experience ‘‘in great and worthy families’’ (ii), but as one who at every stage, from conception to reading proof, gave herself to the text. Raffald is the sacrificial heroine of The Experienced English Housekeeper, and the reader imagines her presence through this persona. Like The Complete Family-Piece, Raffald draws attention to the production process. Her insight is to repersonalize it.

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Bath Cakes, from Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) Rub half a Pound of Butter into a Pound of Flour, and one Spoonful of good Barm, warm some Cream, and make it into a light Paste, set it to the Fire to rise, when you make them up, take four Ounces of Carraway Comfits, work Part of them in, and strew the rest on the Top, make them into round Cakes the Size of a French Roll, and bake them on Sheet Tins, and send them in hot for Breakfast.

The marketing counterpart of this intensified, ‘‘virtual’’ author, is the incarnate reader, imparted a physicality not associated with ‘‘The Reader’’ of rhetorical convention and thereby enabled to see herself in the text as its object in ways that are visceral and immediate. This physicality is evoked in references to the vulnerable human body, which food affects for good or ill. Such references address the reader both in terms of her own physical reality and, by implication, that of the people for whom she cooks. The effect is to render her the potential instrument of her own and her family’s health, a role that is hard to ignore (as she would, if she passed up the text). The Pastry-Cook’s Vade Mecum states the issue baldly: its recipes must be own’d to be very useful, since they contain all that may contribute not only to the Preservation, but even to the Recovery of Health: A good Kitchin having certainly a better influence upon our Constitutions, than an Apothecary’s Shop. For a skilful Cook, by this nice way of dressing Meats, quickens a pall’d Appetite, and enables a sick Stomach to perform its usual Functions, whereby the continual losses which the humane Body sustains by Transpiration, and Excrements are effectually repair’d. (Preface)

The statement combines principle (‘‘A good Kitchin . . .,’’ ‘‘a skilful Cook . . .’’) with claims that the text enables the cook to carry principle into practice. In commercial terms, it encourages the reader to envision herself, qua reader, as reassuringly nonabstract, consistent (however incompletely) with her own felt reality. Just as an intensely present author would guide the reader, making the text reader-friendly, so, too, the reader’s presence in the text would make the text accessible, as present to the reader as she is to herself. Moreover, the text is ‘‘present’’ in another sense: its concern for the physical implications of food and food preparation are identifiably current, attuned to concerns about food and health in contemporary natural philosophy.40 The reader’s physicality is a selling point of Ann Shackleford’s The Modern Art of Cookery Improved . . . In the Composition whereof Both HEALTH and PLEASURE have been Consulted (1767). The

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Preface invokes food chemistry and notes that the text is medically approved: She has avoided the errors which those people give into, who are unacquainted with the nature and affinities of the materials they have in hand, namely, that of using ingredients that counteract each other. . . . [E]rrors of this sort not only make dishes expensive, they are also by that means frequently rendered unwholesome: to remove any evil of that kind, which ought above all things to be guarded against, the whole of this book has been submitted to the inspection of a physician of eminence, who has kindly added a dissertation on aliments, in order to render our work more useful and pleasing to the public. (iii–iv)

While many culinary texts included sections on home remedies, and Glasse (among others) had a chapter on feeding the sick, Shackleford makes the point that ordinary cooking affects physical wellbeing and must be carried out with attention to phenomena not apparent to the average cook. She mystifies cookery so as to suggest that Modern Art demystifies it. In this sense, she promises to domesticate the contemporary medical treatise, which examines the effects of individual foods and on occasion, how they interact, but rarely analyzes the effect of culinary practices.41 Shackleford implies that her recipes reflect such analysis, assuring readers of the benefit of information unavailable to the lay public. The most interesting turn away from an abstract reader is the Anglicization of the reader’s body, notable for example in Carter’s London and Country Cook, which offers directions for ‘‘dressing after the best, most natural and wholesome manner, such provisions as are the product of our own country . . . my receipts are all suitable to English constitutions and English palates’’ (v). His earlier Compleat City and Country Cook complimented the ‘‘Goodness and Agreeableness to English Constitutions’’ of his recipes for wines and asked whether ‘‘English Palates were not as nice Judges of good eating as French ones’’ (vii). Likewise, in The Compleat English Housewife, Eliza Smith declares that ‘‘[t]hese Receipts are all suitable to English Constitutions and English Palates’’ (Preface). John Thacker’s The Art of Cookery observes that most cookery books were not calculated for ‘‘these Northern Parts,’’ so if readers were to follow them, ‘‘instead of Meats that are healthful, and agreeable to the Palate, they will find a Hotch-potch, destructive to an English Constitution’’ (Preface). Accordingly, he praises English cuisine. As a marketing tactic, such claims echo outspoken nativist speculation on imported beverages that implicated food in general and had

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considerable currency in the mid-eighteenth century. John Waldron’s A Satyr Against Tea (1733) argues that whatever good may come of drinking tea, it is restricted to the Chinese: ‘‘Its Virtue surely must be Local, / And not affect our Constitution, / With Any Virtue but Pollution’’ (7). Simon Mason’s The Good and Bad Effects of Tea Consider’d (1745) is a deeply nativist tract that treats sage as the answer to tea, noting that ‘‘it is much more salutary and agreeable to our Constitutions . . . it is the Product of the same Earth, nourished in the same Climate, and exposed to the same Vicissitudes of Seasons as ourselves’’ (22–23). Simon Pauli’s much-quoted Treatise on Tobacco, Tea, Coffee, and Chocolate (1746) argued that ‘‘being Europeans, we ought to use the Regimen, Aliments, and Drinks, peculiar to Europe; for it is no less generally than justly observed, that the natural Produce of any Country is best suited to the Constitution of its Inhabitants.’’ He recommended ale and wine, respectively, ‘‘to those of the different Parts of Europe’’ (132). The ‘‘constitution,’’ in particular the English constitution, was becoming a point of reference in nonculinary discourse on food and drink. Even vociferous supporters of imported beverages acknowledged that aliments affected different constitutions differently and had to be used accordingly.42 References to the effects of food on health would have resonated with readers, therefore, with regard to contemporary debates and as an incident of everyday self-preservation, generating the urgency that anything involving physical well-being naturally provokes.43 PREFACES, RECIPES, AND MARKETING The correspondence between prefaces in early culinary texts and in their modern counterparts suggests that the culinary preface is a distinct subgenre and that it sells recipes in definable ways. If the culinary preface is, as this chapter suggests, informed by the nature of what it sells (directions for learning to cook), then the meaning of ‘‘recipe’’ should be considered in defining how this ‘‘paratext’’ would bind the reader to the text. As William Eamon observes in Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (1994), ‘‘recipe’’ has an important connection to the pragmatics of experimentation: It is a prescription for taking action: recipe is the Latin imperative ‘‘take.’’ Because it prescribes an action, a means for accomplishing some specific ends, the recipe’s ‘‘completion’’ is the trial itself. A recipe is . . . an experiment, a ‘‘trying out.’’44

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The preface of a culinary text, like a recipe, would convince readers to try something, to venture, to essay. In this sense, the preface is the first recipe, in the form of a marketing pitch. It urges readers to try the text—to experiment—and to buy the text as a necessary condition thereof. Its epistemological assumption, which it promotes to readers unfamiliar with how culinary knowledge is acquired, is that such knowledge depends on an act of will, a commitment to follow recommended protocols, guided by an author whose competence was likewise gained by experience. In the ideal scenario of the generic preface, the reader would buy the text, make the essay, and see what turns out. In The Experienced English Housekeeper, Elizabeth Raffald states that ‘‘the only favour I have to beg the publick is, not to censure my work before they have made trial of some one receipt’’ (Preface). Indeed, one could scarcely become an experienced housekeeper without buying the text and sticking with its protocols. Readers are meant to see themselves in the title, but as a kind of futurity, an aspiration to be striven for. In The Art of Cookery, Hannah Glasse also urges readers to experience the text: ‘‘I only beg the favour of every Lady to read my book throughout before they censure me’’ (Preface). Both authors assert that if readers make the essay, they will be satisfied. Trial is crucial to the text’s epistemology, shifting the initial burden onto the reader to buy the text and try a recipe. The preface proposes a version of knowledge—of knowledge acquisition—congenial to the type of text on offer, so if the reader ‘‘buys’’ that version of knowledge, she will buy the text. The reader buys a collection of minitexts, recipes that reenact the representations of the preface (which reflects the nature of recipes) and hold out the promise of knowledge while leaving the attempt and possible success up to the reader. The preface shifts the burden to the reader even as it appeals to her desire for success, poising itself as on a knife edge between the two. After all, culinary texts cannot seem too easy without seeming to offer insufficient incremental value. Thus, if Delia Smith’s introduction leads with the suggestion that a self-described ‘‘idiot’’ can master her recipes, she suggests that this person is ‘‘anything but an idiot’’ and explains that what really matters is progressive acquisition of culinary technique: What I feel quite sure of is that problems only arise when recipes assume a lot of knowledge and experience that isn’t always there. Cooking is rarely an automatic instinct—we have to learn as we go.

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Shifting the burden even further, Jill Norman states in The New Penguin that as she matured in the profession, she ‘‘came to understand that techniques are the key to all cooking, that if you have mastered those you can turn out a dish without necessarily having to follow a recipe to the letter’’ (x). That is, creativity is built from the ground up. Of course, since Smith’s text and Norman’s are allpurpose, they are more inclined to acknowledge the basics (which readers may or may not have) than the Naked Chef would be. But their prefaces are simply more transparent versions of the generic commercial pitch: try this, this text has knowledge that you want, and when you get it, you will acquire (in some measure) our skillsets. All prefaces hold out the prospect of joining the ranks of the texts’ authors (however imperfectly), either every day or from time to time, as when dilettante cooks get the notion to ‘‘try’’ something special. Ultimately, the to-be-experienced text is the focus of the preface, inviting the reader to commit to the text and necessarily, to enhance her own experience through it. As if to crystallize this complex come-on, Carter’s London and Country Cook has a magnificent frontispiece showing every phase of kitchenrelated activity, at the center of which a woman sits in her still-room holding the text open on her lap.45 The reader’s eye is instantly drawn to the text, which is intimately, graphically associated with a reader. The image perfectly instantiates the relationship that culinary prefaces aim to create by making the reader desire to create them. Prefaces appeal to desire, and desire sells books. Indeed, Charles Lamb envisions the Preface to his Royal Cookery (1710) as a sort of predinner convocation, wherein guests are given a bill of fare so as to whet their appetites. In Lamb’s equation: The preface ¼ the bill of fare : Royal Cookery ¼ the dinner. In each case, the inducement excites and satisfaction follows. Lamb’s conceit, while somewhat broad, nonetheless brilliantly theorizes how the cookbook preface can be a delicious come-on: Were there no other Reason for a Preface to this Treatise, the very Subject of it seems to bespeak one: For as it consists of a Sett of Entertainments as nice and delicate as any Court of Country can boast of; so it is common in the case of Treats, besides the Preface of an Invitation, to dispose the Guests into their several Places, and sometimes to prepare their Appetites, by giving ’em, beforehand, a short Bill of Fare. In compliance with which laudable Custom, I

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hope, I may be allow’d as far at least as the Parallel will bear, to take my Readers by the Hand, and introduce them with some Decency to this visionary treat: especially, since every Guest is like to pay his Shot, before he has any Title to the Banquet.

Lamb acknowledges that the reader is likely to ‘‘pay his Shot,’’ that is, buy the book, so that he can take the book home and cook. If the reader plows through to the end of the Preface, then its precis of the book’s delights (‘‘this visionary Treat’’) likely will have that effect. The preface—this Preface—is unabashed, and designed to arouse the reader, so much so that he cannot relinquish the book until he has bought it. Lamb’s rhetorical fusion of the meal and the Preface—or rather, the prospect of the meal and the Preface—is intended to create in the reader’s mind a sense of necessary entailment, in which reading the preface leads naturally to purchasing the book, cooking from it, and eating. If other cookbook authors were not as explicit in drawing out this sequence, they alluded to it in descriptions of delicious dishes that readers would learn to make. The Preface of Joy, for example, describes the exuberant chaos of its own production, evoking a jumble of foods and utensils where everyone was ‘‘obsessing over hummus, cranberries, finger bowls, frog legs, and grilled pizza, and the many conversations of who is eating what in this country.’’ The result—‘‘It’s been fun’’—implies a futurity in which readers will also have fun. NOTES 1. See http://www.beneaththecover.com/2007/05/21/cookbooks/ (last accessed November 28, 2009). 2. See http://www.frpbooks.com/about/news.aspx?section¼details &type¼default&iid¼1424 (last accessed November 28, 2009). 3. See http://www.bookmarket.com/statistics.html (last accessed November 28, 2009). 4. On literacy rates in relation to cookbook sales, see Kim Hall, ‘‘Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces: The Gendering of Sugar in the Seventeenth Century,’’ in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan, 168–90 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Cookbooks offered ‘‘upwardly-mobile women readers a peek into the status competitions and consumption patterns that they wished to emulate’’ (171). See also Lynette Hunter, ‘‘Printing in the Pennines: The Publisher and Provincial Taste 1683–1920,’’ in Traditional Food East and West of the Pennines, ed. Anne

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Wilson, 9–31 (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), noting that ‘‘the main group of people wanting a new printed cook-book is the newly growing urban middle classes, with more money to buy the wider range of foodstuffs that was becoming available.’’ These classes were concerned with ‘‘learning about the food of the aristocracy and using food to establish social position’’ (10–11). Hunter observes that they lacked culinary manuscripts kept by gentlewomen. Regarding such manuscripts, see Karen Hess, Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), App. I. Families of all classes might lack hands-on guidance. In Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Naomi Tadmor demonstrates how parental death, household breakup, and servants’ mobility led to ‘‘significant fluidity in household composition,’’ often destroying continuity in adult supervision (34). As young people formed new households, they suddenly needed domestic instruction. 5. Bibliographies include A. W. Oxford, English Cookery Books to the Year 1850 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1913); Virginia Maclean, A Short-Title Catalogue of Household and Cookery Books Published in the English Tongue 1701–1800 (Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 1981); and Katherine Bitting, Gastronomic Bibliography (Ann Arbor, MI: Gryphon, 1971); the section on books in English in William Cagle, A Matter of Taste: A Bibliographical Catalogue of the International Books on Food and Drink in the Lilly Library, Indiana University (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1999). 6. For examples of such sleuthing, see the section on ‘‘plagiarism’’ in Marcus Bell’s introduction to Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook (1685; Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 2000); ‘‘Quizzing Hannah Glasse: Or Hannah Glasse Scrutinized,’’ in Glasse, ‘‘First Catch Your Hare . . .’’: The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747; Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 1995), xv–xxxiv; Appendix II in Gilly Lehmann’s introduction to Martha Bradley, The British Housewife (1756; Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 1996); and Malcolm Thick’s introduction to William Ellis, The Country Housewife’s Family Companion (Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 2000). 7. During the same period, accounting manuals faced a similar problem. In A New Treatise of Arithmetic and Book-keeping (1718), Alexander Malcolm cited ‘‘the great . . . Cloud of authors in my way’’ (Preface). Doubleentry bookkeeping was well developed, so manuals differed only over minor theoretical matters and pedagogical modes. 8. For example, the introduction to Charlotte Mason’s The Lady’s Assistant (1780) observes that ‘‘[t]here having already been a great Number of Publications concerning the art of Cookery, it may perhaps be thought unnecessary to produce another book on the subject—yet, I trust that, upon examination, this work will appear of more real utility than may be at first imagined.’’ In the twenty-first century, ‘‘product differentiation’’ and ‘‘consumer perception’’ are staples of marketing curricula in business

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schools. Mason, like dozens of others, groped toward some means to differentiate her product and, concomitantly, to appeal to consumers who perceived few immediate differences between The Lady’s Assistant and competing texts. 9. Publishers (known as ‘‘booksellers’’) did not always advertise every book, hoping that ads for likely best-sellers would attract readers to other books on their list. See James Tierney, ‘‘Advertisements for Books in London Newspapers, 1760–1785,’’ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 30 (2001): 153–64. 10. If the reader had examined other prefaces, the ‘‘horizon of expectations’’ would be such that he would merely assimilate such invective to the genre, on the assumption that all culinary texts indulged in the practice. On reader reception of texts based on the ‘‘horizon’’ constituted by prior reading, see Hans Robert Jauss, ‘‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,’’ New Literary History 1 (1970): 7–37. This chapter will discuss the possible effect of such reaction. 11. Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2. 12. Genette, Paratexts, 200, 222. 13. Daniel Defoe used the prefaces to his fictions to excite readers’ interest. See Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chap. 2. On the book trade’s commercialism, see David Foxon, rev. and ed. James McLaverty, Pope and the Early EighteenthCentury Book Trade (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1991); Catherine Labio, ‘‘ ‘What’s In Fashion Vent’: Behn, La Fayette, and the Market for Novels and Novelty,’’ The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28 (1998): 119–39; and Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 14. In ‘‘Advertisements for Books in London Newspapers, 1760–1785,’’ Tierney demonstrates that for various reasons, book advertising in newspapers fell off in the later eighteenth century. 15. On shoppers’ dedication to browsing, see Daniel Defoe, The Compleat English Tradesman (1725–27), vol. I, letter VIII. 16. It is also true that books were much more expensive relative to a person’s earnings than they are in the twenty-first century and that families owned far fewer. Thus, Bob Harris observes that when buying books, ‘‘literacy was probably less of a constraint than cost’’ (290) and that ‘‘as book prices rose in the later eighteenth century, and as the number of publication proliferated, few individuals could afford to purchase more than a small selection of them on their own’’ (291). See ‘‘Print Culture’’ in A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. H. T. Dickinson, 283–93 (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002).

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17. Gary Waller, The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern Construction of Gender (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 153–54. Waller cites Tony Bennett, ‘‘Texts in History,’’ Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 18 (1985): 1–18. See also Robert Darnton, ‘‘First Steps Toward a History of Reading,’’ in The Kiss of Lamourette, 154–87 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). Darnton argues that ‘‘Reading has a history. It was not always and everywhere the same. . . . Interpretive schemes belong to cultural configurations, which have varied enormously over time’’ (187). For a discussion of a shift in eighteenth-century reading practices, demonstrating the need to attend to their specificity, see Elizabeth Harries, The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994), chap. 4. 18. John Shirely’s The Accomplished Ladies Rich Closet of Rarities (1696) indicates in the Preface that the skills that it teaches are crucial and are ‘‘such as most contribute to the Advancement of each Individual Female, to a Station that may render her acceptable in the Eyes of great ones, or at least create her a good Repute, and pronounce her happy, though moving in a lower Sphere.’’ On the importance to women of prudent household management and food preparation, see Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), chap. 4. 19. The sociology, anthropology, and psychology of food are immense subjects. For an excellent overview, see The Cambridge World History of Food (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000). See also Stephen Mennell’s classic All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1985). Michael Symons’ A History of Cooks and Cooking (Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 2001) has a good bibliography. The importance of self-expression as a type of sophisticated, nonslavish adaptation to fashion has historical roots in guidebooks for women. See, for example, Mrs. William Parkes’ Domestic Duties (1825), Mrs. John Sandford’s Female Improvement (1836), and Lady Judith Montefiore’s The Jewish Manual (1847). Martha Stewart’s magazine, Living, is the flagship publication of a multi-billion-dollar industry founded on this notion. 20. Delia Smith’s Complete Illustrated Cookery Course (London: BBC Books, 2000), Intro. 21. On the tendency of authors to introduce third-person praise, mostly to heighten credibility, see Genette, Paratexts, 207–9. 22. Nigel Slater, Real Good Food (London: Fourth Estate, 1995), Preface. 23. Nigella Lawson, Nigella Bites (London: Chatto and Windus, 2001), Preface.

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24. Jill Norman, The New Penguin Cookery Book (London: Penguin, 2001), Preface. 25. Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers, River Caf e Cook Book Green (New York: Random House, 2000), Preface. 26. Jamie Oliver, Happy Days with the Naked Chef (London: Penguin, 2001). 27. Susan J. Leonardi complains about a loss of personality in Joy’s latterday makeover. See ‘‘Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster a la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie.’’ PMLA 104 (1989): 340–47. 28. Joy of Cooking (New York: Scribner, 2006), preface. Julia Child’s endorsement is much prized in the world of cookbooks. See, for example, Jacques Pepin’s Complete Techniques (2001), where Julia states on the cover: ‘‘A standard kitchen item the world over. . . . There has never been anything like it anywhere.’’ The PBS series Baking with Julia was turned into a cookbook by Dorie Greenspan, Baking with Julia. 29. For a list of editions, see Joy of Cooking Web site, http://www. thejoykitchen.com/about.lasso?menu¼two (last accessed November 28, 2009). See also http://www.cookbkjj.com/college/joy.htm (last accessed November 28, 2009), a Web page from Cook Books by Janet Jarvits, bookseller, providing bibliographical information to collectors of Joy’s American editions. 30. See ‘‘The Precession of Simulacra’’ in Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 1–79. ‘‘Simulation’’ (attributed to late capitalism) is opposed to representation. It is ‘‘a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself’’ (4), canceling referentiality, hence originality, in any text or material phenomenon. Anthony Bourdain makes a related point, noting that ‘‘2007 was the year that Food Network canceled ‘Emeril Live,’ and stopped ordering episodes of ‘Mario Molto,’ a calculated break with the idea of the celebrity chef as a seasoned professional and a move toward an entirely new definition: a personality with a saute pan’’ (New York Times, December 27, 2009, ‘‘Sunday Opinion,’’ 12). 31. Glasse’s hard-edged formula was difficult to shake, even for fine cookbooks. Toward the end of the century, John Farley’s The London Art of Cookery (1783, with numerous printings through 1800), could still claim that ‘‘The generality of Books of this Kind are so grouped together, without Method or Order, as to render them exceedingly intricate and bewildering; and the Receipts written with so much Carelessness and Inaccuracy, as not only to render them exceedingly perplexing, but frequently totally unintelligible.’’ Just as Glasse follows up derision with self-commendation and a rationale for why her work is eminently useful, so Farley states that ‘‘In this Work, however, we hope, that Perspicacity and Regularity will be seen in every Step we have taken’’ (Preface). 32. In Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), Linda Colley demonstrates that England, Scotland,

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and Wales were drawn toward unity by anti-French, anti-Catholic sentiment that transcended regional disparities. England stood for, hence stood up to, what was not-France. Some texts, such as William Verral’s A Complete System of Cookery (1759), praised French cuisine, but Verral was in the minority and did not produce a second edition. See Gilly Lehmann’s discussion of the fate of French-leaning culinary texts in her introduction to Martha Bradley, The British Housewife (1756; Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 1996). Notably, some seventeenth-century texts announced their inclusion of English and French recipes, but this practice tended to disappear. 33. Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769), Preface. The Pastry Cook’s Vade-Mecum (1705) suggests that ‘‘any Body that carefully peruses this Book, may supply the want of a Cook and Confectioner’’ (Preface). 34. Glasse apparently lifted many recipes from earlier texts, but none directly from the French. See tables of corresponding recipes in ‘‘First Catch Your Hare’’ xxxi–xxxiv. 35. Daniel Defoe, The Secret History of the Secret History of the White Staff, Purse & Mitre (1715), 8. 36. In the seventeenth century, the experiential was prominent in the meaning of ‘‘experiment.’’ The Oxford English Dictionary states that the verb transitive meant ‘‘to have experience of.’’ As a verb, it meant ‘‘to make trial of,’’ ‘‘to test, try.’’ The term also meant ‘‘practical acquaintance with a person or thing,’’ ‘‘a practical proof.’’ If a ‘‘receipt’’ became an ‘‘experiment,’’ it would have been tried and tested; it would constitute proof of the directions’ practicability. See, for example, G. H., Choice and Experimented Receipts (1668) and The Ladies Cabinet Opened: Wherein is Found Hidden Several Experiments in Preserving and Conserving . . . (1639). 37. In the seventeenth century, ‘‘closets’’ could be used for intimate, private meetings; access would have been an index of trust. They were also repositories for private papers in elite households. An opened closet, applied to a collection of recipes, implies an elite donor’s donation, ostensibly on a limited basis. See Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson, eds., The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digby Opened (1669; Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 1997), xlvi–l. See also Kim Hall, ‘‘Culinary Spaces,’’ on the commercial motivation of revealing so-called elite culinary secrets. 38. As has been suggested, eighteenth-century texts such as Martha Bradley’s The British Housewife (1756) continued this same logic, requiring readers to ‘‘practice’’ their art to succeed. Concomitantly, she still offered ‘‘secrets.’’ Bradley, however, had a more disciplinary edge than her seventeenth-century forebears. 39. In ‘‘Recipes for Reading,’’ Leonardi observes that recipes with no discernible context also have no appeal. She notes that ‘‘although I may pick up a recipe from the supermarket rack, I never try it’’ (340). 40. See The Cambridge World History of Food, Vol. 16, Food as Medicine, especially the discussion under ‘‘Dietetics during the Scientific Revolution.’’

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41. Compare William Buchan, Domestic Medicine; or, the Family Physician (1769), noting that ‘‘the arts of cookery render many things unwholesome, which are not so in their nature. By jumbling together a number of different ingredients . . . the composition proves almost a poison.’’ Buchan does not indicate how to avoid this consequence, except to suggest that ‘‘it were well for mankind if cookery, as an art, were entirely prohibited’’ (68). 42. See, for example, Thomas Short, M.D., A Dissertation Upon Tea (1730). 43. The health effects of particular foods were hotly debated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On sugar, for example, see Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985). For the larger context, see Jack Cecil Drummond and Anne Wilbraham, The Englishman’s Food: A History of Five Centuries of English Diet (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958). 44. William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Early Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 131. For a discussion of Eamon’s formula in another context, see Caterina Albano’s introduction to Hannah Wooley, The Gentlewoman’s Companion (1675; Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 2001), 37. 45. The frontispiece first appeared in N. Bailey’s Dictionarium Domesticum (1736), produced by the same bookseller. See image on p. 24.

CHAPTER 6

NICHE AND SPECIALTY COOKBOOKS

Although there are still plenty of general cookbooks—old warhorses like Joy of Cooking and Good Housekeeping, and newer entries like Gourmet—the market has become minutely segmented. Anyone who cooks has a shelf full of texts, and they are not clones of Joy. Anyone who just ‘‘reads’’ cookbooks has, perversely, even more. They pile up like novels, in part, because cookbooks need not be merely functional, that is, they need not limit themselves to culinary instruction. They can be thought-provoking, like Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford’s Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China (2008); or cultural histories, like Terese Allen and Harva Hachten’s The Flavor of Wisconsin: An Informal History of Food and Eating in the Badger State (2009); or nostalgia trips like Louis and Billie Van Dyke’s The Blue Willow Inn Bible of Southern Cooking: Over 600 Essential Recipes Southerners Have Enjoyed for Generations (2005). Cookbooks are as psychologically involving as any other type of literature, and so readers collect them.1 Cookbooks are hard to resist. The most interesting personalize the preparation and consumption of food, situating these two most basic functions—shared by virtually everyone—in context with an individual reader’s self-definition. Rachael Ray’s 30-Minute Meals (2003), therefore, would not ordinarily appeal to readers of The Pleasures of Slow Food: Celebrating Authentic Traditions, Flavors and Recipes (2002). Cookbooks encourage readers to be themselves when they eat or even when they just think about eating. The Pleasures of Slow Food promotes purposeful, thoughtful eating as opposed to grabbing

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a Big Mac (‘‘Over 99 Billion Served,’’ though McDonald’s stopped counting in 1994). Cookbooks are carefully calibrated texts, finetuned to catch consumers as they hop on a trend or retreat into solitary bread-baking. They reflect readers’ concerns, and thus while they are commercial, they are also timely; frequently they have a politics. Diet for a Small Planet (1971), for example, sponsored by Friends of the Earth, reflects the 1970s’ growing concern with ecology. Earth to Table: Seasonal Recipes from an Organic Farm (2009) reflects twentyfirst-century concerns that food be ‘‘natural,’’ free of pesticides and grown in accordance with natural rhythms. Michael Pollan, the godfather of responsible eating, wrote the introduction. This chapter examines niche cookbooks, observing how they address—and indeed model—self-conception and aspiration. It begins with modern examples, examining the nature of niche markets and the proclivity of niche cookbooks to segment such markets (coming closer and closer to the individual, the ultimate micromarket). The chapter then moves on to the eighteenth-century forebears of these texts. The goal is to establish a fact about cookbooks that is obvious in the twenty-first century and was already emerging in the eighteenth century: cookbooks are incredibly involved with broader discourses concerning food and health, and indeed with social mores in general. Niche cookbooks, starting in the eighteenth century and continuing into the present, are particularized outcroppings in such broader discourses; they domesticate them, targeting individuals in their own kitchens. Such cookbooks reify the rhetorical strategy, discussed in earlier chapters, of speaking to an intended reader—Ellis’ ‘‘Housewife,’’ for example—who is made to feel at home in the text, the object of a solicitous author instead of a distant, detached, print-culture institution.

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY NICHE COOKBOOKS Vegan cookbooks are proliferating, in part because the risks of meateating are big news. The New York Times’ health columnist, Jane Brody, reported several alarming studies in ‘‘Paying a Price for Loving Red Meat.’’2 A front-page story in the Times, ‘‘Woman’s Shattered Life Shows Ground Beef Inspection Flaws,’’ prompted an outpouring of letters, some swearing that the authors had eaten their last burger.3 Science Daily reported ‘‘Arsenic in Chicken Feed May Pose Risks to Humans.’’4 An Arkansas television station noted

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that run-off from chicken farms may be raising E. coli levels in well water.5 Such stories, while scary, do not begin to broach the unnerving possibility that meat-eating destroys the rain forest, undermining efforts to fight climate change.6 Then there are reports of depleted fish stocks and fish containing mercury.7 Searing discussions of meat-eating, such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals (2009) and Jeffrey Moussaieff’s Face on Your Plate: The Truth about Food (2009), provoke not just fear but guilt. Novelists and psychologists investigate animal minds, leading to demands for animal rights.8 Animal Rights is taught in law schools; groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) are well financed; radical feminism and ecofeminism describe meat-eating as oppression.9 Americans are beginning to eat self-consciously.10 People who never considered a vegetable diet are starting to view it is as the responsible choice—provided, of course, that an exclusively vegetable diet is interesting and healthful. This is where vegan cookbooks come in, offering (and, they hope, popularizing) cuisine that jettisons even milk and eggs.11 Vegans are on a mission, determined to demonstrate that nothing derived from animals is necessary for a delicious, well-balanced diet. The array of titles is staggering, suggesting that the movement has caught on, not least because its inventiveness fascinates adventurous cooks. Bryant Terry’s Vegan Soul Kitchen: Fresh, Healthy, and Creative African-American Cuisine (2009) reinterprets West Indian and Southern soul food. It exemplifies how a cookbook that occupies a primary niche (vegan soul food) can segment the market even further (soul food or vegan) and potentially capture either segments. That is, if a potential purchaser is not a soul-food fan seeking to turn vegan (or a vegan seeking soul food), she still may purchase Vegan Soul Kitchen because it slots into at least one niche that addresses her interest. Segmenting the market, then linking together the separate niches, is typical niche cookbook practice because it targets specific readers while expanding the targeted base. Another niche-within-a-niche book, The Joy of Vegan Baking (2007), tackles milk and egg replacement. Local Bounty: Seasonal Vegan Recipes (2008) foregrounds the fresh-local-seasonal approach shared by virtually all vegan texts; to uncommitted vegans, it offers a new approach to seasonality, potentially a secondary niche. The Vegan Mediterranean Cookbook (2001) capitalizes on the ‘‘health’’ of the region’s inhabitants (while alternatively segmenting the ‘‘Mediterranean’’ market); The Urban Vegan: 250 Simple, Sumptuous Recipes

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from Street Cart Favorites to Haute Cuisine (2010) is for hipsters; How It All Vegan: Irresistible Recipes for an Animal-Free Diet (2009) emphasizes taste. Becoming Vegan: The Complete Guide to Adopting a Healthy Plant-Based Diet (2008) is written by two registered dieticians and aims at the nutritionally skittish. Faced with a shelf of such books, as one is at Barnes & Noble, the curious reader will likely choose one, impressed by the sheer number of books that the cuisine has gone mainstream and is worth a look. Niches do not need to be occupied by just a few titles; many titles compete for a limited readership, even as they try to expand it. In this vein, Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook (2007) carries the implication that ‘‘if you only buy one. . . .’’ The authors also wrote Vegan with a Vengeance (2005) and Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World (2006), titles that suggest veganism’s missionary zeal to expand the market dramatically. Cupcakes were in fact one of the earliest offerings of vegan cuisine seriously to catch on. They emerged from the cupcake craze started in New York by Magnolia Bakery and spread to both coasts by Babycakes.12 Entire Web sites are devoted to cupcakes.13 The Web site for Cupcake Camp (apparently no pun intended) features a worldwide directory of venues, in which each meeting is ‘‘an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and eat cupcakes in an open environment.’’14 A ‘‘camp’’ for cupcake-eaters suggests that for all their jewel-like decadence, cupcakes still, perversely, evoke childhood. Such complex associations are in fact irresistible, and the best cookbooks know it. Hello, Cupcake: Irresistibly Playful Creations Anyone Can Make (2008) offers tiny architectural wonders that could challenge a professional, even as it suggests that children will consume them. On the more traditional side, Christabel Martin’s Cupcakes (2006) is positively demure, and Elinor Klivans’ Cupcakes! (2005) nostalgically features bakery favorites. Somewhere in the middle are Hey There, Cupcake!: 35 Yummy Fun Cupcake Recipes for All Occasions; 100 Best Cupcake Recipes; The Cupcake Cookbook; Cupcakes Year-Round; and Martha Stewart’s Cupcakes: 175 Inspired Ideas for Everyone’s Favorite Treat. Cupcakes used to come in two flavors—yellow and chocolate— with two kinds of frosting. But not anymore. The cupcake niche is highly segmented. Authors proliferate cupcake varieties—so many, in fact, that they are numbered and sorted. (The idea that it is possible to differentiate 175 toy cakes is totally funny.) There is a cupcake for everyone. If veganism is serious, cupcakes are the antidote,

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‘‘irresistible playful creations.’’ Vegan cupcakes split the difference, letting serious people play and playful people play at getting serious. The very idea demonstrates how niche cookbooks take account of people’s variant lives. Nonetheless, it is possible to overdo anything (even vegan cupcakes). If one insists on gorging, shelves of diet cookbooks offer support. Cookbooks are available for diabetics and for people who cannot tolerate gluten. If one has high blood-pressure or cholesterol, cookbooks for that condition also are available. For the lactose intolerant, for example, The Lactose-Free Family Cookbook and Go Dairy Free: The Guide and Cookbooks for Milk Allergies, provide appropriate recipes. The American Heart Association Low Salt Cookbook covers a variety of conditions. The niche for medical-related cookbooks is highly segmented, with the intent of proving that such books have concern for particular physical problems and demonstrating their readiness to help. Should anyone just need escapism, there are shelves of entertaining cookbooks. The Opera Lover’s Cookbook: Menus for Elegant Entertaining (2006), with Pavarotti lifting a glass toward the reader and a forward by soprano Renee Fleming, is pure fantasy. Some fantasies, however, are possible: cookbooks give readers a ‘‘taste’’ of where they may actually go: Turkey, Morocco, Thailand. Cookbooks also highlight places where travelers may just have been: New York, Philadelphia, Arkansas.15 For places with distinctive regional cuisines, readers may turn to The New England Cookbook and The New Orleans Cookbook. Titles like Swedish Homecooking in America appeal to fanciers of microniche books. Books such as The New High-Altitude Cookbook and High-Altitude Baking appeal to the geographically challenged. Cookbooks with such titles as Sandra Oliver’s magnificent Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and Their Food, at Sea and Ashore, in the Nineteenth Century (1995) attract readers with regional and historical interests.16 Reading Saltwater, one can imagine what it might have been like to hunker down on a whaler. Narrowing the focus still further are cookbooks from famous restaurants, like Gallatoire’s in New Orleans, which epitomize a region’s cuisine. Chanterelle, named for (the late-lamented) Chanterelle in Greenwich Village, reflects a dream of New York for the young and beautiful. Chanterelle has a send-off from the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, and features fabulous pictures. It is still available, and it could become a keepsake, a record of past glories.

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But suppose you are just hunkering down, not going anywhere. You might look to cookbooks on home-canning, on how to use a pasta machine, bread machine, crock pot, clay pot, ice cream maker, juicer, grill, smoker, or food processor. If money is a problem, there is The Frugal Foodie: 200 Gourmet Recipes for Any Budget (2009).17 For college students on a budget, there is The Healthy College Cookbook—:Quick, Easy, Cheap, and because no market is too narrow to segment even further, there is PETA’s Vegan College Cookbook. Suppose someone cares about just one kind of food: The Pasta Bible, The Bread Bible, The Soup Bible, The Cookie Bible, and The Cake Bible offer dispositive advice. There are cookbooks about fish, shellfish, raw food, roasting, and drying. For those who want to make candy, there is Who Wants Candy?, The Candy Bar Cookbook, and the Ultimate Candy Cookbook. The list is endless. Except for behemoths like Joy of Cooking, modern cookbooks are niche cookbooks. They cater to specific needs and desires and conscientiously seek to create them. The Joy franchise itself has gone niche, with publications like Joy of Cooking: All About Cookies.

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NICHE COOKBOOKS In the eighteenth century, the market for niche cookbooks was infinitesimal relative to the thousands of books available in the twentyfirst century. Yet such books were beginning to emerge, responding—as they do now—to individual needs and interests. Such books are important because they demonstrate, from yet another perspective, the commercial nature of cookbooks—the tendency of the market to segment even as it is still forming, and to target individuals based on their particular consumerist profile. This tendency—wholly unknown to manuscript culture—is a print-culture phenomenon, made possible because cookbooks can be multiplied endlessly and need to stand out to sustain their sales. Moreover, because they can sell many copies, they can have a narrow audience. In the eighteenth century, booksellers and authors recognized that even if someone owned a cookbook, they might be persuaded to buy something specialized that offered new skills. As noted in chapter 5, ‘‘new’’ by itself was not a convincing claim and had to be further supported. Those who did not own a cookbook could perhaps be persuaded that one with a narrow focus was all they really needed. A vegetarian cookbook might be perfect for someone who planned to swear off

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meat. It might also appeal to someone contemplating such a commitment, provided the book had a sufficient come-on. Just like they do in the twenty-first century, niche cookbooks responded to but also encouraged interests. Indeed, by the eighteenth century, cookbooks were on a mission, if not yet to save the planet then at least to make people healthier. They were part of a wide discussion of diet that extended from treatises condemning foreign foods to those that depicted the evils of eating meat and sugar. Cookbooks were also political, concerned to offer the poor ‘‘cheap’’ knockoffs of traditional foods that ideally could keep them from rioting. ‘‘Cheap,’’ which is now a term of derision, was then just an accurate descriptor. Toward the end of the century, when grain shortages, war, and the French Revolution bore down on British society, cookbooks offered ‘‘cheap dishes’’ to the poor. They resembled books from World War II that taught women how to extend meatloaf and make sauce from windfall apples. They were political as well, finessing claims that sugar was drenched in the blood of slaves. This section examines specialty texts on confectionery—some of the earliest niche cookbooks—as well as books intended for the poor, those promoting vegetable diets, and manuals on homebrewing. Confectionery Confectionery texts flourished despite sugar’s bad rap, and indeed as a counterpoint to it. In this sense, they epitomized the market’s power to harness desire and defeat contrary influences such as guilt or fear. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, sugar had a tough reputation: it was said to be unhealthful, it was difficult to work with, and it was the basis of the slave trade. Criticism came from everywhere. On matters of health, James Hart’s Klinike or the Diet of Diseases (1633) claimed that sugar ‘‘rotteth the teeth, making them looke blacke, and withal, causeth many a lothesome stinking-breath’’ (97). Thomas Tryon’s The Good House-wife Made a Doctor (1692) held that ‘‘the too frequent mixing of Sugar with our common Foods and Drinks, obstructs the course of Nature, heats the blood till it becomes thick and putrified, whence proceeds Stoppages of the Nerves, hindring the Passages of the Spirits’’ (139). Such ‘‘evils do in especial manner take place among Children, Women, and Young People, who chiefly maintain the Confectioners, and are the great

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Devourers of Sweet-meats’’ (137). Wholesome Advice Against the Abuse of Hot Liquors (1706) blamed sugar for making coffee, tea, and chocolate so delicious that people overindulged, such that the drinks ‘‘bec[a]me Poison’’ (6). Yet people craved sugar, and no amount of finger-wagging could change that. Indeed, because of its difficulty, sugar cookery was perversely attractive; women sought to master it as an ‘‘accomplishment.’’ Sugar boiled over when ingredients were added unless it was perfectly scummed. Yet boiling directions were maddening. The nomenclature used to designate ‘‘heights’’ was woefully imprecise—a few seconds too long and the confection was burnt, a few too little and it sank.18 In The Art of Cookery, Glasse typically advised boiling sugar to a ‘‘candy’’ height or until it is ‘‘ropy’’ or hangs ‘‘like a hair.’’ Such terms could designate almost anything stringy. The 1736 edition of Charles Carter’s The Compleat City and Country Cook contained an extensive ‘‘Appendix on Preserving,’’ so comically precise that it could rarely be equaled in practice: There are several degrees of boiling Sugar for several Uses in Confectionery, &c. The Degrees of boiling are six, Smooth, Pearled, Blown, Feathered, Cracked, and Caramel. These six Degrees are also subdivided with respect to their particular Qualities, as the lesser and greater Smooth, the lesser and the greater pearled, Feathered a little and a great deal, and so of the rest. (234)19

Carter’s descriptions of how to recognize each ‘‘degree’’ (or subdegree) were just as challenging. Because of the limits of technology, his directions were rarely improved upon; they often were adapted or just copied. In practical terms, authors and readers just threw up their hands. Most all-purpose cookbooks barely touched confectionery except for syrups and creams.20 They may have feared responsibility for the mess that might ensue. Specialty authors saw an opening. Yet as the century wore on, confectionery’s biggest potential impediment was the slave trade, fueled by demand for sugar. Hideous images of that relationship were hard to avoid. Early in the century, Pierre Pomet’s A Compleat History of Drugs (1712, reprinted and expanded over several editions) described the horrific conditions under which slaves toiled, as well as their maiming and death from giant rollers that pressed the cane. Quakers presented the first antislave trade petition in 1783. In 1784, James Ramsay’s An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar

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‘‘Barbarities in the West Indies.’’ (Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.)

Colonies raised public awareness of slaveholder brutality. In 1787, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade held its first meeting, and Josiah Wedgwood issued his famous medallion of a kneeling slave, ‘‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’’ Literate slaves published searing autobiographies.21 In 1788, ‘‘Africanus’’ issued Remarks on the Slave Trade and Slavery of Negroes, yet another outcry. Abolitionists backed a sugar boycott. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called sugar the blood of slaves, as did politicians like William Fox. William Blake was deeply affected by the Haitian slave revolt (1791), which he reflected in designs for Innocence and Experience (1794).22 Women analogized their condition to that of the slaves, and bookstalls bulged with tracts decrying the effects of sugar-based colonialism.23 James Gilray’s famous print, ‘‘Barbarities in the West Indies’’ (1791), showed a slave drowning in a vat of sugar while his owner stirred. Another print, ‘‘The Anti-Saccharites’’ (1792), satirized George III as foregoing sugar but only to save on the cost. It is a testament to skillful marketing and sugar’s irresistible appeal that during the period of greatest opposition to slavery two confectionery texts

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Sugar production in the West Indies, from Pierre Pomet, The History of Drugs (1712).

appeared, Robert Abbott’s The Housekeeper’s Valuable Present . . . being a new and Complete Art of Preparing Confects (1790) and Frederic Nutt’s The Complete Confectioner (1789). Indeed, despite sugar’s drawbacks, consumption rose throughout the eighteenth century as prices correspondingly dropped.24 Sugar’s accessibility, therefore, was yet another reason for confectionery texts’ success—if the cook wasted five pounds on candying lemons, it would not be a disaster. In her Preface to The Compleat Confectioner (1742), Hannah Glasse depicts sugar cookery as a reasonable aspiration, a matter of saving money and coping with the privations of ex-urban life: Ladies who reside chiefly in the country, where they have no opportunity of procuring things from a Confectioner, must very sensibly feel the want of such a book as this; and those who have hitherto bought of the Confectioners, will soon find, that a vast expence is to be saved by the use of this book.

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Trade card of D. Negri, the great Italian confectioner doing business in London. (From Ambrose Heal, London Tradesmen’s Cards of the 18th Century. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1968.)

Underlying this clever little passage are two proffered assumptions: that readers naturally want to consume confections (but have no access to confectioners), and that a commercial text (specifically Glasse’s text) will save readers from confectioners’ predacious commerciality. While neither may have been true, such suggestions could make a reader question her own assumptions: maybe consumption of sugar was acceptable and maybe the bother was better (especially if lessened by instruction) than the cost of buying sweets. Chocolate Almonds, from Hannah Glasse, The Compleat Confectioner (1742) Take a pound of chocolate, finely grated, and a pound and half of best sugar, finely sifted; soak gum dragon in orange-flower water, and work them into what form you please; the paste must be stiff; dry them in a stove. You may write devices on paper, roll them up, and put them in the middle.

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The niche cookbook invariably urges readers to reexamine their views and to consider how the book can improve their personal alimentary practice. Glasse zeroes in on how one reader stuck in the country should feel deprived, while another, beholden to fancy urban confectioners, should feel upset by the prices she pays. Glasse segments the market and then captures both. That is, both readers potentially are saved by The Compleat Confectioner, whose author gains credibility by appearing to appreciate each reader’s predicament (the better, of course, to solve it). Moreover, when confronted by Glasse’s reasoning, a reader might be particularly susceptible if she owned Glasse’s Art of Cookery, which derided ‘‘expence’’ as French. *** The first truly stand-alone confectionery text (that is, without medicinal or cookery components) was The True Way of Preserving and Candying . . . Made Publick for the Benefit of all English Ladies and Gentlewomen; especially for my Scholars ([1681] 1695). Yet while the title suggests a ‘‘teaching’’ vehicle, ‘‘The Epistle Dedicatory’’ undercuts this position, claiming that confectionery cannot entirely be learned from a book: Yet I do not know but that you may miscarry in endeavouring to do what I have here directed; For, as the Old Saying is, It is Use that makes Perfectness; and no Person can do that with a Pen, that your seeing and observing shall do. . . . But this, I am sure, will be sufficient for to help your Memories, after you have seen what is here Practiced; which is all I can promise You, or my Self.

The author struggles with the nature of a niche text, on the one hand offering specialized instruction but, on the other, claiming that the text is limited in value. For maximum effectiveness, he seems to think readers should be his ‘‘Scholars,’’ taking lessons in real time as if London (where the book was published) were his market, rather than a potentially infinite discursive community. In this regard, he cordons off the value of the circulating text just when it is most necessary: sugar is pouring into Britain, and an urban middle class, anxious to emulate the aristocracy, is clamoring for genteel instruction.25 Moreover, although the recipes actually are detailed, at crucial points, they seem to be just what the author states they are: aide-memoire. The first recipe, for example, suggests that when boiling sugar ‘‘you must clarify it with eggs.’’ If one does not know how to clarify with eggs, then the instruction is pointless and (as the author suggests) ‘‘you may miscarry.’’

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The idea that confectionery could be taught is the apparent, if unstated, premise of The Pastry-Cook’s Vade Mecum (1705), which smuggles recipes for sweets in among home remedies.26 Another early entry was Mary Eales’ The Compleat Confectioner: or, the Art of Candying and Preserving in its Utmost Perfection. Being a Collection of Receipts of the Late Ingenious Mrs. Eales, Confectioner to their late Majesties King William and Queen Anne. Familiarly Adapted for the Use of Ladies, And Very Necessary for All Those Who are Willing to Excel in the Most Excellent Qualifications of a Good Housewife (1733). The title represents an advance over the Vade Mecum’s, situating Mrs. Eales at the pinnacle of accomplishment and pinpointing the necessity of confectionery skills ‘‘for All Those Willing to Excel’’ in housewifery. The title poses the precise challenge posed by sugar itself: is the reader daring enough? Her status depends on her decision.27 Eales’ text went through five, possibly six, editions through 1788, testifying to its stature. Edward Lambert’s The Art of Confectionary (1744), another specialty text, might thus have seemed superfluous to the undiscerning reader. Yet, upon studying it, that reader would have appreciated Lambert’s relative clarity; indeed, the text had two more printings through 1767. The 1761 edition states right on the cover that the author (‘‘the late ingenious . . . Confectioner’’) provides ‘‘the best methods of clarifying, and the different ways of Boiling Sugar,’’ and in fact Lambert does try to explain all those complex ‘‘heights’’ to which sugar was boiled. On the first page, he explains his approach: Since the Ground-work of the Confectioner’s Art Depends on the Knowledge of clarifying and boiling Sugars, I shall here distinctly set them down, that the several Terms hereafter mentioned may the more easily be understood; which, when thoroughly comprehended, will prevent the unnecessary Repetition of them.

This is intended to calm the skittish reader with literally ‘‘clarifying’’ information: the definition of each height, which in Lambert’s nomenclature includes ‘‘clarifying,’’ ‘‘smooth,’’ ‘‘blown,’’ ‘‘feathered,’’ ‘‘cracked,’’ and ‘‘caramel’’ (not unlike Glasse’s smooth, blown, feathered, crackled, and caramel, and virtually identical to Carter’s language). While the definitions seem unworkable to a modern reader accustomed to precision, they are definitions nonetheless. In the context of a specialized text, they allow the eighteenth-century

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reader to feel that she is starting from somewhere definite—that is, from a reassuring foothold in expertise—even if the directions are still daunting.28 The niche text has a psychological advantage merely by being ‘‘niche.’’ It imparts confidence. It allows readers to expect a narrower, but more refined treatment of a subject, and hence a more deliberate learning experience. Macaroons, from Hannah Glasse, The Compleat Confectioner (1742) Take a pound of almonds, scald and blanch them, and throw them into cold water; dry them in a cloth, pound them in a mortar, and moisten them with orange-flower water, or the white of an egg, lest they turn to an oil; afterwards take an equal quantity of white powder sugar, the whites of four eggs, and a little milk; beat all well together, shape them round upon water-paper with a spoon, and bake them in a gentle oven on tin plates.

More confectionery texts followed—Elizabeth Price’s The New, Universal, and Complete Confectioner (1760) and The Court and Country Confectioner (1770) by one Mr. Borella, identified in a later edition as ‘‘now head confectioner to the Spanish Ambassador in London.’’ Borella offers the old tease that while professionals will resent his claims, it is nonetheless true that confectionery ‘‘may be easily and successfully practiced by the English house-keeper’’ (‘‘The Author’s Address to the House-Keepers of Great Britain’’).29 Backing up his claims, he states that The Court and Country Confectioner will offer ‘‘a more speedy, plain, and familiar Method of understanding the whole Art of Confectionery.’’ The key terms are ‘‘Method’’ and ‘‘whole Art,’’ two conventional locutions that, in context, imply that the text is not just a collection of recipes. Rather, it offers (in its own estimation) a systematic, comprehensive treatment of a narrow specialty. Like Lambert, Borella starts with the basics, and although his boiling directions are even more obscure (he cites twelve indistinct ‘‘heights’’), he claims to cover everything within the field’s limited compass. The niche text, reflecting on itself, opines that while it is smaller in scope, it is superior within its scope. Whether this is true for any given text, the idea is good marketing. It sets the niche text apart as belonging to a distinct subgenre— that is, niche texts—and it sets a particular text apart as belonging, for example, to niche texts concerning confectionery. Such segmentation encourages a potential purchaser to think about the subgenre of niche texts (what do they do that more general texts do not?), and about whether a text within the subgenre (the one in front of

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‘‘The British-Butcher, Supplying John Bull with a Substitute for Bread.’’ (Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.)

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her) is more likely to meet her needs because it is a niche text. Such marketing provides a powerful incentive. As confectionery texts pile up toward the end of the century (at least eight, in multiple editions), such encouragement delivers the message that ‘‘confectionery’’ includes a defined corpus of rules and practices, whose pedagogical substrate has gone mainstream. As this message takes shape, the risks associated with sugar cookery—both practical and moral—become sugarcoated. By the time Abbott and Nutt publish their texts, and opposition toward sugar is raging, there is a sufficient marketing counterforce to withstand it. In this sense, eighteenth-century confectionery texts provide the perfect model for developing and marketing the niche cookbook. Cooking for the Poor The state of the poor in eighteenth-century Britain tended to rise and fall with the price of bread. It was tied to agricultural policy and to whether Britain was at war. It was affected by harvest failures, export policies, and the Industrial Revolution. In the last decade of the century, all these factors plus the French Revolution produced a near upheaval. There were food riots, threats against the king, and serious concerns that revolution would cross the English Channel.30 Indeed, throughout the century, the poor had to be fed; as they were crammed into workhouses, the issue was how to feed them cheaply relative to the work they could perform. Scientists like Count Rumford formulated ‘‘cheap’’ soups that were widely copied; ‘‘soup houses’’ passed out tickets limiting the poor to one trip per day.31 The political philosopher Edmund Burke—who admired Marie Antoinette—railed against ‘‘poor rates,’’ a tax charged against real estate; middle-class rate-payers cried that the cost was crippling.32 By mid-century, hundreds of tracts had flooded the public sphere with titles linking poverty, food costs, and public regulation: For the Poor, Considerations Relative to the Bakers’ Allowance for Baking, Under the New Law Regulating the Price and Weight of Bread; Considerations on Several Proposals, Lately Made, For the Better Maintenance of the Poor; Cheap Provisions, Recommended to the Public in General, and the Poor in Particular; and Observations on the Defects of the Poor Laws, and on the Causes and Consequences of the Great Increase and Burden of the Poor. Food costs—well over half a poor family’s budget—were central to debates about the ‘‘burden of the poor.’’33

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One problem was the poor’s insistence on white bread, which they clung to as a symbol of Englishness. As the price of wheat rose, however, white bread became a luxury in the eyes of bourgeois ratepayers, who urged the poor to accept ‘‘substitutes.’’ Substitutes became the watchword, parodied by the poor’s supporters and reviled by the poor themselves.34 Nevertheless, agencies like the Board of Agriculture held solemn tastings, debating whether mixtures of rye, barley, oats, and other grains could be baked into something palatable. Maize (corn) was put forward but was scorned by the poor as food for slaves and Indians.35 Rice had more success, but it was still workhouse food and rumored to cause blindness.36 Hannah More, the Evangelical operative, took as her mission to convert the poor to brown bread. Her insidious little tract, The

Cover of Hannah More’s The Cottage Cook; Or, Mrs. Jones’s Cheap Dishes (1795).

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Cottage Cook; Or, Mrs. Jones’ Cheap Dishes: Shewing the Way to Do Much with Little Money (1795), showed bourgeois readers how to persuade the poor that brown bread was just as traditional as white and far more economical. ‘‘Substitutes’’ were everywhere, offered to the poor by everyone except those who had to eat them. A fascinating pamphlet, An Enumeration of the Principal Vegetables, and Vegetable Productions, that May be Substituted, Either in Part or Wholly, in Place of Wheat and other Bread-Corn (1796), featured bizarre concoctions made from ‘‘Eryngo’’ (sea holly) and ‘‘Foolstones, or Dogstones,’’ as well as more likely, but no more palatable, dishes made from beans, potatoes, almonds, and similar assorted flora. An almond milk whose flatulency-inducing tendencies could, allegedly, be relieved ‘‘by triturating along with the almonds some caraway seeds’’ (17); ‘‘a sort of bread or cake’’ made from carrot meal and flour, the pamphlet admitted, ‘‘may not be altogether pleasing to the sight’’ (3). Food consumed by animals was proposed for humans. A Letter to the Right. Hon. William Pitt, by one Thomas Beddoes, M.D., speculated on whether grass, hay, and turnips—tons of which go to make a steer—could ‘‘by any cheap culinary process . . . be made fit food for man’’ (13). No wonder the poor were furious. Responding to the offer of inferior foodstuffs, The Poor Man’s Friend (1795) warned that ‘‘the poorest industrious Englishman thinks he has the right to eat good wheaten Bread: and although the Scotch peasant may be fed on oatmeal porridge, an Englishman will revolt at the idea!’’(4). The author, architect Alexander Dalrymple, ominously puns on the coincidence that physical revulsion has a cognate, political ‘‘revolt.’’ Eighteenth-century cookbooks aimed at the poor were among the most political ever written. They were not just cookbooks—that is, culinary instructional texts—but rather were efforts to address the effects of scarcity, high prices, and inconvenient cultural norms (‘‘the poorest industrious Englishman thinks he has the right to good wheaten Bread’’). They implicated every stratum of society, intervening in relations between rich and poor. They throw into relief the political subtexts of so many eighteenth-century cookbooks and demonstrate the potential of cookbooks in general to serve as political instruments.37 Primitive Cookery: Or the Kitchen Garden Display’d. Containing a Collections of Receipts for Preparing a Great Variety of Cheap, Healthful and Palatable Dishes, Without Either Fish, Flesh, or Fowl;

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With a Bill of Fare of Seventy Dishes, that Will Not Cost Above Two Pence Each (1767) was among the earliest cookbooks attempting to adapt menu-planning and the composition of dishes to the cost of provisions. Unlike the typical text that promised a paradoxical conjunction of elegance and frugality, or even those promising ‘‘plain’’ ‘‘cheap’’ cookery with no directions to produce it, Primitive Cookery had a visible agenda: demonstrating how to make decent, inexpensive food. It is not always consistent in this regard—calling for meat in some cases, and for copious amounts of eggs and dairy—but it is much more focused on true ‘‘frugality’’ than its predecessors. It is not aimed at the socially aspiring, and it does not provide directions for carving, trussing, or entertaining. Yet neither was the text condescending. It does not include odd recipes for drinks spiked with caraway or for ersatz bread made of carrots. Instead, it includes honest recipes for beans and potatoes, which readers were invited to spice up, and for an array of fruits and vegetables. The recipes are short and simple and do not require a servant to turn a spit or spin sugar. ‘‘The Bill of Fare of seventy dishes that will not cost above Two-pence each’’ has nothing in common with elaborate bills of fare in most cookbooks, which had course after course of rich presentations. Here is one typical bill: Sorrel, parsley and eggs, mixed well together, and fried with butter and a little salt; when done, put some melted butter and vinegar upon them, and this makes excellent food. (77)

This actually sounds pretty good and does not seem terribly expensive. It is one course, whereas most bills of fare contained multiple dishes. Yet sometimes Primitive Cookery loses its focus on ‘‘cheap’’ dishes. For example, a recipe for ‘‘Goosberry Tanzey’’ (a popular pudding, halfway between an omelet and custard), calls for an awesome amount of eggs and dairy: Pick a quart of green goosberries, and boil them in half a pound of butter, till they are well coddled. Then pour into them the yolks of sixteen eggs well beaten with half a pint of cream. Sweeten to your taste with sugar, then boil it as you would a tanzey; and when baked, strew over it rose-water and sugar. (48)

Butter, cream, and eggs in quantity were largely unavailable to the poor, especially the urban poor, and rose water would have been an

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incredible luxury. The recipe, and many like it, suggests that Primitive Cookery was a niche text that was also borderline, attempting to define itself and not always succeeding. It had not, in other words, targeted a precisely delineated audience whose needs it could address with clarity. The audience appears not to be fixed in one socioeconomic sector, condemned to eat plain, cheap food. It seems liminal (like Primitive Cookery), almost poor but not really. Because the text addresses such an audience—indistinct and to a degree unstable—it cannot entirely fulfill its stated objective to offer ‘‘cheap’’ food. The cost of dishes tends to blur; sometimes they are cheap, but other times they seem lifted from Glasse or Bradley. The text is interesting, therefore, for the direction in which it attempts to move and for its sincere intentions. It is a niche text not fully conscious of how to define its market. After a leading chapter on how to preserve fruit, Primitive Cookery speaks to the poor about regimen in ‘‘Dr. Lobb’s Advice to the Poor with regard to Diet.’’ The essay is far from promoting the hard discipline associated with straitened circumstances. It advises the poor to eat mostly vegetables and avoid strong drink ‘‘whenever provisions are scarce, and the prices of them are high’’ (1). It admits ‘‘Flesh and Fish, and Strong Beer and Cyder, when the Poor want, and can afford it’’ (3). A ‘‘Ragoo of Cauliflowers,’’ for example, calls for ‘‘cutlets of veal and ham.’’ Instead of inculcating discipline, therefore, Primitive Cookery is more about lifestyle, allowing the poor to make choices, standing by to offer guidance. It is essentially a book for when the poor—or anyone—feel poor and wants suggestions for calibrating their self-estimation with an affordable diet. Its niche is intermittently relevant, speaking to an audience that might or might not on any given day wish to turn to it. Its niche is in this sense contingent, based on an audience whose self-definition also is contingent, unstable, and subject to external forces such as swings in the economy. The book’s affiliation to vegetarianism is contingent as well, in that while the title promises ‘‘Dishes, without either Fish, Flesh, or Fowl,’’ an occasional slippage is evident. The text wobbles in terms of targeting a particular, meat-averse constituency. Like its commitment to the poor, Primitive Cookery is primarily but still contingently vegetarian. Since it promotes a vegetarian diet because of its relative cheapness, the text is vegetarian by default, rather than by ideology as would be expected in the twenty-first century. Thus, although it begins to conceptualize a niche, it does so without the

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‘‘The Rabbit Merchant.’’ (Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.)

missionary zeal that inspires true vegetarian and vegan texts, and that motivates authors to target people who have adopted or wish to adopt a diet that excludes meat. Conversely, some people who buy a vegetarian cookbook may not stick to it 100 percent. In this sense, Primitive Cookery is realistic, providing readers a sort of comfortable flexibility; they can be vegetarian most of the time and include meat at their discretion (assuming they can afford it).38 As a marketing strategy, this is ingenious, appealing to readers by offering guidance, but not overruling their sense of self-determination. To a reader interested in trying vegetarianism, but not ready to make a whole-hearted commitment, the approach is just right. Primitive Cookery occupies a flexible niche. Eliza Melroe’s An Economical, and New Method of Cookery; Describing Upwards of Eighty Cheap, Wholesome, and Nourishing Dishes . . . and Above Forty Soups . . . Adapted to the Necessity of the Times, Equally in All Ranks of Society (1798) also was aimed at the poor, although it claimed that its ostensibly health-based principles applied to everyone. In fact, it was part of the late eighteenthcentury campaign exhorting the poor to replace bread with soup.39

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Melroe’s supposed breakthrough was that fat was ‘‘nourishing’’ and should be stirred back into the soup rather than skimmed off the top. Emulsified with oatmeal, it turned soup into a meal: ‘‘Excellent soups can be made with great facility . . . by which the frugality will be found so great, that anyone, let his or her rank be what it may, will have a pleasant and sufficient dinner costing only four or five-pence’’ (13). Melroe occupies a niche—cooking for the poor—by claiming not to occupy it and to offer only the ‘‘frugality’’ that ordinary cookbooks invoked. The difference, of course, is that anyone could see through this pose. No one accustomed to Mrs. Raffald or Martha Bradley would pick up An Economical, New Method of Cookery thinking that its dishes were suitable fare. The New Method obviously targeted the poor, and it shook off some down-market stigma by claiming not to be. That is, instead of pushing the poor to eat soup because it was cheap, Melroe pushed soup on everyone because of its healthfulness. The fact that only the poor would be inclined to take notice was beside the point. The higher classes could feel good about helping the poor, while the poor would have recipes ‘‘adapted to the necessity of the times.’’ If the poor wished to play along, they could tell themselves that they were looking after their health. Vegetarianism In The British Housewife (1756), Martha Bradley takes on proponents of a vegetarian diet: God who gave Adam no Orders to eat Flesh, gave that Liberty in express Words to Noah: And his Descendants were ordered to eat of every Thing that moved and lived, as well as every Thing that grew; nor are we to suppose this an Indulgence without Reason, he who appointed it, acts only according to Wisdom. (II:110)

Bradley would not have jumped to the defense of meat-eating had there not been calls to abandon it. She defends meat from charges that it causes ill health, and she argues that all foods are good in moderation.40 While she is on the winning side, British vegetarians were highly vocal.41 The redoubtable Thomas Tryon, for example, who produced works on popular medicine, argued that people literally are what they eat—docile like vegetables or fierce like beasts: [A]ll Vegetables and Fruits being in themselves of a clean simple Nature and Operation, which being well-prepared and temperately eaten, have

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only power to waken their Similes in the Body and Senses . . . [but] when any Creature is killed, the great pain and agony they endure, does so powerfully awaken the Center of the wrathful Fire, and also the internal Poysons which are the root of every Life, that the said fierce Poysonous Spirits seize the Blood.42

While such a one-to-one correlation may seem simplistic, for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries similar views prevailed— for example, if shelled walnuts resemble the brain, then perhaps they could treat brain fevers. Tryon taps into theories that make contemporary sense. He also invokes the growing notion that ‘‘luxury’’ is corrupting, weakening the national character; a ‘‘clean simple’’ food, therefore, is preferable to one that is rich and indulgent.43 As always, debates around food were outcroppings of larger discourses, stalking horses for profound disputes over national identity, social class, and emulation. In this sense, seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury vegetarianism carried the same discursive baggage as vegetarianism and veganism do in the twenty-first century (when they are termed a cure for an ailing planet). By the eighteenth century, there was a barrage of anti-meat-eating literature. Louis Lemery’s A Treatise of Foods (1704) claimed that meat was detrimental to health; the text went through several editions. In The English Malady (1733), Dr. George Cheyne railed against meat from his own postgluttonous experience, after losing weight on a vegetable diet from a high of thirty-two stones (448 pounds). His Essay on Regimen argued that God did not intend men to eat meat or to witness the death-throes of fellow creatures. In numerous other texts, such as his best-selling Essay of Long Life (1724), Cheyne denounced the British diet as too rich, arguing that it should contain less meat. However, the battle for vegetables was, as it still is, uphill. Advertising exalted meat, as in this bit of doggerel for meat pies aimed at Oxford students: O bear me witness, Isis’ sons! Pierce but the crust—the gravy runs: – The taster licks his lips, and cries, O RARE BEN TYRELL’S MUTTON PIES!44

Indeed, vegetarianism ran straight into meat’s masculine ideology, steeped in an association with national strength.45 The eighteenth century produced a quantity of meat poetry unrivalled in any other

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era—popular, amateur male verse that glorified the carnivore life. The Secret History of Clubs (1709) cites several meat poems as anthems of the Beef-Stake Club, for example, ‘‘In Praise of Beef’’: Beef swells our Muscles, fills our Veins Does e’evy Way improve us, Strengthens our Sinews, and our Reins, And makes the Ladies love us. (385)

Richard Leveridge’s ‘‘The Roast Beef of Old England’’ (1735) was among the nation’s most celebrated songs, not least for its fightsong sentiments: When mighty roast beef was the Englishman’s food, It ennobled our hearts, and enriched our blood, Our soldiers were brave, and our courtiers were good, O! The Roast Beef of Old England! And O! For Old England’s Roast Beef!

To advocate vegetarianism, therefore, was seen as not just eccentric, but also willfully weak-limbed and weak-willed. Primitive Cookery finesses this critique because the poor rarely could afford meat anyway. To suggest that they eat it when they could was disingenuous, a means of remaining politically correct. In addition to Primitive Cookery, there were other important provegetable texts. John Evelyn’s Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets ([1699] 1704) constituted a plea for vegetarianism with an appendix of recipes.46 Its centerpiece is an extended recipe for the perfect, purest, most exquisitely balanced salad. The recipe, a masterly conceit, is a version in miniature for reproducing Eden, a project pursued by the Royal Society (which sought to reproduce Eden’s plants in England). Evelyn, who unlike most cookbook authors was a natural philosopher (scientist) and classical scholar, clearly had in mind an audience of his peers, men accustomed to dissecting phenomena or small animals to understand them. Acetaria is an exquisite analysis of a salad, by means of which Evelyn broaches larger questions, such as balance, perfection, and proper eating. It is philosophical as much as culinary, and its niche may be reserved for it alone. Yet it presents vegetarianism as an approach to life that integrates a number of culinary concerns—seasonality, elegance, health, the right equipment and ingredients, and of course taste. In this sense, it is the first great vegetarian cookbook, even though its intended

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Cover of Adam’s Luxury, and Eve’s Cookery (1744).

audience was small and its actual audience may not have appreciated its depth of reference and relationship to natural philosophical objectives. Acetaria is a classic, a text that transcends its context and that still fascinates. It demonstrates how a niche text need not be a narrow text and also need not even have grand ambitions in order to become a sort of monument.47 Goosberry Fool, from Adam’s Luxury, and Eve’s Cookery (1744) When you have pick’d a Quart of Goosberries, scald them in Water till tender, mash them in it, and then boil them with three Pounds of Sugar till it

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is pretty thick, and put to ’em a Pint and a half of Cream, and the Yolks of eight Eggs. Stir them well together over a slow Fire; when ’tis enough, put it in your Dish, let it cool, and then eat it.

Adam’s Luxury and Eve’s Cookery (1747) is a two-part text, treating both the kitchen garden and the kitchen. The first part is conventional, explaining how to raise all sorts of fruits and vegetables and tend a garden during each month. Like many gardening books, however, it also includes recipes, in this case enough to qualify as a cookbook. The culinary part of the text purports on the cover to ‘‘afford a great Variety of cheap, healthful, and palatable Dishes,’’ although there is no subsequent discussion, as in Primitive Cookery, of how such recipes will save readers money. Apparently, by growing, preserving, and cooking one’s own produce, one naturally will save money. The front cover states as much, throwing in as well a health claim:

‘‘Tea.’’ (Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.)

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Designed for the Use of all who would live Cheap, and preserve their Health to old Age; particularly for Farmers and Tradesmen in the Country, who have but small pieces of Garden Ground, and are willing to make the most of it.

Whereas the more copious household management texts, which Adam’s Luxury imitates, assume that one always would integrate the farm with the kitchen—and so make a virtue of necessity—this text makes a necessity of virtue, urging tiny householders to ‘‘make the most’’ of their land. The recipes are spare and similar to those in contemporary cookbooks; they assume substantial prior knowledge (like how to make bread and boil sugar), and they call for butter, cream, and eggs in an array of dishes. What is surprising, however—again like Primitive Cookery—is how often the recipes call for meat. A ‘‘Ragoo of Collyflowers,’’ for example, requires ‘‘Cullis of Veal and Ham’’ (124)—a cullis is made by cooking several pounds of meat down to a concentrated essence. ‘‘Collyflowers with Gravy’’ calls for ‘‘Cullis of Veal and Gammon of Bacon’’ (125). ‘‘Asparagus Soup’’ begins by instructing ‘‘Take twelve pounds of lean Beef’’ (186). Such recipes, neither cheap nor vegetarian, render the premises of the text somewhat doubtful. In effect, the culinary instructions are an appendage to the gardening instructions; they are not an independent, ideologically, or health-driven riposte to meat-eating. Adam’s Luxury appeals to readers looking for ways to use vegetables, rather than to committed vegetarians. The difference is important, complicating the vegetarian niche by expanding it to include texts concerned with vegetable cookery but useful to nonvegetarians (those who want to cook vegetables, but do not care if they throw in some meat). If a committed vegetarian acquired this text, she would be disappointed and perhaps indignant. Like Primitive Cookery, Adam’s Luxury demonstrates that the concept of niche marketing, while in many cases evident in the eighteenth century, was at times liberally construed. Self-professed vegetable cookbooks, for example, could not break free of the ideology of meat. Brewing texts, which are discussed next, were more clearly delimited, appealing to people who wished to brew beer and ale. Brewing In the eighteenth century, cookbooks regularly provided directions for brewing beer and ale and for making wine. Beer and ale, however,

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symbolized national strength and were celebrated in opposition to wine in songs like ‘‘Beer-Drinking Britons’’: The French with their vineyards are meager and pale, They drink of the squeezings of half ripen’d fruit; But we, who have hop-grounds to mellow our ale, Are rosy and plump, and have freedom to boot. . . . Shou’d the French dare invade us, thus arm’d with our poles, We’ll bang their bare ribs, make their lanthern-jaws ring; But your beef eating, beer drinking, Britons are souls Who will shed their last drop for their country and king.48

The rise of tea drinking was perceived as weakening, and as tea and toast replaced steak and ale as the breakfast of choice, opponents of tea feared a national crisis.49 Beer and ale were regarded as real food. When Cheyne’s Essay on Health and Long Life claimed that water was sufficient for human needs, it was roundly attacked. Defenders of beer and ale claimed that these beverages were necessary for workingmen and soldiers. Women drank, too, as evidenced in these lines from Mary Collier’s ‘‘The Woman’s Labour’’ (1739): At length bright Sol illuminates the Skies, And summons drowsy Mortals to arise; Then comes our Mistress to us without fail, And in her Hand, perhaps, a Mug of Ale To cheer our Hearts, and also to inform Herself, what Work is done that very Morn.

In fact, people rarely drank water because of its doubtful purity.50 In the country, home-brewing was common, at least for some portion of the drink consumed.51 Brewing was central to an integrated household economy because the yeast (‘‘barm’’) generated by fermenting ale could be used to bake bread.52 If a householder did not ferment his own ale, he had to get yeast from a brewery or buy bread from a baker. Hannah Glasse assumed that readers were home-brewers; her recipe for French Bread (‘‘take a Pint and a half of good Ale-yeast not bitter’’) appeared just below ‘‘Rules for Brewing’’ and restoring spoiled beer. Farmers often raised hops because it was a preservative. Given the importance of beer and ale, however, and its dependence on tricky chemical processes, the question was how to manage such processes as well as possible. While

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cookbooks provided advice, a natural opening emerged for specialty texts, that is, for expert instruction on an elusive subject. French Bread, from Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747) Take three Quarts of Water and one of Milk, in Winter scalding hot, in Summer a little more than Milk warm, season it well with Salt, then take a Pint and a half of good Ale-yeast not bitter, lay it in a Gallon of Water the Night before, put it off the Water stir in your Yeast into the Milk and Water, then with your Hand break in a little more than a Quarter of a Pound of Butter, work it well till it is dissolv’d, then beat up two Eggs in a Bason, and stir them in, have about a Peck and a half of Flour, mix it with your Liquor, in Winter make your Dough pretty stiff, in Summer more slack; so that you may use a little more or less of Flour, according to the Stiffness of your Dough, mix it well, but the less you work it the better, make it into Roles, and have a very quick Oven, but not to burn, when they have lain about a quarter of an Hour, turn them on the other Side, let them lie about a quarter longer, take them out and rasp them, stir your Liquor into the Flour as you do for Pye Crust; after the Dough is made cover it with a Cloth, and let it rise while the Oven is heating.

Several such texts emerged. Samuel Child’s Everyman His Own Brewer (1790) went through nine editions, after an earlier title by the same name (1768). There was The Complete Distiller (1793), The Complete Family Brewer (1789), and George Watkins’ The Compleat Brewer; or, the Art and Mystery of Brewing (1760, 1767, 1773). William Ellis’ The London and Country Brewer (1734) went through seven editions, and the early Guide to Gentlemen and Farmers for Brewing Malt-Liquors (1703) went through five. There was even Martin Grindal’s eccentric Warm Beer, a Treatise Proving . . . that Beer so Qualify’d, is far more Wholesome than that which is Drank Cold (1724). In view of all the general cookbooks providing brewing instruction (at least twenty by the century’s end), these specialty manuals represented breakout, opportunistic texts, seeking to define a market by offering more focused, elaborate instruction. They were also aimed at men, who probably were disinclined to ‘‘cook’’ from their wives’ cookbooks. What is fascinating, however, is that these texts, emulating information in cookbooks, also marketed themselves by using and amplifying cookbook rhetoric. The Introduction to George Watkins’ The Compleat Brewer claims that the art of brewing—preceding the appearance of his text—has been ‘‘a secret in the hands of a few persons; and, notwithstanding the printing of many treatises, the public were yet wholly unacquainted

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with it.’’ He names previous authors as inadequate and asserts that his experience uniquely qualifies him to lay down proper rules: Certainly, I persuade myself, that, by my own experience, and by carefully observing the practice of such as brew well, I have informed myself of several lesser articles, which never were yet published, but on which the success of the work entirely depends. . . . Upon the strength of these observations, and the Certainty of some practice, I hope to lay down, in a Plainer manner than has hitherto been done, the general rules of brewing; and to direct even the least parts of the operation in such a way that all shall understand them: so that every one shall be able to brew good, wholesome and pleasant drink.

With his emphasis on experience, Watkins sounds as though he is channeling Martha Bradley or Mrs. Raffald. In the Preface, he invokes nativist claims found in Eliza Smith, Charles Carter, and their peers: The superior excellence of malt-liquor above wine, In point of wholesomeness, and the consideration of its being a product of our own kingdom, are reasons why every man who wishes well to his fellow creatures and his country, should promote, to the best of his power, the estimation and consumption of it. . . . Our hearty ancestors, knew no other wine, but that from corn or from the apple; and, if we enquire into their constitutions, we shall find them, I am apt to believe, better than our own. (i)

The Preface argues in favor of producing a malt liquor that is better than wine and able to replace it. Yet while the Preface sounds like conventional alimentary nationalism, it is, as it were, more potent: if cookbooks make general claims concerning British palates and produce, The Compleat Brewer can in addition tap into malt liquor’s strong, culturally embedded ‘‘British’’ associations. In this sense, brewing occupies a natural, lucrative niche, deploying well-known cookbook arguments while, synergistically, using culturally approved claims that reinforce its marketing strategy. Watkins targets the home-based producer, arguing that homebrews can be greatly improved. Like Bradley, he argues that although brewing may seem challenging, it is within reach—assuming diligence and proper instruction: A good season, good malt, good hops and a proper kind of water, are the requisites without which fine beer can never be made: but these

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are all in the persons power who brews ever so small a quantity; and with these, and cleanliness, which is as necessary in the brew-house as in the dairy, there will be no fear but that the observance of the rules here laid down, will be rewarded with all the success that can be desired. (v)

Watkins makes the whole operation seem rational, so that good beer naturally follows from ‘‘observance of the rules.’’ This is cookbook rhetoric, typical of demystifiers like Hannah Glasse and Mrs. Raffald. Indeed, Watkins assures readers that they need have ‘‘no fear.’’ He senses, moreover, that a niche text should address the reader’s desire that it sweep away his problems. He reduces brewing to a series of steps, assuring readers (contrary to what must have been their own experience) that chance plays no part, and that all the elements of a good brew are within their ‘‘power’’ to achieve. He even offers readers the opportunity to take out their resentments against the local brewer: ‘‘every family may have, with little trouble, and at slight expence, that barley-wine . . . in a degree of perfection, that shall put the breweries of the wine-cooper out of countenance’’ (v). The claim echoes Hannah Glasse’s argument that if women learn confectionery, they will not need to patronize the local confectioner. This town versus household argument is a powerful inducement to purchase a niche text and go in-house, as Everyman His Own Brewer proclaims as a distinct and presumably practical objective. Watkins subtly flatters the potential reader, setting up his text as the one for perfectionists, who would do things correctly from the start instead of by muddling through: Those who set out amiss, have nothing to consider, but how to disguise faults, or recover imperfections; and the common books of brewery abound with receipts to this purpose. But it is always better to prevent evils than to cure them; and no drink of the malt kind, will ever be so good, as that which is made merely and only from that ingredient, with the hop and water. (v)

So-called frugal texts were always telling readers how to salvage spoiled meat or curdled custard—and indeed ropy beer. But The Complete English Brewer targets the home-brewer who is above making do, who takes entertaining seriously and takes pride in feeding his family and workers. It is not for readers of Primitive Cookery, concerned to save money first and eat well second. Such positioning is a

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niche strategy, segmenting the home-brewing market into those for whom malt liquor is just a necessity and those who want to savor what they drink. It illustrates the potential of even the narrowest niche to be segmented even further and also the power of niche marketing to make people think about whom they are and what they want from an instructional manual. Those who decide that they are in the targeted audience are more likely to buy the text. Apricock Wine, from Eliza Smith, The Compleat Housewife (1742) Take three pounds of sugar and three quarts of water, let them boil together, and scum it well, then put in six pounds of apricocks par’d and ston’d, and let them boil till they are tender; then take them up, and when the liquor is cold bottle it up; you may if you please, after you have taken out the apricocks, let the liquor have one boil with a sprig of flower’d clary in it: the apricocks make marmalade, and are very good for present spending.

Unlike confectionery, the production of beer and ale really were necessities; the issue was how to do it successfully at home. By claiming that the process is a closely held secret but subject to ordinary rules, Watkins tantalizes but reassures readers—a strategy that became a convention among cookbook authors, including authors of niche texts. The niche text is in many ways just like its all-purpose peer. The difference is that it can be even more personalized and, hence, even more likely to formulate a specific challenge that it can more specifically address. NOTES 1. The staff of Mario Batali’s Babbo maintains a list of Cookbooks for Reading. See http://www.babbonyc.com/staffpicks-cookbooks.html. Cookbook collecting is well established. See, for example, www.vintage cookbooks.com and www.oldcookbooks.com. See also Mary Anna Du Sablon, America’s Collectible Cookbooks: The History, the Politics, the Recipes (1994). In New York’s West Village, Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks is a collectors’ Mecca. 2. Personal Health, April 27, 2009. 3. For story, see New York Times, October 4, 2009. 4. See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/0704091157 46.htm. 5. See http://www.todaysthv.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid¼830 04&catid¼2. 6. See story in the Guardian, September 7, 2008, ‘‘UN Says Eat Less Meat to Curb Global Warming,’’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/ 2008/sep/07/food.foodanddrink.

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7. On depleted fish stocks in need of recovery, see the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation’s report at http://www.fao.org/ newsroom/en/news/2005/100095/index.html. See the Food and Drug Administration’s list of mercury-contaminated fish at http://www.fda. gov/Food/FoodSafety/Product-SpecificInformation/Seafood/Foodborne PathogensContaminants/Methylmercury/ucm115644.htm. 8. On recent fiction dealing with animal minds and animal rights, see ‘‘Mau-Mauing the Flesh Eaters,’’ New York Times Book Review, November 15, 2009, 31. For recent studies of pigs’ cognitive abilities, including their use of mirrors to locate food, see the front-page story in New York Times Science section, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/science/ 10angier.html. 9. Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975), arguing that animals should have rights based on their ability to feel pain (rather than on intelligence), is considered the founding text of the animal liberation movement. See also Gary Steiner, Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), arguing that animals have a moral status equal to human beings. A seminal text for ecofeminists, Carol J. Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (1989), recently came back into print. 10. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), exemplifies such self-consciousness, leading to its further increase. 11. Books such as Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian (2007) are typically vegetarian rather than vegan, and include dishes using milk and eggs (which vegans avoid). 12. New York Magazine picked Babycakes’ vegan cupcakes as the best cupcakes—of any variety—in the city. See http://nymag.com/bestofny/ food/2006/cupcakes/. Both Magnolia and Babycakes have their own cookbooks. 13. See, for example, ‘‘All cupcakes, all the time!’’ http://cupcakestake thecake.blogspot.com/, and ‘‘How to Eat a Cupcake—The original cupcake blog where you choose what cupcakes I make next,’’ www. howtoeatacupcake.net. 14. For Cupcake Camp’s universal Web site, including directions on how to start a Camp, see http://cupcakecamp.org/. 15. See, for example, the Arkansas Classic Country Cookbook: Traditional and Contemporary Recipes, which has a chapter on ‘‘Natural Wonders.’’ 16. Saltwater won the 1996 Jane Grigson Award for Scholarship in the Julia Child Cookbook Awards. A companion cookbook was issued in 2008. 17. Such books respond to the times. See ‘‘Depression-Era Cooking Makes a Comeback,’’ about an online cooking show featuring frugal, nononsense advice from a woman who lived through the Great Depression,

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http://www.oregonlive.com/foodday/index.ssf/2009/04/depressionera_ cooking_makes_a.html. 18. Without hands-on instruction, it was near-impossible to distinguish among ‘‘clarified,’’ ‘‘smooth,’’ ‘‘pearled,’’ ‘‘feathered,’’ ‘‘blown,’’ ‘‘crackling,’’ ‘‘caramel,’’ and various other stages (‘‘heights’’) that depended on split-second timing. Yet it was crucial. As Mary Kettilby notes in A Collection of Above Three Hundred Receipts in Cookery (1724) in her recipe for Quince Marmalade, ‘‘You must carefully watch the Colour, because it turns muddy and black in a Moment, and the Colour is as Delicate as the Taste in this and all Sweet-Meats’’ (36). 19. Carter’s definitions derive from Francois Massialot’s The Court and Country Cook (1702). Carter, however, had wider currency. 20. Among other prominent texts, Richard Briggs’ The English Art of Cookery (1788) contained no instructions on how to boil sugar to its various ‘‘heights.’’ Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English Housekeeper (1796) contained elaborate instructions on making spun sugar decorations, but it described only how to boil sugar to ‘‘Candy height.’’ Penelope Bradshaw’s Bradshaw’s Family Jewel (thirteen editions between 1749 and 1754) contained sugar-boiling instructions, but these instructions were authored by Edward Lambert, a prominent confectioner who authored his own specialty text (see discussion to follow). Sarah Harrison’s The House-keeper’s Pocket Book (nine editions between 1733 and 1777) was typically vague in requiring that when candying angelica, the cook should ‘‘add more Sugar to the Syrup and boil it to an height’’ (87). John Farley’s The London Art of Cookery (1783, 1792) was among the best sources of confectionery information in a general cookbook. 21. The best-known slave autobiography is The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789), available online and in numerous modern editions. 22. For Blake’s intense response to slavery, see http://www.accessmylibrary. com/article-1G1-193098806/blake-antislavery-designs-songs.html. 23. Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s poem, Song V, in Poems (1792), noted that ‘‘woman, either slave or queen/is quickly scorn’d when not ador’d.’’ The same volume contained her ‘‘Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Slave Trade.’’ On eighteenth-century opposition to slavery and it connection to sugar, see Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery 1713–1833 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Keith Sandiford, The Cultural Politics of Sugar (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (New York: Routledge, 2003); Claire Midgley, Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2007); and Selwyn Carrington, The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1775– 1810 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2002).

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24. During the first decade of the eighteenth century, British consumption stood at 4.5 pounds per capita; during the first decade of the nineteenth century, it was 19.8 pounds—a 350 percent increase. See Alain Huetz de Lemps, ‘‘Colonial Beverages and the Rise of Sugar,’’ in Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari, 383–93 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). The standard reference for the history of sugar is Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985). 25. He seemed to be of two minds regarding the value of print as well, since even as he downplayed the usefulness of his own work, he observed that ‘‘of all the Pieces that I have yet seen, I never could find any thing, or at most very little, that was worth your taking notice of in them: And indeed, they may be truly called a ready Way to spoyl Sugar and Fruit, rather than to Preserve Sweet-Meats’’ (Preface). 26. Early seventeenth-century texts with substantial confectionery content, for example A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen (ten editions between 1608 and 1656) and Hugh Plat’s Delightes for the Ladies (1608), did not discuss pedagogy; they contained no rationale as to why readers might need to practice confectionery, nor did they explain confectionery technique systematically. They did not seek to create a specialized market or to segment a market to achieve maximum appeal. On these texts, see Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), and C. Anne Wilson, ed., ‘‘Banquetting Stuffe’’: The Fare and Social Background of the Tudor and Stuart Banquet (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1991). A Queen’s Delight or the Art of Preserving was originally published as part of A Queen’s Closet Opened (1655) but was sometimes published as a standalone text, which, in later editions, contained definitions of boiling and clarifying sugar. 27. Gervase Markham’s The English Hus-Wife (1615) opined that ‘‘whosoever is ignorant therein [that is, in confectionery] is lame, and but the half part of a compleat Housewife’’ (69). Such sentiments, albeit attenuated, made their way into the marketing of niche texts. 28. Here are Lambert’s directions for ‘‘The boiling Sugar to the Degree called Smooth’’: ‘‘When your Sugar is thus clarified [as previously instructed], put what Quantity you shall have Occasion for over the Fire, to boil smooth, the which you will prove by dipping your Scummer into the Sugar; and then touching it with your Fore-finger and Thumb, in opening them a little you will see a small Thread drawn betwixt, which immediately breaks, and remains in a Drop on your Thumb; thus it is a little smooth; then boiling it more, it will draw into a larger String; then it is become very smooth’’ (5). A cook would have had to practice this several times before instinctively understanding when sugar was smooth.

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Lambert’s directions for ‘‘clarifying’’ sugar were somewhat better and way ahead of Raffald’s suggestion that clarification take place while preserves are being made, rather than in advance. 29. The claim is a variant of that in The Pastry-Cook’s Vade Mecum, which promised that ‘‘any Body that carefully peruses this Book, may supply the want of a Cook and Confectioner’’ (Preface). Both suggest that sugar cookery is hard but ultimately accessible, a formula that every cookbook of the period riffs on. 30. There is a vast literature on eighteenth-century British poverty. See, for example, M. J. Daunton, Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1700–1800 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995). For the 1790s, see Sandra Sherman, Imagining Poverty: Quantification and the Decline of Paternalism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001). 31. On Count Rumford and soup houses, see Sherman, Imagining Poverty. 32. See Burke’s Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (1795). As an example of middle-class anger at poor rates, see D. Nield, Addresses to the Different Classes of Men, in the Parish of Saddleworth (1795), which opined that unless some new means of supporting the poor were found other than taxing real estate, ‘‘it is highly probable that land will be of no real value’’ (6). 33. Budgets in David Davies’ The Case of Labourers in Husbandry (1795) and Sir Frederick Eden’s The State of the Poor (1797) show that the poor spent about 70 percent of their income on food, with the rest going for basics like candles and fuel. 34. For example, a famous print by James Gilray, ‘‘Substitutes for Bread’’ (1795), shows members of parliament gorging on ‘‘substitutes’’ like fish and meat made from gold coins. Outside the window, the poor are marching in protest. Brown bread, the butt of scatological jokes, was known as Brown George or Pitt’s Purging Pills. 35. On the resistance of the poor to ‘‘Indian corn,’’ see, for example, William Buchan, Observations Concerning the Diet of the Common People (1797), noting that ‘‘such is the aversion of the common people of this country to every sort of food to which they are not accustomed, that they refused to purchase it’’ (23–24). This did not stop Count Rumford, however, from writing a detailed description of the joys of Indian Pudding in his 1790s essay ‘‘Of Food; And Particularly of Feeding the Poor.’’ 36. For a detailed examination of efforts to find ‘‘substitutes,’’ see Sherman, Imagining Poverty. 37. See, for example, Sandra Sherman, ‘‘The Politics of Taste in The Jewish Manual,’’ Petits Propos Culinaires 71 (2002): 62–84. 38. Beef was invariably more expensive than vegetables, though during grain shortages it was actually cheaper per pound than wheat. In part, vegetables were cheap because they were easy to grow at home and could easily be dried or pickled for future consumption.

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39. On the late eighteenth-century campaign for soup, see Sandra Sherman, Imagining Poverty, chap. 6. 40. Bradley’s argument was biblical rather than medical: ‘‘Adam had a stronger Frame of Body, and therefore a plainer Nourishment supplied him due Strength; the human Nature was degenerated in the Days of Noah, and he required a richer Food’’ (II:110). 41. See Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times (New York: Norton, 2006); Colin Spencer, The Heretic’s Feast: A History of Vegetarianism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995), and Anita Guerrini, ‘‘A Diet for a Sensitive Soul: Vegetarianism in Eighteenth-Century Britain,’’ Eighteenth Century Life 2 (1999): 34–42. 42. Thomas Tryon, Miscellania (1696), 34, 35–36. 43. See Maxine Berg, ed., Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires, and Delectable Goods (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007). 44. ‘‘Verses Occasioned by Ben Tyrell’s Mutton Pies,’’ The Oxford Sausage (1764), 18. 45. See Sandra Sherman, ‘‘English Nationalism,’’ Petits Propos Culinaires 78 (2005): 66–88. 46. See Sandra Sherman, ‘‘An Eden on a Plate,’’ Petits Propos Culinaires 69 (2002): 70–91. 47. Evelyn acknowledges that his subject could be dismissed as slight relative to the learning that accompanies its presentation: ‘‘I expect some will wonder what my meaning is, to usher in a trifle, with so much magnificence’’ (Dedication). The cover of Acetaria states that it is by the ‘‘Author of Kalendarium,’’ Evelyn’s gardening manual. On the relationship between Acetaria and Evelyn’s extensive writings on gardens and gardening, see Sandra Sherman, ‘‘Replanting Eden: John Evelyn and His Gardens,’’ Endeavour 26, no. 3 (2002): 113–17. 48. From The Scots Nightingale . . . A New and Select Collection of the Best Scots and English Songs (1779), 164. 49. See, for example, Dr. John Lettsom, The Natural History of the Tea Tree (1771). 50. A. F. M. Willich’s Lectures on Diet and Regimen (1799) describes certain ‘‘filtering machines’’ available to householders to cleanse water and other liquids. They were not, of course, effective against bacteria. 51. In Staging Domesticity, Wendy Wall notes that by the mid-seventeenth century, commercial production had outstripped home production. Thus ‘‘while country gentry and yeomen continued to brew beer at home, most middling and poorer sorts would have availed themselves of local brewers for part of their consumption’’ (231, n. 44). Texts recommending home-brewing in the eighteenth century would have been aware of this development and targeted their readership accordingly. 52. Old recipes for bread usually call for a cup (or more) of ale barm on the assumption that the baker is brewing ale at home.

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CHAPTER 7

POINT OF VIEW

Modern cookbooks adopt ideological or at least pedagogical positions: they advocate for fresh/local/seasonal cuisine, for veganism, for a return to an alimentary regime consistent with sustainability. They suggest that ‘‘thirty-minute meals’’ equal ‘‘cooking,’’ and that childhood indulgences (cupcakes) can be redesigned as elaborate grown-up fantasy. Even the simplest cookbooks have subtexts, advancing ideas about how to shop (farmers markets, not supermarkets) and how many hors d’oeuvres should replace dinner. Cookbooks are complex, multivalent texts, situating food at the center of larger concerns. They opine on everything from saving the planet to controlling one’s time. They can be travelogues. They are certainly vehicles for the philosophies of celebrity chefs. They are, in other words, worth studying outside the kitchen and beyond preparing a specific meal. This chapter examines how (in two culturally resonant cases) eighteenth-century cookbooks anticipate this development. It considers what preoccupied culinary authors apart from imparting culinary know-how; it considers as well how such cookbooks project ideas and organize recipes around them. It explores how their rhetoric is tied to the cuisine on offer, and how modern cookbooks draw on their example. In the first case, the chapter addresses these issues by way of eighteenth-century cookbooks’ fixation on authentically ‘‘British’’ cuisine.1 In the second, it examines such cookbooks’ interest in the geopolitics of food, centered on importation of exotic ingredients. Both these cases demonstrate that cookbooks had become politicized

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early in their history, situating food in the context of nationalism and trade relations.

BRITISH VERSUS FRENCH FOOD It is worth recalling how insistently eighteenth-century cookbooks batter away at French cuisine. Hannah Glasse, Charles Carter, Eliza Smith, John Thacker, and many others elevate British cooking and provisions over their cross-channel counterparts. Glasse, for example, famously praises ‘‘a good English Cook’’ over ‘‘a French Booby.’’ Carter asks whether ‘‘English Palates were not as nice Judges of good eating as French ones,’’ and asserts that ‘‘I know no reason that we in the midst of our abundant Variety, should so far ape our indigent Neighbours, as to dress our more delicious Fare after the Humour of the perhaps vitiated palates of some great personages or noted Epicures of France.’’2 Thacker brands French food as a come-on, claiming that English dishes are given French names only ‘‘to excite Curiosity, and make them by that artifice better liked.’’3 Smith admits into The Compleat English Housewife (1727) only those few French dishes as ‘‘may not be disagreeable to English Palates.’’ Such nationalism, strains of which are visible in Robert May and his predecessors, is the most salient point of view in the period’s culinary literature. In view of the intensely commercial nature of cookbooks, one might ask whether such anti-Gallicism represents an authentic point of view or just a marketing strategy, an attempt to ballast a text’s claims to good English ‘‘frugality.’’ Given Britain’s animus toward France and French food, the anti-French sentiment in cookbooks is, most likely, both principled and commercially expedient. Moreover, as a rhetorically complex claim, the polemic is an antecedent of modern cookbooks’ habit of turning to their advantage political sentiments in society at large. Eighteenth-century culinary nationalism demonstrates how cultural artifacts circulating in the market absorb and redeploy popular discourses, refracting them toward immediate, specifically focused ends. In this regard, cookbooks rarely promote ideas that have no preexisting constituency or hope of catching on. Their commercial objectives leave little room for such gambits. Even Diet for a Small Planet (1973) represents emerging views concerned with sustainability. The invidious comparisons made to French cuisine by eighteenth-century

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‘‘French Happiness English Misery.’’ (Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.)

cookbooks were part of a vast literature that critiqued French food. In effect, Francophobe cookbooks gave voice—in a culinary key—to commonplace sentiments, which would have been recognized by and would have appealed to British cookbook readers. As such, their outspokenness constitutes a template for cookbooks’ intervention into larger discussions, of which cookbooks then become yet another facet. That is, while cookbooks are rarely out front on issues, they position issues to be of specific interest to cookbook readers. They make issues accessible to readers who otherwise might not appreciate such issues, or—if readers do appreciate them—still need practical advice on how to act on their convictions. Cookbooks are instrumental, therefore, not just to cooking but to adapting social initiatives to specific domestic environments. This chapter examines how food preparation is politicized in the eighteenth century, that is, how (in twenty-first-century terms) the personal was political. Martha Bradley’s claim, for example, that a British servant can equal a French maitre, is deeply political. It challenges France’s culinary mystique, even as it promotes personal striving.4 It punctures what it presents as French pretensions, creating a tiny satire whose butt is a figure that the British love to hate. Bradley even ventures into culinary history to undercut the French and give

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home cooks a political perspective on foods that they prepare. Her recipe for Roman Asparagus renames a supposedly French dish, attributing it to ancient Rome: This is a famous modern Dish of France. It is Properly enough called Roman Asparagus, for it is a Piece of the old Roman Cookery, and it is very much to the Credit of the Inventors of it. . . . We see they understood the real of Art of Cookery As well as the modern French, for there is nothing in their Made Dishes of this Kind the Rudiments of which are not laid down here. (I:671)

In Bradley’s estimation, history reveals that France’s claim to culinary genius may not be entirely deserved; in the case of this asparagus dish, France has merely updated a Roman classic. This observation is not necessary in the context of a recipe, and Bradley’s making it is overtly political (it also gets her off the hook for offering ‘‘a famous modern Dish of France’’). By valencing the pedagogical to the political, Bradley ingratiates herself to readers, sharing a mutual prejudice while making a point about good instruction and dedicated practice. For Bradley, the political is instrumental—indeed strategic—to her commercial objectives, and provides a rhetoric through which to involve readers in her project. Yet even as her political argument focuses inward toward the text and reader, it ramifies outward, adding to the ongoing deflation of France in eighteenth-century discourse.5 Whether or not Bradley has that intention, her text has that effect. It becomes polemical, and along with many other texts, for example, Glasse’s The Art of Cookery, normalizes cookbook polemics. The effects of this process appear in the twenty-first century in overtly political texts such as Diet for a Small Planet and also in subtler books that advocate veganism, Slow Food, a return to sustainable agriculture, or even the new domesticity of home bread-baking. In Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China (2008), Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford make an extraordinary declaration, attesting to the political potential—and political history—of culinary texts: This is a cookbook, not a thesis, but it is probably the most outwardly ‘‘political’’ cookbook we will ever write (though we think of all our cookbooks, and a great many other cookbooks that we most admire, as inherently political). (2)

Duguid and Alford’s notion of an ‘‘Other’’ China, one composed of minorities living beyond the sphere of eastern, urbanized prosperity, assimilates cooking to one of many cultural practices under

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threat from the majority Han. Merely to describe such food, and situate it in a precarious cultural context, is to take sides, and take up a cause in favor of preserving cultural distinctiveness. Beyond the Great Wall is political without advocating any particular cuisine. However, to the extent that any cookbook seeks to make the world more sensible (or at least more to its author’s liking) by foregrounding a routine or a regimen, it is seeking to privilege certain cultural relations, it is practicing advocacy, and in that sense it inherits a type of discourse (if not any specific discourse) that developed in the eighteenth century. Even texts that do not seem political, such as those that advocate low-fat diets, are still heirs to a tradition of culinary texts that expound a point of view. Cookbooks do not just sell disembodied expertise. Rather, they sell an approach, a perspective on using their expertise. The eighteenth-century cultural environment authorized English cookbooks to take up arms against the French. England abounded in exponents of cross-channel culinary disdain; their beef, so to speak, was that serving French food in England was an affront to the natural, unadorned quality of English provisions. The London Tradesman (1747), for example, deplored French culinary dishonesty and suggested that ever since Britons ‘‘conformed our Palates to Meats and Drinks dressed after the French fashion,’’ food played at seduction, ‘‘dressed in Masquerade, seasoned with slow Poisons, and every dish pregnant with nothing, but the Seeds of Diseases both chronic and acute’’ (277). Like the French nation, French food was devious. Indeed, at a French table one never knew what one was eating: ‘‘Fish, when it has passed the hands of a French Cook, is no more Fish; it has neither the Taste, Smell, nor appearance of Fish’’ (277). French cooks in England were seen as mischievous, radically out of place.6 Hannah Glasse reflects this sentiment not just by berating a ‘‘French Booby’’ but also in the design of her text. The Art of Cooking includes a chapter entitled ‘‘Read this chapter, and you will see how expensive a French cook’s sauce is,’’ suggesting that French food has no place in a British cookbook, much less in British kitchens. By inserting a chapter so admittedly out of place, whose contents she invites readers to reject, Glasse refracts anti-Gallicism through recipes that ostensibly speak for themselves and shows readers that French food should be rejected. In case her readers miss the point, she observes in a note to the chapter’s final recipe, ‘‘Sauce for a Brace of Partridges,’’ that French cooks in England are draining the national treasure: It would be needless to name any more; though they have much more expensive Sauce than this.—However, I think here is enough to

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shew the Folly of these French Cooks. In their own Country, they will make a grand Entertainment with the Expence of one of these Dishes; but here they want the little petty Profit; and by this sort of legerdemain Sum, fine Estates are juggled into France. (54)

Popular plays always portrayed Englishmen abroad as vulnerable to foreigners; in Glasse’s version, they are gulled right at home. Glasse knows the market for such sentiments. To Pot Cheshire Cheese, from Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747) Take three Pounds of Cheshire-Cheese, and put it into a Mortar, with half a Pound of the best fresh Butter you can get, pound them together, and in the beating, add a Gill of rich Canary Wine, and half an Ounce of Mace finely beat, then sifted fine like a fine Powder. When all is extremely well mixed, press it hard down into a Gallipot, cover it with clarified Butter, and keep it cool. A Slice of this exceeds all the Cream-Cheese that can be made.

Indeed, if the Tradesman is nostalgic for traditional fare, then the fashionable Tatler is even more to the point, exhorting readers to ‘‘return to the Food of their Forefathers, and reconcile themselves to Beef and Mutton. This was the Diet that bred the hearty Race of Mortals who won the fields of Cressy and Agincourt.’’7 The remark implies that plain English fare is strengthening and helped defeat the French. While culinary anti-Gallicism turns up in cookbooks as disdain for French extravagance and unaccustomed sauces, it reflects as well a more profound, myth-making notion that beef is hallowed food, closely identified with English martial prowess against the eternal cross-channel foe. In ‘‘The Roast Beef of Old England, A Cantata,’’ a French priest longingly addresses a haunch of beef, acknowledging that beef is food for kings: Renown’d Sir-Loin, oft-times decreed, The theme of English ballad, On thee e’en Kings have deign’d to feed, Unknown to Frenchman’s palate: Then how much more thy taste exceed Soop meager, frogs, and salad.8

Whether or not this priest’s views are just, he correctly observes that beef is celebrated in English song. The most famous instance is Richard Leveridge’s ‘‘O the Roast Beef of Old England’’ (1735), whose nostalgia-packed lyrics lament that ‘‘since we have learnt

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Frontispiece for Mrs. Taylor’s Family Companion (1795).

from all-conquering France / To eat their ragoos as well as to dance / We’re fed up with nothing—but vain complaisance.’’ The song’s title appears under the frontispiece of Mrs. Taylor’s Family Companion (1795), a cookbook in which a jolly group of men, their forks raised, are about to consume a giant roast. On the wall above their table, the song’s title appears as well, as if readers cannot get enough beefy nationalism. By contrast, in the ‘‘Cantata’’ all the French are starving: a soldier, ‘‘shirtless, pale, and lean’’ gazes ‘‘with wonder on the British food’’ and wails ‘‘Oh! Grant me von letel bite.’’ It is little wonder, therefore, that cookbooks provide extensive instructions on how to roast beef, featuring the signature process of making beef British. Roast Beef is the first recipe in The Art of Cookery and the first that Professed Cookery attacks for inaccuracy. The art

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of roasting beef is a matter of national pride.9 Thus, while Glasse features recipes signifying the obverse of national cuisine (if only to dispel them), she and her peers offer recipes for roast beef as indisputable ‘‘British’’ signifiers, counterweights to any suspect dishes that may lurk in their texts. Politics-by-recipe appears in modern culinary texts where, for example, instructions next to an ingredient suggest ‘‘preferably organic.’’ Amusingly, for all the bluster over roast beef, pudding was not far behind as a literary icon. The English loved to claim that their most common foods were not merely delicious, but beyond the capacity of Frenchmen to prepare. In Samuel Bishop’s Poems on Various Subjects (1800), a French chef tries to make plum pudding from a recipe taken from a British cook—alas, ‘‘These directions were tried, but when tried had no good in:/’Twas all wash and squash, but’twas not English pudding’’ (II:167). Obviously, the Frenchman lacked the je ne sais quoi of a plain English cook. In this chauvinistic atmosphere, diet is a measure of national fitness. While the French deride the classic British diet of beef and ale, it is celebrated at home as the food that keeps Britons free.10 An inscription on William Hogarth’s print, ‘‘France,’’ contains these contentious lines, composed by David Garrick to taunt the French during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63): With lanthorn jaws, and croaking Gut See how the half-starved Frenchmen strut, And call us English Dogs! But soon we’ll teach these bragging Foes, That Beef and Beer give heavier Blows, Than Soup and Roasted frogs.

In the topsy-turvy turn of war-based doggerel, out goes French extravagance; bare-ribbed Frenchmen (who also inhabit ‘‘A Cantata’’) have almost nothing to eat. In this same vein, when the nation was again at war with France in the 1790s and the poor were near revolt for lack of bread, progovernment propaganda claimed that the French had it worse. A pamphlet called A Quartern Loaf for Eight Pence (1795) claimed that most Frenchmen ‘‘live on bread made from flour of grey pease, eat salads made with stinking oil, red herrings, black puddings, the most nauseous cheese, and the poorest of all wines’’ (12). The point is that it hardly mattered what was said about French food—maybe it was rich and extravagant,

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maybe it was vile. In either case, it was French, which made it fair game for British cookbooks to cite as a foil for their own cuisine. The culinary war against France was serious politics, carried out in a variety of venues. Cookbooks reflected and augmented the attack. Twenty-first-century unabashedly political cookbooks are the legacy. For example, Political Palate: A Feminist Vegetarian Cookbook (1981) named for the feminist-lesbian restaurant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, run by Bloodroot Collective; The Queer Cookbook (1996), with directions for gay entertaining; and Beyond the Great Wall, whose complaints concerning the treatment of Chinese minorities were sufficiently strong to provoke a backlash.11 Like Diet for a Small Planet, these books envision food and the service of food as enmeshed in the politics of their respective communities. Political Palate (followed by a phalanx of Bloodroot texts) is on a crusade, seeking to win converts—not necessarily to lesbianism, but to a philosophy that sees meat-eating as male-oriented domination that hurts other species. It uses food as an ideological weapon. Thus whether or not one agrees, the cookbook is interesting beyond its technical instruction; its pedagogical ambition encompasses how readers think about food’s relation to gender. The Queer Cookbook, while not as outspoken and much more playful, has a similar orientation; Beyond the Great Wall points overtly to the risks of cultural survival. None of this, in whatever form, is ‘‘politics by other means;’’ it is politics. At one remove, the Ethnomusicologists’ Cookbook: Complete Meals from Around the World (2006) takes point of view in a different direction, providing recipes for exotic meals, recommendations for their proper musical accompaniment, and substantial scholarly discussion, including recommendations for further exploration. This presentation derives from ‘‘a recognition that food and music are often conjoined in live context’’ (3).12 That is, people often eat in a musical environment; when other people seek to recreate the authentic experience, correct music must fill the new environment. Viewed more generally, the Cookbook asserts—and goes far toward demonstrating—that food cannot be dissociated from a cultural context and can be fully appreciated only when it is inserted back in its cultural context (insofar as possible). That is, if preparing foreign food must, by necessity, be unhinged from an authentic culinary context, then consuming such food can be premised on reconnecting to its context, however imperfectly. The text instructs readers in cooking and in choosing music; it becomes the avatar of a multifaceted experience, which it guides readers to create.

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Bryant Terry’s Vegan Soul Kitchen: Fresh, Healthy, and Creative African-American Cuisine (2009) offers not only musical suggestions, but poetry and art as well. Like the Cookbook, it argues for creating an alimentary environment, demonstrating how to consume traditional food to create an authentic experience. It theorizes eating as a cultural—that is, communal—act that cookbooks necessarily disembody unless there is an act of cultural restoration. The idea is comforting, assuring readers that in attempting to produce ‘‘authentic’’ cuisine, they are not fooling themselves, falling into some simplistic ruse orchestrated by a publisher. Books like this and the Ethnomusicologists’ Cookbook, that is, guides to eating that challenge the limits of print and indeed of any one medium (the music needs the food just as the reverse is true), offer a new point of view on cookbooks themselves. The eighteenth-century text, which incorporated politics into its recipes, broke ground for this type of break-the-mold thinking. It established that cookbooks can, and probably should, have a point of view, and can domesticate ideas in the culture at large.

CULINARY GEOPOLITICS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY More than any cookbook of the period, Martha Bradley’s The British Housewife (1756) instantiates the globalization of the British pantry. The purview offers a fascinating counterpoint to the text’s seasonal organization and concern for locally available foodstuffs. Crucially, it challenges the complacency (represented in other texts) of the seemingly self-sufficient, self-enclosed domestic environment—the country estate that raised its own provisions—as well as of the urban household with shops and markets down the street. For Bradley, the kitchen is the hub of a global food-supply network; it receives food by means of that network but, implicitly, it affects that network by means of the cook’s food choices. Bradley’s forthright expression of views concerning slavery and colonial competition, two salient factors in the supply chain of her day, is another forerunner of the modern politicized cookbook. While most eighteenth-century cookbooks contain recipes identifiable with foreign countries, and call for imported ingredients, Bradley deconstructs the ingredient list, explaining international economic tensions lurking beneath it. She makes readers reflect on cooking as an act with geopolitical consequences, such that choosing

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certain ingredients reinforces schemes that adversely affect other people. The implicit question for readers is: Is this how I want to cook? By confronting readers with colonialism, Bradley turns them into alimentary activists by default: either they support or oppose the prevailing regime, but they can no longer just be passive consumers. This is a breakthrough in cookbook development. Bradley also cites the effect of national monopolies, such as that of the Dutch, on British consumers. The gaping question, which she leaves to readers, is what to do about it. Yet the fact that she raises such a question signals female readers that irrespective of their remoteness from high policy, their kitchen is a political place. No one previously had asked readers to think in these terms in the context of a cookbook. Indeed, a whole chapter, ‘‘Of foreign Articles pickled, or otherwise preserved,’’ indicates that foreignness itself is a quality to be pondered. Yet even as Bradley explores the dark side of globalization, she presents its value, creating a complex matrix of considerations for readers to sort through. By explaining how exotic ingredients became popular in Britain through international trade, she depicts alimentary variety as the natural consequence of Britain’s commercial power, undermining nationalist insistence on a ‘‘British’’ diet. It is indicative that in her long discussion of ‘‘the Nature of Foods, and suiting them to Constitutions’’ (I:121–25), Bradley never advocates the culinary nativism of, say, Eliza Smith, who advocates British foods for British constitutions. Sensibly, Bradley assumes that some people tolerate certain foods while others do not—her job is to guide and to help make food as digestible as possible. Because Bradley accepts alimentary imports as one more element in a sophisticated British diet, her readers must consider logistics; she turns readers into potential supporters of a strong merchant marine and of a fleet to protect the commerce in foodstuffs. Of course, this may not have been her objective, and it is unclear what inspired her to care about the back-story of exotic ingredients. Yet clearly, she thinks that understanding the provenance of food is important to its choice and presentation. She most likely picked up relevant data in travel literature—which describes the production of sugar and cultivation of spice—and she may have read pharmacopoeia. In any case, she foregrounds this information in a cookbook, complete with political commentary. She extends the genre in the same manner that cookbooks assimilated garden and etiquette manuals. Such generic extension is a means of competing, of offering something

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new, and also is a means of educating, of making food preparation an element of larger cultural concerns (which women can then address on their own). While such expansiveness is now taken for granted, for example in texts like Beyond the Great Wall, Bradley’s approach was a significant advance, helping to reshape the genre. It suggests impatience with the genre, which was focused on the kitchen or self-sufficient household and failed to address the global implications of a diet (nationalists notwithstanding) that was more than just locally derived. Had Bradley been writing today, she might have produced Kate Heyhoe’s Cooking Green: Reducing Your Carbon Footprint in the Kitchen (2009), premised on the notion that what happens in the kitchen does not stay in the kitchen but has worldwide implications. Like Heyhoe, Bradley takes current ideas and fuses them into cookbook discourse. She makes the merely relevant inescapable—at least to housewives—so that even readers detached from the politics of food have to pay attention. For readers who positively want to pay attention to their food’s global context, Bradley has a lot to offer. In this sense, The British Housewife—now 250-plus years old— is strikingly modern. In the eighteenth century, spice was the quintessential globalized commodity. Bradley’s discussion of ‘‘Cayan Pepper’’ implicates it in Britain’s colonial empire: The Fruit of a Plant of a lively full red Colour, prepar’d by drying and powdering. As we got the taste of Caviare from Russia, we imported this from the Negroes of our Plantations. The Fruit is common in Africa, and they having been accustomed to eat it there, shewed our People the Way in America, and they have taught us. (I:9)

Bradley confronts readers with slavery. Although she does not condemn it and perversely seems pleased with Britain’s ‘‘Plantations,’’ she ensures that the slave system be considered as part of the price of ‘‘cayan.’’ Given the growing awareness of how sugar production was ravaging slaves, this is no small matter. Indeed, Bradley makes doubly sure that readers weigh cayenne’s human consequences by noting that domestic cayenne is barely comparable: ‘‘We have of late try’d the making of it here, by drying our own Capsicum Pods from the Gardens; this does not come up to the Heat or Flavour of the Foreign; but mix’d with Bay Salt and Mushroom Powder, it makes a very mild and pretty Kind’’ (I:10). Readers are offered a

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choice: use a less potent variety or a mixture that alters the flavor, or opt for a product associated with slaves. Whether or not readers appreciate this offer, they cannot but realize that Bradley is raising their awareness of colonial-alimentary reality. If readers never before stopped to think about where cayenne comes from and how it is produced, they finally have to think about it. Bradley’s description of cayenne is long—nearly two pages—so she could have finessed information on ‘‘the Negroes of our Plantations.’’ She apparently chooses to include it because she sees it as part of the spice’s profile. In describing cloves, mace and nutmegs, and cinnamon, Bradley again recurs to their geopolitical profile, this time to illustrate the Dutch monopoly of the spice trade. Regarding cloves, she states, ‘‘We have cloves from the Dutch; they have destroyed the Trees in Molucca Islands, and propagated them in their Island of Ternate; so that they supply all the European Nations’’ (I:12). As to mace and nutmegs, she notes that they are ‘‘the Produce of the East Indies,’’ and that ‘‘The Dutch supply us with Nutmegs and Mace, as they do with Cloves; the whole Spice Trade being in a Manner in their Hands’’ (12–13). The same with cinnamon: ‘‘The Dutch supply us with Cinnamon, which they have in the Islands of Ceylon in such Abundance that they burn a great deal annually to keep up the Price’’ (13).13 It is interesting to speculate on why, when Bradley recommends these spices in her recipes, she includes information that could deter readers from using them. The key, however, is that Bradley never suggests boycotting an ingredient, but rather provides information that enables readers to think about what they consume. Thus in the chapter ‘‘Of the Nature of Foods, and Suiting them to Constitutions’’ (I:121–25), she observes that there are rules for deciding what is suitable, leaving readers to make the decision. She views her cookbook as empowering, a very modern idea. If it is not as polemical as a modern text—that is, if its viewpoint is subtler—it nonetheless embodies the idea that readers should make politically informed, personalized choices about food. The British Housewife offers readers numerous accounts of how products are traded. With regard to ‘‘caviare,’’ Bradley observes that ‘‘[t]he Italian Merchants settled at Moscow are the People who principally trade in it. We have a great deal of it from Archangel, but export the most of it again’’ (I:9). Here, Britain apparently benefits from the food trade, a phenomenon that, to some extent, mitigates the generally gloomy picture (Britain on the short end) that Bradley presents. She describes the romantic way in which anchovies are caught ‘‘upon the Coasts of Provence and Catalonia’’ using flames

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Trade card of Mr. Holt’s Italian Warehouse. (From Ambrose Heal, London Tradesmen’s Cards of the 18th Century. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1968.)

and lanterns, and warns against domestic imitations ‘‘of putting right Anchovy Liquor to pickled Sprats’’ (I:6–7). Far from building a case against trade, Bradley wants readers to understand its importance as they set about adopting alimentary practices.

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Street seller, ‘‘Capers, Anchovies.’’ (From 1800 Woodcuts of Thomas Bewick and His School. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1962.)

In discussing soy, she observes that it is produced in the East Indies from mushrooms and spices, but is degraded on account of hard trading: What they used to send us over at first was very strong and fine, and all of a Kind. At present our Traders have beat them down in Price, so they make it carelessly with different Ingredients, and do not boil it up to half the Strength. (I:113)

At virtually every turn, even when readers cannot change anything, Bradley explains how global economics affects the availability of

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foods, their quality, and the relative advantages of British traders. She wants readers to perceive foods in context from a global perspective, because there is always something to be learned. When she writes about salt, she draws attention to how it is made in France: The two Kinds of Salt-petre go by different Names; that which is purified is called Salt-petre, and that which is rough, as it comes from abroad, is called Petre-Salt. The French make their Salt-petre at Home, from the Rubbish of old Walls, and we might do the same. The pure Salt-petre is stronger than the other. (I:120)

Like William Ellis canvassing Hertfordshire for good ideas, Bradley looks across the Channel, presenting a new if humble proposal for improving saltpeter. By the time she makes this proposal, readers have become accustomed to her global reach, which, as the details pile up, lends The British Housewife a cosmopolitan authority beyond the mere citation of foreign recipes. Surprisingly, in discussing sugar, Bradley cites its East and West Indian origins without mentioning slavery (a topic that concerns her with regard to spice). What does seem to interest her is another source of corruption: the chemical process, during which juice is extracted from the cane, boiled, purified, and hardened into loaves. Sometime during refinement, when it is separated into grades, it can be artificially whitened, thus requiring the purchaser to take care: [S]ome Care must be taken, when the finest are used, to buy them pure, for many bad Tricks are used in the preparing them. I have seen Powder-blue settle from fine Sugar in Tea; and Powder-blue is made from a Mineral called Cobalt, which is poisonous. (I:121)

The specter of an invisible poison in a foreign food (a specter that is still familiar) offers yet another turn in Bradley’s discussion of alimentary imports. The range of her interest in such imports is stunning (if with regard to slavery somewhat erratic); even confectionary texts do not mention cobalt. Indeed, as this chapter shows, Bradley opens the cookbook genre to geopolitical commerce in a manner that is unprecedented. Such loosening of generic limitations is, in fact, her greatest legacy. As the next section will show, modern cookbooks now seem headed in the genre-bending direction that she pioneered.

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THE ULTIMATE LEGACY: STRETCHING THE GENRE Throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, two contrary impulses influence the direction in which cookbooks develop. One impulse is simply to define the genre—establishing the appearance of authority, learning to be intelligible, and providing a vehicle for chefs’ self-expression. By following this impulse, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries laid the foundation for what is recognized as the modern cookbook and, thereby, helped to stabilize the genre. Yet even as cookbooks are developing, the second impulse is also in play, loosening generic norms and accommodating new types of material. Bradley’s introduction of a globalized perspective is a case in point, as is the general politicization of culinary texts by means of anti-Gallicism. This second impulse is again radically destabilizing the genre. Thus, if cookbooks still appear to be generically well defined, that is becoming an illusion—the effect bookstores’ lining them up on shelves labeled ‘‘cookbooks.’’ By evolving away from the generic norm, cookbooks are pursuing a tendency that characterized the genre when it was developing. Twenty-first-century political, outspoken cookbooks have entailed a redesign of the form of the cookbook, introducing poetry, musicology, and art. In some cases, cookbooks have become so idiosyncratic as to be sui generis, the ultimate departure from the norm. For example, in the Foreword to Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck Cookbook (2008), the food scientist Harold McGee declares it to be like no other cookbook he has ever seen: ‘‘The recipes are dwarfed by the headnotes, and they’re followed by a set of disquisitions on, among other things, perfume and acids and the science of chewing’’ (8).14 Where Martha Bradley situated food in a global, cultural context, Fat Duck situates its recipes in a swirl of the author’s personal (read: nerdy, highly technical, ‘‘scientific’’) interests and obsessions.15 This is not what cookbooks normally do, because their aim (at least up to now) has been to facilitate recipes’ reproducibility, rather than to constitute a museum-like exhibition of personalized rarities (even those premised on public, scientifically sanctioned norms). If McGee is astonished, therefore, it is because he expects generic conformity, a certain objectivity untempered by a digressive proto-novelistic expansiveness. Yet the vast autobiography that initiates Fat Duck offers a model of culinary rule-breaking, setting

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Blumenthal apart and readying the reader for compounding generic ironies that should not, after all, have surprised McGee: Normally, the road to becoming a chef begins with an apprenticeship in which the cook learns on the job, starting with the most basic skills of food preparation—peeling and picking and plucking and bone-chopping and topping and tailing and straining and rinsing— and eventually moving on to a membership of sorts by observing (and possibly getting an earful from) a great chef at work. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, I’d effectively embarked on my own unconventional apprenticeship. Instead of being taught by the greats, I learnt from their cookbooks. . . . Teaching oneself from cookbooks and coffee-table books, without a mentor, is not an approach I’d recommend to anyone else, and it’s no substitute for hands-on experience in a professional kitchen, but it gave me an open-mindedness about cooking that was to serve me well in the future. (27)

Blumenthal pulls off a double-edged send-up of culinary education, arguing that while he was too clever to be tutored by a chef (he learned from reading cookbooks!), this is no prescription for anyone else (motto: don’t expect cookbooks really to teach cooking). It is as if after three hundred years, the old debate is still unsettled, except that this time—instead of modestly defending the genre—Blumenthal explodes the genre; he positions himself as its unique beneficiary, with reason therefore to turn the cookbook into a projection of his mind and art in learning and self-revelation. Readers are left with a tormenting question: if Blumenthal claims that learning from cookbooks was his singular prerogative, and if that experience is not recommended in his own, then what is the purpose of Fat Duck and what can anyone learn from it? The recipes are so intricate—so technically awesome—that they make readers wonder how it is possible to cook from the text, even if it is mind-expanding.16 If it is barely possible to cook from a cookbook, if it is a source of immense interest but only of rarefied practical applicability, then to put ‘‘Cookbook’’ in the title is an irony, a challenge even to a malleable genre that turns it on its head.17 Yet Fat Duck is hardly alone in delivering the author’s individual culinary consciousness, turning the genre not only on its head but, in effect, inside out. The Eat Me Daily blog had this to say about David Chang and Peter Mehan’s Momofuku (2009), named after the eponymous

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restaurant (Chang is the chef-owner): ‘‘While sitting down for a cover-to-cover read might leave you inclined to skip over the technical parts of the recipes, save room for the headnotes; some stretch pages long, delivering backstory in stunning, rigorous detail. Never have I seen a cookbook so uncensored, so unselfconsciously packed with stories.’’18 Here is another sophisticated reader exclaiming over a radical new turn in the genre, taken aback by its sheer audacity. The blog marvels at a ‘‘conversational, confessional voice’’ that is ‘‘quite profane’’ and the ‘‘truly riveting drama’’ of Chang’s culinary life story, ‘‘a book-within-a-book’’ that goes on for fifty pages. As one pores through Momofuku, taking it up with no intention of cooking, the obvious question is whether this is a cookbook with a memoir, or a new type of hybrid genre about a life lived through food. Momofuku is not just another glossy vehicle for a celebrity chef; it is deeply psychological, Chang’s attempt (assisted by Mehan) to exhibit a personality that explains—that justifies—an extraordinary personal success. While Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential does not shrink from profanity and self-revelation, and Julia Child’s My Life in France is at times unbuttoned, neither memoir is part of a cookbook. As the genre evolves, personal narrative is increasingly prominent in its construction. Elizabeth Raffald hit on the idea 240-plus years ago as a means of ingratiating herself to readers and projecting a type of appropriate female modesty. As the idea is revived, however, it is taking on a life of its own, offering readers a chance to see how one person’s life is more interesting when viewed through a culinary prism. Ree Drummond’s The Pioneer Woman Cooks (2009), for example, follows a city-bred vegetarian to an Oklahoma cattle ranch where, as a rancher’s wife, she is supposed to serve three carnivore meals a day. Since she cannot entirely, she compromises. As the New York Times reported, ‘‘vegetarians and gourmands won’t find much to cook here, but as a portrait of a real American family kitchen, it works.’’19 That a cookbook can be praised as a family portrait, especially when the recipes are given short shrift, is a remarkable development, testifying to the distance that cookbooks have come in extending the genre. That is, if cookbooks have always been about appealing to the individual reader, they are now becoming about the individual author. Such genrebending, which is only beginning, is likely to radically alter why and how people read cookbooks.

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Almond Soup, from Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) Take a Neck of Veal, and the Scrag-end of a Neck of Mutton, chop them in small Pieces, put them in a large Tossing Pan, cut in a Turnip with a blade or two of Mace, and five Quarts of Water, set it over the Fire, and let it boil gently ’till it is reduced to two Quarts, strain it through a Hair Sieve into a clear Pot, then put six Ounces of Almonds blanched and beat fine, half a Pint of thick Cream, and Chyan pepper to your Taste, have ready three small French Rolls made for the Purpose, the size of a small tea Cup; if they are larger, they will not look well, and drink up too much of the Soup; blanch a few Jordan Almonds, and cut them lengthway, stick them round the Edge of the Rolls slantway, then stick them all over the Top of the Rolls, and put them in the Tureen; when dished up pour the Soup upon the Rolls: These Rolls look like a hedge-hog: Some French Cooks give this Soup the name of Hedge-Hog Soup.

In 2009, the New York Times reported on a cookbook that the former Microsoft executive, Nathan Myhrvold, is producing in his laboratory. Wylie Dufresne, the chef at a cutting-edge restaurant in Manhattan, exclaimed that ‘‘[i]t is a cookbook that is going to be in its own category.’’20 Given Myhrvold’s use of a one-hundred-ton hydraulic press to make beef jerky, Dufresne is probably right. If biochemistry texts are often jokingly called cookbooks, perhaps that title could now seriously be applied in reverse. As Invention of the Modern Cookbook has tried to show, eighteenthcentury cookbooks incorporated contemporary cultural resources and responded to an array of discursive stimuli. Such nimbleness— one might say opportunism—is in the nature of this highly selfconscious genre. Always aimed squarely at the market, the trait is now coming to the forefront as cookbooks turn inward, taking their place in a discourse of self-revelation that has colonized the media. Even overtly political cookbooks such as Beyond the Great Wall reflect the personal experience of the authors as they travel through China’s outback—each, in fact, writes separate sections, showcasing differing perceptions. In an uncanny way, just as cookbooks and novels wrestled with similar problems during their early development—how to market themselves, how to project authority—they are converging once again, this time around the idea of exploring an inner life. If Jane Austen could contrive a hero out of Fitzwilliam Darcy, then David Chang can modestly offer himself. One wonders at the impetus. In part, perhaps cookbooks’ current generic expansion is a response to the Internet, where food blogs have become intensely personal and where (at the other extreme)

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barebones recipes are available without any comment at all. Cookbooks have to compete with both these media choices, as they did in the past with gardening and conduct books. Moreover, as the Internet encourages a type of democratic, free-for-all spontaneity, cookbooks are getting personal with a type of eye-popping outsize flair. Yet as Myhrvold’s effort shows, there are other avenues of invention as well, taking science out of the kitchen (where Blumenthal still experiments) and cooking in the lab. For cookbooks, the possibilities are fascinating. As a result, the genre inevitably will be destabilized, with authors taking increasing license. One critic has said of Grant Achatz’ Alinea (2008), discussed in chapter 4 as culinary hagiography: ‘‘It’s not sure if it’s a coffee table book, or a cookbook, or Other.’’21 That ‘‘Other’’ is coming soon. But now readers may have some idea of where its original came from.

NOTES 1. For a modern approach to preserving (but if need be, creating) authenticity, see Alan Warde, ‘‘Imagining British Cuisine: Representations of Culinary Identity in the Good Food Guide, 1951–2007,’’ Food, Culture and Society 12, no. 2 (2009): 151–71. The Bread and Roses blog, http://breadandroses123.blogspot.com/2009/01/victorian-farm.html, is unabashedly obsessed with preserving a culinary past. But such sentiments are not confined to Britain. In Eating: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 2009), Jason Epstein describes his lifelong interest in recreating the food of his childhood. See also Sandra Sherman, ‘‘The Politics of Taste in The Jewish Manual,’’ Petits Propos Culinaires 71 (2002): 62–84, concerned with the preservation and promotion of authentic Jewish cuisine in Victorian England. On nostalgia among immigrant elites for a so-called authentic cuisine, see Anita Massur, ‘‘Culinary Nostalgia: Authenticity, Nationalism, and Diaspora,’’ Melus 32, no. 4 (2007): 11–31. For nostalgic practice in historic and contemporary China, see Mark Swislocki, Culinary Nostalgia: Regional Food Culture and the Urban Experience in Shanghai (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 2. Charles Carter, Compleat City and Country Cook (1732), Preface. 3. John Thacker, The Art of Cookery (1758), Preface. 4. For a discussion of such mystique, see Gilly Lehmann, ‘‘Politics in the Kitchen,’’ Eighteenth-Century Life 23, no. 2 (1999): 71–73. See also Ben Rogers, Beef and Liberty: Roast Beef, John Bull, and the English Nation (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003).

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5. Compare Bradley’s external focus with John Farley’s in The London Art of Cookery (1783–1800), where the reader is directed to consider the book’s internal organization and, hence, utility: ‘‘We have divided the whole Book into separate Parts, and those Parts into Chapters; so that our Readers have only to look into the Contents, and they will there find, at one View, the whole of that Branch of Cookery they may want to consult. The Utility of regularly classing every Thing in a Book of this Kind is too obvious to need Arguments to support it’’ (Preface). Farley’s conception of the cookbook is traditional and generic, while Bradley envisions her text as not limited by generic, that is, utilitarian constraints. 6. On the precarious position of French cooks in British kitchens, see Lehmann, ‘‘Politics in the Kitchen.’’ 7. Tatler, March 18, 1710. 8. From the song collection, Ways to Kill Care (1761), 2. 9. Although the French were not enchanted with British beef, the Swedish traveler Pehr Kalm remarked that ‘‘the Englishmen understand almost better than any other people the art of roasting a joint.’’ See Joseph Lucas, trans., Pehr Kalm’s Account of His Visit to England on His Way to America in 1748 (1892), 15. 10. For a French critique of eighteenth-century British food, see Pierre Grosley, A Tour to London (1772). Grosley, who considered all British provisions inferior to the French, observed that ‘‘Beef . . . which they set a value upon in proportion to its quantity of fat, mixing in the stomach with beer, their usual drink, must give rise to a chyle, whose viscous heaviness can transmit none but bilious and melancholy juices to the brain’’ (181–82). 11. See, for example, the Retorte blog, featuring complaints and countercomplaints concerning the text’s politics, http://retorte.blogspot.com/ 2008/05/cookbook-review-beyond-great-wall.html. 12. Sean Williams, The Ethnomusicologists’ Cookbook: Complete Meals from Around the World (New York: Routledge, 2006), 3. In the spirit of avoiding cultural condescension, the introduction notes that the meals are only exotic-seeming, as they are everyday fare to someone else. 13. Bradley’s information on the Dutch in Ceylon might have come, for example, from A Description of the Great and Most Famous Isle of Ceylon, published in A Collection of Voyages and Travels, vol. 3 (1732). The text describes European rivalries for spices and states that ‘‘The Dutch company is now, through God’s blessing, in the possession of the cinnamon of all kinds, as likewise of all the spices viz. of the nutmegs, mace, and cloves’’ (747). She probably also read Pierre Pomet’s A History of Druggs (1712 and later editions), which discusses the politics of spice. Since the BritishDutch rivalry in the South Seas was long-standing, she must have been aware of their local wars, and of the representations of the rivalry in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature. For a fascinating examination of the British-Dutch rivalry and its reflection in literature, see Robert

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Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 14. Heston Blumenthal, The Fat Duck Cookbook (London: Bloomsbury, 2008). In the Acknowledgments, Blumenthal himself declares that ‘‘[f]rom the start I wanted this to be a cookbook like no other’’ (527). The publisher likes this idea, citing two reviews on the back cover asserting that Fat Duck is ‘‘like no other book I have seen in the past twenty years,’’ and ‘‘The cookbook will never be the same again.’’ 15. While the final section of Fat Duck, ‘‘Science,’’ sounds as if it should be objective, Blumenthal personalizes it, noting that ‘‘the information in the following pages has been a source of inspiration to me’’ (424). When he describes ‘‘Ice Cream Science,’’ he casts the information in terms of personal obsession: ‘‘What made some [fondly remembered] ice creams so delicious? I had to know’’ (433). 16. In the Foreword to Fat Duck, McGee gamely asserts that ‘‘[a]nyone who cares about food can learn a lot from science, and then make that learning matter by cooking with it. . . . And there is no better place to start learning than the first page of this remarkable book’’ (11). Yet in light of Blumenthal’s own assertions, the claim comes off as deeply ironic. 17. Blumenthal states that ‘‘the recipes are complicated and I make no apologies for that’’ (130). As a way in, he suggests starting with a subrecipe—for example, a gratin of truffled macaroni, which is a building block of one of the larger, general recipes. Yet this very suggestion underscores how barely approachable the Cookbook actually is. One has a sense that Blumenthal’s attempt at reassurance—that his book is ‘‘a springboard to creativity’’ (131)—is, however unintended, a concession that very few if any readers will be able to follow his directions rigorously. 18. http://www.eatmedaily.com/2009/10/book-review-momofuku-bydavid-chang-and-peter-meehan-the-hype-justified/. 19. New York Times, ‘‘Dining,’’ November 4, 2009, D7. 20. New York Times, November 17, 2009, D3. 21. See the Eat Me Daily blog, http://www.eatmedaily.com/2008/10/ alinea-cookbook-grant-achatz-review.

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Old cookbooks, household management, and food-related texts are available through academic libraries. Virtually all such texts have been microfilmed (for example, in the Goldsmiths’-Kress and Women Advising Women series); if a university does not own the films, it can order them through interlibrary loan. Film still provides the most complete archive, but it has the drawbacks of an old technology (microfilm-readers break down, and setup is time-consuming). Most books published before 1700 are also available through Early English Books Online (EEBO), to which most academic libraries subscribe. EEBO could be more user-friendly, but it is still more practical than finding a Rare Books Room. Most books published between 1700 and 1800 are available through Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), which was recently updated with thousands more texts. (Urge your library to purchase the updates.) ECCO is fully searchable. For example, every recipe for cullis in its database can be retrieved in seconds. The microfiche archive American Imprints has early American culinary texts, although microfiche is the worst technology imaginable and has been superseded by microfilm and online resources. With the growing appreciation for culinary history (even avant garde chefs like Heston Blumenthal acknowledge its value), more old cookbooks are being reproduced in facsimile editions with expert introductions. A search on WorldCat—a standard library resource— or even on Amazon.com, will provide up-to-date information on what is now available. Of course, for the sheer thrill of reading an

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original edition, just visit a culinary archive: Radcliffe College, Indiana University, Michigan State University, and the New York Public Library are superb, although many academic institutions hold some old texts (often donated by old-biddy alumnae but now are prized possessions). Cooking schools, for example Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island, are a great source for early cookbooks.1 In England, the British Library, as well as Oxford, Cambridge, and Leeds Universities collectively will have more or less everything published in the United Kingdom. Important culinary manuscript collections are housed at the Wellcome Institute in London, the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, the University of Pennsylvania, and the New York Public Library’s Whitney Cookery Collection. WEB SITES Food History News. http://www.foodhistorynews.com (terrific for connecting with culinary historians and for keeping up with the latest developments). FoodHistory.com. http://www.foodhistory.com (for American food history). Prospect Books. http://www.kal69.dial.pipex.com/shop/pages/index.html (major publisher of reprints and texts on food history; also has news on major culinary history symposia). Culinary Historians of New York. ‘‘Resources.’’ http://www.culinaryhistoriansny.org/resources.html (a mine of current resources). Food Books.com. ‘‘Serious Books for Serious Cooks.’’ http://foodbooks. com/foodlink.htm (includes culinary history).

COOKBOOKS, HOUSEHOLD MANAGEMENT, AND FOOD-RELATED TEXTS2 Adam’s Luxury and Eve’s Cookery; or, The Kitchen-Garden display’d. London, 1744. A facsimile reprint. London: Prospect Books, 1983. Bailey, N. Dictionarium Domesticum. London, 1736. Barker, Anne. The Complete Servant Maid; or, Young Woman’s Best Companion. London, ca. 1770. Borella, [Mr.]. The Court and Country Confectioner; or, The House-keeper’s Guide, to a More Speedy, Plain, and Familiar Method of Understanding the Whole Art of Confectionary. London, 1770. Reprint, 1771, 1772. Bradley, Martha. The British Housewife; or, The Cook, Housekeeper’s, and Gardiner’s Companion. London, 1756. A facsimile reprint. London: Prospect Books, 1996–99. Bradley, Richard. The Country Housewife and Lady’s Director. London, 1727.

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Lambert, Edward. The Art of Confectionary. London, 1744–67. M. W. The Queens Closet Opened. London, 1655. Markham, Gervase. The English Housewife. London, 1615. A facsimile reprint. Kingston, ON: McGill-Queens University Press, 1986. Mason, Charlotte. The Ladies Assistant. London, 1773. May, Robert. The Accomplisht Cook. London, 1660, 1665, 1685. A facsimile reprint. Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 1994. Melroe, Eliza. An Economical, and New Method of Cookery. London, 1798. More, Hannah. The Cottage Cook; or, Mrs. Jones’s Cheap Dishes. London, 1795. Moxon, Elizabeth. English Houswifry. Leeds, 1741–1800. Nott, John. The Cook’s and Confectioner’s Dictionary. London, 1723. Nutt, Frederick. The Complete Confectioner; or, the Whole Art of Confectionary. London: 1789. The Pastry-Cook’s Vade-Mecum. London, 1705. Peckham, Ann. The Complete English Cook. London, 1767. Price, Elizabeth. The New Book of Cookery; or, Every Woman a Perfect Cook. London, 1780. ———. The New, Universal, and Complete Confectioner. London, 1785. Primitive Cookery; or the Kitchen Garden. London, 1767. Rabisha, William. The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected. London, 1661, 1673. Raffald, Elizabeth. The Experienced English Housekeeper. London, 1769–1800. Shackleford, Ann. The Modern Art of Cookery Improved. London, 1767–71. Simmons, Amelia. American Cookery. Hartford, CT, 1796. Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1958. Smith, Eliza. The Compleat Housewife. London, 1727 (with numerous subsequent editions). Thacker, John. The Art of Cookery. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1758–65. This Is the Boke of Cokery. 1500. The True Way of Preserving and Candying. London, 1681, 1695. Trusler, John. The Honours of the Table; or, Rules for Behaviour during Meals. London, 1788. ———. The London Adviser and Guide. London, 1786, 1790. Tryon, Thomas. The Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness. London, 1697. ———. The Good House-wife Made a Doctor. London, 1692. Wooley, Hannah. The Gentlewomans Companion; or, a Guide to the Female Sex. London, 1673, 1675.

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Brears, Peter. The Gentlewoman’s Kitchen: Great Food in Yorkshire, 1650– 1750. Wakefield, UK: Historical Publications, 1984. Brown, Peter, and Ivan Day. Pleasures of the Table: Ritual and Display in the European Dining Room, 1600–1900. York, UK: York Civic Trust, 1998. Carrington, Selwyn. The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade 1775–1810. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2002. Cruickshank, Dan, and Neil Burton. Life in the Georgian City. London: Viking, 1990. Day, Ivan, ed. Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: The British at Table, 1600–2000. London: P. Wilson, 2000. Drummond, Sir Jack Cecil, and Ann Wilbraham. The Englishman’s Food: A History of Five Centuries of English Diet. London: Jonathan Cape, 1958. Fink, Beatrice, ed. ‘‘The Cultural Topography of Food.’’ EighteenthCentury Life 23, no. 2 (May 1999). Lehmann, Gilly. The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 2003. Maclean, Virginia. A Short-Title Catalogue of Household and Cookery Books Published in the English Tongue, 1701–1800. Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 1981. Mendelson, Anne. Stand Facing the Stove: The Story of the Women Who Gave America The Joy of Cooking. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. Mennell, Stephen. All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1985, 2nd ed.; Champaign Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking, 1985. Paston-Williams, Sara. The Art of Dining. London: National Trust, 1993. Sambrook, Pamela, and Peter Brears, eds. The Country House Kitchen, 1650–1900: Skills and Equipment for Food Provisioning. Phoenix Mill, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton/National Trust, 1997. Sandiford, Keith. The Cultural Politics of Sugar. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Sherman, Sandra. Imagining Poverty: Quantification and the Decline of Paternalism. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001. ———. Fresh from the Past: Recipes and Revelations from Moll Flanders’ Kitchen. Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2004. Sussman, Charlotte. Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713–1833. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Wilson, C. Anne. Food and Drink in Britain. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1976. ———. Waste Not, Want Not: Food Preservation from Early Times to the Present Day. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1991.

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NOTES 1. The International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) has a program to preserve ‘‘endangered treasures,’’ old cookbooks on the verge of falling apart or disintegrating. Many universities and related institutions have received grants for this purpose. See the IACP’s Web site, www.iacp. com, for a list of annual awards. 2. Except for This Is the Boke of Cokery (1500), editions cited are for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Post-1800 editions are not cited. Where there is a range of editions during this period, that fact is indicated by a dash (–).

INDEX

The Accomplisht Cook (1660), xxxii, 40–43, 61, 88, 90, 107, 122–27, 156, 172, 174, 175 Acetaria (1699), xxiii, xxxii, 82, 214, 215 Adam’s Luxury, and Eve’s Cookery (1747), xxiii, xxxiii, 80, 215, 216, 217 Alinea (2008), 77, 166, 249 Amelia Simmons, xi, xxxv American Cookery (1796), xi, xxxv Anchatz, Grant, 77, 166, 249 apprenticeship, as a means of learning to cook, vii, xxxiii, 41, 43, 44, 59, 60, 101, 172, 175, 246 The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (1747, 1755, et al.), xxii, xxxiii, xxxiv, 35, 46, 59, 62, 63, 170, 182, 198, 202, 232 Batali, Mario, 121, 122, 145, 175, 176 beef, xxxiii, 12, 17, 18, 77, 102, 105–7, 192, 214, 217, 218, 233–36; jerky, 248; roast, xxxiii, 105, 214, 234–36

bees, 26, 27, 30 Beyond the Great Wall (2008), xxv, 191, 232, 233, 237, 240, 248 Blumenthal, Heston, 245, 246, 249, 253 Borella, Mr., 204 Bourdain, Anthony, xxii, 102, 118, 147, 166, 175, 247 Bradley, Martha, viii, xx, xxi, xxv, xxxiv, 6, 8, 9, 16–20, 28, 29, 56–61, 63–66, 76, 78, 84, 88, 90, 94–98, 107, 108, 109, 110, 139, 144, 210, 212, 220, 231, 232, 238–45 bread, xxiv, xxxv, 17, 44, 50, 56, 68, 75, 82–84, 90, 101, 102, 125, 132, 192, 196, 205–9, 211, 217–19, 232, 236 brewing, 3, 13, 50, 15, 78, 87, 197, 217–22 The British Housewife (1756), viii, xx, xxi, xxxiv, 6, 9, 17, 19, 21, 30, 56, 58, 63, 78, 84, 98, 108, 212, 238, 240, 241, 244 Carter, Charles, xxvi, xxxiii, 66, 67, 97, 99, 130–34, 139, 141, 142,

260

146, 166–68, 177, 180, 183, 198, 203, 220, 230 carving, xxxv, 25, 34, 75, 88, 91–95, 156, 209 Chambers, Amelia, xiv, 162 Chang, David, 246, 247, 248 Cheyne, George, xxxiii, 213, 218 Child, Julia, xxxv, 66, 89, 104, 122, 125, 127, 164, 165, 247 A Collection of Above Three Hundred Receipts in Cookery (1724), xvii, 158, 159, 171, 176 Collingwood, Francis, xix, 79, 89, 146, 147 Cook, Ann, xxxiv, 147, 148, 169 The Complete Family-Piece (1741), 6, 8, 10, 18, 20, 21, 26, 27, 177, 178 confectioners, xii, 29, 84, 137, 138, 147, 200–204, 221 confectionery, xxii, xxiii, 197–200, 202–4, 206, 221, 222 The Cottage Cook (1795), xxxv, 207, 208 Deen, Paula, 118, 119, 144 Diet for a Small Planet (1973), 192, 230, 232, 237 Eales, Mary, 66, 67, 203 Ellis, William, xxxiii, xxxiv, 6–8, 12, 13, 14, 15, 20, 53–56, 88, 102, 120, 139, 144, 192, 219, 244 The English Art of Cookery (1794), 68, 79, 96 Evelyn, John, xxiii, xxxii, 82, 214 The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769), viii, xix, 84, 100, 103, 104, 133, 139, 140–43, 178, 179, 182, 248 France and the French, xx, xxiv, xxxi–xxxv, 8, 31, 58, 60, 66, 88, 90, 96, 98, 102, 109, 122, 127, 135, 137, 143, 156, 157, 162,

INDEX

166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 174, 175, 179, 180, 197, 202, 206, 218, 219, 230–37, 244, 248 Genette, Gerard, 160, 161, 163 genre, vi, viii, ix, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xvii, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, xxviii, 5, 16, 39, 49, 62, 79, 81, 87, 102, 156, 160, 174, 181, 204, 239, 240, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249 gingerbread, 49, 138 Glasse, Hannah, xix, xxii, xxiii, xxxiii, 45, 46, 59, 60, 62–65, 67, 79, 88, 105, 106, 107, 133, 137, 139, 141, 144, 146–148, 168–171, 180, 182, 198, 200–204, 210, 218, 219, 221, 230, 232–34, 236 Henderson, William Augustus, 22, 25, 80, 91–95 The Honours of the Table (1787), xxxv, 93, 94 The Housekeeper’s Instructor (1790), 22, 25, 80, 91, 92, 94 Joy of Cooking (various editions), 64, 76, 102, 155, 162, 164, 165, 177, 191, 196 Julie & Julia (2009), viii, xvi, xxxv, 66, 122 Keller, Thomas, 120, 122, 125, 127, 132, 166 The Lady’s Assistant (1773), xv, 84 Lamb, Charles, 145, 146, 183, 184 Lambert, Edward, 203, 204 The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book (1984), 101, 102, 105 The London Adviser and Guide (1786), xxxv, 80 The London Art of Cookery (1792), xviii, xxxiv, 79

INDEX

manuscripts, women’s domestic, vii, xv, xvi, xviii, xix, xxv, 1–16, 19, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 41, 44, 45, 47–55, 58–61, 102, 105, 127, 140, 147, 174, 178, 196, 254 Mason, Charlotte, xv, 84, 85, 87, 146, 147, 181 May, Robert, xxxii, 40–44, 61, 64, 88–90, 98, 106, 107, 122–28, 130, 132, 134, 135, 136, 139, 141, 156, 159, 164, 166, 171, 172, 174–76, 178, 230 Melroe, Eliza, 211, 212 The Modern Art of Cookery Improved (1767), xxxiv, 82, 179 Moxon, Elizabeth, xxxiv, 79, 133, 136, 139, 141 Nationalism, culinary, xxiv, 134, 220, 230, 235 novel, English, xi–xiii, xx, xxii, xxxiii, 81, 144, 155, 248 Oliver, Jamie, 119, 120, 127, 132, 138, 164, 165, 195 Poison Detected (1757), 82, 83 Pomet, Pierre, xxxii, 198, 200 Primitive Cookery (1767), xxiii, xxxiv, 80, 208–11, 214, 216, 217, 221 print culture, xv, xvi, 24, 40, 56, 130, 133, 142, 148, 155, 156, 177, 178, 192, 196 The Professed Art of Cookery (1754), 147 The Queen’s Closet Opened (1662), 109, 173, 174 The Queen’s Royal Cookery (1713), xxi, xxxii, 25, 44, 64, 157, 176 Rabisha, William, xxxii, 127–30, 139 Raffald, Elizabeth, viii, xix, xxxiv, 31, 84, 86, 99, 100, 103, 104,

261

110, 133, 139–46, 169, 178, 182, 212, 220, 221, 247, 248 Ray, Rachael, xxii, 118, 122, 127, 147, 175, 191 Restoration (1660), xii, xxxi, 40, 155 Royal Cookery (1710), 145, 183 seasonality, 76, 77, 79–81, 99, 107, 110, 193, 214 secrets, disclosure of culinary, 8, 40, 41, 46, 121, 131–33, 171, 172, 174 Shackleford, Ann, xxxiv, 82, 179, 180 slavery, xxiii, xxxii, 197, 198, 238, 240, 241, 244 Smith, Eliza, xxxiii, 28, 133–37, 167, 168, 171, 177, 180, 220, 222, 230, 239 Stewart, Martha, 95, 99, 104, 120, 127, 194 sugar, xvii, xxiii, xxxii, 31, 43, 66–68, 81, 84, 88, 99, 100, 108, 110, 125, 129, 135, 138, 197–204, 206, 209, 215, 217, 222, 239, 240, 244 This Is the Boke of Cokery (1500), xxxi, 39, 40 Trusler, John, xxxv, 36, 80, 93, 94 trussing, 34, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 113, 209 Tryon, Thomas, xxxii, 197, 212, 213 The Universal Cook (1792), xix, 67, 79, 146 urbanization. xiii, xviii, xxix, 36 veganism, xxiv, 192–96, 211, 213, 229, 232, 238 vegetarianism, xxii, xxiii, xxxii, xxxiii, 196, 210–14, 217, 237, 247 Woolams, John, xix, 79, 89

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About the Author Sandra Sherman is a food historian and adjunct professor of English at Fordham University. She is the author of Fresh from the Past: Recipes and Revelations from Moll Flanders’ Kitchen (2004), Imagine Poverty: Quantification and the Decline of Paternalism (2001), and Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (1996). She has written numerous articles on food and speaks on the subject in Britain and the United States. She is also an attorney and Assistant Director of the Intellectual Property Law Institute at Fordham University School of Law.