For a significant part of the early modern period, England was the most
active site of recipe publication in Europe and the only country in
which recipes were explicitly addressed to housewives. Recipes for
Thought analyzes, for the first time, the full range of English
manuscript and printed recipe collections produced over the course of
two centuries.
Recipes reveal much more than the history of puddings and pies: they
expose the unexpectedly therapeutic, literate, and experimental culture
of the English kitchen. Wendy Wall explores ways that recipe
writing--like poetry and artisanal culture--wrestled with the physical
and metaphysical puzzles at the center of both traditional humanistic
and emerging scientific cultures. Drawing on the works of Shakespeare,
Spenser, Jonson, and others to interpret a reputedly unlearned form of
literature, she demonstrates that people from across the social spectrum
concocted poetic exercises of wit, experimented with unusual and
sometimes edible forms of literacy, and tested theories of knowledge as
they wrote about healing and baking. Recipe exchange, we discover,
invited early modern housewives to contemplate the complex components of
being a Renaissance maker and thus to reflect on lofty concepts such as
figuration, natural philosophy, national identity, status, mortality,
memory, epistemology, truth-telling, and matter itself. Kitchen work,
recipes tell us, engaged vital creative and intellectual labors.
