by Kristina Duemmler, UNC Charlotte

I have always been fascinated with reading. Many people believe that reading is a static activity that does not reveal important information about readers; but reading practices are everywhere, and they reveal a lot about readers. This is especially true when looking at Early Modern recipes. 

I recently graduated with my B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and will be a student in the M.A. Program in English there in the fall. I am a member of the English honors program. As part of the program, I am expected to conduct research and produce a thesis. When thinking about topics for my research, my mind immediately turned to readers.

I looked for an area of study that had little research on readers, and that is when I encountered Early Modern recipes for the first time. As I scanned through these wonderful works that held so much history, I couldn’t help but notice the many instances of marks that hinted at the activities readers participated in.

I immediately went online to look for scholars that had already looked at readers of recipe books. I was sure that there would be a lot of research that I could study, but I was mistaken. There was little research done on the practices of Early Modern recipe book readers. Thus, my thesis idea was born.

I spent the rest of the semester hunched over Kristine Kowalchuk’s Preserving on Paper, specifically her transcribed version of Mary Granville’s Receipt Book. I also spent a large amount of time analyzing images from the original Receipt Book (Oh, what I would have given to be able to go to the Folger’s Library and look at the text in person).

Through these months of analysis, two things occurred. One, I found clear areas where readers engaged with the text in meaningful ways, and these meaningful interactions told me a lot about the readers during the 17th and 18th centuries. Two, and almost as important as the first, I developed a deep respect for receipt books and for the transcription and preservation of these texts.

Now, after my long-winded explanation, I will share the fun and fascinating things I found within Mary Granville’s Receipt Book.

Stains

The stains that occurred within the Granville project were the first things I noticed when looking at the manuscript. These beautiful little mistakes can tell a lot about the reader and about the text itself.

Granville, Mary, D’Ewes, Anne. “Receipt Book.” The Granville Project, Folger Shakespeare Library. V.a. 430. Pages 18 and 25

The stain that is pictured above appears on page 18. The spot is directly on top of the writing. Since the stain appears on top of the writing, I speculate that the stain occurred after the writing of this recipe. Thus, it might have occurred during the reading of the recipe and might have been caused by the reader.

If my assumptions are correct, that would place the recipe book within the confines of the kitchen. It would also suggest that this was not a text that was read leisurely. Instead, this text was used and practiced. The recipes were read and then acted out.

Annotations

Annotations are another part of recipe books that interested me. Annotations can tell us a lot about the readers intentions. I could say a lot about annotations, but I am short on words. So instead I will focus on corrections made to the text.

Granville, Mary, D’Ewes, Anne. “Receipt Book.” The Granville Project, Folger Shakespeare Library. V.a. 430. Page 165.

The recipe for making spanish pap has been edited. The original recipe called for two yolks of eggs; however, the two has been written over with a four. This annotation occurs in a different hand from the author, so I am guessing that it was the reader who made the correction.

If it was in fact the reader making this correction, then it shows us that the reader used this recipe and made improvements to the recipe to suit her needs. This is important because it shows that the readers were active readers that individualized the text.

As Elaine Leong argues in her article, Collecting Knowledge for the Family: Recipes, Gender and Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern English Household, readers of receipt books had “a desire to personalize and adapt these collections to one’s own requirements” (Leong).

Manicules

Last, but certainly not least, I looked at manicules. Manicules are fascinating and, once again, show the practices that readers participated in.

Granville, Mary, D’Ewes, Anne. “Receipt Book.” The Granville Project, Folger Shakespeare Library. V.a. 430. Page 102.

Once again, here is a moment where the reader is interacting with the text. This manicule is pointing out a particular recipe of interest. The reader could be marking the recipe to show that it was tried and successful, or the reader could be marking the recipe so that he or she could quickly find the recipe again in the future.

One interesting note about the manicule is the unique and individualized nature of them. While manicules share some basic features, like a pointing finger, their appearance is extremely distinctive. Distinct manicules were a way for the reader to make the text meaningful and their own. Readers created manicules, not only to point to important passages, but to also share in the making of texts. They wanted to create a text that was specific to their needs. The readers created a text that was individual and unique.

If my findings are correct, then it suggests that the readers of recipe books were active readers that engaged with the manuscripts in meaningful ways. Readers also individualized the text to suit their specific needs. 

After conducting my research, I was pleased with my findings and with the time I spent analyzing the Granville receipt book. I look forward to future research I may conduct involving recipe books.

Resources:

Leong, Elaine. Collecting Knowledge for the Family: Recipes, Gender and Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern English Household. Centaurus, 2013

Granville, Mary, D’Ewes, Anne. “Receipt Book.” The Granville Project, Folger Shakespeare Library. V.a. 430. Pages 18 and 25

Granville, Mary, D’Ewes, Anne. “Receipt Book.” The Granville Project, Folger Shakespeare Library. V.a. 430. Page 165.

Granville, Mary, D’Ewes, Anne. “Receipt Book.” The Granville Project, Folger Shakespeare Library. V.a. 430. Page 102.

By Robin Kello, PhD Student, UCLA (formerly, MA Student and co-founder of EMPS, UNC Charlotte)

 

“Ahem. These manuscript books are portraits of the past. The past is another country, in which we discover the oddities and continuities of our own cultures and customs.”

Eyes glaze over in my “Food and Social Justice” course. A young man pulls the brim of his baseball cap lower over his eyes. Their phones suddenly become even more attractive to their restless attentions. The temperature rises. I am doing it again—trying to impart wisdom.

Much to the dismay of their future teachers, I encourage students to ask that most difficult of questions—Why do it?—about any intellectual endeavor. How might Calculus, Film History, Business, or indeed recipe transcription, add to one’s life? I emphasize values that transcend the economic, visions that emerge out of new labors, how the recipes on these centuries-old pages articulate relations between the human and nonhuman worlds. Perhaps that energy is at times infectious, but a monologue, no matter how ecstatic, remains a monologue.

The transcribathon provides another model—more immediate than trying to convince—of exposing undergraduate students, who may be drawn to digital literacies and the use of the internet to broaden the realm of knowledge, to the work of recipe transcription. It replaces description with discussion. In place of explanation of discovery, there is discovery itself: the deciphering of a troubling letter, a slanted secretary-handed word, a thoroughly weird recipe. Wait, does that say “Sheepeshead Pudden?”

On April 8, 2016, the Early Modern Paleography Society of UNC-Charlotte (full disclosure: I serve as their note-scribbler, the secretary who is vexed and awed by secretary hand) hosted a transcribathon. During the course of the day, novices and old-hands alike worked their way through an anonymous 1720 manuscript of recipes and remedies. EMPS even provided a sample of candied Angelica, cooked according to the specifications of the manuscript. If you have ever longed to cross celery and licorice, I recommend get your hands on this recipe.

The transcribathon itinerary included a panel discussion with students, professors, and a representative from the botanical gardens of UNC-Charlotte, who conversed on their relationship to this sort of work from perspectives that bridged Environmental Sciences and the Humanities, and touched on the political and ethical aspects of reflecting on human/nonhuman relations by way of seventeenth and eighteenth-century manuscripts. Their points of view provided a constellation of entry points into the study of early modern texts—spanning from Shakespeare to the North Carolina soil, from the leaf of the page to the leaf of the branch. A student interested in literature, history, new instructional technologies, or collective learning—each had a window into a way of conceptualizing this labor, before engaging in the labor itself, and they continued to ask questions about the panel participants long after the day was over.

But on the day, we got back to work, eyes on screens and fingers on keys, not just watching and interpreting but creating. I would like to think that what may have seemed esoteric to my students became immediate and concrete at the transcribathon, that I helped them cross theory and action, the warp and weft of all valuable labor. At the end of the term, I asked my students what the most interesting aspect of the course was, and a few said the transcribathon.