1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910797810303321

Autore

Wall Wendy <1961->

Titolo

Recipes for thought : knowledge and taste in the early modern English kitchen / / Wendy Wall

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania : , : University of Pennsylvania Press, , 2016

©2016

ISBN

0-8122-9195-6

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (327 p.)

Collana

Material texts

Disciplina

641.509

Soggetti

Food writing - England - History - 16th century

Food writing - England - History - 17th century

Cooking, English - History - 16th century

Cooking, English - History - 17th century

Formulas, recipes, etc - England - History - 16th century

Formulas, recipes, etc - England - History - 17th century

Medicine - History

Knowledge, Sociology of - History

Renaissance - England

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Preface. The Appetizer -- Introduction. The Order of Serving -- Chapter 1. Taste Acts -- Chapter 2. Pleasure: Kitchen Conceits in Print -- Chapter 3. Literacies: Handwriting and Handiwork -- Chapter 4. Temporalities: Preservation, Seasoning, and Memorialization -- Chapter 5. Knowledge: Recipes and Experimental Cultures -- Coda -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index -- Acknowledgments

Sommario/riassunto

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.