Episode 33: What recipes tell us about women's knowledge and lives
Your browser doesn't support HTML5 audio
Episode 33: What recipes tell us about women's knowledge and lives
Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg
Producer: Leila McNeill
Music: Falling asleep under a million stars by Springtide
Rate. Review. Subscribe.
In this episode, the hosts dive into the history of recipes, or receipts, and chat about what historical recipes can tell us about women’s knowledge and lives in the past.
Show notes
Some Notes on Papyrus Ebers, Ancient Egyptian Treatments of Migraine, and a Crocodile on the Patient’s Head by Lutz Popko
Recipe/Receipt from Merriam-Webster
“A choice manual of rare and select secrets in physick and chyrurgery” by Elizabeth Grey, the Countess of Kent
“Bear Fetish in Early Modern England: Sex, Gender, and Registers of Value” by Mark Albert Johnston
Making Medicines in the Early Modern Household by Elaine Leong
The Way to a Man’s Heart: Gender Roles, Domestic Ideology, and Cookbooks in the 1950s by Jessamyn Neuhaus
Transcript
Transcription by Julia Pass
Anna: Oh, my God. This podcast does not make any medical claims or offer any medical advice of any kind.
Leila: Yeah. Don't eat gillyflowers.
Rebecca: Welcome to Episode 33 of the Lady Science Podcast. This podcast is a monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science. With you every month are the editors of Lady Science magazine.
Anna: I'm Anna Reser, co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Lady Science.
Leila: I'm Leila McNeill, the other founder and editor in chief of Lady Science.
Rebecca: And I'm Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor.
Anna: This month we've been thinking a lot about recipes. No doubt many of us are cooking more than ever, leaning on old standbys from Grandma's recipe box and trying new things from glossy food magazines or the pages of cheerful recipe blogs. So today we're going to look into the history of recipes, but not just the culinary kind.
Anna: In the history of science, recipes can be an invaluable source for learning about everything from medicine to alchemy. But recipes are kind of a tricky source to work with sometimes, as we'll see, and I think it's worth thinking about the different ways recipes have functioned and changed over time.
Anna: So obviously this is a hugely broad topic, so I've tried to narrow it down. And I've chosen just a couple of things to focus on today. First, what do recipes tell us about how women created and circulated knowledge, especially in the early modern period? Women were not the only ones writing and using recipes, of course, but in times and places where women are not well represented in what we might term elite scientific and literary circles, recipes are a really important form of writing and knowledge creation that women had access to.
Anna: And so then the other part of this is that I am fascinated by the various ways you can use recipes as sources to talk about the past and the limits of how you can do that and how, recipes can kind of reshape the way we think about the past more generally.
Rebecca: But before we get into all that fun stuff, let's try some old-fashioned cooking. So to begin, I've become like Julia Child, but we're ancient cooking. To begin, let's sauté a quantity of lamb in fat, then add barley and vegetables, which need to simmer with the lamb in milk for a while. To serve, you should crumble up some barley cakes and top the stew with these and maybe some garnish.
Rebecca: So that's how you make Babylonian lamb stew according to a recipe on a 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet that Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid, a historian of ancient science, posted on Twitter recently. She said this recipe, along with a few others, were used as suggestions for using up all that extra quarantine bread you've been making. So we know that people have been writing down recipes for as long as they've been writing at all, and not just for food.
Rebecca: Much of the knowledge that we have about, say, ancient Egyptian medicine comes from papyri like the London Medical Papyrus and the Ebers Papyrus, which contain instructions and materials for making remedies from everything from the pain of childbirth to complaints of the eyes and skin. Many of these medicines involved some kind of magic spell. So for example, there was a recipe for, quote, "pain in half of the head," which scholars suspect refers to what we might now call migraines. And this recipe involves creating a small sculpture of a crocodile out of clay, perhaps with grains in its mouth, and binding it to the head of the patient with linen inscribed with the names of the gods. Which, frankly, given the fact that we still don't really know what the best way to remedy migraines is, sure, why not?
Leila: Yeah. Let's just give it a shot.
Anna: I'm gonna try it next time.
Rebecca: Yeah. Try it. Literally science has not figured this out yet.
Anna: And, I mean, then if nothing happens, you still have a cool little crocodile friend.
Rebecca: It's true. I just really imagine a cute little crocodile statue.
Rebecca: Anyway, what is a recipe, though? The ancient Babylonians obviously would not have recognized the word we use now to describe the set of instructions for lamb stew. The familiar understanding of what a recipe is comes from the early modern period around the 1500s or 1600s. And what we now call recipes used to be called receipts, and books of recipes were commonly called books of receipts. This is because "recipe" and "receipt" both come from the same Latin word "recipere," which means "to receive or take."
Leila: And the use of the word "receipt" instead of "recipe" persisted well into the 20th century. You can find lots of examples of cookbooks using "receipts" in places like eBay, where we found some from the 1980s to even later. And so while many scholars use the term "recipe" in their published research about these sources, if you're doing a deep dive on recipes of the past, make sure you also use "receipt" in your search terms as well.
Leila: And recipes are a really broad category of texts, and you can find them almost anywhere in the world and in any time period. They can be formalized documents such as methods for making reproducible materials like medicines and pigments or industrial processes, or they can be quotidian and informal that are passed between family and neighbors. And they may cover everything from laundry to sore throats.
Leila: Culinary recipes have always been a big part of the domestic lives of women in cultures where women are most often tasked with preparing food. And from the stews of the Babylonians to the Jell-O molds of your grandmothers, there are plenty of extant sources out there to work with.
Leila: But recipes and receipts, particularly in the early modern period, were merely sets of instructions, and they covered not only the preparation of foods but also the compounding of medicines; methods for making wondrous alchemical substances, soaps, and other substances for washing and cleaning; and for brewing beer or making liqueurs.
Leila: With the advent of printing, these became among the most widely made and used type of texts in the early modern world. And they are of special interest to us because women were as likely or even more likely to have access to and use these kinds of texts to create and codify knowledge both in public and in private.
Anna: So one very famous early modern recipe book which you can view in several places online was called A choice manual, or Rare and select secrets in physick and chyrurgery compiled by the Countess of Kent, Elizabeth Grey. And this book contains both medical and culinary recipes, and the medical section covers just about everything you could think of, from consumption to melancholy to shrunken sinews—which sounds very bad; I don't know what that is—to how to treat the bite of a mad dog.
Anna: And so among the recipes for food, in the other section, you can find information on preserving things like stone fruits and citrus, which you can do by boiling them with sugar to make jams or cooking in them in sugar and drying them out in the oven or storing them in egg white syrups, which I have no idea what that ends up tasting like.
Anna: So these types of books were incredibly common and popular, and many of them were written by women. Books of receipts like the countess's Select Secrets were a hugely important way that women participated in the creation and circulation of knowledge in the early modern period. The popularity of these books in the marketplace also tells us that what we might think of as intimate domestic knowledge—making medicine for your family or your family recipes—that kind of knowledge was actually itself an economic product in the trade in recipe books and part of the larger commercial exchange of knowledge in the period.
Rebecca: Historian Elaine Leong has written about how recipes show knowledge being created and shared in the early modern world. She's also observed that the everyday practices of creating, testing, revising, and distributing recipes can give us a sense of how important the culture of making things was during this time period.
Rebecca: One person that Leong writes about is a 17th-century widow named Elizabeth Freke, who left behind a notebook containing recipes, remembrances, household inventories, and reading notes from her study of popular medical texts. In Freke's notebook Leong found lists of medicine that challenged older assumptions about women's medical practice being entirely a domestic affair. As another historian, Mary Fissell, commented on Leong's study, quote, "We can no longer assume that women merely plucked herbs from the garden and made simple domestic remedies in their kitchens, in some way insulated from the larger concerns of the market." Surprise. Women live in the world.
Anna: I don't believe you.
Rebecca: They interact with other human beings, some of them outside the walls of their homes.
Anna: Not anymore.
Rebecca: Some of them even men. I mean, no. The good old days of the 17th century, when we could go outside.
Leila: Hey, look, we're reviving the long 19th-century walk through the sad, quiet moor now, though.
Rebecca: We're talking lots of turns around the room.
Rebecca: Anyway, Leong's study required a pretty cool bit of historical sleuthing, my jokes aside. She compared the lists of medicines in the notebook along the household inventories to Freke's recipes and determined which medicines she regularly concocted and in what quantities. Can I say this is the kind of historical research that I both love and know I could never, ever do because I have no patience? I read these kinds of things, and I'm like, "Oh, my God, your brain works differently than mine." Which is great.
Rebecca: Anyway, many of the things that Freke made herself from family recipes, but she also used recipes and information that she found in popular medical books and pharmacopoeia. So here's an excerpt from Leong's description of these notebooks that really shows how Freke was gathering recipes from different sources and even crediting where she got them. Here we go. "Elizabeth made up batches of 'pallsey water' from her grandmother's recipe, syrup of saffron from a recipe attributed to her sister Frances Norton, and a variety of other recipes including 'hot surfett water,' ague water, 'aqua mirabolus,' 'eliza sallutas,' syrup of turnips, oppy water, 'red strek cider,' white mead, and cowslip wine. The final match—cowslip wine—was given to Freke by Mr. Smith of Winch, a cleric who provided medical care for her and her husband on several occasions." End quote.
Leila: Syrup of turnips sounds disgusting.
Rebecca: It sounds terrible.
Anna: I'd try it.
Leila: I mean, yeah, I would try any of these things, but just the once, probably.
Anna: Yeah, but a fresh-made batch, not a bottle of turnip syrup they excavated from the remains of Freke's house or something.
Leila: Like that dude on Antique Roadshow or whatever that drank that witch's bottle that he thought was an old bottle of port.
Rebecca: Oh, no. Didn't it have pee in it?
Leila: And it had urine in it.
Rebecca: Oh, no. Yeah. I mean, seriously, when in doubt, a historical bottle, it has either urine or mercury in it. Don't drink it.
Leila: Yeah, man.
Anna: Don't drink the forbidden turnip syrup.
Rebecca: All of these things probably had opiates in them as well, let's not forget.
Leila: Many of the recipes that household medicine makers used required pre-prepared ingredients like distilled waters of herbs that would have been purchased. According to one contemporary writer, you could do this at home, but if you didn't, quote, "have the convenience of distilling them, you may buy them from the apothecaries at a shilling a pint." Ina Garten approved.
Anna: If you don't have access to homemade turnip syrup, store-bought is fine.
Rebecca: Yeah. It is amazing how that is literally passed down through recipes to the modern day, where people are like, "You should really make this yourself, but store-bought is fine."
Anna: It's fine, but I'm judging you from the deep, dusty annals of time, just so you know.
Leila: Freke was plugged into her local commercial and social networks of medical knowledge in ways that show she was doing something much more than just picking herbs. And making these medicines was not always simple. The combination of pre-processed and homemade ingredients meant market trips, and the recipes themselves were often complex and time-consuming.
Leila: For Freke's saffron syrup, for example, quote, "One first steeps saffron in aniseed water for 20 days, shaking the stopped bottle once a day. One then adds additional ingredients, boils the liquid into a syrup, strains the syrup, and simmers this final syrup for a while. The product is finally left to cool in a silver basin before being bottled." End quote.
Leila: So this requires a lot of complex knowledge and skills and time and patience. Freke and other household medicine makers did not only make medicines for their families but often for neighbors and community members.
Leila: And medicine preparation was often an important part of the charity work women engaged in. This reminds me of our discussion about Lydia Pinkham, who was compounding her own medicines, and I think kind of speaks to this idea that women weren't just doing this within their homes and passing it to their families and neighbors, but plugged into some larger economic trend and force that was going on, too.
Anna: Yeah. I love the idea that somehow women who are living in cities and towns that we know in this period have a certain economy and a certain robust social life, that women who lived in these towns couldn't possibly be participating in all that, that they're somehow just cloistered in their house with their little garden picking their herbs and there's just no way that they're important participants in the larger market for these products.
Rebecca: This is one of those things that I 100% blame the Victorians for. The things I blame the Victorians for is a very long list. I mean, but there is this whole idea that I feel like I then have to explain to various people and I yell about a lot to people I know who really don't care about women's roles before the Victorian period and even during the Victorian period, but there's this moment where there's the angel of the house, and the idea of women being delicate and inside becomes at least the ideal. And you have to be like, "No, that wasn't the ideal before 1850."
Rebecca: The idea of women being out and about and makin' stuff and talkin' to the apothecary was not crazy and immoral, but we get so stuck on this idea that what good women did was based on this Victorian idea. Even historians at certain point had to relearn like, "Oh, right, things were different before that. Women had different positions in the world."
Leila: Yeah. And this modern idea or modern iteration of a housewife is a Victorian phenomena. Before that, especially before industrial capitalism and stuff like that, when you had a clearer separation of public and private life, women were not just confined to their homes in this angel of the house, domestic goddess type of way, that it was a very different way of caring for a home than what we associate with the 19th and 20th century.
Anna: Yeah, and that idea that there's these gradated steps of the way the historiography evolves about that stuff so that like, "Even if women are making medicine or buying it from the apothecary, then they're only using it to treat their own family." But that presumes still some of these vestiges of women being confined to home and family life and not being involved with their larger community in any way.
Anna: We have plenty of evidence that women were doing that and were speaking to their neighbors and going around and helping each other. And it's excruciating how long it seems to—we had to go one tiny step at a time toward excavating our way through this Victorian idea back to something that is—it's not even we're rediscovering it or anything. It's there in the sources. People just applied their assumptions to it so we didn't have to talk about it, I guess.
Leila: Yeah. And another area where we see women being tapped into their community in a way that deals with recipes and stuff is the brewing of beer and how that was largely a female enterprise for a very long time and in lots of different places around the world until it started to make too much money. How they were just a little too tapped into the economic market, I guess. And men took over from there. But I think that there's just all of these different ways that women were plugged into a larger community, and we've just had a large cultural amnesia about the ways women have participated in all aspects of life.
Rebecca: It's just that, frankly, life was hard, and it was all hands on deck. I feel like that's just part of it, is that life was weird and messy and interconnected, and we didn't have, for better and worse, lots of luxuries. And everyone had to try hard to make sure that you survived because it was hard.
Rebecca: And it's also worth saying that in the 19th-century angel of the house and the 20th-century domestic housewife were also very plugged in, but it was overlaid with this assumption that they were supposed to pretend that wasn't the case. And what makes this period different is that my sense is that that overlaid assumption wasn't there yet. And so it's very obvious in the text, as you say. Yeah.
Anna: So Freke and other household medicine makers were just one category of recipe users. And because of how widespread recipes were and are and how varied their uses are, there are lots of other directions you might take the study of receipts. And I mean lots.
Anna: So one that I found particularly fascinating and one that it's one of those things where I read it and I was like, "Of course. Of course you could do that" is what recipes can tell us about the history of the senses. So obviously studying culinary recipes can tell us about what people in the past thought was tasty, but we can also study other kinds of recipes to learn about how people sensed their world. So recipes for cleaning products like wash balls can tell us about how people smelled the world and what they thought were good or clean smells.
Anna: In Susan North's book Sweet and Clean?: Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England, she writes about how reading recipes for soaps used to clean clothes can tell us something about what early modern people thought clean smelled like, which is one of those things that we all know intuitively what clean smells like, but why do we think Tide or whatever smells clean? There is a whole cultural history of that. I don't know. I got so excited.
Anna: So if you scoop some clothes up off the floor for the smell test in the early modern period and they smelled like cloves, camphor, or musk, which were all things commonly added to laundry soap, then they were probably clean. And then as now, if they smelled like BO, they probably were not clean. So recipes can also tell us things like people's personal grooming habits and what was considered attractive and healthy.
Anna: So in a culture that was very concerned about the way that odors might contribute to disease—I believe we've talked about that before—English hairdressers in the early modern period made and sold various kinds of scented oils for men's beards that you would just mush in there, and then the bad disease vapor couldn't get into your nose, I guess. So one commenter recommended that medical students should use these products because having a perfumed beard was said to, quote, "greatly comfort the brain and relieve the senses." And I don't have a beard to oil, but, boy, I would love to have my brain comforted right now. That sounds great.
Rebecca: That does sound great. Yeah. Early in pandemic times I bought a buncha candles, and my wife was like, "What do you think you're doing? Do you think getting the bad odors will save you?" And I'm like, "Shut up." I was cooking a pizza the other night and had a vanilla candle going, and I swear I thought for a second that I was making cake, and I was super confused. Anyway, I'll stop with my tangent.
Leila: What's going on over there, Rebecca?
Anna: You doin' okay?
Leila: It's gettin' weird in quarantine.
Rebecca: It's gettin' weird. It's gettin' weird.
Rebecca: Anyway, recipes can be tricky sources, however. We've talked about food, technology, and women's labor in the magazine and on the podcast before, and one thing we always try to keep in mind is that recipes can only tell us what the recipe itself said to do, not what the user of the recipe actually did. Jessamyn Neuhaus makes this point in her work on 1950s cookbooks, noting that people definitely resisted the ways prescriptive literature like recipes told them to behave. And it's worth trying to recover that resistance.
Rebecca: And it's also useful to look at the prescriptive literature on its face for what it can tell us about the creation of norms. And this is complicated when we bring gender into the equation. Isn't it always? If we prattle on about what our sources say housewives were supposed to do at any given time using recipes or any other prescriptive sources, aren't we just reinforcing the gender norms created by those texts? What about the men who didn't put sweet-smelling oil in their beards?
Leila: Is that the equivalent of a man not wearing a mask right now, not putting your beard oil in to prevent disease?
Rebecca: Yeah, maybe. But were they bucking a gendered fashion or a public health recommendation? Yeah. Or were they just allergic to cloves?
Anna: I'm sure some of them probably just liked their stinky beards.
Rebecca: Yeah. They probably thought it smelled good. They probably hated cloves or whatever.
Leila: I would imagine that these recipes can tell us a lot also about grooming habits and stuff like that but also fashion as well, like looking at recipes for different dyes and things like that. That's also really interesting, which would be a very regional type of study, what was available and used for pigments and dyes in some areas but not in others and how that changes over time as well.
Anna: I was thinking about this the other day in a contemporary context because for some reason I keep getting advertisements for this paint startup that is making house paint in cool, trendy colors, but there's something special about it where it is eco-friendly or something. I don't know how eco-friendly you can make latex house paint, but that it doesn't like outgas or something like that. That they have a particular formula, not only for the colors that they have that are exclusive. And I'll see if I can find a great article in The New Yorker about very expensive bespoke paint companies and how they come up with their paint recipes and protect them and stuff.
Anna: But just like what you're saying, Leila, about fashion. So the décor of a certain time and place and what kinds of pigments were available to paint your house and if you have a lapis lazuli pigment that's very expensive, then your whole palace is blue because that's how you show off that you're very expensive. But then also what kind of binders are available to make paint out of? I don't know.
Anna: Jessamyn Neuhaus's study of these cookbooks. We've talked about it before. Basically what she says is she studies all of these cookbooks that we love that have the hot dog crown roast and all these sculpted congealed salads and this very elaborate food. The cookbooks say you're supposed to do all of this to impress your family and your dinner party guests or whatever.
Anna: And basically her point is, yeah, the cookbook says you're supposed to do it, but the cookbook's written by the Jell-O company and is trying to sell you on the idea of making a elaborate Jell-O sculpture for your dinner party. And plenty of people just did not care about that and didn't do it. And there were some people who would have been horrified by the idea of making a hot dog crown roast and would never do such a thing. So just thinking through the larger context of the recipe and who's using it and why and whether they're using it as directed or not.
Anna: The other example that I had from my own research—and I just really wanna mention this book because I love it—is I found a cookbook assembled by the Sisters of the Temple Beth Israel in Houston, who were all Jewish women who were married to or worked themselves at NASA in the '60s. And so they made this really amazing space-themed community cookbook.
Anna: And it's really great. They had it bound in hardcover. It's not one of those coil-bound community cookbooks that I have a bunch of. It's really professionally done. They hired an illustrator to do all of these interstitial things for the sections.
Anna: That kind of source, not only did that tell me there's a community of Jewish women in Houston who are connected with NASA who attend this temple, there's a picture of the temple on the back of the cookbook. There's this illustrator who I could look up who may have been working on other space-related projects if they lived in Houston. That might be an interesting lead.
Anna: And then even before you get into the recipes themselves, the names of the people who contributed them are in the book, so you could use that to look up people who were in this community that I'm studying. And then you can also look at the content of the recipes themselves, the drawings. It's a whole huge, dense knot of different leads and threads that you could follow.
Anna: And one of the things I like about cookbooks in that sense as nodes or starting points or sources is that generally you're starting with women, either what women are supposed to do or a group of women or gendered activities themselves. So it's just, for me, a good place to dive into something.
Rebecca: Yeah. One of the bits that we talked about earlier that I love that I think speaks to this is the fact that in Elaine Leong's work, she's talking about also the fact that there are these recipes, but then there are the people that the women got the recipes from. And so in these recipe books, networks are named. And even you think about in printed recipe books the way that you leave marginalia and sometimes you say even like, "This is how Mom did it" or whatever. Or even today.
Rebecca: And just because recipes are and continue to be, I think, yeah, they have these personal and intimate things. The fact that community cookbooks have been a part of so many different social movements, whether political or just a community of people who are maybe otherwise marginalized in other parts of how they move through the world says something about the idea of recipes as, yeah, a place for nodes to go off of. Yeah. That's super cool. That sounds amazing, that cookbook.
Anna: Yeah. Maybe I will take some pictures, and we can dump 'em in the bottom of the show notes. I just always wanna show people because the illustrations are extremely cute.
Anna: So the study of recipes, as I think we have covered, is its own subspecialty among historians of science, medicine, and knowledge. And so there are a lot of excellent resources on this and really good, engaging, interesting books like the one about clean smells. And so I'll put some reading recommendations as well in the show notes.
Anna: I did wanna flag up just a couple of cool online resources in particular if you're interested in this. The Recipes Project was put together by a group of scholars who work on these sources, and it's basically a collective blog, but it's really cleverly organized into these thematic series that really give you an idea of how far recipes can take you in learning about the past. So that covers all kinds of things, from art technology—like we talked about recipes for pigments and paints, things like that—to a whole section on Russian recipes. There is a series on the relationship between recipes and temperature and measuring temperature. So that's something to look into if any of this is interesting to you.
Anna: And then more reading recommendations in the show notes. So to wrap up, I think we will leave you all with the Countess of Kent's tried and true remedy for melancholy in the hopes that it and this podcast might cheer you up just a little bit in these frankly wild times. So "Take one spoonful of Gillifloures, the weight of seven Barlie corns of Beverstone, bruise it as fine as flour, and so put it into two spoonfuls of Sirrup of Gillifloures and take it four hours after supper or else four hours after dinner. This will cheer the heart."
Leila: What are gillyflowers?
Anna: I have no idea.
Rebecca: Yeah. I don't know what any of those things are.
Anna: Probably something you shouldn't eat. I mean, there's a lot of serious—
Leila: A lotta stuff in these old recipes that you probably should not consume or put on your person.
Rebecca: Gillyflowers.
Anna: Lots of mercury. Like a lot of mercury.
Rebecca: So I asked the internet. A gillyflower is a carnation.
Anna: Oh. Aren't carnations poisonous?
Rebecca: I think they are.
Anna: Oh, no. Don't do this. I just liked the part that said "This will cheer your heart" at the end, okay? I was just trying to be nice.
Rebecca: Now we're gonna get people poisoned. Don't eat carnations.
Leila: Anyway, if you liked this episode today, leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts so that new listeners can find us. Questions about any of the segments today? Tweet us at @ladyxscience or #LadySciPod. For show notes and episode transcripts, visit ladyscience.com.
Leila: We are an independent magazine, and we depend on the support from our readers and listeners. You can support us through a monthly donation with Patreon or through one-time donations. Just visit ladyscience.com/donate. And until next time, you can find us on Facebook at @ladysciencemag and on Twitter and Instagram at @ladyxscience.
Leila: We did it.