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Not Just the Tudors
How to Run a Stuart Household
00:35:48
How women collected and shared their knowledge through their recipe books
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own on Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, Brilliant Rivals, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:29]
Ryan Reynolds
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone Paying Big Wireless Way Too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.
- [00:51]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
Of 45 for 3 month plan equivalent to 15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms at MintMob.
- [01:02]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the tudors. In the 16th and 17th centuries, recipe or receipt books were far more than manuals of food preparation, though they were also that. They were collections of knowledge, from beautifying potions to remedies for illness and pain relief, from conduct guides to experiments with herbal medicines with their roots in medieval books of secrets. Writers and compilers of these all purpose guides group together instructions for domestic cooking, the art of distillation, health elixirs and sugar craft, as well as laundry notes and techniques of starching. They document changing habits, innovation and adaptation in times of scarcity, and the influence of the emerging spice trade. Today we'll be talking about Margaret Baker. One of her receipt books from around 1675, now at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. includes a preservative against the plague, a medicine for one that cannot hold their water in their sleep, a plaster for a canker in a woman's breast. But others of her recipes are for culinary creations or cosmetic purposes, and some are for more than one thing. It contains, for example, a medicinal recipe for weakness of the back, which calls for bread, egg yolk, cinnamon and nutmeg, a spiced eggy bread or French toast if you will, to be eaten first thing in the morning. It sounds delicious, but in humoral theory, it was also efficacious. Cinnamon and nutmeg might help disperse phlegm, which was thought to have accumulated in the back of the body overnight. I'm delighted to be joined today by Dr. Kimberly Connor, a historical archaeologist and food historian, to discuss her work on the life and recipe books of Margaret Baker. Currently part of the Market Street Chinatown Project at the Stanford Archaeology Centre of Stanford University, Dr. Connor has written extensively on the social and cultural contexts of food and dining. Her work on Margaret Baker charts the ways in which women, both literate and illiterate, have historically collected and shared ideas and the ways in which female identity has been shaped within the home. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb and you are listening to not just the Tudors from history hit. Dr. Connor, thank you so much for joining me.
- [03:47]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
It's a pleasure to be here.
- [03:49]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Could you introduce us to Margaret Baker and also how you came to research her and her recipe or receipt books?
- [03:56]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
I think it's easiest to start with the way that I met Margaret Baker, which was as part of a transcribeathon through the Early Modern Recipe online collective. And a transcribe a thon is an event where members of the public can join in with scholars and with students to write out the recipes that are in these recipe books and to get an idea of what's actually involved in the process of doing research on them and to get to explore some of the really fun details that are in the books. And I was working through and looking at these recipes and they were really interesting, but I was very frustrated by the fact that we knew that Margaret Baker had written this book, but we didn't know who Margaret Baker was or anything more about her. And in fact there's not just one book, but there's three books. And so it's a really big collection of recipes by one woman in particular. People reference her recipes a lot and yet we didn't have any understanding of her context because we didn't know who she was. And so it began as just a side project for me because I was really annoyed at not knowing who she was. And I noticed along with many other people that inside these books there were a lot of references to the people that she had collected recipes from. And sometimes it showed her relationship. So she would talk about her aunt or her sister in law or her cousin Latice Corbett, who was a really important provider of 300 medical recipes. And I thought if I follow those relationships, I should be able to figure out who Margaret Baker is. And so I started building a tree and I started building a family tree from Lattice Corbett, who was actually born Lattice Knowles and who married John Corbett. We already knew that was the likely link for this book for Margaret Baker. So I just started building out the family tree. And it took hours and hours, but eventually I found the connection to a Margaret Baker who fit and who fit the timeline that we knew worked for these books.
- [05:59]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, it's a wonderful piece of historical investigative work. What does it tell us in the end about Margaret's education, her social status from learning of her family tree and her sources?
- [06:13]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
On the one hand, it doesn't tell us as much as I would have hoped. I wasn't able to find any evidence about when she was born, for example, or when she died. But it did help me in understanding the kind of world that she grew up in. We know that her siblings were baptized around 1603 and 1607, so she was probably born in the early 17th century. And her parents were Sir Richard Baker and Margaret Main Waring. And Sir Richard Baker is really interesting. He was a very well known figure at the time. He held several positions in the government and he was High Sheriff of Oxfordshire. But he's particularly well known for his writings and he wrote religious texts and he translated religious texts. And he produced a book that was a history of England called the Chronicle of the Kings of England. It's a really well known book because it was the major history of England for several centuries. But it also sometimes gets made fun of because it was a kind of last narrative history of England before they moved to a more source based way of writing history. And so from that we can infer that he probably provided an environment for Margaret to grow up in, that was literate, that was interested in the kind of historical and literary worlds of England at this time. We also know that Richard had traveled extensively to Europe and so it's quite possible that he had connections that Margaret would have been able to see and to use in terms of getting recipes from sources in other languages, but also through actual personal connections to the continent.
- [07:51]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's absolutely fascinating. So let's go back and talk a bit about recipe books generally. I've already intimated something of the answer here, but you've much more to say than I. How does a 17th century recipe book differ from a modern cookbook?
- [08:07]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
I guess it differs in two main ways. The first is in the kind of combination of recipes that you find in one of these books. They're not just culinary recipes, but there's also recipes for medicine for Household products, things like ink or starch, as well as sometimes you get veterinary recipes or other kinds of recipes that help a woman run an early modern household. And so it's a kind of compendium of all of the things that a woman might need to be able to make to run a household like that. The other way that it's really different is that we have a very set idea of what a recipe should look like. And it has a heading, and then it has a list of ingredients, and then it has a set of instructions that are in order of how you actually make the product. But early modern recipes don't look like that. The ingredients are combined with the instructions. And so as you go along, it will say, take 2 pounds of flour and add 2 pounds of sugar and then add a dash of rose water. So it's not organized for information in the same way that we're used to today.
- [09:12]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you mentioned that she had written three books. Are there differences in content between the three of them?
- [09:20]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
There are some differences between them, mostly in the proportion of medical recipes to culinary recipes. And that's largely because, as I mentioned, there's this really big collection of nearly 300 recipes that came from her cousin's cookbook, and those are all culinary recipes. Really. And so that means that the book that has that collection in it leans more heavily towards the medical recipes. But other than that, there's not really a system of organization that runs across the three books. There's not, for example, one book that is culinary and one book that is medical. The recipes are mixed in together. And so on the same page, you can have recipes for things like puddings next to salves or medicines.
- [10:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you said that this is an unusual amount of information from one woman, but presumably there are similar surviving texts from the period. How do they compare to Margaret's?
- [10:17]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
There are lots and lots of surviving texts that are similar. What's different about Margaret's is that they're all written in the same hand, so it's the same handwriting across all three books. There's about 400 recipes per book. So we're looking at a total collection of about 1200 recipes with only three recipes that are in a completely different later hand. So that is quite a large collection from one woman. We get collections of similar sizes, but in those cases, what's generally happened is that the book has been passed down through multiple generations of a family, so from mother to daughter, even to granddaughter, and that we see a more accumulation of the recipes over time. And that's what gives the collection, its size. So it's quite possible that Margaret also used recipes from an existing collection to start her collection. Perhaps she copied recipes from her mother's receipt book or something similar. But altogether, the range of attributions and the way that she points to where recipes came from suggests that most of these recipes were collected during her lifetime.
- [11:30]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Okay, let's delve into these books a little bit. Let's come back to the culinary things and talk about some other things. First, we've got excerpts from medical texts detailing human dissections, experiments in alchemy, studies of mental illness. How wide ranging were Margaret's interests?
- [11:49]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
Most of it is pretty standard for one of these types of books, and I think it's useful to think of them as a way of training young women to be able to run a household. And so it's the kind of thing that a woman might do as part of her training to be a married woman who will be expected to run a household of dozens, maybe even hundreds of people, and who will have to take care of them. Maybe not doing all of the cooking directly herself, but certainly managing the process of feeding all of those people. And what we see is largely those kinds of recipes that Margaret will need. Where it does start to suggest maybe something about her personal interests is in the depth of the medical writing that she's interested in, in the recipe book, alongside some of the recipes she's copied, sect and extracted them from medical texts at the time. Like you said, she mentions experimental work as well as human dissections. And that is quite unusual. What's really interesting to me about that is that when you look at Lettice Corbett's will, she also seems to have an interest in these kinds of medical practices, and she bequeaths her surgeon's instruments to one of her goddaughters. And so there seems maybe to be a sympathetic interest between the two women who are related also by marriage.
- [13:16]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So what other kinds of recipes and treatments does it contain or do they contain for illnesses and ailments?
- [13:24]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
It's very wide ranging. One of my favorites is a recipe for a salve, which contains tobacco, which at this point was still a relatively new product that had come into Europe. But what's particularly interesting is that this salve is supposed to help with the wounds from poisoned arrows, which probably wasn't something that Margaret actually had to treat in her medical practice, but she obviously wanted to be really prepared and have the recipe there if she needed it.
- [13:52]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's fascinating because that sounds like it's come from Native American knowledge, if we're talking about poisoned arrows and tobacco.
- [14:01]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
And it had come certainly from a published source. So this is one of those other things that's really interesting about recipe books, is that as well as collecting recipes from people that they actually knew, these women are taking recipes from printed recipe books. And so when they're able to access them, they could take the parts that they were interested in and add it to their collection. What we don't know is how directly someone like Margaret Baker was able to do that. So did she have access to this book, or was it that one more step removed where she had access to someone else's recipe collection, which had taken recipes from a published book?
- [14:39]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And we've also got a number of beauty treatments, recipes to keep the face smooth and to whiten the hands, to stop hair falling and grow thick. What can we learn from the range of subjects covered about how to care for one's appearance?
- [14:55]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
It speaks a lot to the role of a woman in this time period, of the kinds of things that she was expected to do and to be. So alongside having all of this knowledge and expertise about how to run a household, how to heal people, how to feed a household, she also was expected to uphold certain standards of not just personal cleanliness, because you get recipes for things like soap, but also of beauty and trying to present herself in a very attractive way.
- [15:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, let us talk then a little bit about the culinary recipes, because you've reproduced many of them yourself, haven't you? How did the process of doing that alter your understanding?
- [15:33]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
I've made a couple of the recipes and I'm still making some more. I actually made some wafers this week, which are a kind of crisp rolled biscuit, which are flavored with rose water and nutmeg and mace, and they were really delicious. And I think that was what I've been surprised by in some ways, is that everything I've made from Margaret Baker's recipes has tasted really good. And it's not always the case that the recipes actually work or that they are appealing to a modern palette. But in this case, it's given me this really profound new appreciation for Margaret Baker, because I can see that she knew how to cook and she knew what she was doing, and I trust her recipes are going to work for me.
- [16:16]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So what kinds of meals does she collect in her books?
- [16:20]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
It's not necessarily that she collects meals. She collects individual dishes, maybe that she's had somewhere else or that she's interested in. And often there's lots and lots of recipes for the same type of dish. So for something like a fruitcake, she has lots of recipes, and sometimes she's annotated on the side. She says this is the one that's best, which is a really nice little insight into her taste and her preferences. We have a kind of range of food products, but a lot of what's missing is the kind of basic foods that you might expect an early modern household to be relying on very heavily and to be eating every day. So we don't have recipes, for example, for staples like bread, or even a lot of recipes for pottages and soups and stews. That really seems to have been the domain of the cooks and the chefs in the house, whereas someone like Margaret Baker was responsible for. For doing a lot of the preserving. So we have a lot of recipes for keeping foods, and especially fruits and vegetables throughout the year, but we also have a lot of recipes for baked goods and confectionery, things that were required a lot of skill to make, and that also contained a lot of the really expensive ingredients, especially those imported spices and things that she wanted to have maybe more control over in the household.
- [17:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I suppose there could be two ways of reading that evidence. One is what you've just suggested, which is about the role of the woman or the lady of the house or whatever in an early modern household. I suppose the other could be that the recipes for basic things don't need to be passed down in writing because they're passed down orally. People know how to do them. It's only the more complicated things that need to be noted.
- [17:59]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
That's definitely true. We do have recipes for things like roast meat meats, for example, but again, it could go either way in that the meat being both relatively expensive and also laden with a lot of social meaning about being British, for example, and about masculine abilities for hunting and virility. It could be that because of those aspects to the meat, we are seeing the meat recipes included. But it could also be that these are more complicated variations of what would normally be cooked. And so that was why they were worth noting down. So it really could go either way.
- [18:37]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And so because of the sort of things that are being included, do we see anything specifically seasonal about them, or is that not quite so much the case?
- [18:47]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
I think that is probably something that the reader was supposed to know and to bring to the text, because there's not really an organization, there's not even an index to the recipes. You really had to know what you were looking for and to go in and find it. So there's not really a way of finding recipes that, for example, would be seasonally relevant.
- [19:21]
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- [19:43]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
Of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com ever wondered what it feels like to be a gladiator facing a roaring crowd and potential death in the Colosseum? Find out on the Ancients Podcast from History Hit twice a week. Join me Tristan Hughes as I hear exciting new research about people living thousands of years ago, from the Babylonians to the Celts to the Romans, and visit the ancient sites which reveal who and just how amazing our distant ancestors were. That's the Ancients from History hit.
- [20:29]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And in terms of more broader context, we've got the 17th century as a time of increasing foreign trade and where ingredients like sugar have become much more popular. But sugar obviously connects with ideas of colonization and exploitation. What can we learn about broader social and geopolitical context? I suppose from something like a recipe.
- [20:54]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
Book, it's really interesting because sugar is very heavily used in these recipes, sometimes up to five pounds in a single recipe. So there's a recipe for hippocras, which is a type of spiced mulled wine that uses very large amounts of sugar. And by this point, the use of sugar seems to be really well embedded in the kind of social class that Margaret Baker comes from. What's interesting then is thinking about some of the other products from that kind of Colombian exchange, because we don't have, for example, chocolate, we don't have vanilla, we don't have corn, there's no tomatoes. So a lot of those products that we think of as really central to the Colombian exchange are just not found in this cookbook. But we do have quite a few products that are relatively new and are mostly used in medical preparations. So we have things like guaiacum, which is a type of bark that's used. There's sarsaparilla, we have the china root, which is a type of bush or shrub that was used specifically for treating syphilis. And these products are found often in combination in Margaret Baker's recipes And Sarah Panel has suggested that because of the kind of novelty of these medical products, that they may have actually been adopted earlier than some of the food products, which tended to be a little bit more conservative, that were slower to change and slower to be introduced into the diets of most people in Europe. And that seems to be exactly what we're seeing here, that there's an increased use of the products of colonization in the medicines, but not necessarily yet in the food.
- [22:37]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That is fascinating. And can we also read into these recipes, pressing at the limits perhaps of what we can do with them, but how women might adapt in times of scarcity? I mean, you talked about preserving and making provision for times when the fruit is not hanging on the trees. What about periods of economic hardship, for example?
- [22:59]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
I'm not sure if we can get at periods of scarcity in terms of seasonal crop failures or anything like that. But what's really interesting to think about is that these books are being produced during the period of the Civil War and the interregnum. And there has been a really big push from some historians to start thinking about the way that social unrest and the slowdown in court life would have affected the production of these recipe books. And they've suggested that there's an intensification of the importance of the domestic in this time period and that people begin to rely more heavily on their personal networks, which is what we're really seeing in these recipe books. We're seeing both the products of personal networks where people are exchanging recipes as well as ingredients, but we're also seeing people building those networks so that when things that are more complex, more important, more politically sensitive come up, they already have these relationships where people are able to go to their networks and find the aid that they need.
- [23:59]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So we've talked about what's included in terms of ingredients to an extent, and what's not included. I was struck by the fact that some of the recipes have what look like fairly fantastical inclusions as well. The hoof of an elf is the one that comes to mind to cure convulsions. Is this a mistranslation or does it suggest a kind of interweaving of the supernatural in these recipes?
- [24:22]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
Probably not a mistranslation. And one of the recipes not in these cookbooks that first got me involved with Imrock was calling for the skull of a recently hanged man. So there's certainly the inclusion of these kinds of ingredients that probably also have a level of sympathetic magic involved in their workings. And I imagine that the difficulty of accessing these kinds of ingredients was part of the point, that it was supposed to make the recipe more efficacious and.
- [24:53]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
To work better, less opportunity for it to be tested.
- [24:56]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
That's probably also true. I wonder if the recipe that has the hoof of the elf has a little cross next to it, because that would tell us that Margaret Baker had tried it.
- [25:04]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Ah. So tell me a bit more about her annotations and marginalia.
- [25:09]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
It's interesting because often what you get is you have a professional scribe would write up a clean copy of a recipe book, and then the actual owner and users might produce annotations on the side. But Margaret Baker has done both herself. So she's written the original text, and then she's also as she's used these recipes, gone through and made little annotations. So sometimes she's crossed recipes out. She obviously didn't think they worked or they weren't as. As good as other recipes that she already had. But the most common type of annotation that we have is a little cross. And so that typically tells us that this is a recipe that she's tried and used. Sometimes it's also written in Latin, probatum est, which tells us that she's tried it. And generally, if she's done that, she thinks it's a pretty good recipe. The other kinds of annotations we get are corrections. So sometimes if a recipe was missing an ingredient or if one of the directions was unclear, she needed to go back in and add something that made the recipe more usable. And the really crucial thing for my research has been the annotations about where the recipes came from. Typically in the margins, she will put who the recipe was acquired from, whether that was Lady Anne Corbett or whether it was Thomas the Butler. Everyone's treated equally and put into the margins there to say where the recipe came from.
- [26:27]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And is that unusual? I mean, is that how you know that one of the recipes came from a published book, for example?
- [26:33]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
No. So the published books are generally not recognized in the text. And it's a matter of knowing what Margaret's voice sounds like enough to recognize that something sounds wrong. But sometimes there are hints. So, like when she talks about the wounds from poisoned arrows, that was a bit of a hint to me that I needed to go looking for, where is this source? Because it's probably not something original. The same is true. There's a couple of recipes with ingredients listed in Latin, for example, and that's a good sign that they've been taken from somewhere else. So then it Becomes a real rabbit hole of trying to trace where specific phrases came from. And can you identify the original source and hopefully also the original date of publication for that source?
- [27:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And was it normal for women to cite, if not published works, at least, you know, the contributor of a particular recipe? Does that happen in other recipe books as well?
- [27:34]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
It's very common and often shows it's done for both family relations and neighbors, but it's also done for kind of celebrities. So you think about if it's a recipe that is attributed to the king's doctor, then that adds at a certain cache, which then people want to write it down and use those recipes. What's maybe interesting about Margaret Baker is just the extent to which this is done and the fact that enough of the names were recognisable and could be linked with people in her family and had the relationship shown that I was able to track them down.
- [28:14]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
This is very interesting because you're suggesting that these are books that she used. She's annotated. I mean, my recipe books always end up with splashes of things on them.
- [28:23]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
And that's not uncommon either.
- [28:26]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
But there's also something about these being seen. So is there an indication that they were intended for publication or are they solely meant for personal use?
- [28:37]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
There's a little bit of both. Typically, the kind of book that Margaret Baker has kept was really for personal use and could be shared with other family members and especially passed down through generations. But there are other types of recipe books, especially where they have been written up by a scribe into a clean copy, which seem to be more like presentation copies, not necessarily for publication, but certainly more for display rather than use necessarily in the kitchen. There are published collections of manuscript recipes in this time period, and they are often, as you mentioned in the introduction, they're associated with this book of secrets. So the idea is that their secret collections of recipes that are being released to the public and the public suddenly have access into the private life of a celebrity or a nobleman who has this secret collection of recipes. So I'm thinking here of recipe books like the closet of Sir Kenom Digby opened, which has the recipes that were published by one of his servants after Sir Kenelm Digby's death. Those are certainly public, although it's unclear if someone like Sir Kenelm Digby would have wanted his secret papers to be made. But also they must have been curated in certain ways to produce a book like that, because often the recipes were kept as single sheets. They weren't necessarily a book. So they've been organized and curated by someone else for publication. That was also much more socially acceptable for a man than it was for a woman like Margaret Baker. And there was a real stigma against women publishing and women putting themselves forward and making their writing public. So it was more achievable for a man than for a woman.
- [30:39]
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- [30:57]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com.
- [31:16]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And so am I right to understand from what you're saying that perhaps we could see that these were maybe gifts to be given to the family or into the wider community?
- [31:27]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
I don't think that we have any examples of enough copies being made for them to be distributed as kind of gifts, but what we do see is that they're often very important within the family to the extent that they're listed in wills and that the sharing of the information in the book is described in the will. So a mother might say, for example, I want each of my children to have however long with the book to be able to copy out the recipes that they want. Lettice Corvette she bequeaths her recipe books to one goddaughter, but says that the books should go to a different goddaughter for a year first to be able to copy out any recipes that she wants before they finally move to their new home.
- [32:12]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So we're talking about presumably a relatively small strata of society where we have literacy amongst women. If we put this in context, more generally, social context, we have literacy as standard common for women of the period. So talk to me a bit about the social status of these texts and also how valuable you think texts like these were for the daily running of a household, given that most women couldn't read or write.
- [32:45]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
It's a complicated question, partly because the books that have survived and then provide us a lot of the evidence for women's literacy are mostly books from the highest levels of society and especially from the nobility. So we have books like Lady Fanshawe's Book of Recipes or Lady Sedley's Book of recipes. And that was part of what attracted me to Margaret Baker was that she didn't have a title. And so it was interesting to me to see if we could figure out who she was and what was happening at that kind of strata, which was really in the gentry. We do have evidence that recipe books were being created by people of a reasonably wide range, certainly down to yeoman farmers who could be collecting recipes. They're collected by both men and women as well. So it's not an exclusively female activity to create these recipe books. And it's a period of really expanding female literacy. These books are part of that process. They're often used as seemingly a way of practicing handwriting and spelling and even organization organizing, for example, recipes into alphabetical order. We get a lot of examples of people practicing their signatures and sometimes their handwriting. It may be that this was a standard part of a young woman's education, like creating a sampler to show that you had the skills in embroidery. This is how you show that you have the skills for actually running a household. In terms of everyday use. It's maybe not that they're being used by the cooks in the kitchen. They may have been used more as a way of a woman giving instructions about what she wanted to be cooked and so she could give those instructions orally to the cooks, even if they could not read themselves. But there's also a really interesting argument from Wendy Wall about a kind of kitchen literacy. That these recipes are part of a broader process that is hard to understand sometimes for us when we think of literacy as being either yes or no, that people are either literate or not, but that in fact, that there was probably a broader range of literacies at the time where people could write in some types of handwriting but not others, where some people could read but they couldn't write. And what's really interesting to me is that she talks about the ways that people were creating in food forms of letters that maybe they didn't make on paper. For example, there are these biscuits called jumbles, and they're often made into letters and words. And this, she argues, is actually a form of literacy that maybe we're not capturing in our more traditional understanding of what that means.
- [35:34]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Do you think then the books tell us about what was viewed as valuable knowledge?
- [35:41]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
I think that the time and effort that's taken to produce these books and the time and effort that's taken to really use these social networks to access the most up to date knowledge that people can to find recipes for illnesses that they haven't had yet, but that they might have in the future. There's a real sense that they're preparing just in case. And to me, that amount of effort really tells us that these books were valuable in and of themselves. And for most people, this is how they get medical treatment. For most people in England, they can't afford to go to a doctor, and they are really relying on the women around them to know what to do in these cases. And that, to me, says that these must have been really valuable in their communities.
- [36:31]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
This has been fascinating because you've given us insights into so many different aspects of 17th century life through the recipe books. So I guess I'd like to conclude by asking you about your work, discovering her life and her family background. How has it that helped you reframe these books as documents of social history?
- [36:54]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
I think there's a lot of people who've come before me who've really shown the value of these books for social history, for understanding women's lives, for understanding the everyday experience of people who often don't get captured in more official documents. What I'm really interested in is how we can expand that by looking at more and more of these recipe books. Because like I said, a lot of the recipe books that have been very well studied and well published are from the upper echelons of society. But there are hundreds, probably thousands of other recipe books in archives and collections around the world. And many of them either are completely anonymous or like Margaret Baker, they have a name, but we don't have any context to put with that. And so I think what I'm really excited about is the opportunity for us to dig into those recipe books and see what we can find out about what's happening at the gentry and in other parts of society and make full use of these really interesting sources.
- [37:53]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, Dr. Kimberly Connor, thank you so much for a really exciting and fascinating look at one particular set of sources and one particular woman. It's been wonderful.
- [38:06]
Dr. Kimberly Connor
Thank you very much.
- [38:08]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors and to my researcher, Alice Smith and my producer, Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susannah Lipscomb next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudors From History Hit.