Description
Book SynopsisIn the Kitchen insists that the preparation of food, whether imaginative, physical, or spatial, is central to a deeper understanding of early modern food cultures and practices. Devoted to the arts of cooking and medicine, early modern kitchens concentrated on producing, processing, and preserving materials necessary for nourishment and survival; yet they also fed social and economic networks and nurtured a sense of physical, spiritual, and political connection to surrounding lands and their cultures. The essays in this volume illuminate this expansive view of cooking and aspire to show how the kitchen's inner workings prove tightly, though often invisibly, interwoven with local, national, and, increasingly, global surroundings. Engaging with literary and historical methodologies, including close reading, recipe analysis, and perspectives on gender, class, race, and colonialism, we begin to develop a shared theoretical and practical language for the art of cooking that combines the physical with the intellectual, the local with the global, and the domestic with the political.
Table of ContentsNotes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
In the Kitchen (Madeline Bassnett and Hillary M. Nunn)
Section 1: Embodied Ecologies
Sympoeisis and Early Modern Cooking: Troubling the Boundaries of Human/Nonhuman (Jennifer Munroe)
Between Earth and Sky: The Cook as Environmental Mediator in
Paradise Lost (Madeline Bassnett)
Instinct and the Body of the Early Modern Cook (Katherine Walker)
Section 2: Bread, Cake, and Carp
Early Modern Leaven in Bread, Bodies, and Spirit (Margaret Simon)
Cake: An Early Modern Chronicle of Trade, Technology, and Exchange (Amy L. Tigner)
The Power of the Pot: Naturalizing Carp Through the Early Modern English Receipt Book (Rob Wakeman)
Section 3: Royalist Cookery
How to Make a Bisk: The Restoration Cookbook as National Restorative (David B. Goldstein)
‘A Little Winter Savory, A Little Time’: Making History in Elizabeth Cromwell’s Kitchen (Andy Crow)
A Culinary Embassy: Diplomatic Home Making in Lady Ann Fanshawe’s
Booke of Receipts (Melissa Schultheis)
Section 4: Around the Hearth
Minding the Fire: Human-Fire Coagency in Margaret Cavendish’s
Matrimonial Trouble and Seventeenth-Century Recipes (Rebecca Laroche)
‘Teâgun kuttiemaûnch: What Food Shall I Prepare for You?’: Exchanges in Early New England Kitchens (Julie A. Fisher)
‘A New Source of Happiness to Man’?: Maple Sugaring and Settler Colonialism in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Edith Snook)
