Description
Book SynopsisSituated at the vital intersection of physiology, gastronomy, decorum, knowledge-production, and labor, recipes from the past allow us to understand the significant ways that kitchen work was an intellectual and creative enterprise.
Trade Review"Wall brilliantly restores an unfamiliar version of early modern domesticity. [Her] achievement . . . is to light up this earlier period, when England was the most dynamic site of recipe publication in Europe." *
London Review of Books *
"A nuanced and in many ways fresh account of how Renaissance recipes function as knowledge. . . . The book is a signal accomplishment that will prove as useful in the years to come as the recipes it analyzes proved to an earlier age." *
Renaissance and Reformation *
"Crammed with delightful discoveries,
Recipes for Thought offers us a vibrant new picture of the early modern housewife as reader, writer, and knowledge producer and the kitchen as an arena of debate, experiment, and invention. Linking the kitchen to the lab and the pharmacy, the recipe to the poem and the play, Wendy Wall rejoins what has since been put asunder to re-create a world we not only lost but forgot about." * Frances Dolan, University of California, Davis *
Table of ContentsPreface. 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
