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1. 1 2020-11-17T12:50:02-08:00 Meghan Adams ef5f31bc97e10f55dcbb2d5e9f4c0b1674ced7e6 Recipe Selections Jessica Joudy 6 selected recipes from the women's manuscript recipe book plain 1036674 2020-12-08T13:01:36-08:00 Jessica Joudy 3f0e1b6bb5ac4a0dc560f480bebf2ca72a5e08b2

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1. 1 2020-11-17T13:17:48-08:00 Catherine Cunha cc5dc9b7774b6a676a31715e1bbd86b0ae5b91c6 Victorian Home Remedies 21 plain 1036654 2020-12-08T18:53:16-08:00 Meghan Adams ef5f31bc97e10f55dcbb2d5e9f4c0b1674ced7e6

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• 1 media/recipebookOpen.jpg 2020-11-17T12:51:13-08:00 Manuscript Women's Recipe Book 22 an introduction to the selected excerpts of the 1800s Women's Recipe Book image_header 1036639 2020-12-08T14:55:45-08:00

  The “Women’s Recipe Book” is a manuscript recipe book originating in nineteenth century England, and is comprised of 153 pages: 127 pages in the actual book, with 26 small pages, flyers and cards inserted in the front of the book. Some recipes are dated, but a majority are not, with the earliest being 1822, and the latest 1886. The recipes inside appear to have been compiled by a singular owner, although there is evidence of use after this period of time. While the original location of the recipe book itself is not noted in the handwritten text, some recipes are written on various repurposed inserts, one of which is an order sheet for “Pictures On Private View”, which lists the prices of each picture in British pounds. Hence, the recipe book likely was first written in England. 

  Each and every recipe is handwritten, a majority of which are in the same hand, presumably that of the woman who owned the recipe book, with others being written by contributing women who are friends, family members, and neighbors of the original owner, who is unnamed in the recipe book. However, even when written in the majority hand, the recipes are often listed alongside the name of the original contributor: “Mrs. Penney” contributes a pudding recipe, and others such as “E. Browne”, “P. Wauleill”, “Mrs. Vernon”, “Miss Wood”, and “Mrs. Fryer” offer recipes for everything from milk jelly to a scrub for copper. The woman who owned it clearly left each recipe tried and tested: she sometimes has crossed out specific instructions and inserting her own alternatives, or added new notes later on about how the recipe might would work better in a specific way, and more than once she has simply commented “good”, “great”, or even “(ditto)” in the margins of ones she found useful, with underlining on certain comments one or two times for emphasis.

  Although the recipe book seems to come from England, it is not entirely British in its culture. Recipes come from all over the world: one is an “American Pie” recipe that calls for lemon, another a French “Charlotte Russe” cake recipe that was quite popular in Western Europe and even the United States at the time, and more than one Spanish recipe is written in this book, including one for Spanish Ham. One recipe is marked as "African". Instructions for puddings, pickling, and preserving make up a substantial portion of the book. However, not only are there recipes for cooking, baking, and the feeding of large groups, but also recipes that functioned as home remedies, with cures for everything from a cough to rheumatism to cholera being carefully noted. Another feature is the inclusion of recipes for making cleaning or household supplies. It is clear that this recipe book is not just a 'cookbook', but a diverse and thorough, if handwritten, guide to managing a household in all its aspects. While we do not know the details of whom contributed to this recipe book, we can still note that it is a product of a women’s community effort. As the recipes had been added and maintained for over sixty years, this text was clearly a long and useful effort of the woman’s dedication to not just cooking, but the care of a family.
  

  While the latest recipe is dated 1886, the book appears to have been in use for years afterwards, either by the original owner or by whoever eventually inherited or found the manuscript text. A newspaper clipping found within the manuscript book, apparently used as a bookmark, is identifiable as being published sometime during or after 1924, and uses language and pricing indicating British origin. Since many of the recipes are undated, it is impossible to know when, indeed, the work was 'done'- or rather, when it left the hands of the contributors and found its way into those of book sellers. However, for at least 40 or so years after the latest dated recipe, the book was still in use and read by women who used the manuscript as a reference for recipes. We can only speculate at this usage, but it might have been descendants of the original author(s).

  In order to interpret this work, we, by necessity, focused less on the identities of the women who created this manuscript and more on the recipes themselves. Unfortunately, the main author of the recipe book never wrote her own name in the text, even though there is some limited insight into her network. Due to the anonymity of the women, we ran into some difficulty in trying to locate the race and class status of these unknown women. In this absence, we chose to select recipes we thought were representative of the different themes we noted were present in the recipes themselves; this allowed us to focus more deeply on the themes of the text, such as socioeconomic class and gender roles, and how they correlate to the recipes and formation of the text. In doing so, we can further understand the communities of women in nineteenth century England and how cookbooks were formed and interpreted in these communities. The following excerpts from the recipe book text are ones that demonstrate these interlocking themes.

  More broadly, we see this manuscript recipe book expanding on our idea of feminist recovery. Historically, texts like this manuscript recipe book have not been given the same attention as other types of rhetorical or literary texts. Being a handwritten and not published text, there are some who would devalue this work as literature. However, through our entry for this recipe book, or rather, “cookbook,” we are making the case of cookbooks being a form of literature that worthy of study. By analyzing and interpreting texts that seem to be noncanonical, we are expanding the idea of what feminist recovery might look like.
  
  To navigate our entry, we have two main paths: Recipe Selections and Contextualizing the Recipe Book. The Recipe Selections path will guide you through the following selected recipes that we chose to highlight in our entry: "Plum Cake," "Ladies Delight," "To Make Black Medicine," and "Cure for a cough." With each recipe, you will see the original manuscript along with our transcription of each recipe for clarification. Some recipes have notes and different paths associated with them to further explore different aspects of the recipe that we found interesting and valuable. The second main path our entry, Contextualizing the Recipe Book, will go into our analysis of the following main themes that were coming out of the recipe book: Women's Cookbooks, Victorian Era Cooking, Victorian Home Remedies, and Cosmopolitanism, National Identity, Crossing National Lines. 

• 1 2020-11-17T13:17:48-08:00 Victorian Home Remedies 21 plain 1036654 2020-12-08T18:53:16-08:00 Within our recipe selections, we chose two home remedies "To Make Black Medicine" and "Cure for a Cough" because of its inclusion in this manuscript recipe book; we were a bit surprised to find multiple home remedies within this recipe book, so this was something that peaked our interests. We further explored the ways in which medicine was viewed and practiced in nineteenth century England, specifically looking at how alternative medicine was viewed and practiced during this time period. 
  
  For background, the foundations of modern medicine in England were being established during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although the foundations of modern medicine were being established, there were also many crucial of shifts relating to the ways in which medicine was practiced during this time as well. Medicine before the nineteenth century turned out to be more charity-based (Brown). Medical dispensaries, like Aldersgate Street Dispensary, (which were the equivalent of medical offices today) were established in the eighteenth century. These dispensaries were opened and endorsed by the Royal College of Physicians. Due to the rise of poverty within England during the eighteenth century, specifically in London, these dispensaries began to fill the unmet need of crucial and vital outpatient care for the poor from the overcrowded hospitals (Hartston). With the decline in proper medical care, especially for the poor and vulnerable, an emerging theme that was coming forth concurrently during period in time was the rise in popularity of alternative medicine. To explain this rise further, we will use a popular form of alternative medicine at this time, hydropathy, as an example and case study. 
  
  Hydropathy was a form of alternative medicine that came from "Vincent Priessnitz’s discovery of the healing benefits of pure water and his establishment of Gräfenberg in the Silesian Alps in the mid-1820s as the first and most famous hydropathic center" (Marland and Adams, 500). Further, Priessnitz called his discovery the "negation of orthodox therapy; it was intended to make medicine redundant" (Bradley). Not too long after Priessntiz's discovery, hydropathic treatment centers were started throughout Britain. Despite the rise in these treatment centers, Marland and Adams argue in their article that the domestic practices of hydropathy heavily impacted its popularity in the mid-nineteenth century. 

  "Domestic guides, while validating home treatment, were also likely to publicize the benefits to be gained from attendance at water cure centers" (Marland and Adams 514). 

  With this, domestic practices of these different forms of alternative medicine at this time, like hydropathy, led to their respective rises in popularity during the nineteenth century. Arguably, the inclusion of "To Make Black Medicine" and "A cure for a cough" can speak to the use of alternative medicines and home remedies within the domestic spheres in Victorian England during the nineteenth-century; maybe this was also a reaction to the decline in quality medical care within Britain, with the poor being hardest hit. Further, this may give us a glimpse into figuring out what social class of the anonymous women fell into given the inclusion of these home remedies within this manuscript recipe book. 
  
  Along with hydropathy, there other forms of alternative medicine that we, from a modern-day perspective, may not fully understand or find a bit strange. Opium eating was one of them. In "Cure for a cough," one of the ingredients was in fact laudanum, an opiate that was widely used during this time period and is found in painkillers today. Of course today, we, as a society, are far more cautious about use of addictive drugs, but this was not the case for Victorian England. Most of the opium in the England during the nineteenth century came from Turkey, accounting for about 80% - 90% of the total imports of the drug into England; Turkish opium had been noted for its strength and high quality (Berridge). Further, there were no restrictions on who could legally buy and sell opium in England until 1868. This led to many tragic deaths, like the instance of an infant dying of an overdose of laudanum due to the fact that the infant was mistakenly given syrup of laudanum instead of syrup of rhubarb; the bottles of both the syrup of rhubarb and laudanum were very similar, which ended up being the cause of this unfortunately fatal mistake (Berridge). This example pointed to the larger public health concern of the dangerous nature of such casual, unrestricted, opium use. In her article, "Victorian Opium Eating: Responses to Opiate Use in Nineteenth-Century England," Berridge states: 

   "the first series of figures on opium beginning in the early 1860s showed the full extent of the situation: 126 deaths from opiates in 1863, for instance, out of a total of 403 poisoning fatalities, with 80 deaths in that year and 95 in 1864 from laudanum and syrup of poppies alone. Around a third of all poisoning deaths in the decade were the result of the administration of opiates, and the relatively high accidental, rather than suicidal, death rate from opiates bore witness to the drug's easy availability" (443). 

  Both the recipes for "Cure for a cough" and "To Make Black Medicine," located within this manuscript recipe book, have given us a glimpse into the medicinal world within Victorian England during the nineteenth century, especially highlighting the ways the domestic sphere was heavily involved in different forms of alternative medicine that were happening outside of established medical spaces. 
  
   

This page references:

• 1 2020-11-17T13:19:20-08:00 Laudanum 10 plain 1036674 2020-12-07T16:21:03-08:00
• 1 2020-11-17T14:46:59-08:00 Recipe-004 1 plain 2020-11-17T14:46:59-08:00 2020-11-17T22:41:36+00:00 Recipe-004.jpg