I like the idea of collecting receipt books, manuscript or published, and deducing what one can from them about the last four or five hundred years of social history. I wish this particular attempt had had either more direct quotations from the sources, or a more sweeping theory. I expect it's a useful academic book, but the refrain of being neither able to prove nor to disprove a pattern as suggested in the work of [lastname], [date] wasn't any too gripping. (For instance, that an upper-class woman who wrote down a servant's recipe might have been respecting the servant, by treating her work like that of a friend; or might have been arrogating the cook's intellectual property.)
Some of the excerpted work was fascinating, usually by contrasting expectations of Femininity with a vivid experience of it. left service in the 18th. century, married a market gardener, became a commercial success running something very like a deli (meats, portable soup, sweets) and published The Experienced English Housekeeper, which was not the last of her successful enterprises. We don't seem to know as much about , who survived slavery and became a caterer and cookbook author.
There were also notes left in family or personal collections of recipes, suggesting sometimes how much the author enjoyed cooking and recipe-keeping, or sometimes how unsuitable and onerous it was.
ISBN: 0312233787
So wrote clew in Cookery. , History. | TrackBack