Collecting Knowledge for the Family: Recipes, Gender and Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern English Household

Abstract

When Mary Cholmeley married Henry Fairfax in 1627, she carried to her new home in Yorkshire a leather-bound notebook filled with medical recipes. Over the next few decades, Mary and Henry, their children and various members of the Fairfax and Cholmeley families continually entered new medical and culinary information into this ‘treasury for health.’ Consequently, as it stands now, the manuscript can be read both as a repository of household medical knowledge and as a family archive. Focusing on two Fairfax ‘family books,’ this essay traces on the process through which early modern recipe books were created. In particular, it explores the role of the family collective in compiling books of knowledge. In contrast to past studies where household recipe books have largely been described as the products of exclusively female endeavors, I argue that the majority of early modern recipe collections were created by family collectives and that the members of these collectives worked in collaboration across spatial, geographical and temporal boundaries. This new reading of recipe books as testaments of the interests and needs of particular families encourages renewed examination of the role played by gender in the transmission and production of knowledge in early modern households.

We Are What We Keep: The “Family Archive”, Identity and Public/Private Heritage

“…By contrast, men appeared to be linked more with objects of higher economic value. A slightly more nuanced view emerges from a historical study of "Family books" in early modern English household (Leong 2013). "Family books" are written collections of family knowledge including notes and medical recipes, which are handed down through the family.…”

Charles Blagden's diary: Information management and British science in the eighteenth century

“…Leong argues that these served as 'testaments of the interests and needs of particular families', shaped by the social and cultural contexts surrounding their composition. 110 As this paper has suggested, Blagden's diary was shaped by transitions in patronage aimed at providing a solution to social ambitions. At the same time, it assisted him in pursuing particular relationships and careers, in its role as an aide-mémoire.…”

Medical practitioners as collectors and communicators of natural history in Ireland, 1680–1750

“…Elaine Leong recently argued that we should approach such collections as both repositories and archives, created in various collaborations across spatial, geographical and temporal boundaries, and adjusted according to testing and experience. 21 In initiating their correspondence with a physician, patients would employ this accumulated experience, combining the knowledge gained from diverse discussions with their surrounding friends and family with any learning or opinion they might have themselves regarding their condition, and any wider knowledge which they were able to obtain, adding any contextual details they believed, for whatever reason, could be relevant or useful in diagnosis. 22 Over the course of Carey and Jurin's correspondence between June 1733 and February 1735, for example, Carey related Catherine's pain both as described by her and interpreted by him, observed a swelling in her breast, noted limited movement, offered information on possible treatments as well as local discussions of them, and detailed her menstrual cycle and general wellbeing.…”