Parergon

Crammed with ideas, Wendy Wall's poetically resonant analysis of early modern recipe writing is embedded in a richly illuminating historical narrative, and artfully layered over with witty variations on the theme of transformation, echoing the transformative act at the heart of the recipe: nature turned into art, perishable materials rendered permanent, and so on. In short, Recipes for Thought has the makings of several engrossing and substantial monographs.

The Preface gives the impression that Wall's subject is recipe collections printed in England c. 1575–1650: 'To my mind, we have not yet accounted for the fact that England took the stage as the most active site of cookery publication in Europe between 1575 and 1650' (p. xii). This is well worth a monograph to itself, particularly as England during this period was the only country in Europe marketing recipe books for women: 'Only in England were women nominated in print to oversee a complex set of knowledges called "housewifery", which blended herbal cultivation, textile making, anatomy, water purification, chemistry, medical care, manners, butchery, the preservation of foodstuffs, and the manufacture of goods' (p. 7).

Wall's terminus ad quem is in fact c. 1750. As her Introduction explains, she is centrally concerned to demonstrate comparatively how the socio-political changes associated with the English Civil Wars are reflected in recipe books published before and after c. 1650. Only two of the five chapters of [End Page 226] Recipes for Thought, however, are based on an analysis of printed sources. For, although Wall 'began this study with the desire to elaborate a more complex contextualization around those printed recipe books that [she] had analyzed in earlier projects', she subsequently discovered a 'vast and understudied' archive of manuscript collections written between about 1570 and 1750, which includes 140 collections held in six major libraries, and newly digitised collections available on the database, Perdita. This discovery 'transformed the story that [she] had begun to tell', in ways that are, inevitably, all too briefly explained (pp. 11–16).

Wall does not attempt to answer many of the numerous empirical questions she raises throughout her monograph. They are part of the abundant food-for-thought generated by her reading of the source material, and indicate its broader implications and its potential for future research. She agrees that recipes have significant and recognisable documentary functions, but wants to show 'how inadequate it is for scholars to regard recipes solely as documenting the domestic world of the past' (p. 251). Her aim is to demonstrate the intellectual and imaginative appeal that early modern recipes held for their readers. Early English recipes, she argues, 'constituted and now bear witness to a rich and previously unacknowledged literate and brainy domestic culture, one in which women were predominantly, though not exclusively, involved' (p. 2). The domestic world of the past she aims to document, then, is much more complex than we have imagined.

Studies that depend on detailed analysis of primary sources to validate their claims are inordinately difficult to summarise. Wall does not attempt to consolidate her findings in a concluding summary. Instead, she offers a crafty little Coda in which, for the first time, she hints at later modern manifestations of the essentially non-utilitarian role of recipe writing and reading. Quoting from Adam Gopnik in a 2009 New Yorker article meditating on why he is purposefully dog-earing the corners of a new recipe book, when the shelves are already overflowing with recipe books and the children eat only fried chicken, Wall contrives a final witty twist to her over-arching theme of transformation by incorporating Gopnik's perception of 'complex desires for self-transformation driving recipe use' (p. 252).

In the absence of a conventional conclusion to this excessively compressed and over-ambitiously conceived study, the reader is likely to be left with little more...