In the Kitchen, 1550-1800

Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad

9789463721646

294 pages

Amsterdam University Press

Hardback $144.00

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Overview

In the Kitchen insists that the preparation of food, whether imaginative, physical, or spatial, is central to a deeper understanding of early modern food cultures and practices. Devoted to the arts of cooking and medicine, early modern kitchens concentrated on producing, processing, and preserving materials necessary for nourishment and survival; yet they also fed social and economic networks and nurtured a sense of physical, spiritual, and political connection to surrounding lands and their cultures. The essays in this volume illuminate this expansive view of cooking and aspire to show how the kitchen's inner workings prove tightly, though often invisibly, interwoven with local, national, and, increasingly, global surroundings. Engaging with literary and historical methodologies, including close reading, recipe analysis, and perspectives on gender, class, race, and colonialism, we begin to develop a shared theoretical and practical language for the art of cooking that combines the physical with the intellectual, the local with the global, and the domestic with the political.

Author Bio

Madeline Bassnett is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University. She is the author of Women, Food Exchange, and Governance in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2016). Her current SSHRC-funded project, Resilient Recipes and Climate Change, examines early modern recipes in relation to Little Ice Age weather conditions.Hillary M. Nunn is Professor of English at The University of Akron. Her research addresses medical knowledge reflected in English seventeenth-century recipe manuscripts. She is a co-founding member of the Early Modern Recipe Online Collective and author of Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Tragedy in the Early Stuart Era (Ashgate, 2005).