By Avery Blankenship, PhD Candidate in the Department of English and DITI Research Fellow
On the very first page of an untitled manuscript cookbook written between the years 1675 and 1750, the names Rose Kendall and Anne Cater are written below which is the bold claim “there book 16 : 82.” In a different hand, written across the center of the page is the name “Elizabeth Clarke.” Then, on the following page, another woman, Anna Maria Wentworth, has written her name twice and declared: “Her Book 1725” (folio ii recto). Across the roughly seventy-five years that this cookbook traded hands, each of these four women has claimed the book, and some form of authorship, as theirs by scrawling their name across the page. However, what each woman has also not done is erase the names of the women who came before them—names which may have been of some familial relationship, but which may have not. With each name that is written on the book, the category of author becomes increasingly expanded, every marginal note or textual addition difficult to attribute to any particular person, perhaps not even written by any of the women amongst the group.
Within the book itself, recipes are attributed to an even wider group of authors of unknown mothers and ladies. The category of author is an important one in cookbooks, given the kind of decisions that book owners might make about the recipes inside of it at any given time. In her book-length study of early modern manuscript recipes as archeological artifacts, Madeline Shanahan argues for the use of the word “author” for the owner of the recipe manuscript and whomever was responsible for overseeing additions in a given period. She writes that “in some ways ‘compiler’ or ‘editor’ may be more suitable terms, but they create a distance which seems inaccurate. These were deeply personal and creative works, and the term author seems to reflect that most meaningfully” (26). Where the latin origin of the word recipe, recipere, or “to receive or to take,” which would imply a top-down understanding of who writes recipes and who receives them, the open-ended and revisionary nature of manuscript recipes and cookbooks extends the writing process outwards, blurring the binaries between reader and writer in a way that prioritizes social connection and memory.
Most of the social significance of cookbooks and recipes lies in what goes unwritten, known to only those whose unique combination of culinary and local knowledge allows them to decode both forms of information at play in any one of these particular texts. As a result, these books can best be understood as a tangled web of interlocked social and cultural relationships represented by both the people and food named within. This tangled web makes the work of translation to text encoding a particularly interesting challenge. Because XML understands text as an OHCO (Ordered Hierarchy of Content Objects) (Renear), the tangled nature of manuscript cookbooks, both in their content and their physical appearance, may introduce some unique challenges to traditional approaches to text encoding or even schemas which accommodate manuscripts.
In this post, I unpack what some of these challenges may be and offer suggestions for addressing them by using the untitled cookbook, a manuscript cookbook currently held by the Folger Shakespeare Library and available within their digital collections (catalog number 231285, call number V.a.429), as a case study when the Women Writers Project’s (WWP) encoding schema is applied to a transcription of the text of the book. My work with this book was conducted over the course of a year and involved exploring a number of important features of cookbooks and recipes which may challenge or stretch traditional approaches to text encoding which I share here. The unique challenges and contexts of early modern cookbooks and their understanding of shared authorship and authority presents interesting perspectives for representing authorship as a process rather than an endpoint—something which this case study demonstrates—and also presents opportunities for understanding recipes as representative of complex social interactions and contexts.
Markup can be best understood, as Allen Renear describes in his chapter on text encoding, as “information formally distinct from the character sequence of the digital transcription of a text, which serves to identify logical or physical features or to control later processing” (n.p.). Borrowing from the original practice of “markup” where an editor would markup a copy of a text in order to indicate how the text should be formatted once it was set in type and printed, the earliest markup languages were designed to format and present digital copies of texts (Huitfeldt 161). The model which theorizes that text is composed of an ordered hierarchy of content objects arose from a need to make the intellectual contents of the text—acts, scenes, verses, and more—distinct from one another in some way as opposed to grouping all content objects together with no distinctions made. The ordered hierarchy model takes the view that content objects “nest in one another without overlap” (Renear). When the TEI was introduced as a specialized vocabulary for encoding text, the OHCO worldview was modified to consider texts not as a singular hierarchy but as groups of related hierarchies. In this modified worldview, “each hierarchy corresponds to an ‘aspect’ of the text and these aspects are revealed by various ‘analytic perspectives,’ where an analytical perspective is, roughly, a natural family of methodology, theory, and analytical practice” (Biggs et al. 352). In this way, the objects which are produced by the TEI are not based on only identifying the formal features of a text, but constitute an entire analytical perspective and interpretation of the text.
One of the fundamental features of the TEI is its ability to be expanded, modified, and interpreted to suit the needs of any particular encoding project. This is something that the TEI stresses at nearly every point of its documentation. When projects adapt the TEI and reshape it to fit the needs of the particular texts they intend to work with, the onus is on that project to think of this work as both deeply political and ideological. As Julia Flanders writes in “Building Otherwise: Gender, Race, and Difference in the Digital Humanities,” technological systems are ideological systems and digital humanities practitioners bear the responsibility as builders and contributors to these ideological systems, even when they may not be visible. The very work of classifying a text as being written by a woman writer (or by a cook, for that matter) requires making interpretive judgment calls about the writer of that text and then embedding that decision within the encoding of the text itself. These decisions are not neutral. That these tags have the potential to make visible or obscure important aspects of the text in search engines and databases places additional responsibility on the encoding project and individual encoder to think about the ways they are choosing to actively mark bodies and texts. Introducing a new genre or form which complicates the worldview of the project—for example, a manuscript document to a largely print-based project—offers an opportunity to reexamine that family of analytical perspectives from which TEI springs.
Manuscript documents are notoriously difficult to encode because of their lack of uniformity or sometimes legibility. The TEI guidelines does provide a separate set of tags and guidelines which can accommodate manuscripts, but the scheme largely focused on the material aspects of the manuscript as it is noted that they are “general enough that it can also be extended to other traditions and materials, and is potentially useful for any kind of text-bearing artefact.” Some of the tags which are included here are <physDesc> which allows for a physical description of the manuscript, <msPart> and <msFrag> for when the manuscript has been compiled as part of a composite manuscript or a fragment of a manuscript which is usually catalogued separately, and <history> which allows for a full history of the manuscript. In 2011, the TEI also incorporated the ability to encode where on the page text is located, the direction of text, as well as the order in which a document was written, which these additional tags certainly give important variety to the rendering of digital editions of manuscripts, they’re still concerned primarily with the materiality of the object and the ability to transfer that materiality into its digital rendition. These types of tags would certainly be useful from a curatorial standpoint, but are rather separated from the textual content of the manuscript; these tags are subsumed under the manuscript header and outside of the <text> element.
As Laura Estill notes in “Encoding the Edge,” one of the major issues with the current guidelines for encoding manuscripts is its separation of material from textual elements. Taking the case study of marginalia as an example, if one were to search for textual additions using the <additions> element, the results would appear in the <physDesc> (physical description) element of the document within the header rather than within the <text> tag. As Estill notes, “relying too heavily on <additions> can lead to multiple shortcomings: first, although the narrative description of the marginalia would be suitable for a catalogue entry or introduction to a manuscript, such a description is by nature paratextual. Second, if the marginalia is transcribed only in the <additions> element, it literally separates the marginalia from the text (and the <text>), which suggests that the marginalia is not, in fact, the text worth studying” (n.p.). While Estill mentions a number of other possible tags (<note>, <label>, <add>) they all come with potential pitfalls that still leaves the encoder, and larger project, to decide upon a theory of both materiality and authorship: what text is considered important, who is considered an author, and what parts of the text are considered material or not?
In terms of authorship, a topic of primary concern to a project like the WWP given its focus on women writers, the guidelines provide two recommended options. The first is the traditional <author> tag which should be used to contain the name(s) of the author of a work. The second is <respStmt> which allows for a statement of responsibility in cases where some of the intellectual content of the book has been supplied by someone other than any of the authors. It isn’t clear based on these general guidelines at what point someone qualifies as an author or is rather best represented with a responsibility statement. In other words, what is the difference between having intellectual responsibility for a portion of the text and having authored it? This leaves individual projects up to defining the meaning of authorship and its parameters.
Applying an encoding schema like the WWP’s, which is adapted from the TEI’s but primarily for the purposes of working with printed works, allows us to explore some of the possibilities for adapting the TEI to the needs of more text-focused manuscript encoding. While the manuscript guidelines provided by the TEI are good starting points, as the TEI itself encourages, they should be customized and adapted to the needs of an individual project. The ideological thrust of the WWP is to “bring texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive and make them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, scholars, and the general reader.” In doing so, there are some important considerations which become essential when shifting from printed works to manuscript ones. Primarily, these are questions related to access and authorship (what kinds of women are being allowed to publish writing through print or commercial publication pathways and for which women is manuscript authorship the primary vehicle of knowledge sharing) as well as materiality (which women have access to the material means to write their words down and for which women is manuscript the preferred form of print). Cookbooks are an especially important genre for exploring these questions in women’s writing given how prevalent manuscript cookbooks were prior to 1850 as well as the importance of cookbooks to the fulfillment of the communicative and literary desires of women across this span of time, vastly popular even in societies and time periods where paper and printing technology is scarce. Formally, cookbooks also challenge traditional order of content objects as understood through manuscript text encoding by intermixing textuality with materiality as well as placing emphasis on communal writing.
The application of a schema like the WWP’s to a manuscript cookbook keeps us focused on questions of literary value and interest. Many of the tags offered by the TEI guidelines for manuscript documents are tags that address the materiality of the artifact. Because of the TEI’s focus on manuscript materiality, the primary distinction between print and manuscript objects is focused on their material differences rather than differences in approach to textuality. These tags are important and they can often tell us something important about the use of that object in the world. However, there are also important features of manuscripts which have more to do with their textual content that is of value to literary scholars. This is especially true when working with manuscript cookbooks since their creation and reception is deeply impacted by the gendered dynamics of the home: one’s access to printing technology or even literacy influencing what kinds of marks one may leave behind and what forms they may take. Encoding manuscripts with an eye towards what manuscripts uniquely represent for literary scholars and readers of these books allows us to deconstruct or “build otherwise” our ideas of what categories of “author” or even “book” are and who belongs within them. This is especially true when our understanding is mostly informed by printed productions, whose understanding of authorship and books is primarily defined by singularity and the book’s commercial production pathway, which Robert Darnton famously outlines in his essay “What is The History of Books?”
Darnton writes that printed books pass through what could be described as “a communications circuit that runs from the author to the publisher (if the bookseller does not assume that role), the printer, the shipper, the bookseller, and the reader. The reader completes the circuit, because he influences the author both before and after the act of composition” (67). The role of the reader is to act as an influencer but the final authority over the text belongs to the author. In the world of print, the category of author is overwhelmingly dominated by white, straight, men. Women writers were either forced to publish anonymously or under male pen names or to carve out a space for themselves in a world where women primarily only served in editorial roles behind the scenes (Harris and Garvey 2004). Scholars such as Sari Edelstein write that even into the nineteenth-century, the print marketplace was “a contact zone that shaped the generic conventions of these rival discursive forms as well as an arena in which ideologies of gender were structured and contested” (13).
The world of print is also shaped by one’s race and class status—rural areas were less likely to have access to books in the first place making them expensive commodities and printed material was typically produced via subscription even in large cities until the nineteenth century (Watson 2015). As Nicole Aljoe writes of West Indian slave narratives, “every West Indian slave narrative is explicitly mediated in some way— by a white transcriber, editor, or translator” (14). The contents of novels are also deeply shaped by both of these factors, for example following the legislation of a cap on the inheritance of mix-race and Black residents of Jamaica, novels begin to frequently feature mix-race children and fights over inheritance as primary plot points. Daniel Livesay writes that in sentimental literature, “well-provisioned characters of color frequently operated as foils to white protagonists who had been denied a rightful bequest or spouse” (250).
Manuscripts reveal a similar kind of entanglement with social stratification and literature. With cookbooks as an example, Elaine Leong explores the role that paper plays in the production and circulation of knowledge within early modern domestic spaces. Cookbooks even well into the nineteenth century could be homemade productions. In the early modern domestic sphere, domestic writers “adopted many of the strategies we associate with scholars to manage their collections of practical knowledge” by turning these loose leaf pages oftentimes into a bound work (Leong 38). The desire to sort and classify this collection of knowledge and material would lead to copying their recipes onto new paper or in some cases even binding and gluing new books themselves. Within these cookbooks, recipes could range from stews and pottages to remedies for colds or medicinal teas. However, these medical practices, due to their domestic and feminine associations, are often deemed as separate from the practices of scholars despite their similarities and in some cases shared media.
Despite the dominance of the printing press beginning in the early modern period, print culture did not manage to divorce itself entirely from manuscript culture. For example, the use of the word “scribbling” became a common way to refer to the productions of the printing press despite its associations with handwriting (Hackel 26). The words “print” and “publish” could similarly refer to either manuscript or print productions. The two technologies could also become blurred in cases where hand drawn images are included in a printed book or manuscript additions are required to complete the book (Hackel 30). These technologies were not thought of as entirely distinct in the ways that we study them today.
Manuscript cookbooks are slippery texts to work with, primarily because of the way they consider knowledge to be a communal pool rather than a singular authority, as is the case in the case study book. As Elizabeth McDougall notes, “writers of recipes have little ‘authority’ over the reception of their texts because reading a recipe is an active process, be it reading and choosing recipes to make in the future or reading the recipe as you cook, turning the words on the page into action” (107). However, the action of a recipe also happens in reverse, as well: the writer or reviser choosing to render action textually in the form of annotations or not. Take for example folio 32 and recto 33 and the inserted recipe in between these pages:
This series of recipes (Figure 1 and Figure 2) presents a theory of authorship and the text that is common in manuscript cookbooks and which complicates straightforward ways of encoding these texts. The first complication is the presence of three different sets of handwriting which implies that there are at least three different scribes contributing to the book on these two pages. It is unlikely that the recipe for Cassias, written on the inserted page, is written in the hand of any of the women who have inscribed their name at the front of the book as the handwriting differs from that of any of the written names which introduces an unknown, fifth author to this text. After all, if we treat the four women who are listed at the front of the book as authors of the text and encode the book as such, then we must treat the unknown author of this inserted recipe the same way. If we look at the handwriting on folio 32 and verso 33, we also see that the handwriting isn’t quite the same by paying attention to the differences in how letters are written (Figure 3). However, because neither recipe has any authorial attribution, we don’t exactly know who wrote these recipes or if they are written by any of the four women either. Perhaps this is why the Folger, in its Digital Collection, lists all four women’s names, but uses the term “Associated Names” rather than “author,” a creative distance from the deeply personal recipes within. Since paper and books were an expensive commodity in the early modern period, it wasn’t uncommon for women to exchange books for the purposes of gathering recipes in this manner. It could be the case that there is a sixth author present here. Finally, on verso 33, we see that the recipe is attributed to an unnamed sister in the title “My Sister’s Way to Make Mead.” In this case, not only do we not know who this sister is, but it is unclear if authorship should be attributed to “My” or “Sister.” Is the author “My,” who has written the recipe down and thus “authored” this version of the recipe, or is the author “Sister” whose intellectual property is transcribed on the page?
The complication of working with manuscript cookbooks and recipes is their formal flexibility and authorial mutability. Largely, this is because recipes originate from an oral tradition wherein women learned recipes by listening and watching other women in a communal setting (McDougall 108). As James McCann writes, recipes are not fixed documents but rather “awkward written summaries of oral knowledge always in some state of change and adjustment” (11). Because cooking is a largely improvisational act, even when there is a written recipe, much of what happens when the act of cooking commences doesn’t actually get written down. The unspoken codes of taste and smell—both personal interpretations—are left untranscribed. McDougall argues that “cooking, like no other activity, reveals the lack of power and authority people have over food and language” (106). Prior to the early modern period, recipes were rarely recorded and cooking knowledge was primarily accumulated through oral transmission, apprenticeship, and cultural knowledge. Since recipes are actually poorly suited to their representation as written texts because of their reliance upon improvisation, the senses, and mutability, their written form always reflects a state of change or process rather than completion.
Because “reading recipes is an interpretive process” (McDougall 107) the writer has little control over how her directions will be taken up, modified, presented, and consumed. In anticipation of this lack of control, the author of the recipe acknowledges it and instead extends an invitation which points to the inability of any recipe-writer to truly conclude a recipe. This open-endedness points to the dynamic nature of the text and its prioritization of social connection over any singular authority of the writer. This social model of writing evidences a writing practice that is historically flexible and resistive of the idea of the writer as “author” in the sense that that label implied singular authority. While text encoding is a form of representation, representing a text in a digital format, the form of the manuscript cookbook is also a form of representation which attempts to capture a snapshot of the cooking process and depict it as an organized structure despite how ill suited this structure is to actually describing what happens when we read recipes. Strategies of encoding other textual artifacts—poems, plays, or novels, for example—may not be the best approach for cookbooks because of their relationship to both authorship and definitive structures.
If we were to approach encoding the recipes on these two pages, due to this dual representative act, there are a few major considerations and historical contexts to consider which may shift one’s approach to encoding them. The first consideration is based on the actual content of the text, particularly ways that encoders must shift their strategies of reading in order to understand recipes. The second consideration is largely structural and is connected to the larger question of how to represent authorship and citationality in cookbooks when both are so tangled. While I will be referring to the two pages shown in figures 1 and 2, these considerations apply across the cookbook as well as to cookbooks and recipes more broadly.
There are a handful of content-based considerations to keep in mind when working with historic cookbooks and recipes that may shift major considerations for encoding them. While we may approach recipes from a modern perspective—assuming that recipes will have a uniform appearance and order with set ingredient lists, measurements, and structures as is common today—this will not be applicable to early modern recipes when their appearance largely reflects a narrative, oral character. Directions are intermixed with ingredients and may not be given in order; recipes at the time were meant to serve as reminders of what one already knows rather than pedagogical texts. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to overcome when working with these texts is placing parameters around their contexts. As cookbook scholar Madeline Shanahan writes, “unlike published works, which were printed in a single dated episode, the recipes contained within a single manuscript may themselves represent change over time. Again, these are not obstacles which cannot be overcome, but they do make such microanalysis more complicated in this period” (22). When a cookbook has been passed down through several generations of women and spans nearly a hundred years, as is the case with our case study example, all manner of things change both socially and culturally over this time. Some of these changes may even be reflected at the level of the individual family: changes in the family’s class status, for example, which is reflected in the kinds of recipes they record.
When encoding recipes, it is important to consider not only the variety of food items and the cuisines which they may originate from, the early modern period reflecting the beginnings of a truly global cuisine as well as the kick off of haute cuisine, but what these dishes and ingredients signify about the writer. For example, in Figure 1, the first recipe is titled “To Make Pork Like Westfalia Ham.” While certainly, one may choose to encode the recipe with tags indicating that this recipe is attempting to recreate a German dish in an English kitchen, harkening back to that global cuisine, what is perhaps more important here is that Westfalia ham is not just any German dish but was considered a delicacy, produced from pigs fed a limited diet and the ham dry cured and smoked carefully. What the recipe is attempting to recreate is an upper class dish using cheaper ingredients. Instead of dry curing a ham and smoking it on top of juniper and beechwood branches, as is traditionally done with Westfalia ham, the recipe instead instructs the reader to cut the pork in the fashion of Westfalia ham, beat it thin with a rolling pin, and then rub it with brown sugar and to brine it and let it stand over the course of three days before a fire in order to recreate the sweet taste and crust the ham would have developed through dry curing. The recipe below, “A Pommatem to Keep the Face Smooth,” while on the surface seems to be disconnected to the recipe for ham, is actually intertwined by this projection of class. The recipe calls for half a pint of oil of trotters, which are pigs feet. The oil is produced by boiling pigs feet in order to produce a gelatin. The recipe is likely placed after the recipe for ham in order to allow the reader (and writer) to make use of parts of the pig likely to be discarded after preparing the ham. The cosmetic uses of this recipe and its associations with pleasure rather than necessity or sustenance also signifies aspirations towards class mobility and leisure in the way that the Westfalia ham does.
In both of these cases, it may be appropriate to link the two recipes together given their shared common ingredient, pork, their shared significance, class, and their placement together on the same page. While the <ref> tag would not be appropriate in this case, given that neither is a clear reference to one another, a dedicated <ingredient> tag (which might include attributes to signify the different food groups or types of major recipe ingredients like pork that the project is interested in tracking) can provide a framework for tracking these sub-classes of recipes and their usages. The project would need to determine how widely the <ingredient> tag might be applied and to what types of ingredients. Of additional use here would be the presence of a unique xml:id on both recipes which could then point to one another using a custom attribute such as “social” to indicate “social”=“class” and thus link the recipes together by both ingredient type and social signification.
Because of the generational nature of these cookbooks, the historical contexts of the various ingredients and food items may shift, even within a single book. Some foods which may have signified one thing in a previous generation can change in the next generation. It is important to use detailed markup such as that proposed above with care in cases where it is not certain what the work of ingredients in a recipe are doing or when an encoder doesn’t have access to the food history knowledge in order to make these determinations. However, when this level of microanalysis can be added to cookbooks and recipes, rather than treating food as purely related to sustenance, the work of encoding becomes significantly richer.
The largest content-based concern when it comes to working with cookbooks and recipes is, as already mentioned, what to do about authors. Since there is no such thing as an “original” recipe, it is incredibly difficult to attribute a recipe to a single author or even a finite group of authors, particularly in books such as our case study book which may have a couple of names listed in the front of the book but additional names attributed to the recipes within. Formally identifying these authors becomes additionally complicated in cases where a recipe refers to a method in “My Mother’s Way” but then a few pages later in a different handwriting, “My Mother,” appears in the title again—is this someone else’s mother? Is the mother the original writer of the book who has now passed the book down to her daughter? After all, as Janet Theophano writes, although most of the attributions in cookbooks indicate domestic relationships amongst women “they did not have to know one another at all” (14). It is important that even when these attributions are perplexing, that they be treated as authorial credit lines in any case. In a period and in a genre where literacy is fairly limited and it is not unlikely that recipes may still be shared orally and transcribed in books, it is important that we treat authorship as shared and communal, in the same way that the book users viewed authorship.
I agree with Shanahan’s argument that the term “compiler” and “editor” implies a creative distance from the work. However, cookbooks, especially in manuscript form, should be treated like edited collections in the sense that recipes have individual authors or creators (which may or may not be the authors of the book) and these recipes are then collected or assembled into a book. Cookbooks are not written in a single session but are rather collected texts. Encoding these documents should likewise reflect this collected nature which may more accurately reflect the relationship between book authors and recipe authors. When encoding a manuscript cookbook, while both the book-author and the recipe-author should be encoded and marked as authors, it may be appropriate in some cases to mark instances where it is clear the author is calling out their position as scribe. For example, in the recipe for “My Sister’s Way to Make Mead,” “Sister” should be marked as the author of the recipe, someone who may have even shared the recipe orally with the author, and “My” is a meta-level declaration as a scribe. By tagging both of these individuals as contributors to the text, not only is their relationship to the text preserved in its particularities but their relationship to one another, as well, allowing for the encoder to even add unique attributes to both tags in order to indicate familial relationships which can be traced by connecting the same occurrences of handwriting to this recipe across the book.
In addition to textual authorship, what is key to keep in mind is that the recipe form itself is relatively new in this period and will largely reflect a work being translated from another form. It is important to treat these objects as both textual artifacts and material artifacts and to not separate one from the other when conducting a textual encoding. When they enter kitchens, they are being treated as tools for use, not necessarily as purely symbolic text. What this means, is that books may be covered in stains, burn marks, tears, etc. These marks are important to how we understand and read these books because they tell us which of the recipes were actually prepared and by which method. They also offer a way for those with limited literacy to leave marks behind on the page. These material marks reflect the multifaceted nature of cookbooks which are not purely literate objects but rather are artifacts which reflect cooking as a process; this process sometimes involves the evidence of actual cooking.
These marks are of particular value to cookbook scholars because in the early modern period, it was not uncommon for cookbooks, even in manuscript form, to be penned as a “fair copy” which was never intended to actually enter a kitchen (Shanahan 28). In these cases, professional scribes might even be hired to transcribe a recipe book as part of a woman’s dowry—additional recipes added at a later point by herself or someone else (Theophano 88). These books would be read from the safety of a room far away from the messy kitchen and thus would be spared from any potential stains. Keeping an eye out for evidence of where a cookbook was read and used is a significant part of its meaning. When there is significant staining on a page or other kinds of standout marks, these marks should be encoded within the <text> element because they are important markers that indicate how a particular page or section of text was interacted with as both symbol and tool, but it is important that these marks not be encoded using “damage” as a descriptor which the WWP’s encoding documentation defines as being used in instances where “the original page has been damaged through fire, water, folding, tearing, creasing, etc.” It is also not appropriate to use “obscured” which the WWP’s encoding documentation describes as “if the original page is intact but the text is obscured or unclear due to partial deletion, patching, poorly inked type, or some obstruction.” One such example of a mark which obscures the text beneath is in Figure 2 on the inserted recipe for Cassias where a stain has made the “as” at the end of Cassias difficult to read.
In the particular case of cookbooks, these marks should not be considered damage or an obstruction, which implies that the written word is the prime mechanism of knowledge in the book, but rather coexisting alongside the written word. It is of value to cookbook scholars to know that a recipe for coffee has a coffee stain next to it whereas the same may not be true of plays or poems. In these cases, it may be useful to have dedicated tags to describe these marks where an attribute might allow an encoder to qualify the particularities (such as a <stain type=”food”> or <stain type=”burn”>) which would allow for a more uniform study of these markings by treating them as signifying, material contributions to the object and would also differentiate from what is considered damage in other contexts.
All together, all of the writers and markers on these two pages converge in a patchwork, melting together to produce recipes whose origins split into at least three separate kitchens. Speaking to this particular form of revisionary practice, Susan Leonardi argues that “a recipe is reproducible, and, further, its hearers-readers-receivers are encouraged to reproduce it and, in reproducing it, to revise it and make it their own” (344). The historical positioning of these texts and their writers in the societal margins echoes rhetorician Julie Jung’s theorization of “margins as sites for creative interruption, spaces where traditions and conventions are in flux and ill-defined and thus open to change” (Jung 19-20). In the blank space of the cookbook page, the reader was given space to pause, reflect, and revise—as is the case in folio 32.
The particular ways in which recipe readers are encouraged to revise calls upon a sense of embodied improvisation, which involves “recombining partly familiar materials in new ways, often in ways especially sensitive to context, interaction, and response” (Bateson 2). In a way, the role of encoding also asks readers of these recipes to recombine materials in new ways in order to understand the contexts of these texts; to both revise their meanings for new audiences and to remediate their structure to uncover new ones. In 1978, Donald Murray theorized the complex role of social connection in the revision process by emphasizing the role of listening. According to Murray, the revision process happens internally, when the writer listens, and externally when the writer makes knowledge meaningful to someone outside of themselves. The role of silence and listening in recipe writing and reading is participatory. The writer doesn’t listen alone—she listens with the women from whom the recipe originated. Once a reader has added her revisions, she also begins to listen. Together, the reader-writer pauses in the blank spaces on the page “as a process of delaying clarification of meaning so that differences can be heard, explored, and understood” (Jung 3).
Meanwhile, the recipe continues to extend beyond the page, transmuting into the essential labor of maintaining human life through the production and reproduction of food. In this way, recipes function less as completed texts and more as active processes, reflecting the ways in which they remain in a constant state of flux. Encoding these texts requires attunement to this slipperiness and adjusting the structure of an encoding schema to reflect the palimpsestic nature of a text which was designed to be both read and used as a practical tool across generations of women, treated as provisions that one sends down from one kitchen to the next. Wendy Wall, scholar of early modern cookbooks, writes that because of their messiness, their contradictory nature, and their overpopulation with names and collaborative writing, “while it is possible in a few instances to trace the precise historical networks registered in a collection, this task is mostly futile (and it’s impossible to generalize on the basis of the few collections that we can pin down)” (11-12). However, with text encoding’s ability to track these exact types of networks and the growing availability of manuscript cookbooks online, through the exciting work done at the Folger and the curation done by the Manuscript Cookbook Survey, it isn’t a matter of impossibility or futility but rather a matter of building and collaborating, much in the very same way these domestic actors built the very books we wish to work with ourselves. One of the exciting possibilities presented when working with an object like a manuscript cookbook, which in many ways defies uniformity, singularity, or even the stability of a timeline, is that these books—as old as they are—are agents of change.
Works Cited
Aljoe, N. Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709-1838. Springer, 2012.
Bateson, Mary Catherine. Composing a life. Grove Press, 2001.
Biggs, Michael, et al. “Philosophy And Electronic Publishing. Theory And Metatheory In The Development Of Text Encoding.” The Monist, vol. 80, no. 3, 1997, pp. 348–67.
Darnton, Robert. “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus, vol. 111, no. 3, 1982, pp. 65–83.
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