Kitchen Activities

In smaller homes in early modern England, the kitchen was typically one of two main rooms on the ground floor. Sharing a central chimney with the parlor in larger homes, the kitchen was often secluded from the rest of the household and had external entrances to facilitate access to wood/coal sheds, cisterns, gardens and yards (Pennell 204) to make cooking easier. Like today, the kitchen was a key room in any home, used for cooking and eating, but it was also a place for conversation, discussion, and family disputes. The kitchen usually included: A chimney, with hooks for hanging meats to be smoked An oven, for baking bread, pies, and pastries A cooking hearth, including a spit for roasting meat Cooking implements such as hooks, tongs, and spoons of iron and wood Cookware of metals such iron, copper, brass, and tin Dishes, bowls, sppons, ladels, and platters of pottery, wood, and pewter for serving and eating Vessels like mugs, cups, and tankards of pottery, wood, pewter, horn, and leather for drinking A table for food preparation and eating A chair or stool for sitting by the hearth

The Complexities of the Early Modern Kitchen

In small households, the wife was often the cook of the house, whereas in bigger households, a male cook or cooking staff might be employed as servants. Housewives had the responsibility to provide food for the family, especially over winter when carefully allocating resources was necessary. Therefore, the family would need to trust the cook with managing quantities of ingredients for daily and longer-term use. Before refrigerators, food preservation was naturally very important. A cook in a household needed to know a variety of techniques to preserve food. Some of the foods preserved commonly included Fruit Nuts Meat Vegetables And even candied flowers

Women in the Kitchen

The housewife or cook would need to understand how to effectively preserve food and adapt for differences in recipes. In terms of gender roles, being the cook of the house provided many women with a purpose considering the kitchen was, at its core, a domestic and feminine space. Historian Sara Pennell notes that, for married women, the kitchen was perceived as the public locus in which that virtuous persona was made visible and accountable (212).

The 1594 book has the following very lengthy subtitle that indicates how crucial the role of women was in making food and preserving the household’s health, noted here in modern spelling and punctuation: Containing many principal points of cookery, as well how to dress meats, after sundry after many of the best fashions used in England and other Countries, with their apt and proper sauces, both for flesh and fish, as also the orderly serving of the same to the table. Hereunto are annexed, sundry necessary conceits for the preservation of health. Very meet suitable to be adjoined to the good housewife’s closet private chamber for of provision for her household.

Recipes and Recipe Books in Early Modern England

Both handwritten and printed recipe books offer evidence of the kinds of domestic knowledge that the people of early modern England had or needed. Within the books, household tips as well as helpful recipes appeared. Recipes were integral to early modern households, and many women made recipe books for themselves and their families. Recipe books were used for record keeping and as a way to move the verbal culture of recipe creation and knowledge to written form. holds the world’s largest collection of manuscript recipe books from the early modern period, with 125 catalogued manuscripts.

Recipe books contained many useful facts. For example, one shared how to salt and dry meat; animals were often slaughtered at the start of winter, so the meat had to be preserved through drying, salting, or smoking. Recipes like this one were often edited over a lifetime and reflected the social context of the time in which they were created.

Printed books of recipes, as opposed to handwritten ones, began appearing in the mid-16th century, with dozens of printed texts of recipes for food and medicines, as well as household management appearing before 1700.

An example of how to is demonstrated in the 1656 . This recipe for a venison pie shows the different techniques and seasonings used in early modern kitchens. Parboyl it, and then sauce it in Vinegar then Lard it very thick, and season it with Pepper, Ginger and Nutmegs, put it into a deep Pye with good store of sweet butter, and let it bake, when it is baked, take a pint of Hippocras spiced wine, halfe a pound of sweet butter, two or three Nutmeg, little Vinegar, poure it into the Pye in the Oven and let it lye and soake an hour, then take it out, and when it is cold stop the vent hole.

, c. 1677–1711. Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library.

Key Print Sources Orlin, Lena Cowen. . Folger Shakespeare Library, 1995. Pennell, Sara. . , vol. 11, no. 3, 1998, pp. 201–216. Tigner, A. L., and D. B. Goldstein. . Duquesne University Press, 2016.

Key Online Soures . 1594. , https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1475–1640_the-good-huswifes-handma_book_1594. Accessed 10 Oct. 2023. Best, Michael. . .. University of Victoria. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/huswifery/women&kitchen.html. Accessed 13 Feb. 2023. Best, Michael. . .. University of Victoria. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/city%20life/trades/cooks.html. Accessed 13 Feb. 2023. Caton, Mary Ellen. . , 10 Sep.–30 Dec., 1999. https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Fooles_and_Fricassees:_Food_in_Shakespeare%27s_England. , Hypotheses. 4 Oct 2023. https://emroc.hypotheses.org/about. Havard, Lucy J. . , vol. 74, no. 1, 20 Mar. 2020, pp. 5–33. http://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2019.0004. Martha Carlin. (n.d.). . https://sites.uwm.edu/carlin/medieval-and-early-modern-cookery/. Accessed 10 Oct. 2023. . . The Folger Shakespeare Library. 21 Jul. 2020. hhttps://folgerpedia.folger.edu/_mw/index.php?title=Recipe_books_at_the_Folger_Shakespeare_Library.

Image Source . c. 1677–1711. MS. Pg. 4. . . Call number V.b.380. https://digitalcollections.folger.edu/img142914.