Who was writing the books?
Who was writing the books?
In most cases, we simply do not know.
The recipe books were attributed to women because their contents related to domestic responsibilities, including cooking, preserving food, maintaining the home and caring for sick occupants. Indeed, named women are occasionally identified as authors, providing important evidence of women’s literacy skills.
However, these books were occasionally written by men, and perhaps surprisingly also by medical professionals, who had access to published medical texts. In most cases, there is no way to identify the authors.
What we do know for certain is how they were produced. They are collective works, often written by multiple people over time, and left open-ended for others to add to later. They were passed between generations, friends and neighbours, edited, copied and shared again innumerable times.
The recipe books are records of a collective identity, in which knowledge was readily preserved and shared. Their collaborative nature is a sharp contrast to the formal, structured environment in which official medical textbooks were produced – eg in Latin, to be read only by educated professionals.
MS232 Book of receipts title page
Highlights
MS193 Book of medical recipes, D. Champion, 1816
Many recipe books were handed down through the generations in one family. However, by the time they came to be collected by institutions like the RCP, those familial links had often been lost. Unusually, this book was donated to the RCP by a direct descendent of its author, Dr Champion. We still have no information about the author – identifying historical figures can be very difficult, even when we expect them to be better represented in the records, such as a male doctor.
https://archive.org/details/ms-193/page/n65/mode/2up
MS250 Commonplace book, Widdows Golding, 1786
Unusually, this recipe book was compiled by an identifiable man, the surgeon Widdows Golding. It looks like an anatomy textbook and contains the same medical information found in official, published sources.
https://archive.org/details/ms-250-combinepdf-complete
MS251 Book of receipts by Mary Goodson, 1687
When signatures and dates are occasionally found in the recipe books, they occur on the title pages. Mary Goodson was the first of several authors contributing to this finished book, which was started in 1687. At this time, 9 out of 10 women were officially illiterate.
https://archive.org/details/ms-251
Further resources
Other recipe books mentioned in this section are:
MS509 Book of medical prescriptions and cookery recipes
https://archive.org/details/ms-509
Digitised copies of all our recipe books are available online via the Internet Archive
https://archive.org/details/rcplondonmanuscripts
Please be aware these books contain descriptions of animal cruelty.
