In the Kitchen, 1550-1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad

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.

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. With Madeline Bassnett, she edited the collection In the Kitchen, 1550-1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad (Amsterdam University Press, 2022). 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). Andy Crow is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Boston College. Their book-in-progress, Austerity Measures: The Poetics of Hunger in Early Modern English Literature, explores poetics and food scarcity in seventeenth-century literature. Their recent work has appeared in English Literary History, Shakespeare Quarterly, and SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900. Julie A. Fisher is an educator and historian of early America. Currently at the National Historical Publications and Records Commission of the US National Archives, she has previously worked with the Yale Indian Papers Project, the National Park Service, the American Philosophical Society and Bard High School Early College in Washington, DC. She is the co-author of Ninigret, Sachem of the Niantics and Narragansetts: Diplomacy, War, and the Balance of Power in Seventeenth-Century New England and Indian Country. David B. Goldstein is Associate Professor of English and coordinator of the Creative Writing programme at York University in Toronto. His first monograph, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England, shared the Shake_x0002_speare’s Globe Book Award. He has also co-edited three essay collections on Shakespeare, food, and early modern hospitality. Rebecca Laroche is Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. During spring term 2019, she was a Before ’Farm-to-Table’Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She has published books and articles on Shakespeare, ecofeminist theory, early modern women, print herbal texts, and manuscript recipe collections. She was a founding steering committee member of the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective Jennifer Munroe is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is co-author of Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory and author of Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature. She is also co-editor of Ecological Approaches to Early Modern Texts and Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity, and co-founding member of the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective. Melissa Schultheis is a PhD candidate at Rutgers University. Her dissertation is titled ’Harrowing Poetics: Home Making in Early Modern English Poetry’. It examines the intersection of English agrarian and domestic labour and poetry to suggest that the material aspects of the rustic home--its methods for organizing time, performing hospitality, and circumscribing its social and physical boundaries--were significant to the development of English vernacular poetry Margaret Simon is Associate Professor in the English Department at North Carolina State University. Her most recent publication is a co-edited volume of essays entitled Forming Sleep: Representing Lost Consciousness in the English Renaissance. She serves on the steering committee of the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective. Edith Snook is Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick (Fredericton). Her current research project, with Dr. Lyn Bennett (Dalhousie), is the Early Modern Maritime Recipes project, an open access online data_x0002_base of recipes from before 1800 circulating in what are now the Maritime provinces of Canada. Amy L. Tigner is Professor of English at the University of Texas, Arlington and Editor-in-Chief of Early Modern Studies Journal. She has co-written Literature and Food Studies (Routledge, 2018), co-edited Culinary Shakespeare (Duquesne UP, 2017), and written Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles II (Ashgate, 2012). Rob Wakeman is Assistant Professor of English at Mount Saint Mary College where he directs first-year composition and teaches early British literatures. His work appears in Exemplaria, Arthuriana, and several edited collections. Katherine Walker is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Her current book project, Instinct, Knowledge and Science in Early Modern Culture, situates embodied ways of knowing in sixteenth_x0002_and seventeenth-century culture. Her work appears in Studies in Philology, Preternature, and English Literary History.