Recipes are pleasure, sustenance, and memory. Recipes are labor, need, and survival.
Ingredients for early modern recipes (ca. 1400-1800CE) took winding, diverse, and sometimes troubling pathways. By funding research, partnering with industry experts, and engaging with public audiences, the Folger Institute uses early modern recipes as an entry point for studying the important histories of Gender, Sexuality, Class, and Race.
Our “Mixology” series draws on the Folger’s rich collection of handwritten English recipe books—the largest in the world—to examine the early modern world and connect it with the present. Together, let’s rethink how we research and talk about the ways ingredients were grown and harvested, marketed and sold, consumed and imagined.
All recipes are courtesy of Christopher E. Smith of Crazy Aunt Helen’s. Try the recipes at home and join us on September 22, 2023, for an evening of cocktails and trivia!
GENDER AND SEXUALITY
In 1976 historian Joan Kelly asked a paradigm-shifting question: “Did women have a Renaissance?” Instead of seeing women as merely strategic brides or producers of heirs, Kelly encouraged researchers to re-think their analyses using the lens of women’s experiences. After this shift in focus, researchers also started questioning the construction of “womanhood” within the gender-binary culture of the early modern world. This new line of thought eventually led to the development of “gender” and “sexuality” as broader, more nuanced areas of academic study.
Fertility and reproduction were central to many early modern women’s experiences. We often assume that without contemporary obstetrics, gynecology, and hormonal contraceptives, those born with a uterus were simply victims of biology—if they survived the perils of their first pregnancy and childbirth, they spent much of their lives pregnant. We shouldn’t conclude, however, that early modern women had no reproductive knowledge or choice. In fact, for much of history, women’s bodily agency was due in large part to their knowledge of medicinal herbs like mugwort, which was used to control menstruation (or “flowers”), terminate pregnancies, and aid in birthing and post-natal care.
Cocktail: For Your Flowers
Historical Recipe: fflowers to bring down.
Take a quart of white wine, the root of a flower de Luce, germander,
unsett hysop, and unsett lime, of each a handfull; boyle all these
well in the white wine, & drink of it morning and evening. Also long
pepper, beaten very fine, and well mingled with white wine, and drunk
Morning and evening doth the same. MS.
Another for the same, and to bring down the afterbirth. Take as much
gallingale beaten to powder as will lye upon a groat, in a spoon-
full of white wine, and drink a little wine after it. probatum . MS.
A Bath to break the flowers. Take wormwood, mallows and mug-
wort of each a quantity; boyle them to a strong decoction in fayer
Water: let the patient sitt over this, as hott as may be: and
when it grows cold, let the patient be gott into hott bed. Use this
at night for a week or 3 or 4 dayes.
Inspired Cocktail: For your Flowers
To bring down your flowers
- 2oz of either Gin or Whiskey*
- .75 oz of Lemon juice
- .5 oz of Simple syrup
- 1 egg white
- .75 oz of Mugwort syrup
Mugwort syrup (makes 1.5 cups)
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 cup water
- 1 cup dried mugwort
For the Syrup: Bring the water and sugar to a boil in a small saucepan. Stir so that all the sugar is dissolved and remove from the heat. Add the dried mugwort. Set aside to infuse for 24 hours. Strain the syrup through a fine strainer into a clean container. Press the mugwort to capture every drop of syrup, then discard.
For the Cocktail: Add all ingredients into shaker tins with ice and shake. Strain into a coup glass.
*May be replaced with non-alcoholic Gin or Whiskey for mocktail version
While some herbs prevented fertility, other foods such as mustard seeds were seen as powerful aphrodisiacs that increased sexual virility. In general, early modern individuals did not associate sexual preferences with identity in the same ways we do today. Instead, the dominant culture insisted that people achieve the “ideal state” of heteronormative sexuality by balancing their physical bodies with intentional diets, exercises, and even mannerisms. Of course, there is also ample evidence of same-sex love and desire, non-heteronormative behavior, and asexuality in the historical record. Researchers are now re-examining and nuancing this evidence using the contemporary vocabularies of gender, sexuality, and queer studies. Approaching history in this way empowers us to question and push back against patriarchal and heteronormative structures, past and present.
Cocktail: Fadoodling Fizz
Historical Recipe: Of losse of carnall copulacion
Note
They which for inpotencie and weaknes of members cannot
1 vse the act of Generation, lett them vse good meates, as hennes,
2 capons partrich, fesants yong doves cock sparrowes cock stones
3 and such, like Also windie meates are good The eggs of partridg
doe stir vp carnall Lust. Also rockett musterd sede gardin cress
Inspired Cocktail: Fadoodling Fizz
To stir up carnal lust
- 2 oz Mustard-infused Gin*
- .5 oz Lemon juice
- .75 oz Simple syrup
- 2 slices of Cucumber, muddled
- 1 Egg white
- Soda water to top
- .5 barspoon of Mustard powder to garnish
Add egg white, lemon juice, and mustard-infused gin to one side of two-piece cocktail shaker tin. Add muddled cucumber and simple syrup to other side. Add ice, shake vigorously, and strain into a tall glass with ice. Top with soda water. Sprinkle mustard powder on top and garnish with a lemon wheel
*May be replaced with non-alcoholic Gin for mocktail version
CLASS AND RACE
Humans have long been interested in classifying and understanding difference. For many years, scholars studying early modern Europe focused on economic and political differences. Wealth disparities, along with the cultural and political divisions that accompany them, were understood as “class.” This emphasis on class, however, was also the by-product of the available historical record, which privileges the writings, objects, and ideas of wealthy individuals who could afford to collect and preserve them… individuals like the Lady Spencer.
The “Lady Spencer,” born into a powerful and wealthy family, is attributed with a recipe for “Reison Wine” in a commonplace book dated to around 1700. For early modern ladies, recipes were a socially acceptable means to share and experiment with culinary, alchemical, and medicinal knowledge. As such, recipes became powerful forms of social capital that women readily collected and exchanged. The cachet of a recipe could be increased by attaching it (sometimes falsely!) to a prominent name such as “Lady Spencer.”
Today, researchers take a more nuanced approach to class. Rather than approaching it as an independent category of historical study, class is viewed as deeply intertwined with constructions of gender and sexuality, as well as the intersections of race.
Cocktail: The Lady Spencer’s Spritz
Historical Recipe: To Make Reison Wine in Lady Spencers way
Take 2lb of Raisons of the Sun shred,
one pound of shugar the Iuce of two
Lemmons, one peel, put them in an
earthen Pott with a Cover, then take
2 gallons of water & let it boyle half
an hour then power it boyling hot into
the Pott & couer it close for three or 4
daies stirring it euery day twise then
straine it and put it into bottles stopping
it very Close and in 2 or three weeks it
will be fitt to drink, if it be in the
time of the year you may put in
Cowslip fflowers which makes it very
pleasant, you may put in 2 quarts more
of water to the Ingrediencies which will be
Good but not so good as the first
Inspired Cocktail: The Lady Spencer’s Spritz
For when you need to name-drop
- 3.5 oz Moscato
- 3 dashes of Bitters
- 1.5 oz Cowslip syrup
- Soda water to top
Cowslip syrup (makes 1.5 cups)
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 cup water
- 1 cup dried cowslips
For the Syrup: Bring the water and sugar to a boil in a small saucepan. Stir so that all the sugar is dissolved and remove from the heat. Add the dried cowslips. Set aside to infuse for 24 hours. Strain the syrup through a fine strainer into a clean container. Press the cowslips to capture every drop of syrup, then discard.
For the Cocktail: Add all ingredients to a wine glass, add ice, and top with soda water. Garnish with a lemon twist.
In “Sugar and Status in Shakespeare,” scholar Kim F. Hall reminds us that in the medieval period sugar was a luxury available only to members of the “upper class”– nobles and royals. During the early modern period, sugar became somewhat more affordable and therefore accessible to “acquisitive, status conscious, strivers.” Hall writes that “even as its consumption spreads beyond the aristocracy, sugar’s age-old associations with royalty become part of the added value of sugar”.
“Lisbon sugar,” or refined sugar, is included in many early modern recipes, often where you might least expect it! First refined in India around 3,000 years ago, sugar spread to China and then the Middle East before crossing the Atlantic, where it became a lucrative and exploitative colonial enterprise. As Before ‘Farm to Table’ fellows Dr. Neha Vermani and Dr. Michael Walkden explain,
harvesting, juicing, and refining sugar cane was labor-intensive. Because of this, the British slave trade was driven by its sugar trade. Britain fought bloody, destructive wars, enslaved hundreds of thousands of people, and utterly changed ecologies, all to satisfy its national sweet tooth.
Over the course of the 17th century, Europeans and Americans transformed what was once a rare delicacy into a cheap commodity. They did this through slave labor and plantation farming as the transatlantic trade in Black bodies—particularly enslaved African men, women, and children—grew to its height.
Racial injustice has been and continues to be systemic and damaging. Today, premodern critical race studies offers us new insights into the history of contemporary racialized thinking and racism. Researchers are helping to create anti-racist spaces by writing more inclusive histories, using innovative teaching methods, and contributing to larger conversations about social justice.
Cocktail: Old–Fashionedly Sweet
Historical Recipe: For a Hot and Costive Habit of body
preserve green Walnuts before the shell is hard,
afer they have lain a day and night in water, first
pricked full of holes; boile and shift the water
often, till they are tender; stick in each a bit of
Candy’d orange peel, and take their weight in
Lisbon sugar; boil them up, and take two, three
or four of these when going to rest.
They are a gentle, wholesome, and certain purge
Inspired Cocktail: Old-Fashionedly Sweet
For a hot and costive body
- 2 oz whiskey
- 2 dashes of Black Walnut bitters
- 1 dash of Orange bitters
- .5 oz Simple Syrup, or to taste
- Brown Sugar to rim
Add all ingredients to a tall glass and stir with ice. Strain into a rocks glass rimmed with brown sugar and add ice. Garnish with an orange wheel.
Join us at Crazy Aunt Helen’s!
Drink like it's 1699
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