This collection of essays provides an overview of new scholarship on recipe books, one of the most popular non-fiction printed texts in, and one of the most common forms of manuscript compilation to survive from, the pre-modern era (c.1550-1800).
This is the first book to collect together the wide variety of scholarly approaches to pre-modern recipe books written in English, drawing on varying approaches to reveal their culinary, medical, scientific, linguistic, religious and material meanings. Ten scholars from the fields of culinary history, history of medicine and science, divinity,...

Sara Pennell traces the emergence of the domestic kitchen as a distinctive space that helped make houses homes from the 17th century through to the middle of the 19th, and explores how the kitchen and its contents - from the hearth to the contents of the dresser drawer -- became a site of specialised activity, sociability and strife. Drawing upon texts, images, surviving structures and objects, The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600-1850 opens up the early modern English kitchen as an important historical site in the construction of domestic relations between husband and wife, masters,...

The development of literacy in the early modern period - a literacy that was often based upon the ability to read - encouraged an interest in didactic texts. These essays explore attitudes and reactions to a range of informational books from that period.