The English word “recipe” and its equivalent in most European languages is derived from the Latin imperative recipe: “take,” as in “take two eggs and beat them until frothy.” Brief instructions for combining and processing ingredients were applied to cooking, pharmacy, alchemy, divination, pigment-making and many craft and industrial processes. In this delightful and absorbing collection of 29 essays, the emphasis is on cooking recipes, but the breadth of fields covered is one of its particular strengths.
The term “recipe” only came into common use near the end of the fourteenth century, notably in a passage of Froissart’s chronicle (referring to a medicine) and in the large culinary assemblage put together by the anonymous author of Le menagier de Paris. Earlier terms, many of which maintained currency after “recipe” became common, include doctrina, confectio, and descriptio. Although English has separate words for food and medical preparations (recipe versus prescription), the extra-culinary utility of “recipe” is clearest in its indistinguishable applicability to both food and drugs in most other European languages.
The articles are adapted from conference papers given at two meetings that brought together specialists from different fields, geographical areas and time periods. Although the Far East features in the title, only one essay, a brief outline by Françoise Sabban on the recipe in China, discusses this area. Two essays are entirely concerned with Arabic culinary texts while two others consider magic and alchemy in Latin as well as Arabic versions. One article traces the origins of the Jewish braided Sabbath bread, challah.
The book favors medieval Europe and cooking but considers the recipe as a form of conveying useful knowledge in many fields, the concise expression of artisanal skill. The articles bring different fields into contact through the concept of “making and knowing” put forward to great effect by Pamela Smith, a body of pre-modern mechanical and vernacular information and craft. Until recently, historians paid little attention to the numerous surviving texts reflecting this kind of knowledge in favor of what were considered higher forms of science or intellectual speculation, a pity because the number and variety of techniques and directions in manuscripts and early printed books is immense. For Western Europe in the Middle Ages, there are at least 15,000 culinary recipes. A single French manuscript from the 1580s in the BnF, described here by Tillmann Taape in the chapter “Orphelins du savoir-faire: la recette en edition numérique et au laboratoire ‘Making and Knowing,’” has 900 recipes, mostly metallurgical but also for painting, including varnishes as well as pigments, medicine, weaponry, and armor.
Consideration of recipes outside the kitchen shows their performativity. The ars invocandi to summon demons requires ingredients (to fabricate balm or unguent, for example), but might also necessitate spells, amulets, signs, even removing the clothes of the officiant (Julien Véronèse, “Les experimenta de conjuration des esprits...”). What in cooking might be non-obvious tips (how to rescue curdled sauces; putting ice in boiling water for hard-boiled eggs) become liturgically important in recipes involving difficult or supernatural procedures. The notion of secrets is central to craft knowledge, acquired by experience or the fruit of innate judgment. They differentiate the skills of experts from those of apprentices or amateurs: witness the reluctance of chefs to share recipes or the persistence of proprietary formulae such as, famously, the one for Coca-Cola.
So important is esoteric knowledge that one might question just how practical certain forms of instruction truly are. Michel Pastoureau’s article on making colors offers something of a counter-conception to that of Pamela Smith because instead of being conjoined, “making and knowing” are opposed as pragmatics versus theory or even fantasy (“Fabriquer la couleur: des recettes pour teindre, pour peindre, ou pour rêver?”). Manuals describing how to make pigments do not always conform to artists’ practical techniques. In pre-modern written lore, Pastoureau remarks, ritual often outweighs result. Strikingly, Leonardo da Vinci composed extensive notes for a treatise on painting, but his actual canvases reflect little of that accumulation of information.
Some of the most intriguing articles are on very specific topics such as the use of dried or salted cod in the Tyrol (Barbara Denicolò, “From Staple Food to Regional Specialty: Stockfish Recipes of the Alpine Area from the XVth to XIXth Century”), or the renowned distilled beverages, medicines and perfumes made by the Jesuati, an Italian lay order (Isabella Gagliari, “ ‘Chemiatri’ di Dio: i frati Gesuati, le loro ricette e la distillazione dell’aquavie”). Others are rather more general, the aforementioned article on Chinese recipes or Salernitan pharmacy manuals (Mireille Ausécache, “Les recettes salernitaines entre experience et théorie”). An overall theme is the contrast or complementarity of theory and codification on the one hand and informal experience and innate talent on the other. This is characteristic of modern cookbooks, some of which provide detailed instructions and anticipate obstacles as opposed to those asserting the importance of personal judgement and observation: J. López Kenji-Alt, The Food Lab versus Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Vibration Cooking.
The article on the pharmacological texts of the School of Salerno differentiates between the attempted precision of the gradation of humoral properties and a less quantified evaluation of the effects of combined remedies. While simple (single-ingredient) medicines were classified by degree of heat, cold, wetness and dryness, use of compound prescriptions--combining ingredients with different complexions--required experiential judgment as to utility and effects. Alchemical formularies deploy deliberate ambiguity in order to keep powerful effects secret, thus excluding the unworthy or insufficiently experienced. This is particularly evident with regard to quantities, time, and procedures, imprecisely specified as “enough,” or “a number of times” or “as appropriate” (Sébastien Moreau, “‘Qui accipit quod debet et miscet sicut debet, procedit inde quod debet procedere’: les recettes alchimiques médiévales arabes et arabo-latines, IXe-XIIIe siècles”).
The problem of instruction as contrasted with prior knowledge is connected with the intended audience for these recipes. There is no anticipated amateur readership in pharmacology, but, because of the power and danger of drugs, the manuals tend towards exactitude. Divination and alchemy too are intended for initiates, but as protection against unauthorized use (or even more strongly, as salesmanship--evidence of perilous effectiveness) they ostentatiously appear to require prior familiarity. The nature of readership for the approximately 170 surviving medieval cookbooks has often been debated. Frequent lack of specificity as to measurements and cooking time imply an inner circle, cooks writing for other cooks. Two Arabic cookery texts from the Maghreb and Al-Andalus with 900 recipes vaguely distinguish “a little,” “a lot,” and “an enormous amount,” and frequently invoke judgement, taste, and proportion (Marianne Brisville, “Mesure et mesures dans les livres de cuisine de l’occident islamique medieval”). Instructions for apprentices in the Parisian cookery guilds of the period 1475 to 1599 contain no reference to cookbook recipes to supplement a thoroughly oral and imitative training (Ryan Whibbs, “‘Gens experts & non suspects’: Apprenticeship in the Cooks’, Charcutiers’ and Caterers’ Guilds of Paris, 1475-1599”).
Texts that address non-professionals, however, impart explicit information about cooking times or how much of each ingredient needs to be used (Antonella Campanini, “Culinary Recipes and their Readership in the Italian Renaissance”). It is also important to distinguish the limits of what is referred to as “sensuous technology”; being able to judge steps in a process by look, taste, feel, smell, or sound. Boiling eggs or making something covered with a crust necessitates more precise instructions about timing when the use of sight for the interior is blocked (Gianenrico Bernasconi, “Mesure du temps dans les livres de cuisine du XVIIe siècle: Sensuous Technology et delegation technique”).
This important assemblage is marred by a surprising number of translation errors. 18 articles are in English, 10 in French and one in Italian. The problems arise in English translations made from French or Italian originals. Two essay titles are incorrect: “The Own and the Foreign. Traces of Local, Regional and National Cuisines in Medieval and Early Modern Recipes” (the first of two contributions by Barbara Denicolò) and “Between the Lines of a Recipe Book: Alchemy, Cosmetics, Metallurgy and Medicine in the Renaissance Ferrara” (Frederica Badiali and Pietro Baraldi). “The Secrets of the Cook...”, a fascinating account of amazing medieval recipes by Bruno Laurioux (e.g. “Dancing chicken” or “Peacock redressed in its plumage”) describes food as “crude” rather than raw (176); the meaning of “intricated” (178) may be “intricate” or more likely “intertwined”; whole sentences require re-reading to figure out (e.g. at 170, “If many historians of sciences and technology have been interest in ‘secret’...it was mainly under the perspective to understand one possible origin of the ‘Modern Science’--as did a pioneer as Lynn Thorndike”).
Nevertheless, these infelicities do not substantially detract from a great accomplishment. An important result of this volume is that cookbooks can be seen in the context of a large genre of expert advice, compilation, secrets and opinion. These compendia about fabricating and transforming materials informed readers but also defended the dignity of artisanal expertise and the legitimacy of practical forms of knowledge.