Preserving on Paper: Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen's Receipt Books

Apricot wine and stewed calf's head, melancholy medicine and "ointment of roses."

Welcome to the cookbook Shakespeare would have recognized. Preserving on Paper is a critical edition of three seventeenth-century receipt books—handwritten manuals that included a combination of culinary recipes, medical remedies, and household tips which documented the work of women at home. Kristine Kowalchuk argues that receipt books served as a form of folk writing, where knowledge was sh…