Searching for Recipes: A Glimpse of Early Modern Upper Class Life
mariekehendriksen - The Recipes Project
By Marieke Hendriksen
On this blog we tend to hear a lot about English household manuscript
recipes but lively traditions existed elsewhere, as Sietske Fransen and
Saskia Klerk also show in their series on a Dutch manuscript of recipes. In
my own search for eighteenth-century Dutch medical and chemical
recipes, I often come across manuscript recipe books that lack a
detailed catalogue description, so I have to check them page-by-page to
see if there is anything relevant for my current research.
Often these recipe books have little to do with medicine or
chemistry, or they contain only a limited number of medical home
remedies. Yet this does not make these books any less interesting to
researchers. This week, when I opened a manuscript at Museum Boerhaave
(inventory number BOERH a 176) which was marked in the catalogue as
‘medicine book and recipes, before 1860’, I caught a fascinating glimpse
of early modern upper class life. Kitchen interior, oil on canvas, Dutch, anonymous, second half of 17th C. Courtesy of RKD images.
Judging by the spelling and state of the paper, my guess is that this
manuscript is quite a bit older than ‘before 1860’, it dates probably
from the eighteenth or maybe even the seventeenth century. This is
supported by the fact that underneath one of the recipes someone has
noted in a different hand ‘1721: selfs geprobeerd’ (‘tried myself’). The
cover and a number of pages are missing, but it contains a wealth of
recipes for food, human and veterinary medicine, household chores, and
home decorations. As many of the cookery recipes list expensive
ingredients spices and lemons, and as the book also contains recipes for
gilding, ink, paints, wax fruit, and a special recipe for nightingale
food, it seems most likely that the recipes were collected in an upper
class household, like that of an aristocratic or well-off merchant
family.
Unfortunately the manuscript is anonymous, and the few names that are
mentioned give little direction either. The only names mentioned are a
certain mister Plaatman as the source of a recipe against kidney stones,
and with a recipe for a potion, the author has noted ‘bij Susanna
ghebruijckt in haer siekte’ (‘used with Susanna in her illness’).
Given the distinct upper class feel of the recipes, and that fact that
they are written in high Dutch in seventeenth and/or eighteenth
century, the first Susanna that springs to mind is Susanna Huygens (1637-1725), daughter of Constantijn. Of course there must have been more women named Susanna, but the population of the United Provinces around
1800 was small – roughly 2 million people – and the upper class thus
too, so it would be interesting to see if additional research can
confirm this surmise. Pieter Holsteyn I, Nightingale, crayon and gouache on paper, ca. 1656-1667. Courtesy of RKD Images.
