9 - A Culinary Embassy : Diplomatic Home Making in Lady Ann Fanshawe’s Booke of Receipts

Summary

Abstract

In 1651, Joseph Averie transcribed Lady Ann Fanshawe's recipes into Mrs. Fanshawes Booke of Receipts of Physickes Salues, Waters, Cordials, Preserves and Cookery. Averie's hand allows us to date the recording of recipes as pre- and post-1651 and examine which sections received the most additions. This reading method reveals the way that recipe books record domestic aspirations, and in the case of Fanshawe, show how those aspirations changed over the course of the Civil War and her time in Iberia. While some features in later recipes appear to be influenced by her time in Spain, all indicate an increased attention to cuisine that asserts her, and her book’s, status as a culinary ambassador and cosmopolitan emissary in a globalizing world.

Keywords: Lady Ann Fanshawe, domesticity, diplomacy, England, Iberia, culinary history

In December of 1651, Joseph Averie transcribed Lady Ann Fanshawe's recipes into Mrs. Fanshawes Booke of Receipts of Physickes Salues, Waters, Cordials, Preserves and Cookery. While it is unclear how much agency Averie had in the resulting manuscript's format, his title anticipates the recipe book's organization into six distinct sections, which he used to arrange the recipes that Fanshawe had collected or inherited prior to 1651. In examining the extant manuscript, we see that a majority of the recipes that appear in Fanshawes Booke of Receipts do not appear in Averie's hand, yet later transcribers and contributors to the manuscript often abide by the structure that this amanuensis imposed on it. Together Averie's hand and the manuscript's organization allow us to date the recording of recipes as pre- and post-1651 and examine which sections received the most revisions and additions. This timestamp is significant as it allows for a comparison of the manuscript's recipe conventions before and after Fanshawe's decision to collate her recipes in 1651, including her time in Portugal and Spain in the mid-1660s. Although many seventeenth-century English receipt books contain recipes from or show the influence of other parts of Europe, Fanshawe's decision to record recipes while travelling with her Cavalier husband during the Interregnum and early Restoration of Charles II makes her notable among royalist women.