‘Wright By Her Own Hand’: Recipe Exchange and Women’s Kinship Networks in Ascendancy Ireland, 1690–1800

From the late seventeenth century, women of the elite classes in Ireland began to share culinary and medicinal information with loved ones across the country and, frequently, across the Irish Sea. This article discusses the practice of recipe exchange in Ascendancy Ireland, drawing on domestic archives primarily in the keeping of the National Library of Ireland. It examines the roles and functions of both letters and family volumes, as well as the relationships between these sources. As the British sphere of influence expanded and more and more women crossed the Irish Sea to marry into Ascendancy families, culinary and medicinal information was circulated regularly and rapidly through letter writing. This information, once ‘approved’, often made its way into bound collections, sometimes passed through families as heirloom objects or gifted upon marriage. Like letters, recipe books allowed women to stay connected across distances, but they also provided connections through generations, and their tangible nature enhanced their value considerably. This article argues that the gendered practice of recipe exchange allowed Ascendancy women to bridge geographical and even generational divides, providing active care for one another and continually reaffirming their kinship networks. Whereas previous studies have focused on broader patterns of cultural, gendered and culinary change, this article will focus on the value and function of recipes in the personal and domestic sphere, exploring how recipe circulation helped women to maintain their connections over generations and expanding distances. Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, Number 27 36 From the late seventeenth century, exchanging, sharing and circulating recipes and domestic knowledge became an important way for elite women in Ireland to maintain their connections to family members and friends from whom they were separated by time and ever-increasing geographical distances. Many of these women were the descendants of the ‘New English’ who had arrived in Ireland in the wake of the Tudor conquest, while others came directly from Britain to marry into established families. Recipes—known more accurately as ‘receipts’ until the nineteenth century—allowed them to conjure familiar tastes of home and concoct trusted cures.1 In a context like Ireland, which was distant, foreign and potentially hostile, such lines of communication were crucial. This article examines the two primary ways in which recipes circulated between households in this period: through letter writing and by the gifting of heirloom volumes. Letters helped to bridge growing distances and create a sense of immediate daily support for one another. Once the recipes and remedies had been tried, tested and ‘approved’, they were often committed to bound family collections. Evidence from the National Library of Ireland’s collections shows that women carried their family recipe books with them to new homes and continued to add to them over generations. Both letter writing and bound volumes were central to women’s role in caring for their families throughout this period. In practical terms, they helped women to access information critical to the health and wellbeing of their families, but they were also an important mechanism for women to maintain connections to family and identity. By writing, exchanging, circulating, recording and archiving culinary and medicinal information, women were able to maintain an active presence in one another’s daily lives and were able to bridge both geographical and generational separation. In the context of seventeenthand eighteenth-century Ireland, which was both foreign and politically turbulent, maintaining these connections to loved ones may have provided an important sense of comfort and connection. It was also an important gendered practice that helped Ascendancy women to rapidly entrench English culinary cultures and norms. While previous studies have considered recipes’ roles as agents of colonial change in detail, this article will look in finer detail at the value and function they had on a more personal and familial level.2 1 For the sake of clarity, I have adopted the contemporary term ‘recipe’ in this paper, in line with other leading scholars in the field. See, for example, Michelle DiMeo and Sara Pennell, eds, Reading & Writing Recipe Books 1550–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 2 Madeline Shanahan, Manuscript Recipe Books as Archaeological Objects: Text and Food in the Early Modern World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015).