Food History

What I love about the Hannah Woolley extract I gave you the other day is what it says about women. Firstly, it says that women carved at table. That it was a permissible activity for gentlewomen. That part of the carving entailed knowing what one was carving and being able to describe the activity correctly. It also says that Hannah Woolley felt that not every gentlewoman had the knowledge to present themselves well in this endeavour.

It’s exactly like Francatelli helping the poor. Woolley was extending a courteously educational hand to the ill-educated gentlewoman. With Francatelli, we knew that there was a great loss in food culture in London in the nineteenth century. Can we say the same thing about the middle and lower gentry in the second half of the seventeenth century?

Woolley isn’t talking about cooks in this chapter. She’s talking about high level food knowledge specific to a particular role in society. Traditionally, in a perfect world, a gentlewoman would be taught this knowledge by her mother. That’s the theory, anyway.

What happened to make Woolley want to list common small birds and how to describe their carving (’thigh that Woodcock,’ ‘display that crane, ‘ ‘dismember that hern’)? Is it a loss in transmission of that important cultural facet? Or is it something different?

What I think is that it was multiple factors. One was the rise of the printed cookbook, which a story unto itself.

The second is the return of the monarchy after several years of Cromwell. Whether that period of time was enough to break cultural patterns is something I can’t say. It’s really not a period I know that well. The fact that people felt there was a break (and they do, even today) means that maybe there was an effort to bring back everything that was lot. Bring back maypoles, morris dancing, and proper instructions on carving for gentlewomen.

The third major possibility is the rise of many members of the merchant and trading classes into the gentry. Women of good business families could marry up, and their vast knowledge of other issues would not stand them in good stead at the dinner tables of their husband’s friends.

This is another set of thoughts that I’m playing with because I don’t have time to research them. They’re worth thinking about. There are so many reasons that people can give for writing books that purport to instruct.

On a final and entirely irrelevant note, I love knowing (from Woolley) that one lists a swan by slitting her. It sounds so much more obscure that it really is!