'A Practical Art': Material Culture and Cookbooks,an archaeological perspective.

Paper to be given at Reading and Writing Recipe Books: 1600-1800,
Warwick University 8-9 August 2008.
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Abstract:
Archaeologists are increasingly realising the potential of data derived from food and dining to consider the material realisation of social and cultural tension. Within the post-medieval period, work has traditionally concentrated on 'excluded' groups - slaves, criminals and the destitute, apparently seeking 'text-free' zones (Moreland 2001) in which to demonstrate the potential of archaeology for enabling study of the historically invisible. However, not only is this concept meaningless but methodologically dangerous in studying a society in which text played a key role. The growing proliferation of manuscript and printed cookbooks in the period up to 1800 provides a rich resource for both historian and archaeologist. This paper will argue that an archaeologically-informed approach to this data can provide insights into the period and contribute to the methodological debate on the use of such sources - providing the uneasy theoretical relationship between text and material record can be resolved.

The idea that the archaeological record is more 'real' or 'unbiased' than written description has permeated much archaeological writing. Materially-derived data has been used to 'correct' the written record. Yet the concept of unbiased material data, whether site-specific or from collections, has also long since been questioned. Text has been used to contextualise objects which are then privileged as being capable of communicating in ways and to senses that written sources ignore. Alternatively and most significantly, written sources can be treated as material culture in their own right, tactile objects which themselves contain insights open to archaeological theorising. Drawing on methodological approaches used in the archaeological consideration of food and dining in England from c1750, this paper will demonstrate the way in which cookbooks, both printed and manuscript, have been and can be integrated into an archaeological study. It will emphasise the potential of interdisciplinary working, while using explicitly archaeological theories and approaches to shed new light on cookbook-derived data.

Moreland, J (2001) Archaeology and Text. London, Duckworth.