Sometime in the early eighteenth century, a Londoner picked up a book bound in parchment decorated with gold tooling and opened it to page 160, where someone had written a recipe for “Indian Pickle.” Courtesy of a “Mrs. Jones,” it called for a complex mixture of ginger, garlic, cauliflower, mustard, turmeric, and long pepper (Piper longum, native to southeast Asia).Footnote ¹ The Londoner read the recipe and scribbled some marginal notes about Mrs. Jones's contribution. Who was Mrs. Jones, and how did her distinctly South Asian recipe find its way into this London recipe book?Footnote ²

Now known by its call number, V.a.680, this book is held by the Folger Shakespeare Library, home to the largest collection of early modern English manuscript recipe books in the world. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British recipe manuscripts were living texts, multigenerational, adaptable, aspirational, and changeable. They were physical testaments to the social alliances and networks of knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britons.Footnote ³ And, as this essay shows, they were tools of empire, used to appropriate, translate, and transmit the global foodways that permeated Britain's earliest colonial schemes.

Close analysis of the techniques and ingredients in two recipes on facing pages of the book offers insights into metropolitan connections to expanding British commercial and imperial networks. The first recipe, “To make Mutton Cabobs,” includes eastern Mediterranean methods that would seem familiar to any modern British kebab shop:

This text represents one of the earliest known British adaptations of foods with origins across the Arab-Islamic, Turkic-Islamic, and Persian-Islamic worlds.Footnote ⁵ Dishes of marinated meat cooked on skewers were integral to the foodways of North Africa, the eastern Mediterranean, and South Asia.Footnote ⁶ Techniques rather than ingredients made V.a.680's kebab recipe unique. By directing that the cubed meat rest in lightly seasoned vinegar, the recipe's author did something unusual: marinating raw meat before roasting was rarely recorded in British recipe manuscripts from the period. And then, by calling for the meat to be stuck onto skewers, alternating with slices of onion so that the two cooked side by side, the author made the dish instantly recognizable as shish-kebab.

At the time V.a.680 was being written, British travelers, merchants, mariners, and government and military officials were interacting with people who regularly cooked kebabs, and these British colonizers transmitted food traditions they had encountered through British imperial projects. It is likely that the “Lady Granard” who contributed this recipe was Mary Forbes, whose husband, George, served with the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean and Russia during the early eighteenth century.Footnote ⁷ But Lady Granard felt the need to translate and appropriate, not merely replicate, these new foodways. At the end of the recipe, she called for grated bread, butter, and broth to be added to the flavorful drippings to make a kind of sauce that would not have appeared in any traditional Mediterranean dish. The result was kebab altered to better fit the tastes of a London household. It was not merely a mutton kebab: it was Lady Granard's mutton kebab.

Another adaptation and appropriation occurred on the next page of the book, with a recipe for sago pudding, a dish popular across Southeast Asia, New Guinea, and parts of East Asia. Edible sago, a starchy flour made from the pith of certain palm trees, was (and still is) used as a base for breads, noodles, gruels, and cakes. By the turn of the eighteenth century, British people living in the metropole were consuming sago as a food.Footnote ⁸ V.a.680 actually contains four such recipes: “To Make a Sago Pudding Mrs. Garrards way”;Footnote ⁹ “To make a Sagoe Pudding Mrs. Tracey”;Footnote ¹⁰ “A Sago Pudding [from] Kettleby”;Footnote ¹¹ and a final, unattributed “To make a Seagoe Pudding.”Footnote ¹² At least some of these recipes indicate a familiarity with sago as an ingredient. To soften the palm starch and thereby make it edible, Mrs. Garrard's instructions are to “boyle … till the sago is tender.” But despite their ties to southeast Asian, New Guinean, and East Asian foodways, all four of V.a.680's sago puddings have been Europeanized. Kettleby's and the unattributed sago were supposed to be cooked as thick “as a hasty pudding,” a familiar textural and textual reference for many Londoners. Most tellingly, Mrs. Garrard's sago calls for “half a pound of fine sug[er],” Mrs. Tracey's for a “Quarter of a Pound of sugar,” Kettleby's to “sweeten it to your Tast[e],” and the unattributed recipe for “half a pound of fine Sugar” and then “some more fine sugar [sifted] over it.” All of this sugar would have been made by enslaved women and men laboring on islands claimed by Britain as colonies in the Caribbean. All four recipe authors thus marked their complicity with British practices of enslavement and brought their sago puddings into line with the aims and ingredients of empire.

Beyond the recipes, close attention to the construction, size, and condition of recipe books offers insights into the history of British foodways, making these books, as Madeline Shanahan has argued, archaeological objects that can be rigorously studied as both physical objects and written sources.Footnote ¹³ V.a.680 continued to be used and adapted, its materiality shaped to fit evolving norms and circumstances. As it aged and began to break down, the binding—full parchment over stiff boards—was removed and then reattached. An index was inserted, organizing the recipes into new categories. Some recipes were organized by ingredient (“eggs,” “vinegar sugar”), others by method (“to dry,” “to cure,” “to dress”), and still others by style (“ragoo,” “a la mode”). The manuscript's original flyleaf and endpapers—red paper with stamped, gilded stars—were replaced with bright blue paste paper. The word “Cookery” was inked and re-inked onto the cover. This work probably helped to preserve V.a.680 as an object, but it also represented its own act of adaptation and translation. These actions turned V.a.680 from a domestic recipe book into something resembling a “modern” cookbook: indexed, categorized, professionalized, and thereby imagined as useful and usable for generation after generation of British subjects, who continued to eat their empire.