Tuesday 5th December 2023
Venue: Online
Jennifer Comerford: Jane Austen’s Pancakes, and Other Recipes
7-8pm GMT
Have you ever wondered what kind of pancakes Jane Austen liked to eat, what sorts of flavour profiles appealed to eighteenth-century palates, or how eighteenth-century recipe books differ from our own? Come find out the answers to these questions and more through this talk on Chawton House’s extensive collection of recipe books.
Eighteenth-century recipe books were eclectic compendiums of knowledge—they not only contained cookery instructions, but also medical cures, cosmetics recipes, cleaning tips, and so much more. These texts tell us about connections between the domestic space of the kitchen and imperial trade networks that introduced a wide range of spices like nutmeg and Jamaica pepper (allspice) as well as dishes like curry and kebab into English cuisine. In addition to highlighting the knowledge recorded in these books, as well as the knowledge assumed, this talk will highlight some of the many ways recipe production in the eighteenth century depended on the maker’s individual creativity and improvisation.
Join us on this excursion into a period of culinary and medical history that feels at once strikingly familiar and persistently estranging, from whimsical variations in recipes for pancakes and gingerbread to the rather more sinister implications of recipes for medical “waters” meant to cure things like scurvy or the plague.
About the speaker:
Jennifer Comerford is a PhD candidate at Northwestern University in Illinois where she specializes in long eighteenth-century British literature. Her research project, “Touching Stories: Hands, Orientation, and Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century British Literature” explores how hands structure women’s experience and knowledge-making practices. She was the 2022-2023 Lawrence Lipking Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the 2023 JASNA International Visitor at Chawton over the summer. During her time at Chawton House, she curated a display, ‘Cooking the Books’, as part of the current exhibition, Treasures of Chawton House.
Tickets: £6
This is an online event. The cut off to purchase tickets is midnight on the day before the event. Ticket holders will be emailed a Zoom link on the day of the event. If you do not receive joining details by midday (UK time) on the day of the event, please email info@chawtonhouse.org with your order number. The lecture will be recorded and emailed out to ticket holders who cannot join synchronously within 5 days. Access to working internet is required. Please note this event will take place live. All times are UK GMT.