When Mary Cholmeley married Henry Fairfax in 1627, she carried to her new home in Yorkshire a leather-bound notebook filled with medical recipes. Over the next few decades, Mary and Henry, their children and various members of the Fairfax and Cholmeley families continually entered new medical and culinary information into this ‘treasury for health.’ Consequently, as it stands now, the manuscript can be read both as a repository of household medical knowledge and as a family archive. Focusing on two Fairfax ‘family books,’ this essay traces on the process through which early modern recipe books were created. In particular, it explores the role of the family collective in compiling books of knowledge. In contrast to past studies where household recipe books have largely been described as the products of exclusively female endeavors, I argue that the majority of early modern recipe collections were created by family collectives and that the members of these collectives worked in collaboration across spatial, geographical and temporal boundaries. This new reading of recipe books as testaments of the interests and needs of particular families encourages renewed examination of the role played by gender in the transmission and production of knowledge in early modern households.

中文翻译：

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为家庭收集知识：早期现代英国家庭的食谱、性别和实用知识

1627 年，玛丽·乔姆利 (Mary Cholmeley) 与亨利·费尔法克斯 (Henry Fairfax) 结婚时，她将一本装满医学食谱的皮革装订笔记本带到她位于约克郡的新家。在接下来的几十年里，玛丽和亨利、他们的孩子以及费尔法克斯和乔姆利家族的各种成员不断地将新的医疗和烹饪信息输入到这个“健康宝库”中。因此，就目前而言，手稿既可以作为家庭医学知识的宝库，也可以作为家庭档案阅读。本文着眼于两本费尔法克斯“家庭书籍”，追溯了早期现代食谱书籍的创作过程。它特别探讨了家庭集体在编写知识书籍方面的作用。与过去的研究相反，家庭食谱书在很大程度上被描述为完全女性努力的产物，我认为，大多数早期现代食谱系列都是由家庭集体创作的，这些集体的成员跨越空间、地理和时间界限进行合作。这种将食谱书作为特定家庭兴趣和需求证明的新阅读方式鼓励重新审视性别在早期现代家庭中知识的传播和生产中所起的作用。