ABSTRACT
The history of reading is about the history of written objects, as well as the testimonies left behind by readers. For kitchen workers, the distinction might be more nuanced, with partial literacy coming into play for reading measurements or labels. Cookbooks, together with other household manuals, were likely the objects of reading for purposes other than the purely instructional, since their proliferation can be related to other indices of the rise of literacy, especially female literacy, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Everything from cooking to romance to business and even murder took place in the kitchen, whose liminal status, often perforated by many windows and doors, made it one of the most dynamic spaces in the home. Some general observations to begin and based on the evidence of handwriting and ink, there is no reason to doubt that this signature was penned by the same person who added the marginal annotations.
