ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the receipt book as a site, strategy of female self-writing and the implications for early modern women's sense of self. The chief of feasts for Richard II who compiled a set of royal recipes in Forme of Cury is credited with authoring the first receipt book in English in 1390. Culinary cookbooks later go into print with the anonymous publication of This is the Boke of Cokery in 1500, and the genre of printed cookbooks, household manuals became increasingly popular in England in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth centuries. For women especially, who were considered legally, physically, spiritually inferior to their fathers and husbands, writing about the self was an extraordinarily vexed process. However, a significant genre of self-writing has been overlooked in recent scholarship on women's autobiography and histories of the self is the manuscript recipe book, a collection of medicinal, culinary, household recipes that provide an alternate window into the expression of the early modern self.
