Early Modern Maritime Recipes: Circulating Knowledge in the Atlantic World (McGill-Queen's Studies in Early Canada / Avant le Canada)

Describing how to pickle beef, make a low-cost substitution for sugar, waterproof a coat, or treat kidney stones, eighteenth-century settler recipes recorded a wide range of processes essential to daily life. Early Modern Maritime Recipes offers a compendium of culinary, medicinal, and domestic recipes from before 1800 that point to the many ways knowledge was preserved and circulated in the Atlantic world.

Drawn from newspapers, letters, diaries, and notebooks held in archives of the northern Wabanaki territories – the region French settlers called Acadia and later named New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island – the collected recipes reflect the needs and practices of an eighteenth-century English-speaking population, revealing much about how settlers grew and prepared food, treated ailments, cared for animals, controlled pests, and maintained their households. Each recipe is Introduced with an explanation of its origins and followed by detailed analysis focusing on sources, ingredients, and techniques. Tracing the integration of Indigenous, African, and other non-European knowledge into settler cultures, the book highlights the many intersections of domestic life with social networks and political power.

Richly detailed and historically grounded, Early Modern Maritime Recipes documents the cosmopolitan quality of settler household knowledge, revealing that the history of settler domesticity is never far from the history of colonialism.