Apricot wine and stewed calf’s head, melancholy medicine and "ointment of roses."

Welcome to the cookbook Shakespeare would have recognized. Preserving on Paper is a critical edition of three seventeenth-century receipt books–handwritten manuals that included a combination of culinary recipes, medical remedies, and household tips which documented the work of women at home. Kristine Kowalchuk argues that receipt books served as a form of folk writing, where knowledge was shared and passed between generations. These texts played an important role in the history of women’s writing and literacy and contributed greatly to issues of authorship, authority, and book history. Kowalchuk’s revelatory interdisciplinary study offers unique insights into early modern women’s writings and the original sharing economy.

Kristine Kowalchuk is an instructor of critical reading and writing at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology.

Kristine Kowalchuk's profile page

"Offering semidiplomatic transcriptions of three seventeenth-century women’s manuscript recipe collections held at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Preserving on Paper will be a valuable tool for students and researchers… This volume takes a delightful range of recipes and makes them accessible for a modern reader."

EMWJ, vol 13 no 2, Spring '19

‘These remarkable 17th century books invite us to consider which forms of writing are actually woven into the fabric of how we live, and who is producing them.’

Literary Review of Canada May 2017

"Studies of manuscript production, circulation, and use have been among the most exciting of recent historiography, pushing the boundaries of how we imagine politics, literacy, and culture. Kristine Kowalchuk’s thoughtful and engaging collection of women’s receipt books joins this literature, pressing readers to consider both context and form of this ‘largely unconsidered or misunderstood genre’. "

Sixteenth Century Journal vol. 49, no. 1 2018

"Readers will enjoy the peek through a 17th century kitchen window that Preserving on Paper offers, but they will also find the recipes and remedies delightful."

The Edmonton Journal, August 11, 2017