Rooted within a broader understanding of the movement of products and ingredients from the Mediterranean and beyond, the distinction between imagined interactions and kitchen practices, and the development, spread, and domestication of tastes, my PhD offers the first detailed and comprehensive study of culinary recipes acknowledged as Spanish and Portuguese within early modern English printed and manuscript recipe books from 1500 to 1680. By comparing and contrasting direct references to Spanish and Portuguese foodstuffs and practices with their Iberian ‘originals’, thus engaging with the pre-modern manuscripts and printed recipe collections still available from Iberia, my thesis proves the degrees of transmission and assimilation, but also divergence and innovation of English texts from Iberian ones. Ultimately, my research contributes to the growing field of Anglo-Iberian studies, emphasising the importance of Iberia, and Spain in particular, to our understanding of early modern English culture. By paying close attention to the context of my sources, this thesis advances the claim that to collect Iberian recipes in post-Reformation England was an evidently, and possibly exclusively, Catholic practice. This work also impacts on recent debates surrounding the nature and transmission of practical knowledge in early modern Europe, shedding new light on the complex nature of, and relationship between, manuscript and print recipe collections, making sense of kitchen expertise as a hybrid, polyvocal (rather than collective) form of domestic and artisanal experience, which cannot be gendered straightforwardly as a female domain. This work, finally, represents an innovative contribution to the well-established field of food studies in a historical, Euro-centric perspective by comparing culinary and related traditions belonging to clearly distinct cultures and, in doing so, substantially enriching our studies of early modern Spanish, Portuguese and English food and kitchen practices.
