Constructing the Politics of Cookery: Authorial Strategy and Domestic Politics in English Cookery Books, 1655-1670
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay argues that authors of English cookery texts in the 1650s, sixties, and seventies debated not only changing ideas and behaviors surrounding cooking, service, and feasting, but were also participating in a renegotiation and redefinition of other Restoration subjects such as public versus private spaces, domesticity, gender roles, and social class. This article considers five cookery texts published between the years 1656 and 1670: two works of royalist propaganda that adopted the form of the cookery book, The Queens Closet Opened (1656), attributed to Henrietta Maria, and The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth (1664), attributed to Elizabeth Cromwell; two works by professional male cooks, The Accomplisht Cook (1661) by Robert May, and The Whole Art of Cookery Dissected (1661) by William Rabisha; and The Queen-Like Closet (1670) by Hannah Wolley, England’s first professional female writer and cookery book author. In these works, domestic spaces and activities – as well as the emerging form of the cookery text itself – become a sort of battleground on which men and women vied to construct and defend their authority as culinary experts and authors of printed cookery books. Simultaneously, these authors were actively engaged in a debate about English nationhood in the Restoration and what kinds of people could or should participate in the politics of good housekeeping.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".