Nuttgens Award winners presentation

Rachel Feldberg: 'Cooking up Natural Knowledge: Recipes, Learning and Improvement in Eighteenth-Century Norfolk’.

Middling women’s recipe collections offer a wealth of information about their owner’s family, social networks - and knowledge of chemical process and medical remedies. Hannah Neal’s Recipe Collection, written into an unused copy of the 1790 edition of the Daily Journal of Gentleman, Merchants and Tradesmen included veterinary remedies alongside tips on waterproofing linen and making gooseberry vinegar, all useful material for a small scale farming family on the edge of the Norfolk Fens. But it was Elizabeth ’Betsy’ Peach, an impecunious widow in Norwich who gathered recipes for wine from friends and the Lady’s Magazine and took the trouble to calculate how much per gallon it cost her to produce. In this paper Rachel Feldberg argues that recipe collections like these articulated women’s engagement with the natural world and their understanding of domestic scientific process, giving us an insight into the state of women’s knowledge and the often-hidden origins of its acquisition. She’ll be exploring the sources of their information, from familial experience to often unattributed interactions with an avalanche of print media, and suggesting that the evidence evinced by Peach and Neal brings us a step closer to understanding the pedagogical role recipe collections played in young women’s lives.

Roseanna Kettle: 'A kind of Polypus’: the Sociable Contexts of William Roscoe (1753-1831)'.

Born in Liverpool to a modest family in the mid-eighteenth century, William Roscoe would become a consummate polymath: as a historian, abolitionist, poet, land developer, politician, lawyer, and banker, Roscoe would work tirelessly to enhance the civic community of which he was a foundational part. He would also be an intensely prolific letter-writer: his surviving family papers, housed at Liverpool City Archives, number over 5,000 items. Roscoe’s catalogue of communicants is impressive, including some of the cultural giants of the late eighteenth century – Mary Wollstonecraft, Georgiana Cavendish, and Horace Walpole, to name but a few.

Roscoe’s poles of communication across the area are numerous, and similarly point towards a large network of interrelated interlocutors consciously crafting the intellectual and social sphere of the Northwest. Indeed, his letters reveal him as a figure exemplary of a form of transpennine interconnectivity. Using this invaluable resource as a starting-point, this talk will seek to track the multiple sociable contexts through which Roscoe’s correspondence moves – whether familial, local, regional, national, or international - documenting research made possible by the York Georgian Society and the Patrick Nuttgens award.