Chapter Text
Editors’ note:—
This journal was collected from a midden some years ago on a dig near the historic beachfront properties of Nassau. Based on the collection of items identified within the midden, the location is suspected to have been a brothel during the 1690s–1710s.
The cover of the journal was a bound fabric, not leather, and the stitching at the spine had begun to come loose. The pages were swelled and curled with the pervasive damp of the site, and many entries, made in pencil, were smudged or faded far beyond legibility. Some, however, were made in a sturdier iron gall ink; this was particularly true for later entries, for the suspected reason that a wealthier patron had begun to show favor to the journal’s owner. These later entries comprise a variety of contents, including bookkeeping records (which support our identification of the site as a brothel), personal notations, fragments of narrative, and recipes and other methods of care and provision.
Based on these entries, which are all in a uniform hand, the journal’s owner is suspected to have been the brothel’s madame. For this hypothesis to be proven correct would prove remarkable indeed, as literacy was not at this time widely spread among women or among the lower classes of any gender, both demographics of which the journal’s owner would almost certainly have been a member.
This supplementary transcription provides a selection from the later, inked set of entries—primarily recipes, and brief discursive glimpses into the writer’s personal life.
Notably, in the burgeoning years of the eighteenth century, regular measures were in little use, and so what contemporaries would have recorded as a recipe seems unconscionably lacking in detail to a modern reader. (However, given the context of the journal as a collection of personal documents, perhaps the informal nature of the recipes, which would likely have been recorded primarily if not only for later personal use, is not so surprising.)
Thus, for this supplementary material to the journal, approximate measurements for each of the ingredients have been supplied based on contemporary sources, as well as a cooking method that, while based on historical documentation, the editors hope will prove more approachable to the modern reader. For the original recipes, please refer to the archaeological team’s official webpage.
A note on sources
A number of contemporary and secondary sources have been consulted in the reconstruction of these recipes. Where possible, modern adaptations were informed by the recipes of native practitioners of today's Caribbean cuisine, and these were sourced primarily from cooking blogs.
Primary sources
Of particular usefulness in terms of insight into ingredient availability and common dishes in the seventeenth-century maritime world, not least for the text's availability in English but also for its wide-ranging contents, is A New Voyage Round the World, an autobiography published in 1697 by William Dampier, an English explorer, privateer, navigator, and naturalist who served on the crew of pirate captain Bartholomew Sharp from 1679–81. This text is available in full on Project Gutenberg Australia.
No less useful but significantly less accessible, however, is the book Maison rustique, à l'usage des habitans de la partie de la France équinoxiale connue sous le nom de Cayenne [Rustic house (or "Country farm"), for the use of the inhabitants of the part of equatorial France known as Cayenne], by Bruletout de Préfontaine, Jean Antoine, published in 1763. While this text outlines in some detail a great number of agricultural products and common dishes available in eighteenth-century Cayenne, French Guiana, and surrounding areas, it is only available in contemporary French and has not, as far as the editors have found, been translated into English or even into modern French. This text has been digitized and made available on the website of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Secondary sources
The website Gode Cookery, originally by James Matterer and now maintained by Monica Gaudio, compiles a collection of recipes from various historical cookbooks, primarily English medieval sources but extending into the seventeenth century.
Max Miller's website Tasting History includes a wide selection of historical recipes from a range of time periods—most significant, for our purposes, being the sections on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though of colonial sites in situ there are rather few. The site includes both contemporary instructions as well as a modern version for each dish.