Monday, 3 October 2016






Written by Henry Howard, the recipe book ‘’England’s newest way’’ was published in the year 1703. It consists of various different recipes including ‘’good pudding’’, ‘’green pudding’’, ‘’a cabbage pudding’’ and ‘’calves-foot pudding’’. This recipe book portrays a shift in the world of recipes in that previous recipe books had not been attributed directly to named members of the artioscracy.


The vast majority of these recipes consist of a range of imperative verbs such as ‘’take’’, ‘’put’’ and ‘’grate’’.  The syntax structure in this recipe is mainly complex and compound sentences as the text  is displayed in a list type structure, although the discourse structure does not support this as it is displayed in paragraphs. There is also an example of non-standard orthography – the recipe says ‘rowl’ rather than ‘roll’, this reflects the time frame in which this recipe was made. A further example  is when the recipe uses 'rabbet' in replace of 'rabbit'. The syntax of third recipe is elliptical, the word order is nonstandard - failing to make sense in some areas.


It is evident that this text was written in the early 1700’s which is shown through the use of extended ‘s’ – whereby they look like the letter ‘f’. For example in this text, one instruction is ‘’beat feven eggs’’ instead of ‘’beat seven eggs’’. Also reflecting the time period this text was written, the word ‘caul’ is used in the second recipe – many people in the modern day may be unaware of what this word means, therefore would have to search the meaning to understand, making it hard to follow the recipe.

1 comment:

  1. Commenting on grammatical change and some interesting contextual aspects. Text is 1703, so before standardisation and Johnson's dictionary in 1755, hence the non-standard forms. Well done!

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