Cooking Up Poisoned Messes—and Antidotes
Just as mountebanks were not always easy to distinguish from physicians or orators, so cooking and preparing medicines were interrelated. The young mountebank’s preparation of a “fulsome dish” with a sauce is not that different from other kinds of cooking; in turn, cookbooks might include recipes for antidotes.
“Boyle milk when itt cold againe & drunk hath been proved very effectuall, when many other things have failed. Mrs More”
“Excellent cordial to expel all sorts of Poison or Contagion”
Take halfe a pound of sugar, the rootes of ellicompanie four ounces, of Junepar berries four ounces, of the rime of lemmonds and oranges, and of the best Cinemon, ginger, Cloves, nutmegg, mace, angellico rootes, jentian rootes, round Aristolicha, rue, red Saunders, scuchimell seeds, pearles, Confection of Reasinthie of each for ounces, trochiques of vipers for ounces, of peper one ounce.
Let the things which are to bee Powdor be made into very fine powdor, and let them all be mixed with the confection of Reasintha with as much of the best venice treacle which will make them into the consistance of an ellictuarie, you may give to the strongor 2 drams and a halfe, as much to the weaker.
The aim of this book is to show how empirical categories–such as the categories of the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the decayed, the moistened and the burned, etc., which can only be accurately defined by ethnographic observation and, in each instance, by adopting the standpoint of a particular culture–can nonetheless be used as conceptual tools with which to elaborate abstract ideas and combine them in the form of propositions.
The raw/cooked axis is characteristic of culture; the fresh/decayed one of nature, since cooking brings about the cultural transformation of the raw, just as putrefaction is its natural transformation.