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In her latest cookbook, the British food writer B. Wilson says there was a time when the store of cooking

knowledge was inherited in families. It was passed along the generations. So recipes were like

these collective memories. And before there were cookbooks, she says, there were things called

books of secrets. In a previous life, I was a historian, and I was aware that cookbooks, in a sense, are quite a modern invention.

And for hundreds of years, cookbooks were not a common technology.

There might be little manuscript collections that people would pass down in families.

But what there were were these published books of secrets.

A book of secrets might contain anything.

A potion for supposedly curing boldness.

Haltuses for sore feet.

Ways to make someone happy if they had melancholy,

ways to make childbirth easier, and then suddenly you get a recipe for jam or a recipe for a delicious tart.

In those books, cooking is treated as a kind of everyday magic,

something that's both practical and wishful in a certain way.

Cooking can still be a remedy.

You mentioned one recipe from 1591 that says to make a tart that is courage to man or woman.

That was the title of the recipe.

What do you figure that was or mean?

Yes. I think the idea of a tart that gives courage to anyone, I don't know. It sounds a ridiculous far-fetched idea, doesn't it? But I go on to say, is it really any more ridiculous or far-fetched

than a few years ago there was a whole spate of cookbooks

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