Recipes and Remedies in 18th Century France: An Interview with Lauren Owens, Ph.D. Candidate

I am looking at how women made recipes and remedies at home using plants, herbs, spices to cure physical ailments within their households or to share within their social networks. Recipes were big social capital for women at the time. I am focusing mainly on 18th century France, but I do step back into the late 17th century when my sources take me there.

When I was doing my master’s degree, I studied infanticide. There the recipes and remedies were in the margins of documents and archives and not easy to find. Legally, of course, infanticide was forbidden but people still resorted to it. It was mainly men who went to seek out these abortifacients to cover up pregnancies out of wedlock. Details on these actions can be found in court records, but finding those records was a needle and haystack situation.

My Ph.D. dissertation project grew out of that work. I wanted to know more about who was making these remedies. But in all my searching, I only found three records of recipes to cause an abortion. So, I had to frame my research question more broadly and study all types of home-made recipes and remedies designed to cure ailments or provide body care.

This topic intrigued me since we are still doing that at home today – every family has a certain set of home cures that have been passed down the generations. In my family it is pickle juice. Any kind of problem, the answer is always pickle juice!

My focus is specifically on women making medicines and science at home. While there were some men who did that too, they were usually learned physicians. For women this private space was their only place of work (in contrast to men), hence my interest in this very gendered form of knowledge making.

For my work, I collected all the recipes and remedies I could find. I looked at letters that women had written to male doctors of the Royal Academy of Medicine and the responses they received, usually telling them that their recipes were not useful. I also used letters from the women of the DuPont family in which they described how they took care of their bodies. I supplemented the letters with treatises dealing with health and wellness as well as plant dictionaries.

These recipes relied on cookery skills and tools, as people had to use pestle and mortar, grind up ingredients, boil and strain concoctions, and so on. That led me to inquire further into the cooking people were doing at the time, and the foods they were eating. Clearly, diet is influenced by wealth and class, but there seem to be some common elements such as meat, red wine, bread. To understand how the recipes are meant to work, I also needed to know the everyday diet of people and how that affected them.

The women making these remedies also needed to know the working of different spices and herbs. Sometime the recipes called for extraordinary ingredients, extraordinary to me at least. There was one that required crushed bones. When I followed this up, I found that the Medici women relied on concoctions with crushed bones for whooping cough and babies. I have come across the need for dragon’s blood too, which I tracked down to be the resin from a palm tree in Africa. Salt and honey seem like more regular ingredients but not necessarily cheap, especially when the salt tax was imposed. In a further study, it will be interesting to look at how some of the more exotic ingredients got to France, the trading networks that existed.

That led me to focus more on the plant humanities aspect of the project. How did people know about the efficacy of different plants? I created a database based on the recipes I collected and organized it according to how different ingredients were used. Certain aches and pains had a cluster of recipes, tooth aches, headaches, hemorrhoids for example, and I have looked at the different strategies employed to remedy those. Overall, I am looking more at women-specific ailments. One chapter of the dissertation is going to examine recipes for beauty treatments. The conversations around health and wellness interest me. How did people talk about it then as compared to how we frame discussions today.

A dimension to my research that I had not expected is astrology. People were aware of the importance of their birth stars for the health of their bodies. All those born in a particular month were deemed to share bodily weaknesses or strength. Instructions for taking medicines might therefore also include details on tides and moon phases so that dosages could be adjusted. It was interesting to see astrology added as one more dimension to consider when supporting a person’s health and wellness.

While there is quite a bit of scholarly literature on this research field for England, Italy, Germany, and Spain, very few people have worked on France. This has allowed me to read the secondary literature on those countries. This type of medicinal knowledge was shared around Europe. When it comes to France, the only references I have found to remedies and recipes in published books are usually in the footnotes or the margins – but they were never the main topic.

I did ask myself why that was, since the topic is so well studied. I believe some of it might have to do with the way the archives are catalogued. Especially, when you try to identify potential sources online in advance to weigh up whether a trip to an archive is worthwhile or not, very often the online archival guides were not very helpful. Given that my time abroad was limited, that made it harder to take risks with trips outside of metropolitan France.

I was in Paris for three months. I researched in three locations of the Bibliothèque National de France: Richelieu, Arsenal, and Mitterrand. In London I went to the Wellcome Library as the British Library had just suffered from a cyberattack and was closed. And then in the U.S., I consulted the Hagley Museum and Library in Delaware, for the letters of the DuPont family.

I taught myself how to read 18th century French handwriting. It took some time but with practice I got better at it. Most of the handwritten material I work with is personal correspondence. While I can read French fine, I wasn’t used to speaking French in my day-to-day. So, I made myself think in French all day to get more in the rhythm. I also made sure to visit many different parts of Paris, and to get a sense of the city, I walked everywhere. I wanted to feel Parisian. When people asked me for directions, I felt I had made it!

If I could go back in time, I would have added in another stop or two in France outside of Paris. Taking more time to look through departmental archives could have alerted me to useful collections in various parts of France.

The one thing I would tell other students about to go on research is to try and find a community you can interact with. It isn’t always easy to make new friends when you are in a place for just a few months and are based in the archives all day. Other researchers are important conversation partners, but if you can, network in advance so you might know a few people in the place you will be based in. Also be open to what a city has to offer. Take time to explore all its cultural opportunities. Always remember – you might not be able to spend this much time abroad again.

I am interested in making this kind of research available to a broader public. Last fall, I wrote a blog post for The Recipes Project about recreating a cookery recipe from the 18th century. The dish I made was a plum pudding. It took all day to make. Granted, I used a French translation of an English recipe, but it allowed me to see how things got adjusted and replaced in the translated edition. I used the French version for my efforts, but unfortunately it did not come out that well. So maybe it was not a good translation!

I am hoping to defend my dissertation in 2026. Going forward, I would like to work collaboratively with scholars whose areas of expertise are in adjacent areas. This could for instance lead to a joint online database that houses prescriptions from the 18th century from all over Europe. In that way, researchers could determine more easily how the same ingredient was used in different countries. It would also break down language barriers, as a lot of the work done in different countries is not widely known outside their language circle. This could also be a way to make these sources available to a broader audience. The collaboration could also include scientists who would be able to evaluate different prescriptions for their contemporary medicinal value.