f Recipes and reception: tracking “New World” foodstuffs in early modern British culinary texts, c. 1650–1750

Conventional approaches to the adoption of “new” consumables in early modern England, have focused on the impact of so-called “new groceries” and the exponential rise in the consumption of tea, coffee and sugar. Yet none of these is strictly a “New World” commodity, and analyses of their uptake are not necessarily suited to investigating the reception of true “New World” edible products, such as potatoes and cacao. In this paper, the mechanisms by which novel foodstuffs are encountered and brought into the English diet are explored, with the emphasis laid upon familiarity as a condition of acceptability. The use of recipe texts to explore the types and varieties of preparation in which potatoes and cacao were deployed also allows an exploration of the utility, and limitations of such texts for the history of culinary reception.