f Making Waterfowl Safe to Eat: Medical Opinion, Cookbooks and Food Purchases in Early Seventeenth-century England

During the early seventeenth century, physicians recognised that nature could artfully be manipulated in order to redress the insalubrious properties of pernicious foods. This “art and diet”, as it was known, was supposed to be used to rectify the harmful characteristics of waterfowl; and because this genre of food was popular with the English gentry, its theoretical modes of preparation and consumption, indicated by regimen guides, cookery books, household accounts and memoirs, enable us to see how the manipulation of nature was understood and, where deemed important, applied at the homes of the well-to-do at that time.