In the early modern period, the work of preparing food and medicine held a significance resonating far beyond the household. Food preparation influenced the public realm when its skills and materials were invoked in political debates, scientific discourse, and diplomatic efforts, where it often served as a means of defining national and individual identity. Familiarity with cooking, as we shall see, mattered in literary works as well, infusing poems and plays with layered meanings derived from the culinary world. As it wove its way into a variety of early modern cultural discourses, cooking and the experiential knowledge it produced offered a sensory language that brought readers of all kinds into its domestic web. The impact of English modes of kitchenwork even expanded across oceans, as food played central and complicated roles in colonization. Yet cooking itself—the activities unfolding within the kitchen as well as the knowledge practices surrounding food preparation—has only recently begun to receive attention from literary scholars and historians.

To be sure, not all early modern cooking took place in the defined space of a kitchen. Rustic cottages and smaller city homes might have relied on a central or hearth fire in an all-purpose room, and many steps of food preparation occurred entirely out-of-doors. Yet the work of early modern cookery demanded at the very least a demarcated area where the tasks of chopping, mixing, and heating could be carried out. Defining the kitchen was one of the many goals of the period's household manuals. Gervase Markham's English Husbandman (1613), for instance, provides an idealized sketch of a yeoman's home that envisions the kitchen, buttery, dairy, and larder to occupy an entire wing, mirroring the sites of the dining hall and guest accommodations (and taking up roughly the same amount of floor space). His plan makes clear that the kitchen is part of the main house and central to its function, though in a subordinate role that foregrounds it as place of hard labour, refuse, and bloody carcasses. ‘You shall place the vpper or best end of your house, as namely, where your dining Parlor and chiefest roomes are […] to the South, that your buttery, kitching [sic] and other inferiour offices may stand to the North’, he instructs.