The first recipe in Abby Fisher's 1881 cookbook, What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, sensually describes how to make dough for "Maryland Beat Biscuit": "add your water gradually in mixing so as to make dough stiff, then put the dough on pastry board and beat until perfectly moist and light" (9). The body partakes in the process of making biscuits, requiring a feel for "perfectly moist and light" dough. Although including the body in food production is commonplace in both contemporary and nineteenth-century cookbooks, Fisher's text, one of the first known American cookbooks that was not also a hospitality manual, intersects with the nineteenth century doctrine of nerve energies that blurred the boundaries between the inside and outside of the body. The telegraph and its electric currents emerged in the 1830s through Samuel Morse and provided a network metaphor that helped develop what Jonathan Crary calls "the doctrine of specific nerve energies" (38). The telegraphic lines connecting disparate geographies were an outer manifestation of the bodily nerves some scientists thought connected all human beings to each other. People suddenly became nodes in a network, undermining powerful myths of an autonomous, unified self.
Fisher, echoing the doctrine of nerve energies, produces food images in her recipes that call upon readers to use their subjective senses to link with and produce food. Here, correspondence between perception and object is unnecessary; food will emerge according the cook's personal taste. In Fisher's food images, the distance between subject and object, promoted through scopic regimes like Cartesian perspectivalism, collapses and connects the producer to his or her product. Fisher's recipes do not merely recite ingredients and dictate instructions; she does not list ingredients with their quantities and she does not describe cooking as a mechanical process. Instead, she uses subjective, qualitative terms that requires cooks to find out what "perfectly light and moist" dough feels like to them.
Blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, Fisher also draws from the African American literary tradition. Frederick Douglass, in his 1845 Narrative, uses the language of telegraphy to express the experience of thinking (Gilmore, Aesthetic Materialism, 111): thoughts, says Douglass, "flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance" (68). Douglass's flashing thoughts appear before him like the sudden appearance of a telegraphic message, challenging the image of a thinker who has total control over his own thoughts. For Douglass, thinking is coextensive with feeling, connecting mind and body. Abstract concepts like freedom were apprehended though feeling, not through an isolated a cognitive process. "I saw nothing without seeing it [freedom]," Douglass explains,"I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it" (69). Douglass apprehends freedom though multiple senses, not just through abstract definition. Likewise, Harriet Jacobs in her 1861 Incidents In The LIfe of A Slave Girl describes her grandmother's home in passive, sensual language: "There we always found sweet balsam for our troubles" (17). "Sweet balsam," signifying familial connection, appears without her conscious effort; her grandmother's love takes sensual form, a material rather than abstract image.
