https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/leading-figures/james-lind-and-scurvy-the-first-clinical-trial-in-history/

Apparently there is disagreement as to whether or not this trial actually occurred, but what matters is not that Lind actually disbelieved his own results and missed the opportunity for immediate impact (!), but that he took the time to document his procedure, laying the groundwork for subsequent “rediscovery”. In this vein I also appreciated your emphasis on the concept of recipes having value as both hereditary endowments and historical records.

The case for the kitchen as laboratory is starting to come full circle of late, through the efforts of wealthy “gentleman chefs” like Nathan Myhrvold who are attempting to bring a systematic, scientific approach to cooking techniques, while documenting that process for a prosumer and consumer audience:

https://modernistcuisine.com/books/modernist-cuisine/

I’m really interested in what “recipe testing” is. I like anything that tests the boundaries of what we assume science is. Sometimes, that leads me to bad conclusions about things. Still, the idea of households in the early modern era “doing science” is fascinating. After reading the book, I think of households more as consumers of “natural philosophy” or “science” than as producers.

“But, like Harriot and Sloane, the linkages to a larger knowledge project are unclear and speculative.” – I think at least the social networks Leong brings up are a step towards connecting household activity to broader developments in science. I’m thinking especially about the parts of the book that discuss the London publishing industry. Right now, I’m thinking that the tastes and money of the upper class shaped what books sold well. As for if any ideas bubbled up from households into “science” in academia at that time, I’m skeptical.

I like this line in your review, too: “Leong examines early modern gender roles by placing women in the sphere of scientific intellectual activity and men as collaborators in household and familial management.” This aspect of Leong’s book was fascinating for me, and you did a nice job of summarizing it in a single sentence.

My final point is about your comment that Leong’s book presents a “unique and concentrated snapshot of upper-class English families.” I absolutely agree that her sources are concentrated, which, while I was reading through the book, made me ask if she was making generalizations that went further than her sources justified. Do you think that 400 examples of printed recipe books is enough evidence? I think they are, but I’m having trouble putting into words why. I hope you have a chance to bring that up in class. As someone who has read a lot less history than everyone else in class, I’d like to hear opinions people have about how historians should make generalizations.

“The kinds of knowledge practices I describe here sit comfortably alongside a number of epistemic schemes. Householders’ zeal to collect large numbers of recipes connects their work to several knowledge-making models in early modern England. We may situate this enthusiastic gathering of “experiments,” to use our actors’ term, alongside other contemporary practices like such large-scale endeavors as Francis Bacon’s manuscript notebooks, later published as Sylva Sylvarum, or the work of the London merchants Clement Draper and Hugh Plat. Concurrently, they also have much in common with Baconian experimental histories, or historia experimentalis, where as in the historia tradition, practitioners sought to collect facts while abstaining from formulating conceptual frameworks or causes. First promoted by Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and later by Robert Boyle, experimental histories consisted of “the collection of experiments of arts” that “exhibit, alter and prepare natural bodies and materials of things.” Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefèvre have demonstrated that experimental histories played a crucial role in histories of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century chemistry. The household was, of course, also a key site for early chemical practices.”

It seems Leong thinks the kinds of testing given new recipe collection should be a kind of historia experimentalis, not different in kind from what Boyle et al. are doing in this period. She returns to this concept in Chapter Four (123):

“Yet while it has received a great deal of scholarly attention, experimental philosophy, as Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefèvre have pointed out, was only one of a number of interconnected experimental styles in the premodern period. Alongside experimental philosophy, technological inquiry and experimental histories—or historia experimentalis, as detailed by figures such as Francis Bacon or Robert Boyle—constituted important and interconnected pathways for hands-on investigations of the natural world.”

The Klein-Lefevre references are to Klein, Ursula, et al. Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science : A Historical Ontology, MIT Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gmu/detail.action?docID=3338529.

The authors discuss “experimental history” in Chapter 2 (p22):

“The “experimental history” institutionalized during the seventeenth century was a tradition of experimentation and observation that evolved around the multiplicity of natural and artificial things. Like natural history, experimental history collected, described, and ordered facts relating to the perceptible dimension of particular objects and processes. And like natural history, experimental history was also regarded as “the basis for the agricultural, commercial and colonial improvement of the human estate.” But whereas natural history was concerned with the observation and collection of things “given by nature,” experimental history reported phenomena procured by intervention into nature, both in arts and crafts and academic sites. For example, late seventeenth and eighteenth-century chemists’ experimental histories of substances reported phenomena observed at many different places, ranging from households and everyday life to the fields, the workshop, and the academic laboratory. Their experimental histories of substances ended with the collection and classification of phenomena, leaving inquiries into their causes to “experimental philosophy.””

This conceptual typology also gives us a way to think about Sloane’s collecting as a kind of natural history and distinguish it from “mere” historia. It doesn’t seem to help us classify Harriott – who maybe should be seen as a proto-practitioner of “experimental philosophy” …?

I’m looking forward to our discussion in the hope that we can assess the practice of recipe testing. On the one hand, it seems pretty clear that at least some of the recipe collectors that Leong chronicled did things that would qualify as “experimental history” by Klein-Lefevre’s definition. But, like Harriot and Sloane, the linkages to a larger knowledge project are unclear and speculative.

By the way, pp 22-25 of the Klein-Lefevre book describe Bacon’s 1620 proposal for an historia experimentalis. The whole chapter (Chapter 2, about 40 pages) discusses the application and development of Bacon’s concept as it was applied to the study of materials, up through the early 19C when an early form of modern chemistry becomes recognizable. And, obviously, food is a material.

Also by the way, Klein is a senior scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.