Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England by Elaine Leong is a comprehensive and thoughtful analysis of early modern knowledge transfer in the household. Elaine Leong received her Ph.D. in Modern History from the University of Oxford in 2006 and has completed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Warwick and the University of Cambridge. Her research is focused on early modern medical and scientific knowledge transfer and production, with a focus on gender, the everyday, and the domestic sphere. She lectures at University College London with courses on health and the body in the early modern era, and sex, gender, and the body in early modern England. In addition, she is a current visiting scholar at the Max Plank Institute for the History of Science in Berlin where she led a research group on the nature of reading and writing in early modern Europe. She has also co-edited two articles on medicine, science, and drug testing from the renaissance through the early modern era with Alisha Rankin, author of The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiments, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science. Published in 2018, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge is her first book and encompasses her research passions by focusing on “knowledge practices in early modern English households,” (https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/users/eleong).
Recipes and Everyday Knowledge explores the early modern household as a space for exploring and investigating the natural world in addition to serving as intellectual hubs that facilitated the exchange of knowledge in social networks via the exchange and experimentation of recipes. The household is defined by the author as a site of “knowledge production and as a collective of knowledge producers,” (9). By doing so, Elaine Leong asserts that the act of collecting, recording, and testing recipes in early modern households set the framework for “empirical and experiential” knowledge making (6-7). In addition, Leong analyzes the role of both men and women in the early modern family unit as contributing to knowledge creation in the household through the collection of recipes. By doing this, 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.
The book is meticulously organized through case studies on a number of English households by examining manuscript and printed recipe collections of the seventeenth century. This format is important because “recipe books… were malleable texts open to correction and extension,” thereby offering the reader a glimpse of “science in the making” akin to “modern laboratory notebooks or ‘research notebooks,’” (13-14). Through the included examples of recipe collection and testing, readers can see the processes of scientific experimentation in relation to the health and everyday knowledge of early modern families. Leong claims that recent research on early modern English recipe collection favors the female perspective by examining women’s manuscript writings and medical practices (10). She argues that her focus on the collaborative nature of household management and affairs extends this research by looking across gender and class relations in households to provide a comprehensive depiction of these “complex social relationships,” (10). In general, the structure of the book is very traditional and scholarly, including introductions and conclusions to each chapter with supporting information sandwiched in between. In this way, the format of the book is geared toward other scholars and historians of the early modern period. However, the language is accessible to a wider audience and the material is incredibly interesting, which is enough motivation for anyone who wants to learn more about recipe collection in early modern England.
Leong’s archival research into recipe collections between 1600 and 1700 turned up nearly 400 examples of manuscript and printed recipe books that formed the backbone of this work. I appreciated her explanation of the way her research was geographically and chronologically limited to seventeenth century England through the documents in the household recipe archive that she explored. In addition, the survival of these collections also depended on who created them, which the author states were mostly wealthy landowners, members of Parliament, and other minor-gentry (14). As Leong notes though, this focus provides a unique and concentrated snapshot of upper-class English families who participated in the making and exchange of scientific knowledge.
Recipes and Everyday Knowledge begins with an overview of recipe collection, social networks, and the place of food and medicine within this culture. Chapter one explores recipe collection through expanding social networks and the collaborative, multi-generational work that these collections demonstrate. Not only did it facilitate the sharing of knowledge within a family, but within a wider circle of friends and acquaintances where new knowledge was disseminated. Chapter two discusses the complex maintenance of the “health” of a household. Here, the author discusses the “science” behind the management, large-scale planning, and organization of a household where hands-on knowledge and trials (such as the testing of medicinal and food related recipes) were crucial to the successful running of an estate.
Chapters three and four focus on the verification of recipes through codification and extensive experimentation and modification of newly acquired knowledge. Before the household accepted a recipe as a part of its “daily practice,” members of the household spent considerable time and effort testing recipes, questioning methods, and trying new techniques. As Leong states, these procedures demonstrate that “householders or recipe compilers,” were “continually engaged in critiquing and rewriting recipes,” rather than being “passive recipients of stagnant knowledge,” (97). Through these chapters, elements of the empirical side of the “scientific revolution” are discussed. The content and argument of these chapters are similar to Leong’s colleague Alisha Rankin in her 2021 book Poison Trials. In Poison Trials, Rankin goes into detail about the types of experiments and testing used to determine if antidotes for certain poisons would be effective in Renaissance science. In Recipes and Everyday Knowledge, Leong discusses the ways in which households would categorize recipes into those of interest, those tested, and those accepted as cures. And in the process of testing, to observe the effects of certain remedies on the human body and adjust production methods until it had been perfected. Both authors discuss the methodology behind testing and experimenting with new scientific knowledge in the form of remedies and medications between the renaissance and early modern periods. This is a significant similarity because it provides a space to discuss the formation of scientific methods in what we refer to as the “scientific revolution.”
Finally, chapters five and six are centered around public knowledge and family history. Chapter five discusses recipe books as a form of recording family history that was then passed down through generations. The author includes a case study where a woman in the 1930s found and opened a chest full of her family’s ancestral documents from the early modern period that contained papers such as land deeds and other legal documents, and which also included a few volumes of recipe books. Leong’s argument here is that recipes collections had value placed on them as historical records of the household that served as “archives” of family history. In chapter six, the legacy of knowledge and what kinds of knowledge were transferred to the public in printed recipes is discussed. In essence, the last two chapters are an exploration of the legacies of recipe collections in transferring new knowledge in the private and public spheres. Overall, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England is an engaging and thoroughly researched work on the transfer and testing of new knowledge via recipe collection in the early modern era.
