The book Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England by Dr. Elaine Leong presents the accumulation of household scientific knowledge by using family recipe manuscripts to show how families accumulated knowledge and tested it. Throughout the first five chapters of Recipes and Everyday Knowledge, Leong uses a number of recipe manuscripts, acquired mainly from archival research, with the Wellcome Library being a significant source of information, as sources to provide case studies that show how upper-class society compiled information and tested it in a scientific way. In the final chapter, Leong adds the use of printed recipe books and home manuscripts to show how families used these printed versions similarly to the use of family manuscripts. This source pool focuses only on English manuscripts and print works, which skews the information and practices toward what was done in England, but it also helps the relatively narrow scope of the book. It also provides an interesting source for the book since the writings come from both male and female actors, countering the idea that the recipe collection process was seen as solely part of the female sphere.
Leong works at University College as a history lecturer and achieved her doctorate in philosophy at the University of Oxford. The book Recipes and Everyday Knowledge also received the 2019 Margaret W. Rossiter Prize from the History of Science Society, showing the high quality of this book on the topic of women in scientific history. She is currently working on a book project called Reading Rivière in Early Modern England, which also studies knowledge production, maintenance, and transfer. Because of this focus in her scholarship, Leong represents a strong author to write a history that focuses largely on knowledge production and transfer.
The main argument of this book is that studying the recipe books of 17th-century households shows the broad connections of the knowledge-making community and represents another process of knowledge-making in this period. To do this, Leong separates the book into four main sections, which explain the social aspect of making these manuscripts, the process of testing them, and how the knowledge was passed on, with the final chapter moving away from the household manuscript to the published recipe books. These chapters are mostly formatted with case studies making up most of the content. The case study format allows the author to show how the families, not scientists as we know them, collected and tested medical knowledge through experiments with the recipes. This information allows Leong to successfully that the house during this period was an important place for the generation of knowledge.
The first significant section of this book is chapters one and two present the social connections in creating these recipe books. This section shows how the collection and spreading of knowledge in recipe books was an essential part of both social relations and patronage at this time. This section shows the cultural importance of a family collecting information for their family book and how that information was spread between families. This process represents a cultural phenomenon similar to and part of patronage since it represents part of the gift-giving culture and the culture of favors created by sharing these recipes. By showing the collection process, these chapters set up the testing shown in the following chapters and show the gathering of knowledge done by a family.
The middle two chapters of the book, chapters three and four, present how the knowledge gathered for these books was tested and verified. The middle chapters represent an essential part of the book’s argument because they show how families proved the recipes collected by the process of the previous section. These chapters present how the authors of these family collections verified the information they took in and put varying levels of effort into recipes from more or less important people. This section, more than others, presents how the creators of family books experimented with the recipes they gathered. By doing this, the author expands on the process of knowledge collection that existed in the books period.
The final section based solely on recipe manuscripts is chapter 5, which explains how knowledge was passed on through these books. This chapter of the book felt out of place when moving from the previous to chapter five, as the book changes from use and collection to the passing on of these works to descendants. But even though the move between chapters felt odd as a change in the topic, it represented an important part of the book’s larger argument. This is because this chapter showed how “the younger generation … placed great value on the family book.” (p. 145) By showing the importance of passing on knowledge with the family books, Leong supports the idea of the cultural importance of knowledge collection within families. Within the context of the larger argument, this chapter proves a culture of family knowledge gathering seen not only in the writers of the recipe manuscripts that survived.
The book’s last chapter focuses not on the household manuscripts but on the printed recipe books, which show similar practices to the family manuscripts, but with a few key differences. The significant difference with the published recipe books is that they largely did not provide where recipes came from other than the name of the author of the collection. But they are similar to the family manuscripts in their use and the way they were created. This is because when acquired by families, the printed recipe books tended to be tested and added to similar to the books created by a family. Furthermore, in their creation, the print books were functionally identical to the family books since they were published versions of important people’s recipe collections. For these reasons, the use of print recipe books presents another example of how families collected and tested knowledge to generate their own knowledge, as shown in the book’s central argument.
This book is written for an audience of historians of medicine and historians of science, and because of this, the narrow and detailed topic of the book fits well for the audience. This audience works well with the content of the book as it presents a detailed account of a specific subject and tries to expand on the knowledge about the knowledge that was created through “household science.” (p.4) The book also expands on the idea of knowledge collection by presenting a lower-level method of collecting knowledge. By doing this, Leong shows how the noble population worked with experiments like those in books like The Poison Trials without being a part of the scientific community of the time. The change of the main actor away from those who viewed themselves as men of science presents another part of the scientific culture of this time. This focus sets the book within the “current conversations in gender and cultural history, the history of the book and archives, and the history of science, medicine, and technology.” (p.4) For this reason, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge is a valuable book for scholars who wish to expand their knowledge of how people other than scientists expanded experimented with medicine and the natural world.
