Elaine Leong’s 2018 book Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science and the Household in Early Modern England (Recipes and Everyday Knowledge) is an illuminating look at recipes collected from multiple perspectives in early modern England. Recipes and Everyday Knowledge demonstrates the household recipes that shaped social and family networking and managing a household and its member’s health. Using impressive archival research, Leong shows the web of ways inhabitants of the early modern world understood their bodies and the natural world around them. The author uses case studies to prove her thesis and analytical themes of gender and cultural history, as well as the history of medicine, science, and technology, to analyze her evidence. Elaine Leong earned her Ph.D. in Modern History from Oxford in 2006 and received postdoctoral fellowships from the University of Warwick and Cambridge. She specializes in early modern medicine and knowledge transfer. Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science and the Household in Early Modern England is a well-organized, fascinating look into multiple facets of early modern life in England using the surprising medium of recipe collecting. The book is engaging for those interested in Early Modern England, the history of medicine and science, and the period’s social history.
Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science and the Household in Early Modern England discuss how household recipe books allowed householders to produce different foods and medicine and how they understood their bodies and the natural world. Using a large sample of manuscript and printed recipe collections, Leong’s argument allows for an in-depth study of household medicine, food production, and social circles established by recipe trading. These categories lend themselves to gender and cultural analysis and delve into cultural history and the history of science and medicine.
Each chapter in Recipes and Everyday Knowledge has its argument that fits nicely into Leong’s central thesis. While proving her chapter thesis, she neatly cites other historians’ work to support her research. The first chapter of Recipes and Everyday Knowledge uses case studies of the Palmer and Bennet families to demonstrate an overview of recipe collecting, demonstrating that families used their social relationships to gather recipes for their collections. In Chapter two, “Managing Health and Household from Afar,” Leong connects the systems of patronage and gift exchange with food production and medicine and argues that taking care of a household required more than curing the body. The social and financial health of the household required looking after as well. Both chapters one and two highlight the social aspects of recipe collecting that Leong mentions in her thesis. Chapters three and four, “Collecting Recipes Step-by-Step” and “Recipe Trials in the Early Modern Household,” respectively, discuss trying and refining recipes on paper and through human trials. These chapters use the social aspects of early modern life and examine the history of science and medicine as recipes go through human trials. In chapter five, “Writing the Family Archive,” Recipes and Everyday Knowledge argues that recipes and recipe collections allow researchers to examine families’ social and economic history and that these collections were a part of family identity, helping to explain the large number that survives in archives. In the closing chapter of Recipes and Everyday Knowledge, “Recipes for Sale: Intersections between Manuscript and Print Culture,” Leong analyses the differences between print and manuscript recipe collections and how they intersect.
Using a large sample of archival research and specific case studies, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge analyses the social, cultural, medical, and scientific ways recipes and recipe collecting were used by householders in Early modern England. Leong uses not just the recipes themselves but the notations in the margins and family correspondence to show the social, economic, and scientific ways that recipes and recipe collecting shaped the lives of early modern English householders. Recipes and Everyday Knowledge is bookended by chapters that focus on how families began and organized their collections and how manuscript and printed collections were malleable to additions and modifications. Next, chapters two and five focus on the social aspect of collecting; chapter two focuses on household relationships, patronage, and gift-giving aspects; and chapter five discusses how family histories were recorded in recipe collections. Finally, chapters three and four focus on the science and medicine aspect of the recipe collection. They discuss recipe modification and trails, including when these recipes were tried, who was asked for advice and clarification regarding recipe instructions or modification, and whom the recipes were ultimately trialed.
Leong’s use of case studies to prove her point makes Recipes and Everyday Knowledge an engaging book. Her inclusion of correspondence, particularly in chapter two, made the historical actors, their emotions, and family dramas come alive and illustrate her argument about the household’s social, physical and economic health and its members. Recipes and Everyday Knowledge’s inclusion of gender analysis in Early Modern England is also a strength of the book. Leong’s refusal to generalize gender roles in the home was refreshing as she points out that both male and female household members contribute to recipe collections when one would assume that since the women’s sphere is the household, women would be the contributor. In chapter two, the brief passage about splitting the split in household duties in marriage was greatly appreciated. The narrow focus of Leong’s book makes it an excellent contribution to research on early modern English households, medicine, and social interactions. Recipes and Everyday Knowledge has connections to both The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science by Alissa Rankin and Collecting the World: the Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane by James Delbourgo. Although Rankin’s book focus’ on Renaissance poison trials, particularly their documentation and their contribution to the evolution of science, the experimentation Leong documents in Recipes and Everyday Knowledge is similar, although the cases Leong documents are consensual, unlike Rankins. In Collecting the World, Delbougo documents the patronage system Sloane uses to amass his collections, while in Recipes and Everyday Knowledge, Leong shows how recipe collecting was a part of the patronage system for both the top and bottom of the system. Recipes and Everyday Knowledge is aimed at the specialist reader interested in Early Modern English medicine, social history, and science. Elaine Leong’s Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science and the Household in Early Modern England is a strong entry into Early Modern English medicine, social history, and the history of science; Leong’s case studies make the book enjoyable and informative.
