Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England - Tapa dura

"Take thousands of recipes, hundreds of family notebooks, dozens of households, and a few experimental philosophers. Heat slowly. Season with questions about how knowledge is made and by whom. Bottle for anyone afflicted with curiosity about the past. This isn't just the definitive book on early modern recipes. With playful prose and choice examples, it masterfully recasts the household as a site of knowledge production and challenges us to rethink the politics and practices of science and medicine."--Lauren Kassell, University of Cambridge "Building on detailed manuscript research, and proceeding through a series of case studies, Leong provides an engaging picture of the households of the landed elite as sites of collaborative knowledge creation, thereby contributing to a broader understanding of 'science' in early modern England."--Times Higher Education "Elaine Leong's elegantly written Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science and the Household in Early Modern England is a close-grained and cutting edge examination of processes of knowledge-making as they took place in practices of reading, writing, compiling, exchanging, testing, revising, and disseminating domestic recipes. Scrutinizing hundreds of handwritten recipe collections handed down in families, Leong tracks and reconstructs in detail methods of working with recipes, revealing their social and epistemic dimensions. She illuminates their collaborative, collective, and cumulative nature, tracing the intersection of manuscript and print collections, and demonstrating that recipe recording and collecting was active knowledge-making that involved the engagement with and experimentation on materials. Rather than passive repositories, Leong reveals recipes and recipe collections in early modern culture to be more like today's apps, providing users with flexible platforms from which they could "make and know." In showing how these texts were produced and used, Leong exposes the practices of recipe gathering and testing as part and parcel of early modern empiricism."--Pamela H. Smith, Columbia University "Recipes and Everyday Knowledge is a game-changer for the study of medical recipes, bringing the whole area of scholarship to a new level of sophistication. Leong exploits a wealth of sources beautifully, persuading her readers that the home was a very significant site for knowledge-making in seventeenth-century England."--Mary E. Fissell, The Johns Hopkins University

Across early modern Europe, men and women from all ranks gathered medical, culinary, and food preservation recipes from family and friends, experts and practitioners, and a wide array of printed materials. Recipes were tested, assessed, and modified by teams of householders, including masters and servants, husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, and fathers and sons. This much-sought know-how was written into notebooks of various shapes and sizes forming "treasuries for health," each personalized to suit the whims and needs of individual communities. In Recipes and Everyday Knowledge, Elaine Leong situates recipe knowledge and practices among larger questions of gender and cultural history, the history of the printed word, and the history of science, medicine, and technology. The production of recipes and recipe books, she argues, were at the heart of quotidian investigations of the natural world or "household science." She shows how English homes acted as vibrant spaces for knowledge making and transmission, and explores how recipe trials allowed householders to gain deeper understandings of sickness and health, of the human body, and of natural and human-built processes. By recovering this story, Leong extends the parameters of natural inquiry and productively widens the cast of historical characters participating in and contributing to early modern science.