Recipes and Everyday Knowledge

Winner

"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."

"In this long-anticipated work, Elaine Leong excels in uncovering the world of early modern English recipe collections in an accessible and insightful narrative. . . . Just as early modern recipe compilers considered the cost and appearance of the manuscripts they created and the printed collections they purchased, there is great value in the presentation of Leong’s book. The structure and thematic approach to the chapters allows both specialists and non-specialists to understand the material and intellectual life and significance of recipe books. The paperback format and its wonderful array of figures make the book affordable and accessible, which has been a challenge in academic publishing. Leong's passion and commitment to the history of recipe books is evident from the multitude of fantastic case studies and rich examples that took years of dedicated research to unearth. The result is a clearer understanding of how recipes were used in making and documenting natural knowledge. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in recipes, for social historians, and for those looking to broaden their understanding of science and its multitude of practitioners in early modern England."

"While Leong's findings clearly build on the history of domestic life and household management, the study also makes significant contributions to less obvious strands of historical scholarship. . . . While the book is not explicitly about health, it adds depth to the history of the patient by revealing how ordinary men and women understood and treated their ailing bodies, as well as how they situated that care within household labour. . . . One of the great strengths of this book is Leong's clever scholarly approach. She uses innovative methods developed out of the history of reading and the history of the book to recover not simply what recipes say, but also how they were produced and used. She also interprets her sources using frameworks and contexts that are not typically associated with recipes, such as 'paper technologies' and 'paperwork of kinship'. While the book is ostensibly a series of case studies centred on a handful of families, the sum of its parts is comprehensive and complex. The sophistication of the book's arguments – not to mention the impressive length of its bibliography – attest to the thousands of recipes and years of archival research that give depth and empirical weight to the stories in Recipes and Everyday Knowledge. Most impressively, Leong takes texts as seemingly terse and opaque as recipes and skilfully uses them to piece together the otherwise invisible details of early modern domestic labour and experimentation."

"A remarkable achievement which improves our knowledge of early modern practices on an impressive scale. . . . Recipes and Everyday Knowledge is the culmination of an extraordinary research project involving the perusal of hundreds of recipe collections, dozens of printed recipe books, and stacks of related correspondence belonging to numerous seventeenth-century elite English families. Equally impressive is Leong’s command of several branches of historiography. Her study contributes an important perspective on the history of medicine, the history of science, discussions about civility and social networks, and inquiry related to credibility and trustworthiness. . . . The brilliance of this work lies in Leong’s ability to present sophisticated analysis in accessible prose alongside engaging anecdotes ranging from a search for Muscovy ducks for a king to debates about water quality in brewing ale. The illustrations throughout the text make her methodology evident. . . . By affirming the centrality of the domestic sphere in everyday life, Leong firmly places recipes into a more expansive historical conversation about early modern epistemic practices."

"[Leong's] book progresses through a series of aptly-chosen case studies—concerning men and women—and asks fundamental questions about how and where early modern knowledge was made; how and why it was communicated; and, ultimately, establishes that recipes were bundles of practical expertise and an integral part of the economy of everyday knowledge in early modern England. I find the social dimensions especially valuable. . . . Substantial, innovative, charming, expansive."

"Long-awaited and impressively well-researched. . . . An important step forward in the process of the broadening of the social and epistemic scope of the narrative of 17th century English science. . . . Leong’s book is remarkable and deserves to be further and deeply discussed because it employs a rather sophisticated and precisely described methodological apparatus. . . . [It's] an unavoidable must read for historians of early modern science and medicine, as it is the best methodological and historical treatment of the complex object ‘recipe’ to date."

"A cohesive narrative that offers new insights into modalities of early modern health, scientific investigation, and social exchange. Beautifully written, impeccably researched, and irresistibly engaging, Elaine Leong’s tale of early modern recipe compilation and domestic experimentation sets a high standard for studies in the social and cultural history of early modern medicine."

"Leong provides rich detail of how recipes contributed to the household and the making of early modern knowledge. . . . Throughout, the book is well-supported by notes and references, providing an excellent backdrop for any study of historical recipes. . . . This book is to be commended in providing a well-substantiated framework for recipe collection analysis and interpretation. It is a must-have book for serious students and researchers of the history of early modern recipes."

"Leong's nuanced case studies enliven a cast of curious characters who compiled, tested, and used recipes from manuscripts and printed books to prepare medicine and food in the home. . . . Recipes and Everyday Knowledge offers the interdisciplinary community of scholars who work on recipes meaningful avenues for future study. . . . Leong's lucid prose and engaging style also make this book an excellent candidate for classroom use."

"Very interesting for readers who are fascinated by the origin of recipes."

“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.”

"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.”

"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."

"This book, like any promising recipe, has many ingredients to recommend it. Building on a substantial database of domestic recipes drawn from a sample of nearly 500 printed and manuscript collections, Elaine Leong’s account of their place within the domestic knowledge-making of early modern English households argues for the collecting, testing, and fashioning of these texts as central to 'early modern household management' (11)."