How can we compare Recipe Books and Laboratory Notebooks? Recipe books and lab notebooks appear dissimilar in their intended audience, content and purpose, but the authors of both books studied nature experimentally in order to make distilled medicine. The works of early modern men of science are upheld as the birthplace of modern scientific inquiry, and at first glance recipe books only testify to the era’s dubious culinary and medicinal prowess. Men such as Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and the American alchemist George Starkey, Boyle’s mentor, recorded in personal lab notebooks the observations and conclusions from chymical experiments, which were chemistry experiments in search of alchemical arcana such as the philosopher’s stone or the universal solvent. The seventeenth century European gentry traded and collected recipes for distilled medicines in order to maintain the health of their households (Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin). Recipe books were ledgers of credit, since recipes, like currency in an economy of gifts, bought status and favors between gentry. Recipe books record investigations of the efficacy and practicality of recipes for distilled medicines. Recipe books contain instructions for baking cakes and concocting practical medicines for men and women to cure their households; lab notebooks were records and guides for chymists’ personal quest for knowledge. Recipe books provide little explanation for why a recipe worked, emphasizing that a recipe worked. Lab notebook writers pondered how and why chemical reactions occurred. Despite these differences, both recipe books and lab notebooks use distillation (right), a separation technique used to make medicines from plants, animals and minerals popularized by the the fourteenth century alchemist Johannes de Rupescissa. Recipe book authors’ experimental methods are comparable to the experimental methods of early modern men of science (left). George Starkey’s lab notebooks, in contrast to his nigh inscrutable printed works, display his experimental methods (William Newman). Both recipe book and lab notebook authors engaged in practical exegesis, the investigation of a text by a trial of its procedures (Jennifer Rampling). Men and women whose names do not appear in chemistry text books conducted experiments; the investigation of natural phenomena occurred in the laboratories of Royal Society members but also in the kitchens of ordinary people.

Recipes books:Emphasize efficacy tests

Labnotebooks:

Emphasize theoretical

explanations of conclusions

Shared Qualities1. Acquisition of recipes from

trusted sources2. Experimentation by

substitution 3. Recipe Salvage 4. Rough and Neat

editions

Similarities and differences in Experimental Methods

Alchemical Investigation in Recipe Books and Lab Notebooks

by Elise Wright, Faculty mentor: Professor Monique O’Connell

A diagram of a distillation furnace from Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Liber de Arti Distillandi, published in English by

Laurnes Andrewe in 1528, from Proquest.com ☞

1.Hand-made but not from Scratch The writers of recipe books and lab notebooks received recipes from trusted sources, and then altered the received recipes after experimentation.Writers did not pluck recipes from the thin air. Family and friends were the source of many recipes in manuscript recipe books (Leong). Printed recipe books name contributors who would increase sales; everyone else is anonymous. The Queen’s Closet Opened (right) attributes many of its recipes to kings, queens, doctors, aristocrats, and the bishop of Worcester, whose admirable curing powder includes black crab claws and the skins of ten adders. Manuscript recipe book authors left traces of their experimentation in marginal annotations (Leong); the evidence of experimentation in printed books is only occasionally mentioned. Thomas Cogan, the author of The Haven of Health, found that Dr. Stephen’s water, by which the good doctor lived ninety eight years, was too weak to his taste. Cogan proposed an alternate recipe substituting strong ale for gascoyne wine. George Starkey developed his experimental procedures in his lab notebooks from the writings of alchemists such as Jan Baptiste van Helmont and Alexandre von Suchten. Starkey records and attempts to clarify Helmonts’ vague procedure to volatilize alkali salts and van Suchten’s process for fixing silver. Like a recipe books author, Starkey derived his recipes from other sources, then experimentally interpreted and improved them.

2. Experimentation by Substitution Recipe book authors and lab notebook authors test received recipes with similar methods: substitution of ingredients and equipment. Thomas Cogan substituted strong ale for gascoyne wine in his recipe for Dr. Stephen’s water. In his attempt to make potable gold, a powerful alchemical panacea, George Starkey tried to improve his method of making stellate of antimony. He substituted mixed calcined salts, then tartar and “the stinking spirit,” and lastly tartar and alum for the two original ingredients, tartar and saltpeter. Dorothea of Mansfield substituted elderflowers for elderberries in a distilled medicine, hoping to improve its efficacy (Rankin). Anna of Saxony (left) found her distillations more successful when made in glassware from Hess; similarly, George Starkey purchased Hessian glassware rather than the poorer quality London glassware. In Choice and Experimented Receipts (right), Sir Kenelm Digby distilled tobacco through a still with three heads and one receiver rather than with three heads of glass and three receivers. When a substituted recipe worked better than the original, recipe book authors and lab notebook authors mark the improved recipe to be included in notebook of conclusions, or a printed edition.

3. Recipe Salvage If a recipe did not yield the stated outcome the first time, recipe and lab notebook authors would repeatedly tinker with the recipe to improve the outcome. Leong identifies this process as recipe salvage. George Starkey’s method for making potable gold required volatile alkalis, basic (as opposed to acidic) compounds converted from solids to gas. His recipe source, van Helmont (right), wrote that alkalis could be volatilized by art. However, Starkey “attempted many things for a long time to render it volatile, and in vain,” as he writes in his lab notebook. Starkey did not throw in the towel, and after seven years he finally distilled his alkali in essential oil rather than wine, ethanol, vinegar, or sal ammoniac. By refusing to accept either that he could not understand Van Helmont’s procedure or that Van Helmont’s procedure was itself faulty, and by conducting numerous experiments in consequence, Starkey engaged recipe salvage. Like Starkey’s attempts to prove Helmont’s reliability, a recipe book author would try as many variations of their aunt’s cheesecakes as possible before giving up. Recipe book authors sunk so much time and effort into correcting difficult recipes because an unusable recipe proved the source untrustworthy, and the source of the recipes in recipe books were family and friends. As a token of friendship, a recipe that did not work would be akin to a counterfeit coin, and the source of an impossible recipe would be akin to a counterfeiter. In recipe books, recipe salvage is an effort to maintain trust in a social relationship; in lab notebooks, recipe salvage is an effort to maintain trust in a relationship between student (a lab notebook writer, like Starkey) and master (a source of the chemical procedure, like van Helmont).

4. Rough and Neat editions Recipe book and lab notebook authors organized their investigations into rough notebooks with untested and partially tested recipes and neat notebooks with proven recipes and conclusions. Sir Peter Temple of Stantonbury, Buckinghamshire created three recipe books. A small, duodecimo sized book holds a smattering of different medical and culinary recipes which Temple jotted down as he came across them. Its larger but equally disorganized cousin contains many of the same recipes deemed worthy of trial. Temple gave his daughter the third recipe book, a polished edition thematically and alphabetically organized and containing a few recipes from its rougher brethren. Temple tested and improved the recipes written in the rough books, and copied the most successful versions into the gift book. Starkey’s conclusion notebook, Sloane MS 3750, summarizes passages from other alchemical authors, his failed and successful attempts to volatilize alkalis and make the Balsamus Samech of Paracelsus. Starkey’s rough notebooks, such as Royal Society MS 179, contain his recipes for volatilizing alkalies and for the Balsamus Samech. Starkey’s printed works, especially Pyrotechny, make no mention of his failed attempts, like Temple’s neat notebook for his daughter. Both writers separate their initial recipe gathering from their experimented recipes, and their experimentation from their final products.  

☞ Similarities in Experimental Methods

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☞ Differences in Experimental Methods

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Emphasis on efficacy tests Recipe books include efficacy tests which determine if a medicine cures the patient, because the purpose of recipe books was to provide useful medicinal recipes. Lab notebooks include few efficacy tests because their purpose was to record the outcome of investigations of vague alchemical (not strictly medicinal) recipes. The True Preserver and Restorer of Health (left) uses anecdotes to prove the efficacy of remedies. Digby successfully self-treated quartan fever with Dr. Bnessius’ cordial water of green walnuts and treated surfeits with poppy water. Not Digby himself, but trusted people “saw and experienced” snail water cure consumption. Dorothea of Mansfield determined the efficacy of untested remedies by using them to treat the local poor and her children before sending her distilled medicine to her patron, Anna of Saxony (above, Rankin). In The Unlearned Alchymist, Richard Mathews listed the names and dwelling places of 148 people his medicine cured, to advertise the efficacy of his pills. Although some of Starkey’s chymical recipes have medicinal uses, he rarely records efficacy tests in his surviving notebooks. Starkey tested his interpretations of alchemical procedures by comparing the physical properties of the products to the properties predicted in his source text. Starkey mentions testing a medicine’s efficacy only once in his notebooks. In Sloane MS 631, he found that the recipe for a salt, from Theatrum Chymicum, was a useless medicine. Starkey’s lab notebooks omit efficacy tests because their purpose differs from recipe books. The purpose of recipe books is to instruct the reader how to preserve health, so efficacy tests assure the reader that the book fulfills its purpose. Starkey writes his lab notebooks to record his investigation of chymical medicine, but also nature more broadly. Starkey’s notebooks investigate how ingredients interact, not if the medicine produced cures people. He calls himself “a silent researcher of nature and art,” resolved “to hunt for truth, not fame” in a letter to the Dutch alchemist Johannes Moriean. The purpose of investigation in a recipe book was to preserve and restore health, and although Starkey also wants to preserve health, the purpose of his lab notebooks is to record his search for general chymical truths.

Emphasis on theoretical explanations Recipe books do not present theories for why medicines cured people or how a procedure resulted in its product; the authors of lab notebooks interpreted the results of their experiments through the lens of theories. Sir Robert Boyle (right) wrote a collection of simple remedies for household usage titled Medicinal Experiments. This is not a book of ground breaking chemical theories, but of useful remedies with simple preparations. Although some remedies are chemical reactions, and demonstrate chemical concepts, Boyle offers no explanation for how or why the remedy is produced. In his cure for ulcers and the stone, he prescribes a solution of Venetian Sublimate dropped into Lime-water strong enough to bear an egg. The medicine is ready when no more reddish stuff precipitates. Boyle does not explain why the solution produces a precipitate, why strong lime water will bear an egg, or why the water will cure ulcers and the stone. Boyle may have omitted theoretical explanations because he himself did not know how the recipes worked, or he may have assumed that his audience was less interested in how a medicine cured a patient than if it did. George Starkey tried to create a silver alloy resistant to aqua fortis like true gold between May 23rd and August 23rd 1655. In his notebook Sloane MS 3750, he interprets his summer’s experiments using the theory that all metals are made of sulfur and mercury. He concludes that antimony has a double sulfur, and that silver may be resolved totally into mercury by “mercury once acuated with regulus.” The audience of a lab book is the author himself, so the lab notebook reflects the author’s interests. Starkey’s lab notebook thus reflects his hunt for truths in the natural world in his theoretical explanations for why and how materials interact. The audience for a recipe book is someone looking to treat a disease, who would have less interest in why or how a treatment works than if it does, so recipe books have fewer theoretical explanations than lab notebooks.

Further reading section☞ Elaine Leong, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge:

Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England.

☞William Newman, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry

☞ George Starkey, edited by William Newman and Lawrence Principe, Alchemical Laboratory Notebooks and Correspondence

☞ Jennifer Rampling, “Transmuting Sericon: Alchemy as ‘Practical Exegesis’ in Early Modern England.” Osiris

☞ Alisha Rankin, Panaceia's Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany

☞ https://recipes.hypotheses.org/

The case of Sir Kenelm Digby The case of Sir Kenelm Digby emphasizes that audience, rather than experimental method, differentiates printed recipe and lab notebooks. Sir Kenelm Digby (left) collected both chymical and medicinal recipes while traveling through Europe. His steward, the chymist George Hartman, divided and published the collection into chymistry books and recipe books for different audiences. The contents of the recipe books emphasized the efficacy of cures, while the later emphasized the production of chymical arcana without medical applications. The printed laboratory book Chymical Secrets and Rare Experiments gathered alchemical arcana and medicines from alchemical experiments which Digby performed himself or collected. The recipe books Hartman published were Choice and Experimented Receipts in Physic and Chirurgery (above right), containing complex chymical medicines down to simple plasters, The True Preserver and Restorer of Health (above), containing mostly herbal remedies, and The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelm Digby, containing culinary, medicinal but mostly mead recipes. Hartman’s prefaces show that he published Digby’s chymical recipes separately from his medicinal recipes because he targeted a different audience for the two works. The preface of Chymical Secrets suggests that the works’ target audience was whoever sought the “secrets and mysteries of nature,” such as the dedicatee, Robert Lord Paston, an original member of the Royal Society. The book contains some medicines, but most are alchemical recipes which demonstrate the properties and production of chemicals without medical application. Hartman published The True Preserver so any person or mistress of a family might make their own medicine without resorting to the apothecary, and he dedicated his work to Lady Anna, the countess of Sunderland, perhaps one of those “worthy Ladies and Gentlewomen, that take delight in the Charitable Office of be∣ing their poor Neighbours Physicians.” The The True Preserver and Chymical Secrets are similar in that Digby deemed the recipes in both books worth collecting and testing, but the books’ contents differ because they were published for different audiences.

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☞ Conclusions

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A door to natural enquiry Manuscript and printed recipe books include few theoretical interpretations of recipes, but recipe book authors’ letters show that theory informed their investigations of the natural world. An epistolary exchange between Edward Conway and his nephew Colonel Edward Harley shifted from judging a beer recipe to debating the nature of water (Leong). The long correspondence, which resulted in no real world trial, shows Harley and Conway’s interest in why and how the recipe worked. Harley argued that boiling water for three hours before adding malt decreased the water’s weight, improving its quality. Conway argued that boiled water was less digestible. Both correspondents defended their theories with expert advice. Harley eventually conceded to his uncle that water looses its “finest part” when boiled, leaving the “gross, unwholesome and earthy part.” This concession reveals Harley's theory for why the taste and properties of water change after boiling. The letters of Dorothea of Mansfield demonstrate her use of Galenic theory to pro-scribe medicine and evaluate potential cures (Rankin). Dorothea refused to treat Martin Luther until she knew whether his right or left side pained him. According to Galenic theory, pains in the right side originated in the liver, and those on the left in the spleen, necessitating different medication. Dorothea doubted the reports of a healing spring because her theories of materials and the human body could not explain how the spring cured people. Dorothea proscribed medicines and cures based on her experience of their efficacy and on her under-standing of Galenic theory. Recipe books themselves do not offer explanations for how recipes work or why they cure people, because their audiences were less interested in explanations than anecdotal proof of efficacy. Recipe book authors such as Conway and Dorothea investigated why recipes worked and held explanations based on theory, just as the authors of lab notebooks.

Printed recipe books targeted an audience concerned with effective treatments; printed books of chymistry targeted individuals with the time and means to study alchemical arcana for the sake of increasing understanding. But both recipe book authors and lab notebook authors engaged in experimentation to learn about the natural world in order to distill medicines to cure or treat disease. A philosopher by fire or a gentlewoman would have used distillation equipment (above) to test recipes and increase his or her knowledge of the natural world, bit by bit.

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The title page of True Preserver and Restorer of Health, the collection of medicinal and culinary recipes gathered by Sir Kenelm Digby and published by G.Hartman in 1682, from proquest.com

A distillation apparatus advertised in The True Preserver and Restorer of Health, published by G.Hartman in 1682, from proquest.com

The title page for Choice and Experimented Reciepts in Physick and. Chirurgery by Sir Kenelm Digby with a portrait of the author, published by George Hartman in 1663, from proquest.com

The title page of The Queens Closet Opened, including a portrait of Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles 1, a collection of medicinal and culinary recipes from many notable persons and published by Christian Eccleston, from proquest.com

Jan Baptiste van Helmont (front) and his son Francis (back), an etching by K. De Moor, 1652 in Ortus Medicenae. From https://wellcomecollection.org/works/b7j9qgqb

Anna of Saxony, also known as Anne of Denmark, Electress of Saxony (B. 1532, d. 1585) in a portrait by Lucas Cranach the Younger, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_of_Denmark,_Electress_of_Saxony#/media/File:Lucas_Cranach_d._J._011.jpg

The Honorable Robert Boyle, experimental philosopher and one of the founders of the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Knowledge. Portrait from https://wellcomecollection.org/works/cmbn9vb9?wellcomeImagesUrl=/indexplus/image/V0023488.html

Sir Kenelm Digby, a British Catholic privateer, chancellor to the Queen Mother, botanist and alchemist who dueled Frenchmen and stole Maria de medici’s heart. Portrait by Anthony van Dyck. https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/14132.html I could find no portraits of his steward George Hartman, who published most of Sir Kenelm’s works.

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