"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.

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