This essay draws on manuscript recipe collections to reconstruct the different forms of temporal knowledge involved in producing foods, medicines, and other goods in early modern English households. It argues that making household goods required experimenting with, understanding, and controlling multiple temporalities. Recipe users planned household production around seasonal and bodily cycles, which some recipes also sought to subvert. When it came to timing production processes, recipe users employed a range of technologically and sensorially mediated strategies. The incorporation of strict durations into recipes suggests that recipe users took advantage of the increasing prominence of clock time in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In other cases, they relied on multisensory observations of ingredient transformations and external environmental factors to time recipe procedures and estimate the shelf lives of goods. Bodily experience and observations of patients played a similar role in determining the proper durations of medical treatments. A focus on temporal knowledge therefore demonstrates that making in the household required the continuous production of knowledge about ingredients, procedures, and environmental conditions, expanding our definition of household science to include following recipes as well as creating and testing them.

Pre-Circulated Paper

The pre-circulated paper will be available one-week prior to the workshop. The paper will be available to the Princeton University community via Sharepoint. All others should request a copy of the paper by emailing Constantine Theodoridis at [email protected].

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 *Those who register one week in advance for in-person attendance will receive a boxed lunch.