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This medium also offered women the opportunity to verify and improve knowledge. Wall draws many connections between circulating recipe culture and “the rise of experimental science” (211). The knowledge presented by these books testifies to lived experience, such as the work of herbalist Elizabeth Okeover whose recipe book reflected trial and error to find cures for a variety of maladies (215-6). Authors of these texts wrote down their observations, willing to question the wisdom of their own approaches if a recipe provided insufficient results. Such a domestic world employed a serious method of inquiry to establish and legitimize knowledge. - origins.osu.edu