Recipe

A recipe is a list of steps that shows what you need and how to make a special dish or meal. It tells you what ingredients to use and how to mix them to create something tasty. Recipes can be for easy snacks or for large, fancy meals.

A sub-recipe or subrecipe is a recipe for an ingredient that you will use to help make the main dish. This makes cooking big meals easier by breaking it into smaller parts.

Recipe books, also called cookbooks or cookery books, are books filled with many recipes in one place. They help us discover new ways to cook and show us how different cultures make their food. These books show cultural identities and how people’s food traditions have changed over time.

In the past, recipes were not only for food. Long ago, the word “recipe” also meant instructions for making medicines, because cooking food and making medicine were often connected in homes.

History

Early examples

The first written recipes we know about are from 1730 BC, found on tablets from Mesopotamia. Other early recipes are from around 1600 BC in Babylonia. Ancient Egyptian pictures also show food being made. Many recipes from ancient Greece are known, including one short recipe quoted by Athenaeus.

Roman recipes start in the 2nd century BCE. The book called Apicius from the 4th or 5th century is the only full cookbook from the classical world. It has courses like starters, main dishes, and desserts. Each recipe starts with “Take…” or “Recipe…”.

Arabic recipes are written down from the 10th century. The first Persian recipe is from the 14th century. Several recipe books from the Safavid time have survived.

Medieval and early modern medical recipes

In older English works, a recipe was called a “receipt.” Medical recipes were important in medieval Europe for sharing medical knowledge. Books like Bald's Leechbook were medical guides. These books were often sorted by sickness or body part.

People kept their own recipe books as special treasures. They wrote down both cooking recipes and medical cures, showing the link between food and medicine at the time.

Modern recipes and cooking advice

The printing press in the 16th and 17th centuries led to many books on home management and cooking. By the 1660s, cooking became an art, and cooks wrote their own books.

In the 19th century, cookery writing took its modern shape. Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families from 1845 was very important. It started listing ingredients and cooking times with each recipe and had the first recipe for Brussels sprouts.

Isabella Beeton published Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management between 1857 and 1861. It was a guide to running a Victorian home, with over 900 pages of recipes. Fannie Farmer’s The Boston Cooking School Cookbook from 1896 had 1,849 recipes.

Components

Recipes can be written in different ways. Two common styles are used. One style shows instructions in one column and ingredients in another. The other style writes everything in a single block, mixing ingredients and steps.

Most modern recipes include several important parts:

• The name of the dish and its history.
• How many servings the recipe makes.
• A list of all ingredients needed, in the order they are used.
• Step-by-step instructions for preparing the dish.
• Measurements for ingredients, often using short forms like "oz" for ounces.
• The time needed to prepare and cook the dish.
• Any special tools required.
• How to cook the dish, including temperature and baking time if needed.
• How to serve the dish, such as warm or cold.
• Whether the dish is recommended to others.
• An optional photo of the finished dish.
• Nutritional information, like calories, to help with dietary needs.

Sometimes, recipe writers also suggest different ways to change a traditional dish, offering new flavors while keeping the same basic recipe.

Writers may add a short story before or after a recipe to share its cultural meaning or personal significance.

Sub-recipes

A sub-recipe is a smaller recipe for an ingredient that is needed in the main recipe. These are often used for things like spice mixes, sauces, pickles, preserves, jams, chutneys, or condiments. Sometimes a sub-recipe needs to sit for many hours or even overnight, which can make cooking more complicated. If you discover you need a sub-recipe ingredient you don’t have, you might need to go shopping or find a substitute.

Cookbooks with sub-recipes, like Christina Tosi’s Momofuku Milk Bar (2011) and Terry Bryant's Vegetable Kingdom (2020), are often aimed at more experienced cooks. Some people find creative ways to use leftover sub-recipes.

Internet and television recipes

By the middle of the last century, there were already many cookbooks. Things changed when cooking shows began on television. The first TV cooking show was hosted by Philip Harben on the BBC in June 1946, called Cookery. Shortly after, James Beard started I Love to Eat, the first such show in the US. These shows brought recipes to many new viewers. At first, people could get recipes by mail from the BBC, and later they appeared on TV through a service called CEEFAX.

The internet also changed how we share recipes. In 1982, a group called net.cooks was created for sharing cooking ideas and recipes, later named rec.food.cooking. In 2008, especially in the US, people started cooking more at home because of money problems. This happened again during the coronavirus pandemic in the early 2020s.

Today, many people learn to cook from TV networks like the Food Network and from famous chefs such as Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, Nigella Lawson, and Rachael Ray. There are also popular shows like Top Chef and Iron Chef, plus many websites with free recipes. But cookbooks are still loved by many.

Copyright

Under U.S. copyright law, recipes themselves are not protected by copyright. But a collection of recipes, like a cookbook, can be copyrighted. Extra information with the recipe, such as pictures of the food or notes about it, can also be protected by copyright.