Recipes

A recipe is a set of instructions that describes how to prepare or make something, especially a dish of prepared food. A sub-recipe or subrecipe is a recipe for an ingredient that will be called for in the instructions for the main recipe.

The earliest known written recipes date to 1730 BC and were recorded on cuneiform tablets found in Mesopotamia.^[1]

Other early written recipes date from approximately 1600 BC and come from an Akkadian tablet from southern Babylonia.^[2] There are also works in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs depicting the preparation of food.^[3]

Many ancient Greek recipes are known. Mithaecus‘s cookbook was an early one, but most of it has been lost; Athenaeus quotes one short recipe in his Deipnosophistae. Athenaeus mentions many other cookbooks, all of them lost.^[4]

Roman recipes are known starting in the 2nd century BCE with Cato the Elder‘s De Agri Cultura. Many authors of this period described eastern Mediterranean cooking in Greek and in Latin.^[4] Some Punic recipes are known in Greek and Latin translation.^[4]

The large collection of recipes De re coquinaria, conventionally titled Apicius, appeared in the 4th or 5th century and is the only complete surviving cookbook from the classical world.^[4] It lists the courses served in a meal as Gustatio (appetizer), Primae Mensae (main course) and Secundae Mensae (dessert).^[5] Each recipe begins with the Latin command “Take…,” “Recipe….”^[6]