On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. For the music album, see The Cookbook. A cookbook or cookery book is cookbook easy kitchen reference containing recipes. Cookbooks may be general, or may specialize in a particular cuisine or category of food.

They may be addressed to home cooks, to professional restaurant cooks, to institutional cooks, or to more specialized audiences. Not all cultures left written records of their culinary practices, but some examples have survived, notably three Akkadian tablets from Ancient Mesopotamia, dating to about 1700 BC, large fragments from Archestratus, the Latin Apicius and some texts from the Tang Dynasty. The earliest collection of recipes that has survived in Europe is De re coquinaria, written in Latin. An early version was first compiled sometime in the 1st century and has often been attributed to the Roman gourmet Marcus Gavius Apicius, though this has been cast in doubt by modern research.

An abbreviated epitome entitled Apici Excerpta a Vinidario, a “pocket Apicius” by Vinidarius, “an illustrious man”, was made in the Carolingian era. Manasollasa from India contains recipes of vegetarian and non-vegetarian cuisines, which preceded the cookbook writing history in Europe by a century. Chinese recipe books are known from the Tang dynasty, but most were lost. After a long interval, the first recipe books to be compiled in Europe since Late Antiquity started to appear in the late thirteenth century.

About a hundred are known to have survived, some fragmentary, from the age before printing. Low and High German manuscripts are among the most numerous. Italian collections, notably the Venetian mid-14th century Libro per Cuoco, with its 135 recipes alphabetically arranged. Medieval English cookbooks include The Forme of Cury and Utilis Coquinario, both written in the fourteenth century. The Forme of Cury is a cookbook authored by the chefs of Richard II. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1871, p.

With the advent of the printing press in the 16th and 17th centuries, numerous books were written on how to manage households and prepare food. In Holland and England competition grew between the noble families as to who could prepare the most lavish banquet. By the 19th century, the Victorian preoccupation for domestic respectability brought about the emergence of cookery writing in its modern form. In 1796, the first known American cookbook titled, American Cookery, written by Amelia Simmons, was published in Hartford, Connecticut. Acton’s work was an important influence on Isabella Beeton, who published Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management in 24 monthly parts between 1857 and 1861.

In 1885 the Virginia Cookery Book was published by Mary Stuart Smith. They provided not just recipes but overall instruction for both kitchen technique and household management. Cookbook also tell stories of the writers themselves and reflect upon the era in which they are written. They often reveal notions of social, political, environmental or economic contexts. For example, during the era of industrialization, convenience foods were brought into many households and were integrated and present in cookbooks written in this time. Norwegian immigrant cookbook in Norwegian, published in the United States in 1899. The latter style often doubles as a sort of culinary travelogue, giving background and context to a recipe that the first type of book would assume its audience is already familiar with.

Professional cookbooks are designed for the use of working chefs and culinary students and sometimes double as textbooks for culinary schools. Such books deal not only in recipes and techniques, but often service and kitchen workflow matters. Many such books deal in substantially larger quantities than home cookbooks, such as making sauces by the liter or preparing dishes for large numbers of people in a catering setting. Jack Monroe for example features low budget recipes. Community cookbooks focus on home cooking, often documenting regional, ethnic, family, and societal traditions, as well as local history.

Community cookbooks have sometimes been created to offer a counter-narrative of historical events or sustain a community through difficult times. Many of these books, particularly those written by or for a well-established cook with a long-running TV show or popular restaurant, become part of extended series of books that can be released over the course of many years. Several libraries have extensive collections of cookbooks. Harvard’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America has a collection of 20,000 cookbooks and other books on food, including the earliest American cookbook, and the personal collections and papers of Julia Child, M.

New York University’s Fales Library includes a Food and Cookery Collection of over 15,000 books, including the personal libraries of James Beard, Cecily Brownstone, and Dalia Carmel. Some individuals are notable for their collections of cookbooks, or their scholarly interest therein. Elizabeth Robins Pennell, an American critic in London from the 1880s, was an early writer on the subject, and has recently been called “one of the most well-known cookbook collectors in the world”. The term cookbook is sometimes used metaphorically to refer to any book containing a straightforward set of already tried and tested “recipes” or instructions for a specific field or activity, presented in detail so that the users who are not necessarily expert in the field can produce workable results. Archived from the original on 2019-11-08. The Oxford Handbook of Food History. LA Times: Chef Breaks Code to Ancient Recipes : Babylonian Collection Now the Oldest Known to Man”.

Interdisciplinary team cooks 4000-year old Babylonian stews at NYU event”. The Greco-Roman World” in Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe, p. Simon Varey, “Medieval and Renaissance Italy, A. The Peninsula” in Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe, pp. Goth, in which case his Gothic name may have been Vinithaharjis.

Christopher Grocock and Sally Grainger, Apicius. Fermented Foods and Beverages of the World. New York: Kegan Paul International, 2000. The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food 2008, pp50f. Hieatt, “Sorting Through the Titles of Medieval Dishes: What Is, or Is Not, a ‘Blanc Manger'” in Food in the Middle Ages, pp.