This article is recipe for stewed beans culinary recipes. For a discussion of semiconductor IC recipes, see Semiconductor fabrication. 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.

Apicius, De re culinaria, an early collection of recipes. The earliest known written recipes date to 1730 BC and were recorded on cuneiform tablets found in Mesopotamia. Other early written recipes date from approximately 1600 BC and come from an Akkadian tablet from southern Babylonia. There are also works in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs depicting the preparation of food. Many ancient Greek recipes are known.

Athenaeus quotes one short recipe in his Deipnosophistae. Athenaeus mentions many other cookbooks, all of them lost. 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.

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. The earliest recipe in Persian dates from the 14th century. King Richard II of England commissioned a recipe book called Forme of Cury in 1390, and around the same time, another book was published entitled Curye on Inglish, “cury” meaning cooking. A page from the Nimatnama-i-Nasiruddin-Shahi, book of delicacies and recipes. It documents the fine art of making kheer. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1871. 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. Although eclipsed in fame and regard by Isabella Beeton, the first modern cookery writer and compiler of recipes for the home was Eliza Acton. 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. 1896 her famous work The Boston Cooking School Cookbook which contained some 1,849 recipes. Yield: The number of servings that the dish provides.

List all ingredients in the order of its use. Describe it in step by step instructions. How much time does it take to prepare the dish, plus cooking time for the dish. Necessary equipment used for the dish. Temperature and bake time if necessary. Would you recommend this dish to a friend?

Nutritional Value: Helps for dietary restrictions. Includes number of calories or grams per serving. Earlier recipes often included much less information, serving more as a reminder of ingredients and proportions for someone who already knew how to prepare the dish. Recipe writers sometimes also list variations of a traditional dish, to give different tastes of the same recipes. Sub-recipes are often for spice blends, sauces, confits, pickles, preserves, jams, chutneys, or condiments. Sub-recipes, and the cookbooks that contain them, are often described as not being targeted at casual cooks.

Reviewers have mentioned finding alternate uses for leftover sub-recipes. By the mid 20th century, there were thousands of cookery and recipe books available. The next revolution came with the introduction of the TV cooks. The first TV cook in the world was Philip Harben with a show on the BBC called Cookery which premiered in June 1946. The first Internet Usenet newsgroup dedicated to cooking was net. It served as a forum to share recipes text files and cooking techniques. S in 2008, there was a renewed focus on cooking at home due to the late-2000s recession.

S was similarly inspired in the early 2020s during the coronavirus pandemic. Jean Bottéro, Textes culinaires Mésopotamiens, 1995. Andrew Dalby, Food in the Ancient World from A to Z, 2003. Taste: The Story of Britain through its Cooking.