A cookbook or cookery book is a culinary reference work that contains a collection of recipes and instructions for food preparation. Cookbooks serve as comprehensive guides that may include cooking techniques, ingredient information, nutritional data, and cultural context related to culinary practices. Cookery books can be general-purpose, covering a wide range of recipes and methods, or specialized, focusing on specific cuisines, dietary restrictions, cooking methods, specific ingredients, or a target audience. They may also explore historical periods or cultural movements.
Cookery books are written by professional chefs, food writers, cooking instructors, cultural historians, collective organizations like community groups or charities, or as anonymous compilations of regional or historical traditions. They target home cooks seeking everyday guidance, professional culinary staff needing standardized recipes, institutional food service personnel, culinary students, or specialized practitioners like bakers or dietary professionals.
Format Recipes are usually systematically organized by course sequence (appetizers, soups, main courses, side dishes, desserts, beverages), primary ingredient (meat, poultry, seafood, vegetables, grains, dairy), cooking technique (roasting, sautéing, braising, steaming, fermenting), alphabetical arrangement for quick reference, geographic or cultural origins highlighting regional or ethnic traditions, seasonal availability, or difficulty level, ranging from beginner-friendly to advanced techniques.
While western cookbooks usually group recipes for main courses by the main ingredient of the dishes, Japanese cookbooks usually group them by cooking techniques (e.g., fried foods, steamed foods, and grilled foods). Both styles of cookbook have additional recipe groupings such as soups or sweets.
The cookbook format has evolved significantly from ancient recipe collections to modern multimedia publications, reflecting changes in cooking technology, ingredient availability, cultural exchange, and educational approaches to culinary arts. Contemporary cookbooks increasingly integrate digital components, video tutorials, and interactive elements to enhance traditional text-based instruction.
Types of cookbooks
Cookbooks that serve as basic kitchen references (sometimes known as "kitchen bibles") began to appear in the early modern period. They provided not just recipes but overall instruction for both kitchen technique and household management. Such books were written primarily for housewives and occasionally domestic servants as opposed to professional cooks, and at times books such as The Joy of Cooking (United States), La bonne cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange (France), The Art of Cookery (UK, U.S.), Il cucchiaio d'argento (Italy), and A Gift to Young Housewives (Russia) have served as references of record for national cuisines.
Cookbooks 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.Melissa Fuster (2015) Writing Cuisine in the Spanish Caribbean: A Comparative Analysis of Iconic Puerto Rican and Cuban cookbooks, Food, Culture & Society, 18:4, 659–680 Related to this class are instructional cookbooks, which combine recipes with in-depth, step-by-step recipes to teach beginning cooks basic concepts and techniques. In vernacular literature, people may collect traditional recipes in family cookbooks.
Cookbooks can also be considered primary historical sources for historians, as they provide clues not only about the culinary techniques and ingredients of an era, but also about broader themes such as gender roles, social structures, cultural identities, and even religious and political ideologies.
Instructional approaches vary between didactic styles, offering detailed step-by-step instructions, explanations of cooking principles, troubleshooting guides, and progressive skill-building,e.g. Mastering the Art of French Cooking and reference styles, providing concise ingredient lists, precise measurements, brief preparation summaries, and quick-reference formats for experienced cooks.e.g. Le Répertoire de la Cuisine
Early works
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 Apicius came to designate a book of recipes. The current text appears to have been compiled in the late 4th or early 5th century; the first print edition is from 1483. It records a mix of ancient Greek and Roman cuisine, but with few details on preparation and cooking.Adamson, Melitta Weiss. "The Greco-Roman World" in Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe, p. 6–7; Simon Varey, "Medieval and Renaissance Italy, A. The Peninsula" in Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe, pp. 85–86.
An abbreviated epitome entitled Apici Excerpta a Vinidario, a "pocket Apicius" by Vinidarius, "an illustrious man",About Vinidarius himself nothing is known; he may have been a Goth, in which case his Gothic name may have been Vinithaharjis. was made in the Carolingian era.Christopher Grocock and Sally Grainger, Apicius. A critical edition with an introduction and an English translation (Prospect Books) 2006 , pp. 309–325 In spite of its late date it represents the last manifestation of the cuisine of Antiquity.
American cookbooks In 1742, Eliza Smith's The Compleat Housewife; or, Accomplished Gentlewoman's Companion was published in North America. This work was not an original North American text but instead a copy of an English cookbook. In 1796, the first known American cookbook, titled American Cookery, written by Amelia Simmons, was published in Hartford, Connecticut. Until then, the cookbooks printed and used in the Thirteen Colonies were British. The shortage of American culinary literature may be due to the gender roles and lack of education for women during this time period. While women served as the primary cooks, the lack of female literacy likely caused the lack of production of cookbooks.
Arabic The earliest cookbooks known in Arabic are those of al-Warraq (an early 10th-century compendium of recipes from the 9th and 10th centuries) and al-Baghdadi (13th century).
Indian
Manasollasa from India contains recipes of vegetarian and non-vegetarian cuisines. While the text is not the first among Indian books to describe fermented foods, it contains a range of cuisines based on fermentation of cereals and flours.
Chinese Chinese recipe books are known from the Tang dynasty, but most were lost. One of the earliest surviving Chinese-language cookbooks is "Madame Wu's" Wushi Zhongkuilu from the late 13th century and Hu Sihui's "Yinshan Zhengyao" (Important Principles of Food and Drink), believed to be from 1330. Hu Sihui, Buyantu Khan's dietitian and therapist, recorded a Chinese-inflected Central Asian cuisine as eaten by the Yuan court; his recipes were adapted from foods eaten all over the Mongol Empire.Hu Sihui, Paul D. Buell, Eugene N. Anderson, tr., A Soup for the Qan: Chinese Dietary Medicine of the Mongol Era as Seen in Hu Szu-Hui's Yin-Shan Cheng-Yao: Introduction, Translation, Commentary and Chinese Text (London; New York: Kegan Paul International, 2000. ), p. 1-8. In 1792, Yuan Mei published Recipes from the Garden of Contentment, which criticized the corruption of Chinese cuisine by the Manchu.
Korean Sanga yorok was written in 1459 by the physician Jeon Soon. It is the oldest Korean cookbook, found thus far.
Ŭmsik timibang, written around 1670 by Chang Kyehyang, is the oldest Korean cookbook first written by a woman.
European 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.John Dickie, Delizia! The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food 2008, pp50f. The earliest genuinely medieval recipes have been found in a Danish manuscript dating from around 1300, which in turn are copies of older texts that date back to the early 13th century or perhaps earlier.Constance B. Hieatt, "Sorting Through the Titles of Medieval Dishes: What Is, or Is Not, a 'Blanc Manger'" in Food in the Middle Ages, pp. 32–33.
Low and High German manuscripts are among the most numerous. Among them is Daz buch von guter spise ("The Book of Good Food") written c. 1350 in Würzberg and Kuchenmeysterey ("Kitchen Mastery"), the first printed German cookbook from 1485.Melitta Weiss Adamson, "The Greco-Roman World" in Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe, p. 161, 182–83 Two French collections are probably the most famous: Le Viandier ("The Provisioner") was compiled in the late 14th century by Guillaume Tirel, master chef for two French kings; and Le Ménagier de Paris ("The Householder of Paris"), a household book written by an anonymous middle-class Parisian in the 1390s.Adamson (2004), pp. 103, 107. Du fait de cuisine is another Medieval French cookbook, written in 1420.
From Southern Europe there is the 14th century Valencian manuscript Llibre de Sent Soví (1324), the Catalan ("The book of all recipes of dishes") and several Italian collections, notably the Venetian mid-14th century Libro per Cuoco,Text printed in E. Faccioli, ed. Arte della cucina dal XIV al XIX secolo (Milan, 1966) vol. I, pp.61-105, analysed by John Dickie 2008, pp 50ff. with its 135 recipes alphabetically arranged. The printed De honesta voluptate et valetudine ("On honourable pleasure"), first published in 1475, is one of the first cookbooks based on Renaissance ideals, and, though it is as much a series of moral essays as a cookbook, has been described as "the anthology that closed the book on medieval Italian cooking".Simon Varey, "Medieval and Renaissance Italy, A. The Peninsula" in Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe, p. 92.
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. Utilis Coquinario is a similar cookbook though written by an unknown author. Another English manuscript (1390s) includes the earliest recorded recipe for ravioli, even though ravioli did not originate in England.Constance B. Hieatt, "Medieval Britain" in Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe, p. 25.
International and ethnic