Other languages

• Dutch: kookboek 
• French: livre culinaire, livre de cuisine 
• German: Kochbuch, Rezeptliteratur 
• Italian: libro di cucina, ricettario culinario, libro di ricette, libro di segreti
  
• Polish: książka kucharska

Material form

Subject

Description

Cookbooks are a type of how-to books that usually contain mostly recipes. In this respect, they overlap with books of secrets and certain medical books, not only in terms of the recipe format but sometimes even in the recipes themselves, as food and dietary prescriptions were an important part of preventive as well as curative medicine. However, cookbooks often distinguish themselves as a separate genre by referring (in the title or other paratexts) to the kitchen, cooking, and/or meals. They tend to pay more attention to modes of preparation (baking, cooking, frying etc.) than to the beneficial effects of the end result. Moreover, in addition to recipes they could contain instructions about required utensils, how to properly supply and maintain your kitchen, how to preserve ingredients, how to serve meals. In this respect, they show more resemblance with household manuals. 

In addition to printed cookery books, culinary recipes were a genre that continued to thrive (even to this day) in manuscript form. Recipes were often exchanged and passed down from one generation to the next. 

Related terms

cookery book, recipe book, culinary literature, how-to book, book of secrets, household manual, medical literature

Sources

K. Albala, Eating right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

A. Capatti and M. Montanari, La cucina italiana: storia di una cultura (Rome etc.: GLF editori Laterza, 2010).

Corema weblog: Cooking Recipes of the Middle Ages – Corpus, Analysis, Visualisation, https://corema.hypotheses.org/

D. Gentilcore, Food and Health in Early Modern Europe: Diet, Medicine and Society, 1450-1800 (London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).

R. Jansen-Sieben, M. van der Molen-Willebrands (ed.), Een notabel boecxken van cokeryen (Amsterdam: De Kan, 1994).

D.L. Krohn, Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy. Bartolomeo Scappi´s Paper Kitchens (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).

B. Laurioux, Le règne de Taillevent. Livres et pratiques culinaires (s.l.: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 1997), https://books.openedition.org/psorbonne/34357

E. Leong, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge. Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

W. Wall, Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen (Philadelphia: PENN, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

M. Willebrands and C. Muusers, Het Excellente kookboek van doctor Carolus Battus uit 1593 (Gorredijk: Sterck & de Vreese, 2020), and accompanying website https://battus.nl/