The History of the Cookbook

Podcast Transcript

Today, cookbooks are ubiquitous. Go to any bookstore and you can find dozens, if not hundreds, of different cookbooks.

Search online, and you can find tens of thousands of websites that provide recipes.

The story of cookbooks is fascinating because it mirrors the entire evolution of human civilization. Not just how we cook and prepare food, but also how we organize knowledge, and what we deem to be important.

Learn more about the history of cookbooks, how they have evolved over time, and how they reflect our culture on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

I do a lot of episodes on big subjects. World leaders, empires, and technologies that have shaped the world we live in today.

So, an episode on cookbooks might seem a bit out of place. To be sure, we would still eat food if cookbooks didn’t exist. The majority of knowledge regarding cooking and food preparation has been passed along from generation to generation for most of human history.

Nonetheless, there is a lot we can learn from the evolution of the simple cookbook.

The oldest known recipes in the world come from Mesopotamia and are inscribed on three clay tablets dating to around 1700 BC, written in Akkadian using cuneiform script. These tablets, likely originating from the ancient city of Babylon, contain about 35 recipes that represent the culinary practices of the elite.

The dishes include stews made with meats such as lamb, goat, and fowl, often combined with vegetables, garlic, onions, leeks, and a variety of herbs and spices, including cumin, coriander, and mint.

Many recipes are for richly seasoned broths and soups, showcasing a complex and sophisticated cuisine far removed from mere subsistence, which we often associate with people from that period.

However, the instructions are terse and lack precise measurements or cooking times, indicating they were intended for trained palace cooks who already understood basic methods.

The first thing that we might recognize as a cookbook was Apicius.

Formally known as De Re Coquinaria, or “On the Subject of Cooking”, Apicius is a Roman cookbook compiled in the late 4th or early 5th century, though it contains recipes that date back to the 1st century.

Traditionally attributed to Marcus Gavius Apicius, a wealthy Roman known for his extravagant feasting during the reign of Tiberius, the actual authorship remains uncertain, as the book was likely a compilation by multiple authors over time.

Written in a mix of classical and vulgar Latin, the text includes over 400 recipes organized by category, such as meats, vegetables, sauces, and pastries. It reflects the opulent tastes of Rome’s upper class.

What’s striking is that it reads almost nothing like a modern cookbook. Instead of “add 2 cups of flour,” you’d find vague instructions like “take some honey” or “season to taste.” Why? Because cooking knowledge was still passed down orally from master to apprentice, and these early books served more as memory aids for people who already knew how to cook

It is not a practical manual for home cooks but rather a record of elite culinary art in the Roman Empire, with minimal instruction and assumed knowledge of professional cooking techniques.

During the medieval era, cookbooks began to appear across different cultures, reflecting both elite culinary practices and the growing importance of written knowledge.

In the Islamic world, cookbooks flourished from the 10th century onward, particularly in Baghdad, where texts like Kitab al-?ab?kh, or The Book of Dishes, by al-Warraq compiled hundreds of recipes influenced by Persian, Arab, and Mediterranean cuisines, emphasizing refined techniques and exotic ingredients found throughout the Islamic world.

In India, cookbooks such as the Manasollasa written in the 12th century in Sanskrit by the South Indian king Someshvara III, included detailed culinary instructions alongside music, art, and governance, showing a royal interest in food.

China saw an early tradition of culinary writing as well, especially during the Song Dynasty, when gastronomic texts described cooking techniques, seasonal menus, and regional specialties.

In Europe, 14th-century cookbooks such as Le Viandier from France and The Forme of Cury in England were compiled by or for aristocratic households.

These cookbooks were often practical manuals for trained cooks in noble kitchens and emphasized presentation, the use of exotic spices, and large banquet dishes. Recipes lacked precise measurements or cooking times, as cooking remained an oral and hands-on tradition.

With the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, cookbooks became more widely distributed.

The first cookbook to be printed on a printing press is De honesta voluptate et valetudine, meaning “On Honest Pleasure and Good Health”, written by Bartolomeo Platina and first printed in 1475.

It featured over 1,000 recipes and included descriptions of kitchen tools and staff hierarchy, offering a rare look into the professional culinary world of the papal court.

This marked a turning point in cookbooks in that it was now possible to have such books reach a much wider audience.

This accessibility also changed everything about how recipes were written. Authors now had to assume their readers might be complete beginners, so instructions became more detailed and systematic. We start seeing the emergence of what we’d recognize as modern recipe format: ingredient lists followed by step-by-step instructions.

One of the biggest turning points in the evolution of cookbooks was the publication of Hannah Glasse’s “The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy” in 1747.

The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy is one of the most influential cookbooks in the history of the English language. Aimed at the everyday English housewife rather than professional chefs, it broke with earlier traditions of elitist or overly ornate culinary writing by offering simple, practical instructions in plain language.

Glasse emphasized thrift, efficiency, and accessible ingredients, making the book enormously popular among the growing middle class in 18th-century Britain. It also played a key role in standardizing British cooking and introducing slightly more structured recipe formats.

Notably, it included some of the earliest English-language recipes for dishes such as curry and macaroni, reflecting early colonial influence. Its enduring popularity, evident in its numerous editions, helped shape domestic cooking for generations and marked a shift toward democratizing culinary knowledge.

Hannah Glasse was also one of the first women to write a cookbook. Previously, books were written by chefs for the wealthy who tended to be men. Glasse was a homemaker who was writing for other housewives.

One of the biggest cookbooks of the 19th century was Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, first published in 1861. It was written by British author Isabella Beeton and quickly became one of the most iconic domestic guides of the Victorian era.

Although widely referred to as a cookbook, it was much more than that. It was an encyclopedic manual for middle-class women tasked with running efficient, moral, and well-ordered homes. The book included over 1,000 recipes, but also covered childcare, budgeting, nursing, etiquette, cleaning, and even hiring and managing servants.

Isabella Beeton, who was only in her early twenties when she compiled the work, drew heavily from existing sources and contributors, yet she organized the material with unprecedented clarity. For the first time, recipes were consistently formatted with a list of ingredients, measurements, and step-by-step instructions, standards still used today.

Beeton died in 1865 at the age of 28, and her writings were republished many times, often without giving her credit.

While recipes were becoming much more standardized, they were still considerably different than what you are used to seeing today.

For starters, almost everyone would have been cooking with wood or coal. Exact temperatures weren’t really possible. You had to know temperatures from experience.

Moreover, almost all ingredients had to be prepared from scratch. You probably would have pre-milled flour, but beyond that, everything else had to be done by hand.

It would not be uncommon for a recipe to start with something like, “Kill and skin a rabbit…”

The trend towards standardization took a big step forward with one of the first major American cookbooks, Fannie Farmer’s “Boston Cooking-School Cook Book,” which was published in 1896.

Farmer was a distinguished cook at her mother’s boarding house, who enrolled in Boston Cooking School, became their top student, and was elevated to its principal in 1891.

Farmer epitomized an even higher level of precision and was a practitioner of what became known as domestic science. She insisted on level measurements and exact temperatures, earning the nickname “the mother of level measurements.”

This might seem obvious to us now, but it represented a fundamental shift in how people thought about cooking: from art to science.

The 20th century saw a proliferation of cookbooks. While measurements and temperatures became standard, specialty books began to be published.

World Wars I and II brought rationing cookbooks, while post-war eras emphasized convenience and modern appliances.

Books from brands, like The Joy of Cooking, Better Homes and Gardens, or Betty Crocker, gained prominence. With more women entering the workforce, cookbooks began emphasizing speed and convenience. This era introduced us to recipes built around processed foods, cake mixes, and canned ingredients.

However, in the 1960s, there was at least one major counterpoint to this trend: Julia Child’s and her 1961 book, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”.

Child proved that home cooks could master sophisticated techniques if given sufficiently detailed instructions. Her recipes were famously long and precise, sometimes running several pages for a single dish. This showed that cookbook authors could successfully teach complex skills through clear, patient explanations.

Unlike most other cookbooks of the era, she was not trying to teach housewives how to cook basic meals. She was teaching how to make advanced French culinary creations.

The success of her book led to her landing her own television show, The French Chef, in 1963. Though not the first person to appear on television cooking programs, earlier figures like James Beard and British cook Philip Harben had brief TV appearances, Julia Child was the first to achieve widespread popularity and cultural influence through the medium.

In a very real sense, Julia Child was the first celebrity chef, and it was all due to the success of her cookbook.

Today, there are more cookbooks than you can count. Instead of writing a cookbook and getting on TV like Julia Child, more often than not, TV celebrities will sell cookbooks.

While cookbooks of all types have exploded, we might have reached a point where cookbooks are obsolete.

If you want to know how to cook something, you can find thousands of webpages with recipes and dozens of videos.

If you have ever searched for a recipe online, you might have noticed something. If you click on a link to get a recipe, you often have to scroll through one or two thousand words of text to get to the recipe at the bottom.

You don’t really care to read an article, you just want the recipe, yet everyone does this.

Why?

It is because Google rewards longer pages with lots of text. The reason why you were able to click on that link was because it ranked high, and that was due in part to the fact that it was full of text, even though no one really likes it.

However, even food blogs and websites might already be obsolete as well. That is because artificial intelligence engines can do particularly good jobs creating customized recipes for whatever you want, for whatever ingredients you might have.

You can literally give most Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT, a list of ingredients you might have and a method of cooking, and it will come up with a recipe uniquely for you.

There will certainly be more cookbooks made, and people will collect them, but in a world with instant personalized recipes at everyone’s fingertips, they will never be the same.

Cookbooks have changed along with humanity. Starting with clay cuniform tablets, to handwritten tomes, to the printing press, to digital publishing, to artificial intelligence.

However, the changes aren’t just with publishing technology. As foods, cooking tools, and culture have changed, these guides to cooking and preparing foods have changed along with them.