Recipe Ideas for all Occasions

The History of Recipes

Written cooking instructions as an idea can be traced way back into distant history, at least as far back into recorded history as the ancient Egyptians, and maybe even further.

In practice though, generally, these early cook books were just simple pictorial recipes for food preparation - cuneiform or hieroglyphic accounts of the foods used rather than precise lists of quantities, ingredients and methods..

Fascinatingly for beer drinkers, the oldest recipe discovered, according to experts in ancient history are some stone tablets writtne in Ancient Sumerian, which detail the making of bread which is then used to make a drink, whicih appears to be a form of beer as it is recorded as having made drinkers feel exhilarated and blissful. Later on, in Roman times Apicius (a Roman Chef) collected together a number of recipes of his times, many of which still survive. These show the types of meals eaten by upper class ancient Romans and include many ingredients that we would recognise today.

In European culinary history, there were a couple of interesting books which date from the 1300s ; a book titled `Forme of Cury`, and another titled `Curye on Inglish`. Don`t be fooled by the titles though, these books are nothing to do with the indian curry that is served today, but instead descriptions of the types of food served to the nobility of those days.

During the the centuries that followed, the upper-class families of Western Europe competed with each other to serve up the most exotic banquets, and consequentially chefs and their recipe collections increased in prestige.

Even so, it wasn`t until the 1800s that cookery and cookery books became popular. The Famous Mrs Isabella Beeton in the UK, and the equally well-known Fannie Merritt Farmer in the US, dedicated their lives to collecting, verifying, and writing down recipes common in their social group.

The arrival of TV brings us cooking programs and the accompanying recipe books. And that pretty much brings us to the present day and the internet revolution, permitting everybody to search through thousands of recipes like the ones you can find on our web site.