A cookbook is a book that contains information on cooking. It typically contains a collection of recipes, and may also include information on ingredient origin, freshness, selection and quality, e.g., the Slow Food movement's ark of taste criteria.

History

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 text that has survived is thought, from the character of its Latin, to have been compiled in the late 4th or early 5th century; it went through numerous manuscript versions before it came out in a print edition in 1483. The recipes that it records are deemed to be a mix of ancient Greek and Roman cuisine, but virtually lack details on how to cook and prepare the various ingredients. There is also a very abbreviated epitome entitled Apici Excerpta a Vinidario, a "pocket Apicius" by Vinidarius, "an illustrious man", made as late as the Carolingian era, for it survives in a single 8th century uncial manuscript. In spite of its late date it represents the last manifestation of the cuisine of Antiquity.

After a long interval, the first recipe books to be compiled in Europe since Late Antiquity started to appear in the late thirteenth century. All told, about a hundred survive, mostly fragmentary, from the age before printing. 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 even earlier. 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 cook book from 1485. 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 Menagier de Paris ("The Householder of Paris"), a household book written by an anonymous middle class Parisian in the 1390s. From Southern Europe there is the 14th century Catalan manuscript Libre de Sent Soví ("The Book of of Saint Sophia") and several Italian collections, notably the Venetian mid-14th century Libro per Cuoco, with its 135 recipes alphabetically arranged. The printed De honesta voluptate ("On honourable pleasure"), first published in 1470, 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". Recipes originating in England include the earliest recorded recipe for ravioli (1390s) and Forme of Cury, a late 14th century manuscript written by chefs of Richard II of England.