Grandma's Best Recipes - Love Food - HardbackDefault Title (2024)

FAQs

What is the first page of a recipe book? ›

The title page is the first page of your cookbook with text on it. It usually contains the title of the book at a minimum. It can also have the name of the author, the sub head, and sometimes an illustration or photograph.

The first recorded cookbook that is still in print today is Of Culinary Matters (originally, De Re Coquinaria), written by Apicius, in fourth century AD Rome. It contains more than 500 recipes, including many with Indian spices.

There are several good qualities a cookbook should have, in order to be useful to a home cook. It should be easy to read. It should not be full of industry jargon or terms that are exclusive to a commercial kitchen environment. It should have ingredients listed first, and in order of appearance.

cookbook, collection of recipes, instructions, and information about the preparation and serving of foods. At its best, a cookbook is also a chronicle and treasury of the fine art of cooking, an art whose masterpieces—created only to be consumed—would otherwise be lost.

Keep in mind that the average size of a cookbook is about 75 to 200 pages. On average, a typical cookbook will have around 150 recipes, but that varies as well, from small cookbooks with just 15 recipes to more than 300.

Recto and verso

The title page is always a right-hand page, the table of contents begins on a right-hand page, chapter 1 begins on a right-hand page, and so on. Book designers call these two pages by the Latin terms “recto” for the right-hand page and “verso” for the reverse or left-hand page.

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.

The earliest known written recipes date to 1730 BC and were recorded on cuneiform tablets found in Mesopotamia. Other early written recipes date from approximately 1600 BC and come from an Akkadian tablet from southern Babylonia. There are also works in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs depicting the preparation of food.

American Cookery, published by the “orphan” Amelia Simmons in 1796, was the first cookbook by an American to be published in the United States. Its 47 pages (in the first edition) contained fine recipes for roasts—stuffed goose, stuffed leg of veal, roast lamb. There were stews, too, and all manner of pies.

If you're looking to purge cookbooks you rarely use, consider donating them to a charity (like Better World Books or Books for Africa), a thrift store, a library, or a used-books vendor.

How many recipes should you have in a cookbook? ›

The standard expectation is that a cookbook should have between 70 and 100 recipes, but larger compendiums have at least 200. Think carefully about how many you want to include.

I recommend that your cookbook have a minimum of 50 recipes. You'll want to test these recipes yourself until you're very happy with the results and then ask others to test them. This part is tempting to skip, but don't!

On the Subject of Cooking

Year: 900 A.D. In the first millennium, Apicius wrote what is now considered to be the oldest surviving cookbook that is still a “book” with paper pages. De Re Coquinaria or On the Subject of Cooking contain almost 500 recipes of the Roman household.

Cooking the books is also known as corporate fraud or accounting fraud. Elements of this white collar crime involve manipulation of financial records or accounting for some benefit or gain. Prosecuted by the federal government, accounting fraud may fall under different offenses.

Meaning of cookbook in English. a book that explains how to prepare particular dishes: She has written several award-winning cookbooks.

Headnotes refer to the recipe introduction of your cookbook, where you tell the story of the dish, techniques you use, the lore of the ingredients—anything that reveals why you make this meal and why it would matter to your reader.