Recipe, receipt and prescription in the history of English

Abstract

Nowadays, the term recipe is immediately associated with the kitchen, various spice cupboards and cookbooks. Very few people realize that the word (with relation to cookery) appeared only in 1631 (OED: s.v. recipe). Earlier, since 1400s, recipe was a common term used by physicians and apothecaries. Hence, it was recorded mainly in medical writings as the heading of medical formulas. In the field of cookery, it was the term receipt which was used on everyday basis to denote the culinary instruction. Additionally, in the late sixteenth century, the term prescription began to be used with reference to doctors’ written instructions and was slowly replacing the term recipe in the context of medical prescription.

The main aim of this paper is an analysis of the rivalry between the three terms, recipe, receipt and prescription, and the examination of their distribution in the history of English. Particular attention will be paid to various uses of the terms and their semantic development. Also, a causal link between the semasiological and onomasiological changes will be considered. Moreover, the fate of the few Old English synonyms (e.g. læcecræft, gesetednes) will be traced.

The conclusions concerning the present topic are drawn on the basis of a corpus study. The data have been selected from a number of electronic text corpora including Dictionary of Old English, Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose, the Middle English Dictionary, Helsinki Corpus, Middle English Medical Texts, Early Modern English Medical Texts, and Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts.

Keywords: recipe; prescription; receipt; semantics