A cookbook is a book that contains information on cooking, and/or a list of recipes. It may also contain information on ingredient origin, freshness, selection and quality, e.g., the Slow Food movement's ark of taste criteria.
While western cookbooks usually group recipes for main courses by the main ingredient of the dishes, Japanese cookbooks usually group them by cooking techniques (e.g., fried foods, steamed foods, and grilled foods). Both styles of cookbook have additional recipe groupings such as soups, sweets.
Famous cookbooks from the past, in chronological order, include:
Usage outside the world of food
The term cookbook
is sometimes used metaphorically to refer to any book containing a straightforward set of already tried and tested "recipes
" or instructions
for a specific field or activity other than cooking, that others can use unchanged. Examples include a set of circuit designs in electronics
, a book of magic spells
, or the Anarchist Cookbook
, a set of instructions on destruction and living outside the law. O'Reilly Media
publishes a series of books about computer programming
named the Cookbook series
, and each of these books contain hundreds of ready to use, cut and paste examples to solve a specific problem in a single programming language