Author: Anne Ewbank / Source: Atlas Obscura
For as long as libraries have been repositories of wisdom and knowledge, there has been a place on the shelf for cookbooks. In fact, many early cookbooks were more than just recipe collections—instructions for concocting medicine often jostled with dinner ideas for page space.
Atlas Obscura has previously displayed ancient recipe collections, such as the Yale Peabody Museum’s Babylonian tablets, which contain the oldest known recorded recipes, and the New York Academy of Medicine’s 9th-century De re culinaria, the oldest surviving cookbook in the West.Cookbooks were once intended mainly for upper-class households. Only relatively recently did printing and educational advances make them more democratic. Today’s versions tend to hold well-lit photographs and elegant prose. But humanity has long turned to cookbooks for inspiration and entertainment, and whether sauce-stained or Gothic-lettered, cookbooks offer glimpses of humanity’s food history. Here is a collection of some of the oldest cookbooks from libraries around the world.
The Library of Congress
This 15th-century Italian manuscript was authored by one Maestro Martino of Como, chef to a famous cardinal. Martino was known for cooking lavish banquets for his employer. Along the way, he achieved fame as “the prince of cooks.” Martino likely deserves the title, according to Brett Zongker from the Library of Congress, since his Libro “is the first known book to specify ingredients, cooking times, techniques, utensils, and amounts.” As a late medieval chef cooking on the cusp of the Renaissance, Martino includes a recipe for everything from almond-rice pudding to “How to Dress a Peacock With All Its Feathers, So That When Cooked, It Appears to Be Alive and Spews Fire From Its Beak.” He also recommends that chefs boil eggs for the amount of time needed to recite the Lord’s Prayer: around two minutes. Martino’s work is momentous for another reason too: In the 15th century, his recipes made up a major part of the world’s first printed cookbook, Platina’s De honesta voluptate et valetudine. A scribe practiced calligraphy on one of the last pages of this particular volume.
The Beinecke Library
Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library contains this handwritten manuscript from the 1750s. According to the library, the recipes include everything from medicinal “plague water” to chocolate puffs. The manuscript has 14 sections and 502 recipes for various meats, sweets, and preserves. Its endpapers were recycled from a 16th-century bible. Little is known about the provenance of the manuscript, which the library purchased in 2007. According to archivist Diane Ducharme, a bookplate in the front of the book bears the symbol of the Martin family, who lived at the appropriately-named Ham Court in the 18th century. “It would have been originally used in a family of similar or superior status,” she writes, “as the sample bills of fare are for the ambitious multi-course meals served at dinner parties and entertainments.”
Biblioteca Nacional de España
The National Library of Spain’s oldest cookbook is a copy of De re coquinaria from the 15th century. But we’ve included here the 16th-century Libro de cozina cōpuesto por maestre Ruberto de Nola,…
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