[Sca-cooks] food(ography)

Elise Fleming alysk at ix.netcom.com
Mon Jun 28 10:10:44 PDT 2010


Emilio asked:
 > >However: Is the work of or ascribed to Apicius the "first cookbook"?

Urtatim replied:
 >Nah. There are several tablets written in
 >Akkadian from around 1700 BCE (i.e., nearly 4000
 >years old) that i think currently qualify as the
 >oldest known cookbooks... well, short collections
 >of recipes.

Johnnae commented:
 >But I would argue that the clay tablets do not make up a "cookbook".
 >They may be surviving recipes from an ancient cuisine but they are not
 >books nor were they assembled into books. They are the barest of
 >'receipts' intended to keep track of accounts and items and what was 
to >be done with foodstuffs.

That's probably the crux of the matter.  How does one define a 
"cookbook"?  We often go around and around in discussions because we use 
the same word(s) but define it/them differently.

Alys K.
-- 
Elise Fleming
alysk at ix.netcom.com
http://home.netcom.com/~alysk/



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