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Recipe, receipt and prescription in the history of English

Paper · 2015 · Magdalena Bator and Marta Sylwanowicz

Summary

The paper traces how English came to name a set of written instructions for preparing something, whether a medicine or a dish. It follows the competition among recipe, receipt and prescription, and also looks at their Old English forerunners built on leech ('physician'). The authors draw evidence from several historical resources: DOE, Helsinki Corpus, Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose, MED, MEMT, EMEMT, the Lampeter Corpus, and Bator's own corpus of medieval culinary recipes. They combine this with OED dating and sense definitions. The study considers both directions of change: how each word's meanings shifted, and which words expressed a given concept over time.

The Germanic leech-vocabulary disappeared during Middle English, giving way to borrowings from Anglo-Norman and Latin. Anglo-Saxons apparently had no dedicated word for a medical formula and stretched existing terms to cover it. By Early Modern English the field had settled: recipe became the cooking term, prescription the medical one, and receipt moved to mean proof that something was received. The corpus evidence also shows culinary uses earlier than OED records them.

Key points

  • OED dates are as follows:
    • Medical receipt first appears in Trevisa (1398), and culinary receipt in Widowes Treasure (1595).
    • The verb recipe ('take') is used from 1300 and became obsolete in the 17th century.
    • The noun recipe has a medical sense from the 16th century and a culinary sense from 1631.
    • Prescription is legal from the early 15th century and medical from the late 16th century.
  • Old English terms include leechbook, leechcraft, leechdom, leechery and leeching. Leechbook ('collection of recipes') had a clear meaning, while the others often blurred two senses.
  • Latin glosses separate two senses of leechdom. Where it renders remedia it means a cure, and where it renders medicina it means medical art.
  • Culinary recipe as a noun turns up once, around 1490, in a recipe heading, well before the OED's 1631. The verb recipe appears 90 times in 15th-century cookery texts, but about 90% of those come from a single manuscript (MS Harley 5401).
  • The Compleat Cook (1658), which is not in the corpora, has seven uses of receipt, six of them in headings. In the corpora, the first use of receipt outside a heading only appears in 1701 (LC).

Interesting ideas

  • I1. When an older text comes with a parallel Latin gloss, the choice of Latin word can separate senses that the native context leaves ambiguous.
  • I2. The authors compare dictionary first-attestation dates against corpus evidence and find earlier uses that the reference work missed.
  • I3. The paper discounts a frequent form once it sees that about 90% of the hits come from one manuscript, attributing it to one scribe's habit.
  • I4. Where a word sits in the text matters: heading uses of recipe and receipt are tracked separately from uses in running text, and the heading Recipe is really an imperative ('take').
  • I5. The study examines both directions at once: the senses of each word and the words available for each concept, showing how a semantic field reorganizes itself.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): Parallel or glossed text could act as a sense witness for linking ambiguous lemmas to WordNet synsets, with the gloss recorded as an explainable reason for the choice.
  • I2 (learn): Compiled lexical knowledge (WordNet/Wikidata facts) could be audited against corpus counts, and mismatches flagged as candidates for repair instead of being trusted blindly.
  • I3 (learn): Silver-data statistics could be weighted by source diversity, so that a pattern seen only in one document cannot become a general rule, much like a negative control.
  • I4 (frames): Instructional headings and leading imperatives could be tagged as directive speech acts, giving procedural texts a distinct frame layer.
  • I5 (world): The ontology could store both word→senses and concept→words mappings, so a reader can explain why receipt in a 17th-century text likely means a recipe.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: Uniwersytet SWPS.

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 works

Cite

Cite as Magdalena Bator and Marta Sylwanowicz. 2015. Recipe, receipt and prescription in the history of English. SELIM 21.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.17811/selim.21.2015.1-23

@inproceedings{bator2015recipe,
  title = {{Recipe, receipt and prescription in the history of English}},
  author = {Magdalena Bator and Marta Sylwanowicz},
  booktitle = {SELIM 21},
  year = {2015},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.21.2015.1-23},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.21.2015.1-23}
}

References

31 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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