"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 17/01/18 (recipe)

I have an e-mail from Peter Cameron-Waller, who's curious to know the origin of the word "recipe". And, he also wonders about pronunciation because he says it sounds as thought it comes from French, but the way we speak it doesn't quite bear that out. So, here goes. It actually comes from Latin, not from French. It didn't travel through French. It is an imperative, so the command of recipere, which means take or recieve. That might seem a little bit odd when you think about modern cookeryrecipes today until you know that the word first appeared in the 15th century at the top of medical prescriptions. And they were the instruction to the patient to take the pills that were prescribed to them in order to cure their ills. In other words, this was the instruction from the pharmacist to the patient - recipere, recipe, take. The pills, incidentally, just as the side note, that they might be ordered to take, could well have been tabloids because the first meaning of the "tabloid" was a small, compressed tablet of medicine. But by the late 16th century recipe had begun to mean the prescription itself rather than the instruction to take it. Ans soon it being generally applied to notes for making a preparation of some kind, or indeed a list of ingredients. And there's a letter from an archive of the personal history of an upper class family that spans centuries, the Vernese. It includes the letter from a Sir Thomas Cave from 1716 which says, "Sister Lovette and I greatly admire the ink you wrote last with but dare not wish for the recipe, it no doubt being a secret". Ink highly prized  in those days, clearly. But the leap from the commodity of ink perhaps to the commodity of food perhaps wasn't such a great one and so the word was first recorded in the cooking sense in the middle of the 18th century. But looking back to the origin Latin recipere, take or recieve, you can see where the modern pronunciation comes from, to answer Peter's second question. Ans also it take you can still find in recipes today. It'll say take two eggs, for example. Incidentally, if you've ever seen Rx on a prescription, which yo ucan still find today, that's the pharmacists way of saying "recipe". So in pharmaceuticals today, in you local chemist, the Rx is an abbreviation for recipe. So we still hold that 15th century meaning today.