The Fifteenth Century

The first four cookbooks to be printed were written by working cooks who had spent their careers in the kitchen. These books are more modest than many of their peers, without the illustrations or hand-painted illuminations that adorn the first print versions of literary classics and religious works. Simple compendiums of recipes, only one has fewer than two hundred recipes and three were written in the vernacular, although even the one Latin cookbook among the four was based on a book written in Tuscan Italian. The everyday, working language of these cookbooks permitted them to serve as household records and as manuals that stewards could take to the kitchen to give verbal instructions to the cooks.