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recipe

UK/ˈɹɛs.ɪ.pi/US/ˈɹɛs.ɪ.pi/
nounA2+Common in everyday speech and writing · #2,913 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: recipes

A recipe is the written instructions that tell you how to cook a dish. Follow the recipe, a family recipe, a recipe for disaster.

It is not copyrightable as a list of ingredients, though the writing around it is, which is why the same dish appears everywhere. A recipe for disaster is the fixed figurative phrase. Note that the word is Latin for take — a recipe began as a doctor's instruction, which is where the pharmacist's R symbol comes from.

Peng 10:53, 17 November 2007 (UTC) · CC BY-SA 3.0

Definitions of recipe

  1. 1nounrecipeWritten instructions for cooking a dish.A2+

    “This recipe for banana bread came from my grandmother.”

    • Said"Can I have the recipe? I'll never make it as well, but I'll try."
    • WrittenHer recipes were written on the backs of envelopes and none gave a quantity for anything.
    • UsedFollow the recipe exactly on the first attempt; improvise on the second.
    • ContrastA recipe, not a menu. A menu lists dishes; a recipe tells you how to make one. menu →
    • Not thisA list of ingredients is not yet a recipe. A recipe has steps, an order and a time.

    Patterna recipe for + noun · follow a recipe · a family / secret recipe · recipe book · a recipe for disaster

recipe is a set of instructions.

Remember it

In Latin it means take! — the same root as receive. Old doctors began every note with it, and a recipe still does: take two eggs, take a cup of milk.

hooks ontoreceive

Where it comes from

Latin recipe means take, the imperative of recipere. It headed a doctor's prescription, which is where the R symbol comes from.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *keh₂p-

  2. Latin

    recipe

  3. Middle French

    récipé

  4. English, today

    recipe

Borrowed from Middle French récipé, from Latin recipe, second person singular imperative of Latin recipiō (“receive”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in In the Kitchen

Practise this word

recipe in the wild

  • A recipe is a set of instructions that lists the ingredients and steps needed to prepare a specific dish or meal.

    Recipe

  • A sub-recipe or subrecipe is a recipe for an ingredient that will be called for in the instructions for the main recipe.

    Recipe

  • Sweet baking chocolate is traditionally used for the flavor of the cake, but few recipes call for it today.

    German chocolate cake

  • The recipe for the sandwich has been published in numerous cookbooks and newspaper stories.

    Peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwich

  • An 1861 recipe says to add salt and pepper to taste.

    Toast sandwich

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.