Where does the word recipe come from?
A navigator for the kitchen. A secret weapon to enable even a novice to feel like a skilled chef. And while we’re all homebound, what better companion is there than the simple recipe?
The word’s colorful history is a classic reminder that words’ origins (like our lives, I suppose) are far more fluid and unsystematic than we typically believe them to be.
Try to digest this: ‘Recipe’ used to mean medical prescription and ‘receipt’ used to mean recipe.
And in a certain period, both ‘recipe’ and ‘receipt’ meant prescription while in yet another both meant culinary recipe.
So what’s the connection between a recipe, prescription and receipt? Well, we can see an intuitive relationship between recipe and prescription if we remember that “prior to the 1950s, the majority of prescription medications in America were compounded by pharmacists; that is, each medication was custom-made from raw ingredients to suit an individual patient’s needs.” It was only “after the mid-20th century [that] pharmacists filled most prescriptions with mass-produced products from drug companies.” In fact, a small but widespread remnant of this fact persists to this day — ever wonder what “Rx” printed near all things pharmacy means? “Those two letters were a 19th-century take on a 16th-century symbol: the letter R with a line through its slanted leg-the line signaling that the “R” is functioning as an abbreviation. It wasn’t till the early 20th century that “Rx” came to be used as the noun we know today.”
How about that!
“Rx” was a way of saying “take this,” because “recipe” means “take” in Latin. And its use as a symbol for presctiptions just persisted.
As for “receipt,” it is thought to share a common root with “recipe”: the Latin word recipere, which means “to receive.”
The background here isn’t all that interesting. What is interesting, however, is that it was perfectly normal to say “Can you send me aunt’s cake receipt?” In fact, many old cookbooks use this parlance.
And somewhere along the way, after both words even being used as synonyms, they each came to take on the meanings they have today.
Isn’t that a recipe for confusion!
NB: There are other, more mythical theories of Rx’s origin too that I choose to ignore here.
Sources:
https://www.history.com/news/where-did-the-rx-symbol-come-from
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Rx
http://reggiedarling.blogspot.com/2012/03/most-pleasing-receipt-of-charleston.html (image)
