Food for thought – or, what’s (in) a recipe?

A diachronic analysis of cooking instructions

Jenny Arendholz | University of Augsburg

Wolfram Bublitz | University of Augsburg

Monika Kirner-Ludwig | University of Augsburg

Iris Zimmermann | University of Augsburg

This paper focuses on the text type of cooking instructions, or recipes, from a chiefly diachronic point of view. After giving a brief overview on both the etymological origins and semantic developments of the notion recipe, we will compare two recipes with regard to formal and functional similarities and discrepancies: one Middle English recipe (“Beef y-Stywyd”, MS. Harl. 279 f. 6v) by an anonymous scribe with its Modern English online counterpart (“beef and ale stew”) by the British chef James ‘Jamie’ Oliver. Opposed to findings by e.g. Görlach (2004), particularly the functional comparison remains mostly obscure, as the medieval recipe escapes functional classification. However, remarkable text type specific parallels can be identified with regard to formal aspects, such as syntactic constructions and lexical codification.

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Published online: 04 July 2013
https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.10.05are

Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Freywald, Ulrike

2021. In Textanfänge [Linguistik in Empirie und Theorie/Empirical and Theoretical Linguistics, ], ► pp. 13 ff.

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