Chapter Two. The History Of The Written Catalogues Of Recipes

Abstract

This chapter examines the ways in which written catalogues of recipes were composed and transmitted in classical Greece. In the first part of the chapter, it identifies short, self-contained collections of recipes within the Hippocratic gynaecological treatises. The chapter explains that small collections of written recipes, comparable to those found on papyri and ostraca from Egypt, were available to the compilers of these treatises. In the second part of the chapter, it suggests that in the late fifth century BC or early fourth century BC, the compilers of the gynaecological treatises made a selection of these short catalogues and included them in their writings. The chapter concludes by examining the similarities between therapies described in the Hippocratic Corpus, on the one hand, and by authors active in the fourth century BC, on the other.Keywords: collections of recipes; Hippocratic gynaecological treatise; written catalogues