recipe
Pluralrecipes
- 1A set of instructions for making or preparing food dishes.
The chef shared a recipe for slow-roasted lamb with the cooking class.
Many family recipes are passed down through several generations.
- 2A set of directions for combining ingredients into any kind of mixture, such as a soap or a dye.
The soap maker wrote down her recipe for lavender bars.
He mixed the fabric dye using an old recipe of plant extracts.
Similarformula, formulation
Note
The broad sense covers any mixture made by following steps: soap, dye, or the alchemical recipes The Economist pictured Isaac Newton copying out by hand in 2014. Cooking has since claimed the word, and the kitchen meaning is now the one most readers expect. Outside food, a qualifier such as alchemical, dye or soap tells the reader which kind of mixture is meant.
- 3A plan or procedure for reaching a particular result.
Long hours with no rest are a recipe for burnout.
Cutting corners on safety was a recipe for disaster.
Similarformula, prescription, blueprint
Note
The figurative use almost always takes one construction: be a recipe for plus a noun naming the outcome, as in a recipe for success, a recipe for disaster. The phrase works for good results and bad ones alike. It is rarely used without the for-phrase. The plan is understood through what it will produce, as if the result were a dish that follows inevitably from the ingredients.
- 4A set of conditions and parameters for an industrial process that produce a given result.
Operators selected the correct recipe for the etching process.
The semiconductor line stores hundreds of process recipes.
Note
Factories borrowed the kitchen's word for a machine's settings. Here a recipe is a stored specification of temperatures, pressures, timings and material quantities that equipment runs to give the same output every time. On the production floor it usually takes a modifier naming the tool or process, as in stepper recipes or etch recipes. Operators select, load or edit recipes rather than follow them by hand.
Less common meaning
- 5A formula for preparing or using a medicine, or the medicine prepared from the formula.
The physician's recipe called for ground willow bark steeped in warm wine.
He carried the recipe to the apothecary to have it prepared at once.
Note
The medical sense keeps the grammar of the Latin behind it. Latin recipe is a command, "receive!", the imperative of recipiō, and it reached English through Middle French. In medicine this use is now archaic. A modern doctor writes a prescription, not a recipe, so this sense belongs in historical fiction or period description. Receipt, from the same Latin verb, is its doublet.
Use it in a sentence
Write your own sentence with recipe, and AI will tell you whether it fits and which meaning you used.
Origin
Borrowed from Middle French récipé, from Latin recipe, the second person singular imperative of recipiō ("receive"). It is a doublet of recept and receipt.