From Egyptian tombs to modern days: The history of cookbooks

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This week's question: How did cookbooks evolve?

According to writer and food critic William Sitwell, "4,000 years ago the only place recipes were being written down was in the tombs of the nobles."

Those nobles resided in Egypt, and the interior of their burial tombs included recipes for the haute cuisine of the day. The recipes were a guide for the culinary afterlife — after all, paradise just wouldn't be paradise without your favorite foods. Thanks to them, we have a 4,000-year-old recipe for flatbread.

While these recipes may have kept some Egyptians' eternal souls well-fed, they weren't particularly helpful for the rest of humanity. Eventually, recipes were recorded on stone tablets and then on scrolls so they could be more widely distributed — among the living.

But written recipes remained out of reach for average citizens for centuries. Only those who could read and write had access. For that reason, old recipes and cookbooks tell anthropologists a lot about what the wealthy ate, but not much about the general public's diet.

So what were the wealthy eating? One of the oldest surviving cookbooks, which dates back to the 4th or 5th century, has a mix of Greek and Roman dishes on its pages. Entrees include camel heels, peacock tongue, flamingo brains and parrot heads.

Eventually, cookbooks became more mainstream. The advent of the printing press sped up the process. In 1845, "Kitchen Mastery" became the first printed cookbook. It's a German text that basic household care, in addition to recipes.

In the 20th century, cookbooks became rampant bestsellers. It's estimated that "Betty Crocker's Cookbook" has sold more than 65 million copies to date. When it was first published in 1950, sales of the cookbook rivaled even the Bible.

The rise of cookbooks actually played a role in the women's liberation movement, even though many of the books promoted traditional roles for women. Cookbooks that focused on fast, efficient dinners freed up women's time and helped spread the idea that women could balance household duties with other activities, like a full-time job outside the house.

Today, millions of recipes are now available online, making the cookbook seem like a potential relic. But the rise of chefs as celebrities, and a renewed interest in cooking has countered that trend. Many well-known figures in the food scene, such as Nigella Lawson, Emeril Lagasse, Rachel Ray and others, have sold thousands of copies of their cookbooks.

With shifting technology, cookbooks will need to continue to adapt — but they've already been doing that for thousands of years.