Recipe vs. Receipt

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Brian from Pittsburgh.

Hi, Brian.

I’m from Pittsburgh, but when I’m up in western Pennsylvania, I’ll be at a family or friend’s house, and we’ll be having a meal, and someone will say, they’ll ask for the recipe of a dish or a dessert, and they’ll say, can I have the receipt? And they’ll say, I’ll give you the receipt. And I’ve not known those two words to be interchangeable, but up there, they know exactly what they’re talking about. I don’t know if it’s generational or regional, but have you ever heard people referring to their recipe as their receipt?

Well, Brian, actually, you’ve spotted a rare linguistic specimen. This is super cool. There are places scattered across the U.S. where people use the term receipt for those sets of instructions of how to cook something, but it’s dying out. But what’s really interesting about it is that for a long time, both recipe and receipt could be used to mean that list of instructions for cooking something. Both of these words come from the Latin word recipere, which means to take or receive, but they entered English at different times and in different ways.

So the older version, the one that you’re hearing when you go and visit these folks, receipt, originally meant the act of receiving something. And then after that, it meant a piece of paper listing all the things that you received in that transaction. And over time, it came to mean the list of ingredients and instructions, first for making a medicine and then later for cooking food. And then the word recipe, the one that is more commonly used in this country, shows up later in the 16th century. And it’s spelled just like the Latin imperative of that verb recipe or reccipe.

And what would happen in the Middle Ages is that when a physician was writing out what amounted to a prescription, they would write that Latin at the top of it. They would say reccipe, meaning here, take these. And then they had the list of the things that you were supposed to take to make this medicine. And what’s also super cool is that this was eventually abbreviated as Rx. And you see that in pharmacies, don’t you? Like on prescription pads and that kind of thing.

So the term recipe went from meaning a list of instructions for making medicine to a list of cooking instructions. And then, as I said, for a long time, those two words existed side by side in the language. And there was a time when receipt was the more fashionable term and recipe was considered a more commercial term. But now the tables have turned, so to speak. And you’re going to hear fewer and fewer people say receipt for that list of instruction. It may well die out in another generation or so.

Well, that’s more than I had anticipated. That’s very interesting. I’ll have to share that with my friends. I’m sure they definitely did not know that.

Yeah.

Well, do that at your next dinner table conversation. It’s a safe conversation.

That’s very good. I do appreciate the information, and I enjoy your show.

Oh, well, thank you so much for calling. We really appreciate it. And go Stillers.

Yes.

Thank you very much.

All righty.

Thanks, Brian. Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, if there’s a word that comes up in conversation at your dinner table and everybody’s curious about it, we’d love to hear about it. So give us a call, 877-929-9673.