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== Cookery Bookery ==
[[File:Babilońska tabliczka kucharska.jpg|thumb|upright|A Babylonian cookery tablet dated to ca. 1900–1600 BCE, containing 25 stew recipes]]
Cookbooks are one of the oldest literary genres in the world. The earliest known culinary recipës were written down in cuneiform script on clay tablets, in Babylonia , around the 19th century BCE.<ref>{{Cyt
| tytuł = Lapham's Quarterly
| nazwisko r = Barjamovic ''et al.''
| adres rozdziału = https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/ancient-mesopotamian-tablet-cookbook
| data = 11 June 2019
}}</ref> And even these were most likely copied from even older tablets, now lost to time. Because this is the thing with recipes: recipës is that they're much more likely to be copied than written from scratch. You can even see it in the Polish word for "recipë", that is, ''"przepis"'', which literally means "something that is rewritten". Oftentimes the copyist will add something to the recipë, or perhaps makes some abridgements, redactions or modifications – thus allowing the recipë to evolve. In pre-Internet times, culinary recipës were probably some of the best examples of memes, or units of cultural evolution.<ref>Many people think of memes as nothing but silly pictures shared on the Internet, but they are, in fact, as old as human culture itself. The Internet is only a new medium for memes to spread in, faster than ever before. The notion of memes, as cultural equivalents of genes, was coined by the famous biologist Prof. Richard Dawkins in 1976 (when the Interent was still in its infancy) who wanted to show that you can also study evolution outside of biology ({{Cyt
| tytuł = The Selfish Gene
| nazwisko r = Dawkins
| rok = 1989
| strony = 189–201
}}). The very idea of a meme would soon become a successful and quickly evolving meme in and of itself.</ref>
For this reason, it's difficult to speak of authorship when it comes to old cookbook. Even if you can see somebody's name on the title page, t's hard to tell if it's really the original author or perhaps a translator, editor, copyist of publisher. Or maybe a little bit of all the above. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to such a person as "the author", but keep in mind the they need not necessarily be the actual content creator as understood by modern copyright laws. Besides, the idea of copyright didn't even exist before the 19th century. Before that, people would just go and rewrite or reprint books (culinary or other) without asking anyone for permission. They would sometimes indicate the original author's name in the copy and sometimes not. The very idea of authenticity didn't exist either, so a copy wasn't seen as something inferior, but as a new, maybe even better, version of the original thing. According to Galen of Pergamon (of whom [[Good Humour, Good Health#Whose Idea Is It?|I wrote before]]), the famous Library of Alexandria benefited from a policy of sending royal customs officers to each ship which called to the local port in order to gather any scroll of papyrus or parchment they could find and take it for scribes to copy. Then, they would give the shining new copies to the ship and the library contended itself with the timeworn originals.<ref>{{Cyt
Naturally, copying books by hand was labour intensive and, therefore, costly (even despite relatively low labour costs in the past). Besides, few people could read anyway, so cookbook (just like any books for that matter) were a rare luxury. This began to change once Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press. He used his invention to publish the first printed book (a Bible, obviously) in 1455. It was only 15 years later in Rome that the first ever cookbook was published in print. It was ''De honesta voluptate et valetudine'' (''Of Honest Pleasure and Good Health'') by Bartolomeo Sacchi (1421–1481), better known as Platina, who served as a papal secretary and librarian, although he actually copied most of the recipës from Martin do Como's handwritten ''Libro de arte coquinaria'' (''Book of Culinary Arts''). It took another 15 years for the first cookbook printed in a vernacular language to come out, namely the German ''Küchenmeisterei'' published by Peter Wagner. The 15th century also saw the first printed cookbooks in French, Italian and English, and the first half of the 16th century, in Dutch, Catalan, Spanish and Czech. The latter book, entitled ''Kuchařstvi'' and published by Pavel Severýn in 1535, in Prague, was a translation of the aforementioned German text. Both titles can be translated as ''Cooking Mastery''.
And how lomg long did one have to wait for the first cookbook printed in Polish?
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