== 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 recipes 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: they're much more likely to be copied than written from scratch. You can even see it in the Polish word for "reciperecipë", ''"przepis"'', which literally means "something that is rewritten". Oftentimes the copyist will add something to the reciperecipë, or perhaps makes some abridgements, redactions or modifications -- thus allowing the recipe recipë to evolve. In pre-Internet times, culinary recipes 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