recipe

Etymology

It is borrowed from Latin recipe (“take!”), the second-person singular imperative of Latin recipere (“to take, receive”),^[1][2][3] which physicians wrote at the head of prescriptions.^[2][4] It was used in English from the 1580s for a medical prescription,^[2] partly via Middle French récipé.^[2][5]

The sense “instructions for preparing a food” is recorded by 1716.^[2] The older sense survives in the pharmacist's abbreviation Rx.^[2] Compare receipt and receive.^[2]

References

1. [1] The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Boston: Houghton Mifflin
2. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] Harper, Douglas, Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
3. [1] Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
4. [1] Simpson, J. A.; Weiner, E. S. C., eds. (1989), The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
5. [1] Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org