A recipe is a set of instructions that describes how to prepare or make something, especially a dish of prepared food. A sub-recipe or subrecipe is a recipe for an ingredient that will be called for in the instructions for the main recipe.
87-657: The earliest known written recipes date to 1730 BC and were recorded on cuneiform tablets found in Mesopotamia. Other early written recipes date from approximately 1600 BC and come from an Akkadian tablet from southern Babylonia . There are also works in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs depicting the preparation of food. Many ancient Greek recipes are known. Mithaecus 's cookbook was an early one, but most of it has been lost; Athenaeus quotes one short recipe in his Deipnosophistae . Athenaeus mentions many other cookbooks, all of them lost. Roman recipes are known starting in
174-436: A 12th man here. Where are you? Where are you? Let's be 'avin' you! Come on!" Norwich lost the match 3–2. Smith denied suggestions in the media that she had been drunk while delivering the speech though she did concede that "maybe in the heat of the moment I didn't choose the best words". In 2008, it was reported that Smith had rejected an offer from Norfolk-born billionaire Peter Cullum , who wished to invest £20 million in
261-490: A 10% rise in egg sales in Britain and her use of ingredients such as frozen mash and tinned minced beef and onions, or utensils such as an omelette pan, could cause sell-outs overnight. This phenomenon, dubbed the "Delia effect", was most recently seen in 2008, after her book How to Cheat at Cooking was published. Her fame (and her relatively uncommon name) has meant that her first name has become sufficient to identify her to
348-569: A 40.4% stake in the club in April 2024, to increase their stake in the club to 85% and take majority control, with Smith and Wynn-Jones's shares decreasing to 10%. As part of the deal, Smith and Wynn-Jones also agreed to stand down from their roles as club directors and become honorary life presidents of the club. Already an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), Smith was appointed Commander of
435-401: A completely unknown writing system in 19th-century Assyriology . It was successfully deciphered by 1857. The cuneiform script changed considerably over more than 2,000 years. The image below shows the development of the sign SAĜ "head" (Borger nr. 184, U+12295 𒊕 ). Stages: The cuneiform script was developed from pictographic proto-writing in the late 4th millennium BC, stemming from
522-536: A consultant for Seven Publishing which now publishes the magazine. Smith has developed other business interests outside of her culinary ventures, notably a majority shareholding of 53% in the football team Norwich City , with her husband. Both Smith and Wynn-Jones were season ticket holders at Norwich and were invited to invest in the club, which had fallen on hard times. She has had a significant impact on improving matchday catering standards and food revenues, only stepping back from day to day responsibilities on reaching
609-550: A given sign could have various meanings depending on context. The sign inventory was reduced from some 1,500 signs to some 600 signs, and writing became increasingly phonological . Determinative signs were re-introduced to avoid ambiguity. Cuneiform writing proper thus arises from the more primitive system of pictographs at about that time, labeled the Early Bronze Age II epoch by historians. The earliest known Sumerian king, whose name appears on contemporary cuneiform tablets,
696-577: A language structure typical of the non-Indo-European agglutinative Sumerian language . The first tablets using syllabic elements date to the Early Dynastic I–II periods c. 2800 BC , and they are agreed to be clearly in Sumerian. This is the time when some pictographic element started to be used for their phonetic value, permitting the recording of abstract ideas or personal names. Many pictographs began to lose their original function, and
783-528: A longer book on prayer, A Journey into God . Smith became friends with the Catholic art historian Sister Wendy Beckett , selecting Beckett's book, 100 Best-loved Paintings, in her second appearance on Desert Island Discs broadcast in December 2023, four decades apart from her first invitation, in 1982. In 2012 Smith criticised atheism , stating that "militant neo-atheists and devout secularists are busting
870-452: A new audience. In the early days, recipes were available by post from the BBC; later with the introduction of CEEFAX text on screen, they became available on television. The first Internet Usenet newsgroup dedicated to cooking was net.cooks created in 1982, later becoming rec.food.cooking . It served as a forum to share recipes text files and cooking techniques. In the U.S. in 2008, there
957-641: A phonetic complement. Yet even in those days, the Babylonian syllabary remained a mixture of logographic and phonemic writing. Elamite cuneiform was a simplified form of the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, used to write the Elamite language in the area that corresponds to modern Iran from the 3rd millennium BC to the 4th century BC. Elamite cuneiform at times competed with other local scripts, Proto-Elamite and Linear Elamite . The earliest known Elamite cuneiform text
SECTION 10
#17328490310461044-432: A pointed stylus, sometimes called "linear cuneiform". Many of the early dynastic inscriptions, particularly those made on stone, continued to use the linear style as late as circa 2000 BC. In the mid-3rd millennium BC, a new wedge-tipped stylus was introduced which was pushed into the clay, producing wedge-shaped cuneiform. This development made writing quicker and easier, especially when writing on soft clay. By adjusting
1131-526: A recipe book called Forme of Cury in 1390, and around the same time, another book was published entitled Curye on Inglish , "cury" meaning cooking. Both books give an impression of how food for the noble classes was prepared and served in England at that time. The luxurious taste of the aristocracy in the Early Modern Period brought with it the start of what can be called the modern recipe book. By
1218-477: A resemblance to Old Japanese , written in a Chinese-derived script, where some of these Sinograms were used as logograms and others as phonetic characters. This "mixed" method of writing continued through the end of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, although there were periods when "purism" was in fashion and there was a more marked tendency to spell out the words laboriously, in preference to using signs with
1305-548: A sharpened reed stylus or incised in stone. This early style lacked the characteristic wedge shape of the strokes. Most Proto-Cuneiform records from this period were of an accounting nature. The proto-cuneiform sign list has grown, as new texts are discovered, and shrunk, as variant signs are combined. The current sign list is 705 elements long with 42 being numeric and four considered pre-proto-Elamite. Certain signs to indicate names of gods, countries, cities, vessels, birds, trees, etc., are known as determinatives and were
1392-559: A slightly different way. From the 6th century, the Akkadian language was marginalized by Aramaic , written in the Aramaic alphabet , but Akkadian cuneiform remained in use in the literary tradition well into the times of the Parthian Empire (250 BC–226 AD). The last known cuneiform inscription, an astronomical text, was written in 75 AD. The ability to read cuneiform may have persisted until
1479-607: A stylus. Writing is first recorded in Uruk , at the end of the 4th millennium BC, and soon after in various parts of the Near-East . An ancient Mesopotamian poem gives the first known story of the invention of writing : Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat [the message], the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay. The cuneiform writing system
1566-468: A traditional dish, to give different tastes of the same recipes. A sub-recipe or subrecipe is a recipe for an ingredient that will be called for in the instructions for the main recipe. Sub-recipes are often for spice blends, sauces, confits , pickles , preserves , jams, chutneys , or condiments . Sometimes the sub-recipe calls for the ingredient to be held for several hours, overnight, or longer, which home cooks sometimes find frustrating as it means
1653-428: Is Enmebaragesi of Kish (fl. c. 2600 BC ). Surviving records became less fragmentary for following reigns and by the arrival of Sargon, it had become standard practice for each major city-state to date documents by year-names, commemorating the exploits of its king. Geoffrey Sampson stated that Egyptian hieroglyphs "came into existence a little after Sumerian script , and, probably, [were] invented under
1740-552: Is a treaty between Akkadians and the Elamites that dates back to 2200 BC. Some believe it might have been in use since 2500 BC. The tablets are poorly preserved, so only limited parts can be read, but it is understood that the text is a treaty between the Akkad king Nāramsîn and Elamite ruler Hita , as indicated by frequent references like "Nāramsîn's friend is my friend, Nāramsîn's enemy is my enemy". The most famous Elamite scriptures and
1827-579: Is an adaptation of the Old Assyrian cuneiform of c. 1800 BC to the Hittite language and was used from the 17th until approximately the 13th century BC. More or less the same system was used by the scribes of the Hittite Empire for two other Anatolian languages , namely Luwian (alongside the native Anatolian hieroglyphics ) and Palaic , as well as for the isolate Hattic language . When the cuneiform script
SECTION 20
#17328490310461914-429: Is called gunû or "gunification"; if signs are cross-hatched with additional Winkelhaken , they are called šešig ; if signs are modified by the removal of a wedge or wedges, they are called nutillu . "Typical" signs have about five to ten wedges, while complex ligatures can consist of twenty or more (although it is not always clear if a ligature should be considered a single sign or two collated, but distinct signs);
2001-451: Is now time for a fresh approach and a younger team who, I am confident, will take the business even further." Smith & Wynn-Jones's twenty-eight years of involvement with Norwich City came to an end on 23 October 2024, when the club's other shareholders approved a deal that allowed Norfolk Holdings, a business group lead by the American businessman Mark Attanasio that previously purchased
2088-545: Is said that many of the recipes were plagiarised from earlier writers such as Acton, but the Beetons never claimed that the book's contents were original. It was intended as a reliable guide for the aspirant middle classes. The American cook Fannie Farmer (1857–1915) published in 1896 her famous work The Boston Cooking School Cookbook which contained some 1,849 recipes. Modern culinary recipes normally consist of several components Recipe writers sometimes also list variations of
2175-453: The Iron Age (c. 10th to 6th centuries BC), Assyrian cuneiform was further simplified. The characters remained the same as those of Sumero-Akkadian cuneiforms, but the graphic design of each character relied more heavily on wedges and square angles, making them significantly more abstract: Babylonian cuneiform was simplified along similar lines during that period, albeit to a lesser extent and in
2262-615: The University of East Anglia and in 2000, a fellowship from Liverpool John Moores University . In 2012 Smith was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork – the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover – to celebrate the British cultural figures of the last six decades. She was appointed Member of
2349-729: The Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin , the Louvre , the Istanbul Archaeology Museums , the National Museum of Iraq , the Yale Babylonian Collection (approx. 40,000), and Penn Museum . Most of these have "lain in these collections for a century without being translated, studied or published", as there are only a few hundred qualified cuneiformists in the world. The decipherment of cuneiform began with
2436-520: The Winkelhaken impressed vertically by the tip of the stylus. The signs exemplary of these basic wedges are: Except for the Winkelhaken , which has no tail, the length of the wedges' tails could vary as required for sign composition. Signs tilted by about 45 degrees are called tenû in Akkadian, thus DIŠ is a vertical wedge and DIŠ tenû a diagonal one. If a sign is modified with additional wedges, this
2523-547: The 15th century, numerous manuscripts were appearing detailing the recipes of the day. Many of these manuscripts give very good information and record the re-discovery of many herbs and spices including coriander , parsley, basil and rosemary , many of which had been brought back from the Crusades . With the advent of the printing press in the 16th and 17th centuries, numerous books were written on managing households and preparing food. In Holland and England competition grew between
2610-401: The 23rd century BC ( short chronology ). The Akkadian language being East Semitic , its structure was completely different from Sumerian. The Akkadians found a practical solution in writing their language phonetically, using the corresponding Sumerian phonetic signs. Still, many of the Sumerian characters were retained for their logographic value as well: for example the character for "sheep"
2697-408: The 24th century BC onward and make up the bulk of the cuneiform record. Akkadian cuneiform was itself adapted to write the Hittite language in the early second millennium BC . The other languages with significant cuneiform corpora are Eblaite , Elamite , Hurrian , Luwian , and Urartian . The Old Persian and Ugaritic alphabets feature cuneiform-style signs; however, they are unrelated to
Recipe - Misplaced Pages Continue
2784-565: The 2nd century BCE with Cato the Elder 's De Agri Cultura . Many authors of this period described eastern Mediterranean cooking in Greek and in Latin. Some Punic recipes are known in Greek and Latin translation. The large collection of recipes De re coquinaria , conventionally titled Apicius , appeared in the 4th or 5th century and is the only complete surviving cookbook from the classical world. It lists
2871-504: The 3rd millennium Sumerian script. Ugaritic was written using the Ugaritic alphabet , a standard Semitic style alphabet (an abjad ) written using the cuneiform method. Between half a million and two million cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times, of which only approximately 30,000 –100,000 have been read or published. The British Museum holds the largest collection (approx. 130,000 tablets), followed by
2958-473: The Akkadian period, at the time of the Uruk ruler Lugalzagesi (r. c. 2294–2270 BC). The vertical style remained for monumental purposes on stone stelas until the middle of the 2nd millennium. Written Sumerian was used as a scribal language until the first century AD. The spoken language died out between about 2100 and 1700 BC. The archaic cuneiform script was adopted by the Akkadian Empire from
3045-542: The Old Persian text. Because Elamite is unlike its neighboring Semitic languages , the script's decipherment was delayed until the 1840s. Elamite cuneiform appears to have used far fewer signs than its Akkadian prototype and initially relied primarily on syllabograms, but logograms became more common in later texts. Many signs soon acquired highly distinctive local shape variants that are often difficult to recognise as related to their Akkadian prototypes. Hittite cuneiform
3132-495: The Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2009 Birthday Honours , "in recognition of ... [her] contribution to television cookery and recipe writing". In 1996, Smith was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Nottingham , a fellowship from St Mary's University College (a college of the University of Surrey ) and a Fellowship from the Royal Television Society . In 1999 she received an honorary degree from
3219-595: The Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in the 2017 Birthday Honours for services to cookery. Smith was baptised in the Church of England , and attended a Methodist Sunday School , a Congregationalist Brownie group and later a Church of England youth group. At the age of twenty-two, she converted to Catholicism . Her first two short religious books, A Feast for Lent (1983) and A Feast for Advent (1983), are readings and reflections for these seasons. In 1988 she wrote
3306-471: The Sumerian signs of the terms in question, added as a guide for the reader. Proper names continued to be usually written in purely "logographic" fashion. The first inscribed tablets were purely pictographic, which makes it technically difficult to know in which language they were written. Different languages have been proposed, though usually Sumerian is assumed. Later tablets dating after c. 2900 BC start to use syllabic elements, which clearly show
3393-510: The Sumerians was not intuitive to Semitic speakers. From the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age (20th century BC), the script evolved to accommodate the various dialects of Akkadian: Old Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian. At this stage, the former pictograms were reduced to a high level of abstraction, and were composed of only five basic wedge shapes: horizontal, vertical, two diagonals and
3480-468: The age of 70. In February 2005, Smith attracted attention during the half-time break of a home match against Manchester City . At the time Norwich were fighting an ultimately unsuccessful battle against relegation from the Premier League , and to rally the crowd, Smith grabbed the microphone from the club announcer on the pitch and said: "A message for the best football supporters in the world: we need
3567-580: The beginning of the Common Era . Cuneiform scripts are marked by and named for the characteristic wedge-shaped impressions ( Latin : cuneus ) which form their signs . Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system and was originally developed to write the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq ). Over the course of its history, cuneiform was adapted to write a number of languages in addition to Sumerian. Akkadian texts are attested from
Recipe - Misplaced Pages Continue
3654-414: The beginning, similar-sounding words such as "life" [til] and "arrow" [ti] were written with the same symbol (𒋾). As a result, many signs gradually changed from being logograms to also functioning as syllabograms , so that for example, the sign for the word "arrow" would become the sign for the sound "ti". Syllabograms were used in Sumerian writing especially to express grammatical elements, and their use
3741-491: The club, but wanted Smith and the other shareholders to relinquish their holdings. Both Smith and Cullum denied this offer had been made, with Smith telling the football club's AGM that she and her husband would be "very happy to stand aside" as majority shareholders if someone came along with an offer to buy them out. In August 2011, Smith announced that, anticipating her 70th birthday, she was stepping down from her catering role at Norwich City's Carrow Road football ground: "It
3828-431: The compound IGI.A (𒅆𒀀) – "eye" + "water" – has the reading imhur , meaning "foam"). Several symbols had too many meanings to permit clarity. Therefore, symbols were put together to indicate both the sound and the meaning of a symbol. For instance, the word 'raven' (UGA) had the same logogram (𒉀) as the word 'soap' (NAGA), the name of a city (EREŠ), and the patron goddess of Eresh (NISABA). To disambiguate and identify
3915-489: The cooking instruction of more than 130 different dishes and pastries, and Madat-ol-Hayat (1597) by Nurollah Ashpaz. Recipe books from the Qajar era are numerous, the most notable being Khorak-ha-ye Irani by prince Nader Mirza. In older English works, a recipe was called a "receipt". Both words "receipt" and "recipe" were originally used to mean instructions on how to administer medicine. King Richard II of England commissioned
4002-516: The courses served in a meal as Gustatio (appetizer), Primae Mensae (main course) and Secundae Mensae (dessert). Each recipe begins with the Latin command "Take...," "Recipe...." Arabic recipes are documented starting in the 10th century; see al-Warraq and al-Baghdadi . The earliest recipe in Persian dates from the 14th century. Several recipes have survived from the time of Safavids , including Karnameh (1521) by Mohammad Ali Bavarchi, which includes
4089-447: The cuneiform logo-syllabary proper. The latest known cuneiform tablet dates to 75 AD. Cuneiform was rediscovered in modern times in the early 17th century with the publication of the trilingual Achaemenid royal inscriptions at Persepolis ; these were first deciphered in the early 19th century. The modern study of cuneiform belongs to the ambiguously named field of Assyriology , as the earliest excavations of cuneiform libraries – in
4176-508: The decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform in 1836. The first cuneiform inscriptions published in modern times were copied from the Achaemenid royal inscriptions in the ruins of Persepolis , with the first complete and accurate copy being published in 1778 by Carsten Niebuhr . Niebuhr's publication was used by Grotefend in 1802 to make the first breakthrough – the realization that Niebuhr had published three different languages side by side and
4263-468: The details of all their recipes. These were joined by reality TV shows such as Top Chef or Iron Chef , and many Internet sites offering free recipes, but cookery books remain as popular as ever. Cuneiform Cuneiform is a logo - syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East . The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until
4350-545: The development of Egyptian hieroglyphs, with the suggestion the former influenced the latter. But given the lack of direct evidence for the transfer of writing, "no definitive determination has been made as to the origin of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt". Others have held that "the evidence for such direct influence remains flimsy" and that "a very credible argument can also be made for the independent development of writing in Egypt..." Early cuneiform inscriptions were made by using
4437-501: The early 1970s, as resident cook on BBC East 's regional magazine programme Look East , shown on BBC One across East Anglia . Following this, she was offered her own cookery television show, Family Fare which ran between 1973 and 1975. Smith became a recognisable figure amongst young people in the 1970s and early 1980s when she was an occasional guest on the BBC's Saturday morning children's programme Multicoloured Swap Shop , giving basic cooking demonstrations. In Taiwan, Smith
SECTION 50
#17328490310464524-446: The early Achaemenid rulers from the 6th century BC down to the 4th century BC. Because of its simplicity and logical structure, the Old Persian cuneiform script was the first to be deciphered by modern scholars, starting with the accomplishments of Georg Friedrich Grotefend in 1802. Various ancient bilingual or trilingual inscriptions then permitted to decipher the other, much more complicated and more ancient scripts, as far back as to
4611-402: The emergence of cookery writing in its modern form. Although eclipsed in fame and regard by Isabella Beeton , the first modern cookery writer and compiler of recipes for the home was Eliza Acton . Her pioneering cookbook, Modern Cookery for Private Families published in 1845, was aimed at the domestic reader rather than the professional cook or chef. This was immensely influential, establishing
4698-485: The format for modern writing about cookery. It introduced the now-universal practice of listing the ingredients and suggested cooking times with each recipe. It included the first recipe for Brussels sprouts . Contemporary chef Delia Smith called Acton "the best writer of recipes in the English language." Modern Cookery long survived Acton, remaining in print until 1914 and available more recently in facsimile. Acton's work
4785-401: The guest for BBC Radio 4 's Desert Island Discs : first on 5 June 1982, when her choices included " The Sound of Silence " by Paul Simon and " Llef " by Rhos Male Voice Choir , and again on Christmas Eve 2023, when her choices included " This Woman's Work " by Kate Bush and " Happy " by Pharrell Williams . It has been claimed that Smith's television series Delia's How to Cook led to
4872-413: The influence of the latter", and that it is "probable that the general idea of expressing words of a language in writing was brought to Egypt from Sumerian Mesopotamia". There are many instances of Egypt-Mesopotamia relations at the time of the invention of writing, and standard reconstructions of the development of writing generally place the development of the Sumerian proto-cuneiform script before
4959-407: The ligature KAxGUR 7 consists of 31 strokes. Most later adaptations of Sumerian cuneiform preserved at least some aspects of the Sumerian script. Written Akkadian included phonetic symbols from the Sumerian syllabary , together with logograms that were read as whole words. Many signs in the script were polyvalent, having both a syllabic and logographic meaning. The complexity of the system bears
5046-535: The main recipe cannot be made in a single session or day. Sub-recipes discovered late and calling for an ingredient the cook does not have on hand means a special shopping trip or trying to find a substitute. Sub-recipes, and the cookbooks that contain them, are often described as not being targeted at casual cooks. Reviewers have mentioned finding alternate uses for leftover sub-recipes. Cookbooks including subrecipes include Christina Tosi 's Momofuku Milk Bar (2011) and Terry Bryant's Vegetable Kingdom (2020). By
5133-443: The meaning and the other the pronunciation (e.g. 𒅗 ka 'mouth' was combined with the sign 𒉣 nun 'prince' to express the word 𒅻 nundum , meaning 'lip', formally KA×NUN; cf. Chinese phono-semantic compounds ). Another way of expressing words that had no sign of their own was by so-called 'Diri compounds' – sign sequences that have, in combination, a reading different from the sum of the individual constituent signs (for example,
5220-560: The mid-19th century – were in the area of ancient Assyria . An estimated half a million tablets are held in museums across the world, but comparatively few of these are published . The largest collections belong to the British Museum ( approx. 130,000 tablets), the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin , the Louvre , the Istanbul Archaeology Museums , the National Museum of Iraq , the Yale Babylonian Collection ( approx. 40,000 tablets), and Penn Museum . Writing began after pottery
5307-546: The mid-20th century, there were thousands of cookery and recipe books available. The next revolution came with the introduction of the TV cooks. The first TV cook in the world was Philip Harben with a show on the BBC called Cookery which premiered in June 1946. A few months later I Love to Eat presented by James Beard became the first such program in the US . TV cookery programs brought recipes to
SECTION 60
#17328490310465394-463: The near eastern token system used for accounting. The meaning and usage of these tokens is still a matter of debate. These tokens were in use from the 9th millennium BC and remained in occasional use even late in the 2nd millennium BC. Early tokens with pictographic shapes of animals, associated with numbers, were discovered in Tell Brak , and date to the mid-4th millennium BC. It has been suggested that
5481-461: The noble families as to who could prepare the most lavish banquet. By the 1660s, cookery had progressed to an art form, and good cooks were in demand. Many of them published their own books, detailing their recipes in competition with their rivals. Many of these books have been translated and are available online. By the 19th century, the Victorian preoccupation for domestic respectability brought about
5568-470: The ones that ultimately led to its decipherment are the ones found in the trilingual Behistun inscriptions , commissioned by the Achaemenid kings. The inscriptions, similar to that of the Rosetta Stone 's, were written in three different writing systems. The first was Old Persian , which was deciphered in 1802 by Georg Friedrich Grotefend . The second, Babylonian cuneiform, was deciphered shortly after
5655-513: The public and the "Delia effect" has become a commonly used phrase to describe a run on a previously poor-selling product as a result of a high-profile recommendation. From 1993 to 1998 Smith worked as a consultant for Sainsbury's . In May 1993 she and her husband Michael Wynn-Jones launched New Crane Publishing to publish Sainsbury's Magazine; the company also published several of Smith's books for BBC Worldwide . Although Smith and Wynn-Jones sold New Crane Publishing in 2005, Smith continues to be
5742-500: The recognition of the word "king". Delia Smith Delia Ann Smith CH CBE (born 18 June 1941) is an English cook and television presenter, known for teaching basic cookery skills in a direct style. One of the best-known celebrity chefs in British popular culture , Smith has influenced viewers to become more culinarily adventurous. She is also notable for her role as Honorary Life President (with her husband Michael Wynn-Jones ) of Norwich City , where she
5829-449: The relative position of the stylus to the tablet, the writer could use a single tool to make a variety of impressions. For numbers, a round-tipped stylus was initially used, until the wedge-tipped stylus was generalized. The direction of writing was from top-to-bottom and right-to-left. Cuneiform clay tablets could be fired in kilns to bake them hard, and so provide a permanent record, or they could be left moist and recycled if permanence
5916-415: The syllable [ɡu] had fourteen different symbols. The inventory of signs was expanded by the combination of existing signs into compound signs. They could either derive their meaning from a combination of the meanings of both original signs (e.g. 𒅗 ka 'mouth' and 𒀀 a 'water' were combined to form the sign for 𒅘 nag̃ 'drink', formally KA×A; cf. Chinese compound ideographs ), or one sign could suggest
6003-472: The third century AD. The complexity of cuneiforms prompted the development of a number of simplified versions of the script. Old Persian cuneiform was developed with an independent and unrelated set of simple cuneiform characters, by Darius the Great in the 5th century BC. Most scholars consider this writing system to be an independent invention because it has no obvious connections with other writing systems at
6090-432: The time, such as Elamite , Akkadian, Hurrian , and Hittite cuneiforms. It formed a semi-alphabetic syllabary, using far fewer wedge strokes than Assyrian used, together with a handful of logograms for frequently occurring words like "god" ( 𐏎 ), "king" ( 𐏋 ) or "country" ( 𐏌 ). This almost purely alphabetical form of the cuneiform script (36 phonetic characters and 8 logograms), was specially designed and used by
6177-652: The token shapes were the original basis for some of the Sumerian pictographs. Mesopotamia's "proto-literate" period spans roughly the 35th to 32nd centuries BC. The first unequivocal written documents start with the Uruk IV period, from circa 3,300 BC, followed by tablets found in Uruk III, Jemdet Nasr , Early Dynastic I Ur and Susa (in Proto-Elamite ) dating to the period until circa 2,900 BC. Originally, pictographs were either drawn on clay tablets in vertical columns with
6264-585: The two languages are related, their writing systems seem to have been developed separately. For Hurrian, there were even different systems in different polities (in Mitanni , in Mari , in the Hittite Empire). The Hurrian orthographies were generally characterised by more extensive use of syllabograms and more limited use of logograms than Akkadian. Urartian, in comparison, retained a more significant role for logograms. In
6351-565: The word more precisely, two phonetic complements were added – Ú (𒌑) for the syllable [u] in front of the symbol and GA (𒂵) for the syllable [ga] behind. Finally, the symbol for 'bird', MUŠEN (𒄷) was added to ensure proper interpretation. As a result, the whole word could be spelt 𒌑𒉀𒂵𒄷, i.e. Ú.NAGA.GA (among the many variant spellings that the word could have). For unknown reasons, cuneiform pictographs, until then written vertically, were rotated 90° counterclockwise, in effect putting them on their side. This change first occurred slightly before
6438-525: Was a renewed focus on cooking at home due to the late-2000s recession . Home cooking in the U.S. was similarly inspired in the early 2020s during the coronavirus pandemic . Television networks such as the Food Network and magazines are still a major source of recipe information, with international cooks and chefs such as Jamie Oliver , Gordon Ramsay , Nigella Lawson and Rachael Ray having prime-time shows and backing them up with Internet websites giving
6525-561: Was adapted to writing Hittite, a layer of Akkadian logographic spellings, also known as Akkadograms, was added to the script, in addition to the Sumerian logograms, or Sumerograms, which were already inherent in the Akkadian writing system and which Hittite also kept. Thus the pronunciations of many Hittite words which were conventionally written by logograms are now unknown. The Hurrian language (attested 2300–1000 BC) and Urartian language (attested 9th–6th century BC) were also written in adapted versions of Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform. Although
6612-438: Was an important influence on Isabella Beeton, who published Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management in 24 monthly parts between 1857 and 1861. This was a guide to running a Victorian household, with advice on fashion, child care , animal husbandry , poisons , the management of servants , science, religion, and industrialism. Of the 1,112 pages, over 900 contained recipes. Most were illustrated with coloured engravings. It
6699-524: Was as a hairdresser; she also worked as a shop assistant and in a travel agency. In 1962 at age 21, she started work in a small restaurant in Paddington , washing dishes before moving on to waitressing, then helping with the cooking. She started reading English cookery books in the Reading Room at the British Museum , trying out the recipes on a Harley Street family with whom she was living. Her next job
6786-550: Was at Carlton Studios in London, where she prepared food for studio photography. In 1969 Smith was taken on as the cookery writer for the Daily Mirror 's newly launched magazine. Their deputy editor was Michael Wynn-Jones , whom she later married. Her first piece featured kipper pâté , beef in beer and cheesecake . She baked the cake that was used on the cover of The Rolling Stones ' album Let It Bleed , which she later recalled
6873-517: Was compared to Taiwanese chef Fu Pei-mei , and she was called the "Fu Pei-mei of England". Her 1995 book Delia Smith's The Winter Collection sold 2 million copies in hardback, becoming the fifth biggest-selling book of the 1990s. In 2003 Smith announced her retirement from television. However, she returned for an eponymous six-part series airing on the BBC in Spring 2008. The accompanying book, an update of her 1971 best-seller How to Cheat at Cooking ,
6960-406: Was further developed and modified in the writing of the Akkadian language to express its sounds. Often, words that had a similar meaning but very different sounds were written with the same symbol. For instance the Sumerian words 'tooth' [zu], 'mouth' [ka] and 'voice' [gu] were all written with the original pictogram for mouth (𒅗). Words that sounded alike would have different signs; for instance,
7047-624: Was in response to a request was for "a gaudy cake" that had to look "really horrible." In 1972 Smith started a column in the Evening Standard . She later defected to the rival Evening News , but she returned to the Standard when that newspaper bought out the News . She wrote for both for 12 years; later she wrote a column for the Radio Times until 1986. Smith's first television appearances came in
7134-448: Was in use for more than three millennia, through several stages of development, from the 31st century BC down to the second century AD. The latest firmly dateable tablet, from Uruk, dates to 79/80 AD. Ultimately, it was completely replaced by alphabetic writing , in the general sense, in the course of the Roman era , and there are no cuneiform systems in current use. It had to be deciphered as
7221-478: Was invented, during the Neolithic , when clay tokens were used to record specific amounts of livestock or commodities. In recent years a contrarian view has arisen on the tokens being the precursor of writing. These tokens were initially impressed on the surface of round clay envelopes ( clay bullae ) and then stored in them. The tokens were then progressively replaced by flat tablets, on which signs were recorded with
7308-451: Was not needed. Most surviving cuneiform tablets were of the latter kind, accidentally preserved when fires destroyed the tablets' storage place and effectively baked them, unintentionally ensuring their longevity. The script was widely used on commemorative stelae and carved reliefs to record the achievements of the ruler in whose honor the monument had been erected. The spoken language included many homophones and near-homophones, and in
7395-558: Was previously the Joint Majority Shareholder alongside Wynn-Jones from 1998 to 2024. Born to Harold Bartlett Smith (1920–1999), an English RAF radio operator and tool salesman, and a Welsh mother, Etty Jones Lewis (1919–2020), in Woking , Surrey , her parents divorced when she was 15 years old and her brother was aged 7. Smith attended Bexleyheath School , leaving at the age of 16 without any qualifications. Her first job
7482-676: Was published in February 2008, again becoming a best-seller. In 2010 she appeared in a five-episode series, Delia through the Decades , with each episode exploring a new decade of her cooking. Also in 2010, Smith and Heston Blumenthal were signed up to appear in a series of 40 commercials on British television for the supermarket chain Waitrose . In February 2013 she announced that she had retired from television cookery programmes, and would concentrate on offering her recipes online. Smith has twice been
7569-406: Was retained, but was now pronounced immerum , rather than the Sumerian udu . Such retained individual signs or, sometimes, entire sign combinations with logographic value are known as Sumerograms , a type of heterogram . The East Semitic languages employed equivalents for many signs that were distorted or abbreviated to represent new values because the syllabic nature of the script as refined by
#45954