The earliest cookbook is the fourth-century De Re Coquinaria by Apicius, which contains about 500 Roman recipes including the first-known version of baked egg custard (Tyropatinam).
Earliest English cookery book A Forme of Cury, the 1381 collection of recipes from Richard II's cook, with such delicacies as Oyfters in Gravye. You can still buy replica copies, but make sure you have a Middle English Dictionary to hand.
Cookbooks as mouth-watering reading Elizabeth David's An Omelette and a Glass of Wine (collection of articles); M.F.K. Fisher's With Bold Knife and Fork. Coals-to-Newcastle award: to Delia, for producing La Cuisine Facile d'Aujourd'hui (150 recipes from her How To cookbooks, repackaged for the French market earlier this year).
Cooking on a budget M.F.K.Fisher's How to Cook a Wolf (the recipe for life-sustaining sludge is a minor masterpiece); Alexis Soyer's A Shilling Cookery for the People (1861) in which the great Reform Club chef - who also set up soup kitchens in Dublin during the Irish famine - produced recipes for those unable to buy expensive books, ingredients or utensils. Observer columnist Katharine Whitehorn's Cooking in a Bedsitter did it more amusingly 100 years on.
Foodie quotes
'Life is too short to stuff a mushroom' - one of the most famous foodie quotes - appears in Shirley Conran's massive-selling lifestyle manual, Superwoman, published 1975.
Roast-beef-and-all-the-trimmings awards
Jane Grigson's English Cookery and Elisabeth Ayrton's The Cookery of England.
The most expensive cookery book currently for sale
Probably Bartolomeo Scappi's 1596 Cuoco Secreto di Papa Pio Quinto, offered at $11,500 by New York antiquarian bookseller Martayan Lan.
Still going strong
Fran¿ois Pierre de la Varenne's Le Cuisiner Fran¿ois, which has (so far) run to about 250 editions since its 1653 first edition.
Misquotes
Brillat-Savarin actually said: 'Tell me what you eat, I will tell you what you are' in his treatise La Physiologie du Gout, (Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy) which he first published in 1825. It has never been out of print.
Foodie misquotes
Mrs Beeton never said 'First catch your hare' in her Victorian bestseller Book of Household Management (1861). The quote comes from Mrs Glasse (see above).
Room service
Escoffier is not best known for his massive 1903 tome Le Guide culinaire - a compendium of some 5,000 recipes - but instead for inventing, with C¿sar Ritz, modern hotel cookery, most notably at the Savoy and Ritz hotels in London.
Best-kept secret cookbook author?
The recent claim that Charles Dickens actually wrote What Shall We Have For Dinner? Published under the pseudonym Lady Maria Clutterbuck, and long believed to have been the work of Dickens' wife Catherine, it features recipes such as giblet soup and lamb's head.
Fastest-selling cookery book
Delia Smith's How To Cook: Book Two which sold more than 200,000 copies in two weeks, just before Christmas 1999.
Best-known cookery book written by a would-be poet
Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families, 1871. Miss Acton wanted her poetry published, but her publisher persuaded her to write the cookery book instead. It proved a better seller.
Best-selling cookery book
Delia, of course. More than 12million books, and still going like hot cakes.
'You had to be there' cookbook
Robert Carrier's Great Dishes of the World, which has sold two million copies since the original lavish version was launched in 1963, selling at the then unbelievable price of four guineas (equivalent to about £65 now).
