Free, open and public domain recipe sources
Where to look for recipes, food history and pictures you can read for free, and in some cases reuse. Links checked in October 2026; a ✓ marks the ones whose license we checked on the site itself.
What you may reuse
In the United States, the Copyright Office says that “a mere listing of ingredients or contents, or a simple set of directions, is uncopyrightable” (Circular 33, Works Not Protected by Copyright). The wording of a recipe that explains how or why, its stories and its photographs usually are protected. Other countries have similar rules, with differences. So: take ideas, ingredients and methods freely, write the text yourself, and only copy text or pictures whose license allows it, crediting the source.
Open licenses: free to reuse with credit
- ✓ Wikibooks Cookbook: thousands of recipes and technique pages written by volunteers. Text under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA 4.0): reuse is allowed if you credit Wikibooks and share your version under the same license.
- ✓ Wikimedia Commons, food category: photos of dishes and ingredients. Each file has its own license on its page (often CC BY-SA or public domain); check and credit it.
- Wikipedia: the articles on individual dishes are a good first stop for history and regional variants, with references to follow. CC BY-SA.
- Seasoned Advice: questions and answers on cooking technique, from the Stack Exchange network. Contributions are under CC BY-SA.
- ✓ Open Food Facts: a collaborative database of food products, their ingredients and nutrition, published as open data that anyone can reuse. Useful for ingredients, not recipes.
Public domain: old cookbooks
Books whose copyright has expired can be copied freely. Their recipes are often written for another age (imperial measures, wood stoves), but they are a goldmine for the history of classic dishes.
- ✓ Project Gutenberg, cookery books: free e-books, public domain in the USA. Two classics:
- ✓ The Book of Household Management, Isabella Beeton (1861), the great Victorian British household book.
- ✓ The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, Fannie Merritt Farmer (1896), which popularised precise level measurements in American recipes.
- Internet Archive: scanned cookbooks and food magazines; many old ones are public domain, others can only be borrowed. Check each item’s rights.
- HathiTrust: a library of digitised books from research libraries, with full view of the public domain ones, including many historic cookbooks.
Free to read, not to copy
Good, free recipe sites run by publishers and individual cooks. Their text and photos are copyrighted: read, cook, link to them, but don’t copy them.
- BBC Food: a large archive of British recipes and techniques.
- Serious Eats: recipes with careful explanations of why each step works.
- Budget Bytes: cheap recipes with the cost of each one.
- ✓ Minimalist Baker: simple plant-based recipes, most with 10 ingredients or fewer, or one bowl, or 30 minutes or less. © Minimalist Baker.
In French and German
The French and German versions of this page (/fr/recipe-sources/, /de/recipe-sources/) list sources in those languages: the French and German Wikibooks cookbooks, Koch-Wiki, Wikisource, the BnF’s Gallica library of old French cookbooks, and Henriette Davidis’s 19th-century Praktisches Kochbuch in the Deutsches Textarchiv.
How we use them
The recipes on this site are written by us, from classic versions checked in several sources. The recipe-text skill (.claude/skills/recipe-text) asks for at least two independent sources for a dish’s history and ingredients, and these are good places to start.