recipe

Etymology

Borrowed from Middle French récipé, from Latin recipe, second person singular imperative of Latin recipiō (“receive”). Compare receipt.

noun

1. (medicine, archaic) A formula for preparing or using a medicine; a prescription; also, a medicine prepared from such instructions.
   As the world's drug habit shows, governments are failing in their quest to monitor every London window-box and Andean hillside for banned plants. But even that Sisyphean task looks easy next to the fight against synthetic drugs. No sooner has a drug been blacklisted than chemists adjust their recipe and start churning out a subtly different one. 2013-08-10, “A new prescription”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8848
2. Any set of instructions for preparing a mixture of ingredients.
   [Isaac Newton] was obsessed with alchemy. He spent hours copying alchemical recipes and trying to replicate them in his laboratory. He believed that the Bible contained numerological codes. The truth is that Newton was very much a product of his time. 2014-06-21, “Magician’s brain”, in The Economist, volume 411, number 8892
3. By extension, a plan or procedure to obtain a given end result; a prescription.
   His new approach is definitely a recipe for success.
4. Now especially, a set of instructions for making or preparing food dishes.
5. A set of conditions and parameters of an industrial process to obtain a given result.
   Stepper recipes.