A cookbook and its recipes should not merely be viewed as textual instructions but also as stories or narratives about a specific era, culture, society, and language. As Hyland claims (Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 22, 113–135, 2002, p. 118), “genres reflect the different personal and institutional purposes of writers, the different assumptions they make about their audiences, and the different kinds of interactions they create with their readers”. Thus, the present chapter aims to investigate some salient features of author – audience communication and audience design (Fischer, Culinary linguistics: The chef’s special. John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2013, p. 133) (i.e., being the receiver of information, or “other”). In doing so, it will employ a diachronic perspective. In this study, recipes and (non-recipe) introductory texts in cookbooks were analyzed by means of text analysis (Görlach, Text types and the history of English, Mouton de Gruyter, 2004) and critical linguistics. The samples were collected from cookbooks published between the fourteenth and the end of the nineteenth centuries in Britain and America. The findings revealed that there had been a number of innovations regarding the underlying sociocultural context: for instance, the spread of literacy; the advent of printing; the changing role of women in the household; the shrinking number of domestic aids as well as the availability of tools and ingredients. All these innovations would target different kinds of audiences with varying needs at various historical periods, as evidenced by substantially altered structure and content of recipes.