Meaning
A combination of actions, circumstances, or ingredients that makes a bad outcome almost inevitable. Borrowing the language of cookery, it says that if you mix these particular elements together, the result is guaranteed to be trouble rather than anything desirable. Works as a noun predicate or with 'be'; conversational and journalistic, bordering on cliché in news writing. Regional use: General English.
Origin
No standard dictionary records a first-use date for the exact phrase, so precise coinage claims found online should be treated with caution; what is documented is the machinery of the metaphor. 'Recipe' entered English by 1533 as a medical prescription, the word being the Latin imperative recipe, take - the OED dates the cooking sense to the mid-1600s, with usage rising steeply through the twentieth century, and Etymonline likewise derives the word from physicians' prescription Latin. From there, a recipe readily came to mean any formula that reliably produces a given result, and Cambridge documents the whole family - be a recipe for disaster, trouble, or success - with the disaster version the ironic member. Dated print evidence is thin: a full-text search of the Library of Congress's digitized newspapers returns a single page containing the phrase, from the Tacoma Times of 5 January 1938 (context unverified and possibly literal), suggesting the fixed idiom was rare before the 1960s and became common only later in the twentieth century.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a recipe for success (opposite)
- a recipe for trouble
- be a recipe for disaster
Usage Examples
- Letting a first-week intern run payroll during a software migration is a recipe for disaster.
- No sleep, cheap coffee, and rush-hour traffic are a recipe for disaster behind the wheel.
- Critics called the decision to double production while cutting inspectors a recipe for disaster.