Cooking the books

Cooking seems a rather odd choice of word to convey fraud. The Oxford English Dictionary lists a dozen or so meanings of the verb ‘to cook’, ranging from ‘prepare opium for use’ to ‘make the call of a cuckoo’ and, of course, ‘prepare food by the action of heat’. Tucked away at the bottom there is also the meaning ‘present in a surreptitiously altered form’ and it is that meaning of cook that was used in the coinage of the phrase ‘cook the books’. The allusion appears to be the changing of one thing into another, as in the conversion of food ingredients into meals. This usage dates back to Stuart and possibly Tudor England and was used by the Earl of Strafford in his Letters and dispatches, 1636:

“The Proof was once clear, however they have cook’d it since.”

The verb was in common use by the 18th century and Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, 1751, made the link to finance explicit:

“Some falsified printed accounts, artfully cooked up, on purpose to mislead and deceive.”

Apart from the expression ‘cooking the books’ this use of ‘cook’ has become less common in the 19th and 20th centuries. The preferred euphemism for the manipulation of financial statements has come to be ‘creative accounting’. This is first recorded in the 1960s and is attributed to the US comedian Irwin Corey, as in this example from the Middlesboro Daily News, May 1968:

‘Professor’ Irwin Corey claims his CPA [Certified Public Accountant] isn’t exactly crooked – but the government’s questioning him about his “creative accounting”.

The numerous corporate fraud cases of the 1990s turned public opinion against the semi-admiring tone of ‘creative accounting’ and journalists stopped using it. That, and the transformation of bookshops, which now seem to sell more coffee and cakes than they do books, has brought about a revival of the term ‘cooking the books’, which looks like staying with us for some years to come.