Two culinary treatises from the Safavid period—the early sixteenth-century Kārnāma and the late sixteenth-century Māddat al-ḥayāt—constitute some of the earliest examples of Persian-language cookbooks generally, and Iranian cookbooks in particular. These collections of recipes have been known and analyzed by scholars since their publication in 1981 by Īraj Ashār, but their circulation in manuscripts beyond the few consulted by Afshār in his preparation of the edited texts has largely escaped description. In this paper, I will introduce three copies of these texts (one of the Kārnāma and two of the Māddat al-ḥayāt) produced during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and examine how these manuscripts situate culinary knowledge within various geographical, social, and epistemological contexts—and how these contexts differ from the courtly environments in which the texts were originally composed. These manuscripts reveal links that are not necessarily obvious in the text of the treatises themselves—to writings about health and medicine, to culinary contexts outside of aristocratic feasts, and so on. But more importantly, the fact that the cookbooks were copied down as a whole rather than simply mined for recipes suggests that they were recognized as significant works in their own right rather than as collections of useful data. By analyzing what the cookbooks themselves have to say about their genre and intended audience in their discursive introductions and comparing to what is revealed by the three manuscripts introduced earlier in the paper, I hope to shed light on the complex ways in which culinary knowledge was textually constructed and received over the course of the Safavid period.