Cooking the books

[girljanine]

what is the origin for the phrase

[geofbob]

This is quite an old usage of the word "cook", but there doesn't appear to be any particular origin for the phrase. "Cook" and "cook up" are often used to donote the fabrication or adulteration of something. Just as nowadays we are dubious about the additives in processed food, so in previous times people were suspicious about the spices and herbs used in cooked dishes, as they might be concealing rotten meat - or, in cooked books, the rotten state of a company's finances.

[iwilliams]

I heard an explanation on TV. Old accounting books used to have a swirly pattern on the edges of the pages, that was visible when the book was shut. If you took out some pages, to cover up some Enron-style scandal, the pattern would look visibly disjointed. So I think they used to do something to the books involving heat, or perhaps steam, in order to blur the pattern back into shape.

[Aido]

The meaning and use is old, but it is from a time when accounts for companies were all logged into a ledger/book and reviewed by officials at the end of the year. Some companies didn't record all of their transactions for the year so when the inspectors were due, they would grab a new ledger, scribble in a years worth of data (probably ficticious) and when they were finished would literelly boil the books and let them dry to give an old and worn look, as if they had been used for the entire year. It was an old way of fiddling your accounts, and the phrase still pertains to the same thing today, just the methods differ.

[babthrower]

To 'cook' has long been used to mean to 'process the truth'. Slang for concoct a lie is 'cook up a story'. Like baking a cake, you start with a set of ingredients and end up with an attractive, saleable product. So 'cooking the books' is an extention of this: concoct a set of plausible records which make the company look good (if you're selling shares) or bad (if you're filing a tax return). The one about boiling the books is an 'urban legend', and pretty silly, too, - have you ever seen boiled paper?