The cutting-edge nature of this article is determined by the fact that up till today the history of Latvian culinary terms has not been thoroughly studied. Beginnings of Latvian culinary terms may be found in written monuments of the 17th and 18th centuries – in the first Latvian dictionaries, in the Bible translation by Ernst Glück (1694), in some contemporary magazines and books, as well as in some of the first Latvian cookbooks published at the end of the 18th century. The first attempts to establish the origin of some Latvian words were made in the hand-written Latvian–German dictionary translated by the German theologian C. Fürecker in the second half of the 17th century. At present the only available Latvian word-stock etymological vocabulary is the Latvian Etymology Vocabulary by K. Karulis (1992; reissued 2001). It mainly covers Latvian literary language words (about 3250, not including references). Internationalisms are not included, except for words that greatly differ from their modern forms in foreign languages. K. Karulis notes that in etymology there may be two or more possible solutions for a word’s origin, and in such cases an in-depth linguistic study and search for historical criteria are required. One of the ways to do this is to compare how different etymological dictionaries explain the origin of the same word. Sometimes it is hard to establish whether a given lexeme is inherited or borrowed. Of the 300 excerpts of culinary lexemes from the 17th and 18th centuries, 20% are inherited and 80% are borrowed. Most borrowings come from German, which is explained by the constant contact of Latvian with Low German and by the fact that the first dictionary compilers were Germans. Borrowings from French and English almost always reached Latvian through German as an intermediary language. The objective of this article is to examine a number of culinary terms (zupa ‘soup’, karaša ‘flat cake’, pīrāgs ‘pie’, biskvīts ‘biscuit’) that were already recorded in the 17th–18th centuries and to compare how their origin is explained in different etymological dictionaries (Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian, German, French). Depending on formal, historical or semantic criteria, these terms are assigned different etymologies in different vocabularies. The task of the article is to trace the history of these words back to their language of origin and to determine the sources and paths of their borrowing.