Cookhouse is part of the Blue Crane Route Municipality, situated in Sarah Baartman District, in the Eastern Cape, South Africa.

The town was also visited by early explorers and writers such as Dutch military commander Robert Jacob Gordon and French traveller François Levaillant.

The current village is said to take its name from a small stone house used for shelter and cooking by troops camping on the bank of this river.

[5] Another theory is that this small town got its name is in the late 1790s because Susanna van Aardt supplied provisions from her "cookhouse" (or outdoor kitchen) to riders and soldiers waiting to cross the Great Fish River.

In the 1870s, the government of Prime Minister John Molteno oversaw a massive expansion of the Cape Colony's railway system, and a route northwards to De Aar from Port Elizabeth and Port Alfred was chosen by the Cape Government Railways to pass through what is now Cookhouse.