The way people prepare, serve and eat food varies immensely over time and distance. Being able to see how certain foods were discussed, advertised and used gives an insight to eras and cultures like nothing else. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy perusing historical cookbook and culinary collections so much.
Happily, more and more of these collections are being digitized and made available online. As a result many I would never have been able to visit – or even in some cases know about – are at hand with just a few strokes of the keyboard. As I find them, I shall add them here – for reasons both selfish (so I can find them again) and selfless (so you can enjoy them too).
Let’s start with the obvious, shall we? The Project Gutenberg Cookery Shelf.
Then onward to Michigan State University, home of the Cookery and Foodways Collection at Stephen O. Murray and Keelung Hong Special Collections made up of three collections:
- Alan and Shirley Brocker Sliker collection of culinary ephemera – a growing collection of advertising cookbooks (you know, those things you see right at checkout that big brands put out). The collection currently covers publications from United States from the late 19th century to present.
- Feeding America – which includes an online collection of American cookbooks from late 18th – early 20th century. Digital images of the pages of each cookbook, full-text transcriptions and the ability to search within the books.
- Feeding Michigan – a digital archive of 68 cookbooks from the MSU Libraries’ collection, which were published in Michigan or produced by Michigan communities, organizations, churches, or individuals dating back to the late nineteenth century.
Service through Sponge Cake (University Library and the Indianapolis Marion County Public Library) — focus on Indiana cookbooks dating from turn-of-the-century, with a special emphasis on fundraising cookbooks published by churches, synagogues and other community organizations. ” (88 digitized items)
Cookbook and Home Economics Collection at the Internet Archive — Includes books from the Young Research Library,UCLA, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley and the Prelinger Library. Covers America in the early decades of the 20th century covering topics on cookery, textiles, family and domestic sciences. (3,073 digitized items)
HEARTH Collection: Food and Nutrition (Cornell) — works on food preparation and nutrition.
Digitized Rare Books from the library’s Culinary History Collection (Virginia Tech) — covers five centuries of culinary arts. Also the digitised items from the History of Food & Drink Collection Virginia Tech
Cookbook Collection at Steenbock Library University of Wisconsin Madison — can’t browse whole collection but there are several curated subsets digitally available for browsing.
Cookery and Culture Digital Collection, Utah State Univ
Iowa Cookbook Collection, Iowa State Univ. Digital Collections
Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive, Univ. of Michigan
Nicole Di Bona Peterson Advertising Cookbook Collection at Duke University
Szathmary Culinary Manuscipts and Cookbooks, a handwritten collection of American and European recipes from the 1600s to the 1960s.
