Primary Sources: Food: Cookbooks

"Manuscript collection of cooking recipes, in two volumes. Volume One: Recipes in alphabetical order, with additional loose recipes in multiple hands, laid in. Inscribed: "Recipe Book" inside front board. Embossed back page: "A. Turnbull's Union Square Book Stationery & Music Store, 879 Broadway NY," and inscribed: "Bill W. Niles." Bound in cloth. Volume Two: Miscellaneous manuscript recipes and home remedies, in record book. Includes miscellaneous newspaper clippings, pasted in, with additional loose recipes in multiple hands, laid in. Inscribed front cover: "Recipes." Bound in marbled paper over boards."

"The Cookbook and Home Economics Collection includes books from the Young Research Library Department of Special Collections at UCLA, The Bancroft Library at The University of California, Berkeley, and the Prelinger Library. These fascinating books take us back to an America in the early decades of the 20th century covering topics on cookery, textiles, family and home, budgeting, domestic sciences, and many other delightful topics."

"The digitized historical cookbooks in this collection date from the 1700s to the 1900s. Mostly American and British, they contain not only recipes, but also elegant engravings of table settings and cooking paraphernalia, home remedies and cure-all tonics, instructions on managing servants, and more. In short, these gastronomical treasures reveal much about the societies and economic times that created them."

"From abundance to diets, from prohibition to war, TWU's collection of cookbooks richly illustrates decades of America's changing relationship with food. Cookbooks tell the story of communities and their people. They document society's relationship with food and how culture influences our understanding of one another. Today, cookbooks are considered the quintessential history book. How better to learn how pop culture, politics, education, and religion influence our society than through food.

The Culinary History and Cookbook Digital Archive includes selected cookbooks and recipe leaflets from the Woman's Collection Cookbook Collection dating back to the 1880s."

"Vintage Cocktail Books Free Digital Library The E.U.V.S. stands for Exposition Universelle des Vins et Spiritueux, which refers to a Museum in Bendor Island in south of France. The Museum is dedicated to the History of Wines and Spirits with a beautiful collection of Old Bottles from around the world and Vintage Cocktail Books. This is the on-line access to the EUVS Vintage Cocktail Books Collection"

"The Feeding America project has created an online collection of some of the most important and influential American cookbooks from the late 18th to early 20th century. The digital archive includes page images of 76 cookbooks from the MSU Library's collection as well as searchable full-text transcriptions. This site also features a glossary of cookery terms and multidimensional images of antique cooking implements from the collections of the MSU Museum. "

"This artificial online collection includes food and cooking related materials from the collections of the State Archives of North Carolina. It is intended to offer an overview of available materials in our collections and is not an exhaustive survey of all food and cooking items. The collection was begun as part of the 2013 North Carolina Archives Week celebration; the theme for 2013 was “Home Grown! A Celebration of N.C. Food Culture and History.”"

"This digital collection features a broad spectrum of materials related to the production, packaging, and marketing of food, including advertisements, printed ephemera, recipe books, and photographs. Subjects represented in the collection include food additives and adulteration, flavoring essences, and safety standards, as well as food-adjacent topics such as sugar, monosodium glutamate (MSG), and margarine."

"For over 20 years, from the 1960s until the 1980s, librarians at the Milwaukee Public Library clipped hundreds of recipes from the Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel. These recipes were heavily used at Ready Reference to answer telephone questions relating to various recipes. Before recipes were readily available on the internet, someone in the Milwaukee area looking for a particular recipe or cooking technique would call Ready Reference.
These clipped recipes form the nucleus of the Historic Recipe File digital collection. Many of Milwaukee's favorite foods appear in the recipes in this collection. This collection provides a fascinating glimpse into the local and ethnic foods that were popular in Milwaukee from as long as 50 years ago."

"A passionate gourmet, Jefferson acquired a stock of standard French recipes for sauces, fruit tarts, French-fried potatoes, blood sausages, pigs’ feet, rabbit, pigeons, and various other dishes. Among the most popular of these recipes at Monticello was this one for vanilla ice cream—written by Jefferson, with his own recipe for Savoy cookies to accompany the dessert on the back."

"Writing extensively on gastronomy, Elizabeth Pennell amassed a large collection of European cookbooks. My Cookery Books (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1903) is a personal account of her cooking activities and describes many of the 433 volumes on cookery from the Pennell bequest in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. The collection is strongest in French and Italian cookbooks from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries and includes such notable items as a fully illustrated edition of Bartolomeo Scappi's Opera (Venice: 1574). Also in the division are 299 volumes of fine printing, bibliography, and literature from the Pennell library. Many works are listed in a separate author/title card file as well as the division file."

"Between 1939 and 1944 Dr. Arvill Wayne Bitting presented to the Library of Congress the 4,346-volume gastronomic collection assembled by his wife, Katherine Golden Bitting (1868-1937), food chemist for the Department of Agriculture and the American Canners Association and author of nearly fifty pamphlets and articles on food preservation and related topics. To facilitate her investigations, as the Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress (1940) states, she collected "materials on the sources, preparation, and consumption of foods, their chemistry, baterriology, preservations, etc., from earliest times to the present day." The Bitting Collection containing numerous English and American publications on food preparation from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a sampling of notable French, German, and Italian works. American regional cooking is well-documented. The treasure of the collection is a mid-fifteenth century Italian manuscript entitled "Libro de arte coquinaria" of Maestro Martino which was a source for the earliest printed cookbook, Platina's De Honesta Voluptate (ca. 1475). Leonard N. Beck discusses the manuscript in his article "Praise Is Due Bartolomeo Platine: A Note on the Librarian Author of the First Cookbook" in QJLC, V.32 July 1975, p. 238-253."

"...contains thousands of food and cookery related publications produced primarily by companies in the United States from the late nineteenth century up to the present. The collection provides a rich resource to study the evolution and history of advertising, food products, individual companies, technology, food preparation, and food production."

"The Maple Recipe collection offers a unique glimpse at the variety in maple sugar and maple syrup use over the last half-century, as it is prominently featured in a range of dishes, from the sweet to the savory. The collection includes entrees, side dishes, appetizers, breads and desserts, and draws recipes from a variety of sources, including commercial cookbooks, regional cookbooks, and community cookbooks."

"UTSA’s Mexican Cookbook Collection is comprised of more than 2,000 cookbooks, from 1789 to the present, with most books dating from 1940-2000. In addition to broad general coverage, the collection includes concentrations in the areas of regional cooking, healthy and vegetarian recipes, corporate advertising cookbooks, and manuscript recipe books.

A selection of the materials from this collection have been digitized and are available online, including manuscript cookbooks from the collection. These handwritten recipe books provide an intimate view of domestic life and Mexican culinary culture. Also available online is the extremely rare 1828 cookbook, Arte nuevo de cocina y repostería acomodado al uso mexicano, once owned by Diana Kennedy."

"The Library holds about 40 manuscript receipt books in its collections. Many of the manuscripts contain a combination of culinary recipes, home remedies, and recipes for things like cosmetics and substances that would be used to accomplish general household tasks such as cleaning and polishing. Others are solely medical, containing formularies for the compounding of various remedies. This digital collection contains eleven English-language manuscript receipt books that were compiled between the seventeenth and the late nineteenth centuries in which the majority of the collected recipes are culinary in nature, but many recipes for home remedies are discoverable here as well."

"The digital collection of cookbooks is a collaborative effort between the University Library and the Indianapolis Public Library and will focus on Indiana cookbooks dating from the turn-of-the-century, with a special emphasis on fundraising cookbooks published by churches, synagogues and other community organizations. "

"The South Carolina Historical Cookbooks collection consists of publications from 1832 to 1921. Many of these “receipt” books provide insight into 19th-century and early 20th-century South Carolina foodways. Geographically, the collection covers many parts of the state, including Kingstree (Kingstree Cook Book 1921), Spartanburg (Spartanburg Cook Book 1917), Sumter (Best War Recipes 1917), and, of course, Charleston. A range of food recipes, as well as other topics and interests, also exists in the collection. Along with recipes such as Pickled Oysters, Rice Cake, Ginger Cake, Republican Cake, Washington Cake, earlier cookbooks also offer home-spun medical and economic advice."

A collection of historical cookbooks starting from the 1600s from Europe and the U.S.

A collection of historical recipe pamphlets from various manufacturer. The bulk of the collection is from 1900-1940.