Helpful Tips from History in the Kitchen's Lacey and Rachel:
Start with a basic Google/Bing/Your Browser of Choice search - don’t forget the Image search!
Wikipedia can also be a great resource, never ignore the references!
Carter, Charles. The Complete Practical Cook, 1730. Accessed via The Internet Archive.
Did you miss Lacey and Rachel's October presentation at the library? They illustrated their process with a recipe from the Virginia Room. Try it at home thanks to their modern take:
Consult cooking-related terms used at the time that your family recipe was created to understand what it is calling for and/or instructing you to do. For an example of how to approach this process, read this OED article, To Make Mangoes of Melons: Using the Evolution of Form and Senses to Understand Historical Cookbooks. Free access with your library card.
A guide for gathering, adjusting, supplementing, and safely preserving family recipes and for interviewing relatives, collecting oral histories, and conducting kitchen visits to document family food traditions from the everyday to special occasions. It blends commonsense tips with sound archival principles, helping you achieve effective results while avoiding unnecessary pitfalls. Chapters are also dedicated to unfamiliar regional or ethnic cooking challenges, as well as to working with recipes that are orphans, surrogates, or terribly outdated.
The Virginia Room houses an impressive collection of over 600 cookbooks that chronicle the region's culinary heritage. These range from historical cookbooks and guides to local cuisine and beverages to community projects compiled by churches, clubs, and civic organizations. Search our catalog for "cookbooks" and filter for those at the Virginia Room as Assigned Branch.
The project includes images and transcripts for over 250 recipes from the 17th and 18th centuries. Content ranges from baking to cookery and alcoholic beverages, to medicines and home remedies, and even household items such as paint and ink. Based on the original manuscript held in the Special Collections Research Center and managed by the Arts & Humanities Team at Mason Libraries.
The digital archive includes 76 cookbooks from the MSU Libraries' collection as well as searchable full-text transcriptions. This site also features a glossary of cookery terms and images of antique cooking implements from the collections of the MSU Museum. Read this introductory essay to learn more about the project.
A public food history project, it sets out to find, cook, and discuss recipes from cookbooks produced between 1600 and 1800, many of them held by the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts.
Harvard's library holds significant number of manuscript cookbooks from the 18th century to the 20th, with fully digitized and accessible online. These often include recipes and menus, formulas for home remedies, guides to home brewing of wine or beer, household financial accounts, clippings from published sources like newspapers and magazines, and much more. Search for items with the word "cookbook" in the title with the resource type of "Archives/Manuscripts" will capture most of them. Click on the search link and refine further by “Online Resources” in the filters on the righthand column.
Links to cookbooks and recipes that date back to the 18th Century.
A free museum and library based out of London, with a vast collection of manuscript cookbooks dating from 1500 to 1800. Use search terms "cookery," "cookbook," "cook book," and "receipts" to find historic cookbooks.
Use search terms "cookery," "cookbook," "cook book," and "receipts" to find historic cookbooks. When available, use the advance search feature to limit publication dates and remove false positives.
Contains transcriptions of many books, available for download as pdfs or readable online. This bookshelf has cookbooks in it, but you can also use search terms "cookery," "cookbook," "cook book," and "receipts" to find historic cookbooks.
