New York State Library

Currently Featured Site

Sample cookbook cover from the Historic American Cookbook Project

December 2003 Featured Site of the Month: Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project What did a Civil War era cook put into an apple pie? Do you have the right ingredients for a neats foot pie? Want to improve your carrot pudding? Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project is an online collection of the most important and influential 19th and early 20th century American cookbooks. A joint project of the Michigan State University Library and the MSU Museum, the digital archive includes "page images of 75 cookbooks in the MSU Library's collection as well as searchable full-text transcriptions. The site will also feature a glossary of cookery terms, essays by culinary historian Jan Longone, and multidimensional images of antique cooking implements from the collections of the MSU Museum." These 75 online volumes represent a fraction of some 7,000 cataloged volumes on the culinary arts in the MSU Library. The books are sorted into the following categories: General, Regional, Ethnic, Household Management, Church and Charity, and Cooking Schools. There's a glossary of terms, and multidimensional images of antique cooking implements from the collections of the MSU Museum.

Related Resources

The New York State Library has extensive cookbook (or "cookery") holdings. (Note: Some items returned will be about cooking, but not actually be cookbooks).

• Search "cookery" in the Library's catalog
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• Search "cookery" in the Library's Manuscripts and Special Collections only
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Here's a sampling of some of the cooking-related books in our collection:

• The art of chocolate : techniques & recipes for simply spectacular desserts & confections. Elaine González. c1998.
• Professed cookery: containing boiling, roasting, pastry, preserving, pickling, potting, made-wines, gellies, and part of confectionaries. With an essay upon the lady's art of cookery: together with a plan of house-keeping. Ann Cook. "[P]rinted for and sold by the author, at her lodgings, in Mr. Moor's, cabinet-maker, Fuller's Rents, Holborn, [1760?]."
• The cornucopia; being a kitchen entertainment and cookbook containing good reading and good cookery from more than 500 years of recipes, food lore &c. as conceived and expounded by the great chefs & gourmets of the Old and New Worlds between the years 1390 and 1899. Now compiled and presented to the public in a single handsome and convenient volume [by] Judith Herman and Marguerite Shalett Herman. [1973].
• Pure ketchup : a history of America's national condiment. Andrew F. Smith. 2001.
• Adirondack cuisine. Armand VanderStigchel and Robert E. Birkel, Jr. c2002.
• Best ever holiday recipes : a treasury of over 100 traditional family favorites. [Barbara Jacksier]. 1986.
• Trim a treat : edible Christmas decorations. Sylvia Schur. c1981.
• Good housekeeping's casserole cook book / [E]ditors of Good Housekeeping magazine . 1958.
• Excellent recipes for baking raised breads. [Fleischmann Company]. c1910.
• The First Ladies cook book : favorite recipes of all the presidents of the United States. Historical text, Margaret Brown Klapthor ; consulting editor, Helen Duprey Bullock. 1982.
• Flower cookery; the art of cooking with flowers. MacNicol, Mary. 1967
• Cooking with wine and high spirits; a lighthearted approach to the art of gourmet cooking. Caruba, Rebecca. 1963
• The Shaker cook book; not by bread alone. Piercy, Caroline Behlen. 1953.
• Cuisine d'amour, a cook book for lovers; being in part, the Squire of Boudricout's Cuisine d'amour -; containing a modern adaptation of nearly two hundred selected historical recipes. Heartman, Charles Frederick. 1952,c1942
• Practical cooking and dinner giving. A treatise containing practical instructions in cooking; in the combination and serving of dishes; and in the fashionable modes of entertaining at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Henderson, Mary Newton Foote 1878
• "The Saratoga favorite." Saratoga Springs, N.Y. First Baptist Church. Young Women's Home Mission Circle. 1885 (MSC)

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