Feeding America Cookbook Archive
Mention the phrase “old books” and most of us probably think either of libraries or of used book stores. Old books can be fragile, expensive, or rare, but they often contain interesting information.
Online archives are starting to make access to old and rare books easier. One resource that everyone who enjoys food should know about is Michigan State University’s Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project.
Feeding America is an archive of 75 American cookbooks dating from 1798 to 1922. The librarians at MSU (which has an extensive collection of cookbooks) chose these books based on their importance in American culinary history.
At first, American colonists had to rely on recipes created in their homelands, despite the fact that some ingredients were now impossible to get. Other ingredients abundant in North America were unknown in Europe, so they were not found in European recipes. The oldest book in the collection, American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, was the first to combine European traditions with American ingredients and techniques.
Other cookbooks in the collection highlight regional cuisines, such as southern cooking and Pennsylvania German food. As immigrants came to America in the nineteenth century, their food traditions became part of the country’s cooking; Feeding America represents the immigrants with books on Asian, Swedish, Italian, and Jewish cooking.
Another thread running through the collection is how cookbooks reflect social trends of their times. The evolution of the American cookbook genre, and its interplay with these social trends, is described in an essay on the site.
The archive is searchable, so one can look for recipes including certain ingredients. Alternatively, one can browse through the books, almost as easily as flipping pages in a real copy. Other advantages of this archive are the savings on shelf space, in money, and the fact that kitchen spills won’t damage these books!
Feeding America is a great resource for cooks, historians and the merely inquisitive.
