Food & Drink History Resources @Virginia Tech (and Beyond): Digital Collections & Exhibits

The Cornell University, “Making of America” site includes many 19th and 20th century periodicals that will include some history of food/food science content

DPLA has curated primary source sets, many of which include food history components or talk about aspects of food history.

Vintage Cocktail Books Free Digital Library The E.U.V.S. stands for Exposition Universelle des Vins et Spiritueux, which refers to a Museum create by Paul Ricard 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 Folger Photograph and Digital Imaging Department regularly generates lists of collections and cover-to-cover items that have recently been digitized (thousands of individual images may also be found in LUNA). This page provides links to the images found in LUNA Insights and to their Hamnet records.

This site has many digitized out-of-print cookbooks, culinary history books, and ephemera. There is also a section limited to "Cookbooks and Home Economics" at https://archive.org/details/cbk.

This collection presents 718 excerpts of sound recordings, 1,256 photographs, and 10 manuscripts from the American Folklife Center's Coal River Folklife Project Collection. The project documented traditional uses of the mountains in the Big Coal River Valley of southern West Virginia, and explored the cultural dimensions of ecological crisis from 1992 to 1999. There are extensive interviews with local residents on the seasonal harvesting of natural resources--ginseng, ramps (wild leeks), berries, nuts, fish, and game--on occupations, including coal mining and lumbering; and on the impact of large scale industries such as logging and mountaintop removal mining on local communities. Cultural and religious community events were a focus of the project, including storytelling, community dinners and foodways, baptisms, and cemetery customs.

The scope of the Food and Foodways collection of archived websites is broad, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of food studies. The collection provides an inclusive space for food-related sites proposed by nominators from a wide spectrum of subject areas and specialties.

This collection makes available online approximately 1,900 posters created between 1914 and 1920. Most relate directly to the war. A smaller subset of the posters relate to food supplies and food propaganda from multiple sides of the war.

The National Agricultural Library Digital Collections (NALDC) offers an easy access to collection materials available in digital format. The NALDC offers rich searching, browsing and retrieval of digital materials and collections, and provides reliable, long-term online access to selected publications. NALDC includes historical publications, U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) research, and more.

The collection contains full-text digital surrogates of eleven of our English-language manuscript receipt books dating from the late 17th to the mid-19th century. While the manuscripts contain mostly culinary recipes, there are also many recipes for home remedies, cosmetics, and for any number of useful household cleaning products. An essay by culinary historian Stephen Schmidt, who is also the principal researcher and writer for the Manuscript Cookbooks Survey, provides historical context for the manuscripts and helps us understand their relationship to contemporary printed cookbooks as well.

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.”

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.

Chicone began collecting Florida citrus crate labels in 1976 and is one of the founding members of The Florida Citrus Label Collectors' Association. He is the author of Florida Citrus Labels: An Illustrated History (1996) with Brenda E. Burnette and "Florida's First Billboards," Florida Citrus Crate Labels (2014), also with Brenda E. Burnette. He donated the labels in this digital collection to the George A. Smathers Library, University of Florida, in 2014 and 2015. They represent 45 years of his dedication in locating and preserving examples of citrus industry commercial art. There are 3,000 labels from Florida in the collection as well as 122 labels from Spain.

Handwritten cookbooks, circa 1600s-1960s, documenting culinary history in America and Europe and how tastes have changed over the years.

The University’s collection includes more than 4,000 promotional recipe pamphlets, published mainly by food and appliance manufacturers and trade associations (the majority are listed in this index). Dating from the late 19th century to the present, this advertising ephemera reflects the evolution of the modern American diet. Of particular interest is the time period from 1880–1930, when industrialization gave rise to the modern food industry (see essay: Eating in America, 1880-1930). The result was a dramatic change in the American diet, driven by an ever-expanding market of products. This digital collection contains a representative sampling of pamphlets from that era.

This site includes more than 1,800 books and pamphlets published by the USDA between the 1880s and 1980s. They related to foods, home economics, and agriculture.

An Exhibition from the Esther B. Aresty Collection of Rare Books in the Culinary Arts, Department of Special Collections, Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania

Between 1900 and 1970, Mississippi churches, youth groups, teacher-parent associations, and other community groups published over a hundred community cookbooks. The recipes in these cookbooks—each attributed to the person who submitted it—offer complex and often surprising insights into the ways Mississippians ate and how they thought about their hometowns, their state, and even the world.

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.

UTSA Libraries Special Collections present a selection of recipes from the Mexican Cookbook Collection, the largest in the nation. From soups and stews to salsas and sweets, these dishes are sure to inspire and ignite culinary exploration among those staying at home.

This collection includes five different digital collections: All Sewn Up: Millinery, Dressmaking, Clothing and Costume; Carson Gulley Cookbook Collection; Home Economics to Human Ecology: A Centennial History at the University of Wisconsin - Madison; Playing House: Homemaking for Children; Recipe for Victory: Food and Cooking in Wartime.

These are usually the most recent edition or revision of VCE publications.

VTechWorks, the Virginia Tech institutional repository, includes more than 3,000 historical Virginia Cooperative Extension (VCE) publications dating back to the 1950s.