Pi(e) Day: How do I find a recipe?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.