Browse Books & e-Books
- BU Libraries Search (BULS) This link opens in a new windowBU Libraries Search provides a single place to search for a wide variety of academic material provided by the library. The material covered by the search includes books, journals, scores, video and audio recordings, and other physical items held by the library. The search also covers ebooks and ejournals owned by the library, as well as online material provided by the library from a variety of sources.
Relevant subjects for print and electronic books may include but are not limited to those listed below. For more information on subjects used for books on gastronomy topics, see: Subject headings for cooking and food and drinking customs.
Search Book & e-Book Collections
Eighteenth Century Collections Online
- Oxford Food Symposium on Food and Cookery This link opens in a new window Contains proceedings from an annual symposium to share food research by scholars, enthusiastic amateurs, writers, and chefs from around the world. Volumes of Symposia proceedings prior to the most recent five years available via Google Books and as free downloads.
- Internet Archive: Texts Looking for "Physiology of Taste, or Transcendental Gastronomy?" The Internet Archive and Open Library offers more than 8,000,000 fully accessible public domain e-books.
- Hathi Trust Digital Library Looking for an e-book of "The Art of Dining, or Gastronomy and Gastronomers?" HathiTrust provides millions of titles digitized from libraries throughout the world. Log in and choose Boston University to get full access to the library.
- Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window Contains page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473–1700
- Eighteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window A comprehensive digital collection that aims to include every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas, between 1701 and 1800. Consists of books, pamphlets, broadsides, ephemera.
- Manuscript Cookbooks Survey A database of pre-1865 English-language manuscript cookbooks.
Cookbook and Food-Related Digital Libraries
- The Cook Book and Home Economics Collection. (Internet Archive e-books sub-collection) The Cookbook and Home Economics Collection includes books from the Young Research Library Department of Special Collections at UCLA, The Bancroft Library at The University of California, Berkeley, and the Prelinger Library. These fascinating books take us back to an America in the early decades of the 20th century covering topics on cookery, textiles, family and home, budgeting, domestic sciences, and many other delightful topics.
- Cookery and Culture Digital Collection, Utah State University. The digitized historical cookbooks in this collection date from the 1700s to the 1900s. Mostly American and British, they contain not only recipes, but also elegant engravings of table settings and cooking paraphernalia, home remedies and cure-all tonics, instructions on managing servants, and more. In short, these gastronomical treasures reveal much about the societies and economic times that created them.
- Service Through Sponge Cake The digital collection of cookbooks is a collaborative effort between the University Library and the Indianapolis Public Library and will focus on Indiana cookbooks dating from the turn-of-the-century, with a special emphasis on fundraising cookbooks published by churches, synagogues and other community organizations. The University Library has created the community cookbook collection using unique materials from the Indianapolis Public Library's collection of historic Indiana cookbooks. The online collection includes digital images of each cookbook in its entirety, plus in-depth descriptions of each item.
- Corpus of Culinary & Dietetic Texts of Europe from the Middle Ages to 1800 This site is dedicated to the study of historical texts on cookery, food, nutrition and dietetics. At present, the main aim is to prepare a corpus of culinary and dietetic texts and to make these texts freely available for different kinds of research. I am particularly interested in the linguistic features (vocabulary, text organization) and in the textual history of German culinary and dietetic texts up to 1800 and of their early European counterparts in England, Italy, France, Spain, Catalonia, Portugal and the Northern countries.
- Digitized Cookbook, Texas Tech University Recipe booklets from food companies, extension service publications, and charity cookbooks.
- Digitized Rare Books from the Culinary History Collection, Virginia Tech Many of these publications are from the library's Culinary History Collection
- Szathmáry Recipe Pamphlet Digital Collection, University of Iowa Libraries Louis Szathmary (1919–1996), a Hungarian-born chef, restaurateur, and food writer, amassed one of the largest culinary archives in the United States, a portion of which is housed at the University of Iowa Libraries. The University’s collection includes more than 4,000 promotional recipe pamphlets, published mainly by food and appliance manufacturers and trade associations. Dating from the late 19th century to the present, this advertising ephemera reflects the evolution of the modern American diet.
- Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project. 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.
- Recipe for Victory : Food and Cooking in Wartime (University of Wisconsin, Madison) The Recipe for Victory: Food and Cooking in Wartime collection presents books and government publications documenting the national effort to promote and implement a plan to make food the key to winning World War I.
- Carson Gulley Cookbook Collection (University of Wisconsin, Madison) Carson Gulley (1897-1962) gained such legendary status as a chef on the UW-Madison campus that both a building and a pie were named for him. Carson Gulley was the first person of color for whom a UW-Madison campus building was named.
- Advertising Cookbooks, Duke University Collection spans the years 1851-2005 and includes hang tags, inserts, recipe cards and guides, cookbooks, operating instructions, owner's manuals and other promotional materials addressed to cooking and kitchen arts. Materials in the collection were used to educate consumers and promote the use of a variety of foods (meat; fish and poultry; dairy; soups; fruits and vegetables; beverages); condiments and spices (sauces, bouillon and broths, chocolate and cocoa, baking soda and baking powder); canning jars; small appliances (cookware, blenders, mixers, microwave ovens); and large appliances (stoves and refrigerators).
- HathiTrust Food Studies Collection Digital books on cooking, gastronomy, food production, etc.
- Historic Recipe File, Milwaukee Public Library For over 20 years, from the 1960s until the 1980s, librarians at the Milwaukee Public Library clipped hundreds of recipes from the Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel. These clipped recipes form the nucleus of the Historic Recipe File digital collection. This digital collection is a work in progress and additional recipes will continue to appear here as they are converted into digital files.
- Mexican Cookbook Collection [Digitized], University of Texas at San Antonio UTSA’s Mexican Cookbook Collection is comprised of more than 1,800 cookbooks, from 1789 to the present, with most books dating from 1940-2000. UTSA Libraries Digital Collections features a selection of manuscript cookbooks from the collection. These handwritten recipe books provide an intimate view of domestic life and Mexican culinary culture.
Non-Digitized Cookbook & Food-Related Collections
- Women Working, 1800 - 1930. Women Working, 1800–1930 is a digital exploration of women's impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression. Working conditions, workplace regulations, home life, costs of living, commerce, recreation, health and hygiene, and social issues are among the issues documented in this online research collection from Harvard University.
- Mexican Cookbook Collection, University of Texas at San Antonio UTSA’s Mexican Cookbook Collection includes over 1,200 titles in English and Spanish documenting the variety and history of Mexican cuisine from 1789 to the present. Areas of particular focus include traditional recipes, regional cooking, and healthy eating.
- Dr. Jacqueline M. Newman Chinese Cookbook Collection, SUNY Stony Brook. In 2002, Special Collections and University Archives at Stony Brook University acquired the Dr. Jacqueline M. Newman Chinese Cookbook Collection, the largest cookbook collection of its kind. The collection includes more than 3,000 Chinese cookbooks; books on food Chinese food culture, medicine, and history; haute cuisine magazines; archival materials; and audio visual materials.
- Long Island Cookbook Collection, Stony Brook University A collection of community cookbooks published by Long Island organizations between 1893 and 1990.
- Ruth Graves Wakefield Cookbook Collection, Framingham State University The Wakefield Cookbook Collection is comprised of the donor's personal library of books on cooking, domestic science, etiquette, and other household topics. The most famous of her original recipes was the Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie.
- Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive, University of Michigan We are not just what we eat, but how we eat — not to mention when, where and with whom. Cookbooks, menus, advertisements, manuals of table etiquette and the like may not be written to preserve the history of everyday life, but that’s exactly what they do. And this is what makes the library’s Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive (JBLCA) so valuable. Containing more than 25,000 items including ephemera publications, it paints a rich and unique portrait of American life over the centuries. In the context of the collection, American culinary history is defined broadly to include both influences upon American foodways and the influence of American culinary practices elsewhere.
- Sinclair New Jersey Cookbook Collection, Rutgers University The Sinclair Jerseyana Collection includes a significant body of New Jersey cookbooks written and compiled by various local and regional groups active throughout the state during the twentieth century, with post-WWII publications constituting its most active area of development.
- Cookery & Food Collection, Michigan State University Researchers will discover important and unique resources for the study of cookery and food. The collection features over 25,000 cookbooks and food related items from as early as the sixteenth century up to the present from all continents of the world. Special collecting emphasis is on contemporary cookery of the Americas, including the United States; African American; Jewish American; Caribbean, Latin and South American; and the influence of West African food and diet on the Americas. The Michigan Cookbook Project is an attempt to collect all cookbooks published in the state. In addition to cookbooks there are strong resources in diet, health, and nutrition from the very old to the latest diet fad.
- Iowa Cookbook Collection, Iowa State University Over the past century, many towns, organizations, and churches in Iowa have gathered recipes from members and published them, essentially preserving and documenting the culinary heritage of this state. These cookbooks often contain family recipes, ethnic dishes, and history about the organization or area. We currently have about 3000 cookbooks dating back to the 1800's for Iowa in addition to about 100 historical America cookbooks dating back to the early 1700's.
- Food, Wine, and Culinary History, Cornell University The Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections offers outstanding research materials on the history of food, wine, gastronomy, and restaurants. Prominent among Cornell's food history collections are: an assemblage of more than 3,000 rare cookery books from the 15th century to the present; The Eastern Wine and Grape Archive, dedicated to preserving the history of the wine industry East of the Mississippi; and a collection of more than 10,000 international restaurant menus from the 1850s to the present.
- Cookery Collection, Rare Books, Kansas State University The Cookery Collection was built in large measure through the generosity of K-State alumni and friends. Over the years, their substantial donations of books and bequests of personal libraries, along with judicious purchases, have produced a collection containing over 15,000 cookbooks and related volumes, ranked among the foremost in the nation. With works dating from 1487 to the present and reflecting several languages and cultures, the collection holds many works considered rare, including some which are not available anywhere else in the world.
- Beatrice A. Macintosh Cookery Collection, UMass Amherst The McIntosh Cookery Collection includes nearly 7,500 books, pamphlets, and ephemeral items relating to the history of cookery in New England. Although there are many commercially-produced cookbooks reflecting New England cuisine from the early 19th century forward, the heart of the collection lies in three areas: cookbooks prepared by community organizations, usually for fundraising or charitable purposes; cookbooks prepared by corporations as marketing tools; and ephemera associated with food production, marketing, or consumption.
- Peacock-Harper Culinary Collection, Virginia Tech ive centuries of culinary arts are documented in the Peacock-Harper Culinary History Collection at Virginia Tech. From this initial donation, a collecting area focused on the history of food and drink emerged. The Peacock-Harper Culinary Collection includes more than 160 pre-1900 imprints, another 153 works published before 1923, and an additional 330 pre-1950 imprints. The large collection contains more than 4,200 volumes and more than 50 manuscript collections.
- The David Walker Lupton African American Cookbook Collection, University of Alabama The University of Alabama Libraries is proud to hold the David Walker Lupton African American Cookbook Collection, one of the largest collections of African American cookbooks in the country. The collection currently consists of four hundred and fifty volumes covering the period from 1827, when the first book with recipes by an African American was published, through the year 2000.
- The Mississippi Community Cookbook Project, University of Southern Mississippi Between 1900 and 1970, Mississippi churches, youth groups, teacher-parent associations, and other community groups published over a hundred community cookbooks. The Mississippi Community Cookbook Project is working to collect, digitize, and study Mississippi’s unique culinary heritage. Over the course of the next year, the first twenty cookbooks will be made available online with accompanying profiles of the communities that produced these cookbooks. We are also developing essays, new recipes, and other materials that will help scholars and the public to make the most of the cookbook collection.
- Little Cookbooks; The Alan and Shirley Brocker Sliker Culinary Collection The collection provides a rich resource to study the evolution and history of advertising, food products, individual companies, technology, food preparation, and food production.
