New Book!
- A Rich and Fertile Land : A History of Food in America Bruce Kraig investigates the history of food in America, uncovering where it comes from and how it has changed over time. From the first Native Americans to modern industrial farmers, Kraig takes us on a journey to reveal how people have shaped the North American continent and its climate based on the foods they craved and the crops and animals that they raised. He analyzes the ideas that Americans have about themselves and the world around them, and how these ideas have been shaped by
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Featured Books
- BU Libraries Search This link opens in a new window
BU Libraries Search provides a single place to search for a wide variety of research material provided by the library. Resources covered by the search includes books and eBooks, journals, scores and sheet music, video and audio recordings, and other physical and electronic items held by the library. Coverage encompasses materials relating to the prehistoric and antique world through to the present.
- BU Gastronomy Cookbook Library Catalog on LibraryThing Catalog of 3600+ cookbooks and other food studies titles held by the Cookbook Library, a non-circulating collection housed within the Gastronomy program in the Fuller Building,
Browse Books
- 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.
Search Book & e-Book Collections
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Early Canadiana Online This virtual library holds the most complete set of full-text historical content about Canada, including books, magazines and government documents. This includes material published from the time of the first European settlers to the first half of the 20th century. Our content spans 21 languages, including French, English, Latin, Greek, and many First Nations languages.
- Manuscript Cookbooks Survey A database of pre-1865 English-language manuscript cookbooks.
Cookbook and Food-Related Digital Libraries
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- Canadian Cookbook Collection (university of Guelph) The Canadian Culinary Collection comprises books used and/or published by Canadians and contains more than 12,600 items. The subject matter in the collection ranges widely--there are books containing recipes and general information about the preparation of food, social histories of food, food handling texts, customs, etiquette, and many other aspects of culinary arts and practices
- Canadian Cookbooks Online Part of the Culinary Historians of Canada web site. "On Canadian Cookbooks Online we will gradually post the cookbooks that tell us about the foods Canadians cooked, ate and shared in the past."
- Una Abrahamson Collection (University of Guelph) The Una Abrahamson Collection of cookery books and social histories ranges from the 17th to 20th centuries and includes more than 2,700 recipe books, as well as never-published manuscripts.
- Feast Afrique Digital Library Digital library of Nigerian, West African, African American and other African diaspora cookbooks, as well as dictionaries, biographies and other books highlighting African culinary traditions.
