“Tell me what kind of food you eat and I will tell you what kind of man you are.”
In these few words, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a French politician, lawyer, gastronome, and author of the still-in-print The Physiology of Taste (1854, first American edition), artfully captured the way in which domestic routines and foodways informed life for individuals, families, societies, and entire cultures. To promote the study of early American foodways, the American Antiquarian Society has created this resource, which makes available digitally more than one hundred of some of the most interesting, important, and unusual cookbooks published in the United States, almost all before 1877.
Cookbooks Digital Library: Over 100 Selected Digitized Cookbooks
Cookbooks in this digital library provide historians and researchers with a close-up view of domestic life in America. Some resemble cookbooks as we know them today, with recipes (then called “receipts”) that include ingredients and instructions. Others cover non-cooking, yet essential, household topics (e.g., purifying water or feeding infants) as well as directions for making and administering health remedies).
Beyond documenting the ingredients and the steps to create a dish, a cookbook can provide clues to what it was like to live in a particular place and time. Historical cookbooks can help today’s reader discover:
- What ingredients were commonly available or highly sought after?
- Which dishes were served routinely, and which might be reserved for a special occasion?
- Who cooked the food? What tools and implements did they use?
- Who maintained the home and was there a focus on health and economy?
- How was cooking, brewing, and housekeeping accomplished before homes were equipped with modern conveniences such as electricity, plumbing, and refrigeration?
Thematic Introductions
Readers can browse through the Cookbooks Digital Library of over 100 digitized cookbooks or start with thematic introductions describing a few select cookbook titles in the following categories:
- Recipes and Instruction
- History and Science
- Housekeeping and Home Economy
- Food as Medicine
- Regional, Religious, or Ethnic Cuisine
Want to Explore Further?
AAS’s entire cookbook collection includes original physical copies of more than one thousand of the earliest cookbooks printed in what became the United States, all of which are cataloged in the General Catalog. The genre term Cookbooks specifically describes collections of recipes for cooking. A wider variety of works about all types of food preparation can be found using subject keywords like Cooking, Food, Beverages, Home economics or the call number Cook Books. Related collections include menus and other food-related ephemera.
Those interested in trying out eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dishes or drinks can find inspiration about cooking with historic recipes on AAS’s blog or on Instagram using the hashtag #AASculinaryroadtrip.
Historic drink recipes featured on AAS’s Instagram culinary road trip turned out more appetizing than many other historic recipes tried out on AAS’s blog, which included a fishy chowder and an apple pie bakeoff.
A selection of two dozen handwritten recipe books from AAS are included in the Manuscript Cookbooks Survey, funded by the Pine Needles Foundation of New York. To the right, a manuscript cookbook from 1829 belonging to Sarah Agnes Bacon of Boston from AAS collections.
Early American Cookbooks from the collection of New York University.
Avery Blankenship, a 2023-24 Botein Fellow, has published the article "Mastering the Art of Reading an Old Recipe" based on her use of the AAS cookbook collection during her fellowship.
Want a hardcover historical reproduction of a cookbook from AAS’s collections like How to Mix Drinks or The Jewish Cookery Book? Andrews McMeel Publishing offers a selection of ten cookbooks with exact color reproductions of the pages found in the American Antiquarian Society copy so purchasers can cook from them in their own kitchen or give them as gifts!
Credits
AAS volunteer Ann Harris developed the idea for this site. Most of the text was written by Ann Harris and Beth Rheaume, AAS library aide and cataloging assistant. Additional text, editing, and project management were provided by Elizabeth Pope, curator of books. Technical aspects related to digital images and web design were handled by Nick Conti, director of information technology, and Caroline Stoffel, online services librarian. The cookbooks were digitized by publisher Andrews McMeel.