There are thousands of historical cookbooks and food-related documents that have been digitized and made available online and this is a list of some prominent collections of those materials. It isn’t comprehensive. Some universities, museums, archives and other institutions may also have relevant materials online.
This list contains collections that are available to me in the United States and primarily in English. Some collections contain primarily manuscript (handwritten) cookbooks which are sometimes a bit difficult to read.
Culinary Institute of America. Conrad Hilton Library, CIA Menu Collection While the Culinary Institute of American appears to have a wonderful archival collection for in person research, their digitized menu collection is available online.
Foods of England Contains links to cookbooks as far back as The Forme of Cury, ca. 1390, although most are 19th century and later.
Hathi Trust Digital Library This web site contains a vast number of links to cookbooks and other food-related materials. For instance, a search using the search term “cooking” yielded 4,633 hits. One of the best sites to use if you are looking for an online version of a particular historical cookbook.
Internet Archive The Internet Archives contains an unbelievable number of cookbooks. In fact a search for “cookbook” yielded 17,923 results. They also serve as the host for collections from a wide range of sources from my own small collection of public domain materials to the huge Cookbooks and Home Economic Collection at the University of California, Berkeley.
Medieval Cookery - Online Cookbooks Medieval Cookery maintains lists of period cookbooks from Andalusia, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, and Spain. Some link to facsimiles of the originals, some to transcriptions of those works. Some, but not all, have transcriptions and/or English translations.
Feeding America: the Historic American Cookbook Project This Michigan State University project contains 76 American cookbooks in a full text searchable format.
Recipes from Scotland From the National Library of Scotland, this site has 42 manuscript recipe books dating from 17th century.
Project Gutenberg Another very large online library and good source when looking for a specific book. A quick search using the word “cookbooks” yielded 4,664 results.
Recipe Books at the Folger Shakespeare Library A wonderful collection of manuscript English works, primarily from the 17th and 18th centuries.
Szathmary Culinary Manuscripts and Cookbooks From the University of Iowa, this collections contains British, Canadian, and US manuscript cookbooks.
Szathmary Recipe Pamphlets Consists of 19th and 20th promotional recipe pamphlets from a variety of companies. These often contain great images and graphic design.
Vintage Cookbooks Online Links to a large number of 19th and early 20th century cookbooks. Some appear to be hosted by the Vintage Cookbooks website and some are links to other sites.
Virgina Tech University Libraries, Digitized Rare Books Cookbooks from the university’s Culinary History Collection, as well books on food science.
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