Online Food and Cooking images: University of Washington

Recently I was at a large book fair to benefit the Mark Twain Library in Redding, Connecticut. Browsing section of photography books, I found a large number of devoted to architecture or to interior design. These tend to focus on ideal homes for th wealthy, but almost nothing relating kitchens. It made me think; how often have books on historic photographs focused on more common domestic architecture?

Archivists and librarians from around the world have been working hard to digitize materials in their collections and make them available to researchers online. These sources do include a wealth of images relating to modest dwellings and many, many images of cooking and kitchens. Recently I started doing a somewhat systematic review of some of these sources and I thought I’d start with the Digital Collections, University of Washington in Seattle. I spent five years as an archivist in Seattle and I’m fond of the area and it’s culture.

There are over 100 collections with digital materials online. You can browse those with obvious collections for food and cooking, such at the Menus Collection or the Salmon in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska Collection, or you can search the collections for specific words. For instance, a search for ‘kitchens’ yielded 347 results, baking 209 results, or cookery 208 results. If you have a more focused research interest, get creative with your search terms. A search for cookbooks found 43 digitized books.

Here are examples of some of the images I found.