Cookery Collection
Visitors to Special Collections will discover a rich selection of cookbooks spanning some five centuries and all the continents. With holdings now over 5,000 items, the Cookery Collection provides a valuable resource for learning about food habits and preparation, folklore, literacy, early medicine, publishing, social and economic history, and scientific and technological progress. The ethno-botanist, for example, can document the culinary use of specific spices and herbs over time, continents, and populations, while the social historian can investigate the changing status of women and servants in the household. Of course, there are recipes, too, from a seventeenth-century English method “To make eel pie” to a local community cookbook’s award winning “Jean’s Jell-o Supreme.” The earliest cookbook in the collection is a 1541 Apicius. There is also a substantial collection of over 150 African American cookbooks, including Robert Roberts’s The House Servants Directory (1828), the first cookbook written by an African American. The collection is especially strong in eighteenth and nineteenth century English and American cookbooks, the result of two major donations from Mary Ross Reynolds and Beatrice V. Grant, both MSU professors in home economics. Recently there has been an effort to collect community cookbooks, especially with Michigan origins. As an unique American invention dating back to the Civil War, these cookbooks were published inexpensively by communities, churches, and charitable organizations to fund practically every conceivable cause. With a growing collection of over 2,000, they provide the reader with an exceptional glimpse into American, regional, and state foods and food habits.
Over the years the Cookery Collection has grown in size and stature, but recent collecting and project initiatives require additional support. Two of the newest collections include Jewish cookery and African cookery which both provide important links between food, culture, migration, and religion. Also underway is the Michigan Cookbook Project that intends to collect all cookbooks with Michigan imprints dating back to the nineteenth century. Another long term project, Feeding America, will soon make important early American cookbooks along with historical commentary available on the Internet for classroom use.
For a description of the 18th Century British cookery holdings, please click here
The Institute of Museum and Library Services has awarded us a "2001 National Leadership Grant" for "Feeding America: the Historic American Cookbooks Project."
Peter Berg and Michael Seadle are the Principal Investigators. In this two-year project beginning in October 2001, Michigan State University Libraries and the Michigan State University Museum will
digitize and make available online 75 of the most important American cookbooks published between 1798 and 1923 and accompanying interpretive materials describing their historical significance.