The foods that your family enjoys might say something about your heritage. Those old family recipes are an important part of your genealogy research. Have you ever wanted to look at really old, American, cookbooks? You should take a look at the Historic American Cookbook Project.
This week, many Americans are going to be sitting down to a Thanksgiving dinner, surrounded by family. This is a holiday that comes with many traditions. The foods that are served, the recipes that were used to cook those foods, and the way we celebrate this holiday are vivid examples of how much food can tell a genealogist about his or her family heritage.
You might be using a recipe today that was one that originally created by your grandmother. Some families have certain recipes that have been handed down, from one generation to the next, for decades or longer. Genealogists might want to gather those recipes into a family cookbook so that it can be easily shared with many family members.
Have you ever wondered what types of recipes a really old, traditional, American cookbook would contain? You can find out the answer to this question by visiting the Feeding America website. The Library of Congress has included the Feeding America website into it’s historic collections of Internet Materials. This is specifically related to The Historic American Cookbook Project that Feeding America has been working on.
The Historic American Cookbook Project is an online collection that contains some of the most important, and most influential, American cookbooks that were published between the late Eighteenth Century, and the early Twentieth Century. You can view page scans from 76 of the cookbooks in the collection through the website, and read full text transcriptions of other cookbooks.
There is a search engine that you can use to sort through the collection of cookbooks. If you want to find a particular author, that is possible. Or, you can search for a specific title. Got a recipe in mind that you know the name of, but can’t recall where it came from? You can search for it by recipe name. There is even an option to do a search for recipes that contain certain ingredients.
The types of foods that Americans eat, the way they are served, and the celebrations that the foods are connected to are significant. Genealogists can learn a lot about their American heritage, or family history, by using the historic cookbooks and recipes as a resource.
Image by Jackie Finn-Irwin on Flickr