Feeding America: the Historic American Cookbook Project

Feeding America is an online collection of some of the most important and influential American cookbooks from the late 18th to early 20th century. The digital archive includes 76 cookbooks from the MSU Libraries' collection as well as searchable full-text transcriptions.

The aim of the online collection is to highlight an important part of America's cultural heritage for teachers, students, researchers investigating American social history, professional chefs, and lifelong learners of all ages.

Content warning: language and content in resource descriptions and collections may be biased, harmful, and oppressive due to the historical nature of the content.

About the Collection

In addition to cookbooks, the original Feeding America site features a glossary of cookery terms and images of antique cooking implements from the collections of the MSU Museum.

Learn more about the project:

• Introductory essay - An essay by Jan Longone that discusses Feeding America and the history of cookbooks in America.
• Browse the Feeding America collection by title, date published or topics of interest.
• Project history
• Digitization process - A detailed description of the process for digitizing the cookbooks.
• View the text encoding guidelines and description of editorial interventions for the creation of the encoded text.

Feeding America was made possible with funds from a 2001 IMLS National Leadership Grant. The project began September 1, 2001 and was completed on August 31, 2003.