Archives
Electronic Highways
Recipe for a cookbook search
Serves 34,000 (approximately the number of students, faculty and staff at UB)
1. In a small to medium room, mix a heaping tablespoon of culinary curiosity and one computer.
2. Preheat the computer until Internet accessible.
3. Blend Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project (http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/) from the Michigan State University Libraries, if your taste is for historic recipes. More than 76 historical cookbooks have been digitized and indexed for easy online searching (http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/coldfusion/search.cfm). Don't know ambergris from trotters? Feeding America provides a helpful glossary (http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/glossary.html) to cooking terms unrecognizable today.
4. Fold in this nice list of culinary history Web sites (http://www.library.uiuc.edu/learn/exhibit/page10.htm) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Libraries' online exhibit, "Communal Cuisine: Community Cookbooks, 1877-1960" (http://www.library.uiuc.edu/learn/exhibit/index.htm) to bring out the flavors of your previous research.
5. For more current cookbooks that are searchable by region, ethnic heritage and recipe type, add The American Cookbook Project from the Smithsonian Institution (http://www.keyingredients.org/002_recipes/002_recipes_home.asp) to your Internet browser. You can season the project's database to taste by adding your own recipes. Just click on the "share a recipe and a story" icon.
6. Sprinkle in a liberal portion of the University Libraries' databases. Searching Early American Imprints I (http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/earlyamerican.html) and Women Writers Online (http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/wwo.html) can lead you to some wonderful cookbooks from the past, including "The Cooks Guide: Or Rare Receipts for Cookery" published in 1664, as well as the 1796 beer-brewing manual, "Every Man His Own Brewer, a Small Treatise, Explaining the Art and Mystery of Brewing Porter, Ale and Table-Beer." Using these texts, you can impress at your next dinner party by serving "pye of eeles and oysters" and homemade barrels of table-beer (to wash down the pie, of course.)
7. Finally, garnish your cookbook collection with Recipes From the Stacks (http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/sw/events/cookbk/cookbook.htm), a cookbook compiled by the University Libraries Staff Development and Training Committee. "Recipes From the Stacks" is on sale now, with all proceeds benefiting the UB SEFA campaign.