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Databases:
The following are links to databases that specifically archive recipes and culinary knowledge.
The AtoZ World Food database contains information on national cuisine, food culture, recipes and ingredients from most countries.
Bloomsbury Food Library offers cross-searchable access to a range of encyclopedias, references works, e-books, and images. Search across numerous ebooks, and key reference works such as Ken Albala’s Food Cultures of the World Encyclopedia, the Cambridge World History of Food, Bloomsbury’s Cultural History of Food, and chapters from Food History: Critical and Primary Sources. Explore image collections from institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA.
The ckbk app offers unlimited access to a curated collection of the world's great cookbooks. It is, however, a paid subscription service (in the same vein as Spotify or Netflix). It is easy to use, with a very friendly user interface and A LOT of resources compiled all into one. Your local library system should have similar if not the same resources if the monthly fee is a burden.
From feast to famine, explore five centuries of primary source material documenting the story of food and drink throughout history. The materials in this collection illustrate the deep links between food and identity, politics and power, gender, race and socio-economic status, as well as charting key issues around agriculture, nutrition and food production.
The Sifter is a free website for searching and comparing authors, their works and the details of their works regarding food and related topics around the world and throughout history.
Academic Articles:
Below are three academic articles that may further aid your exploration of cookbooks as important academic resources.
This paper provides a historical analysis to demonstrate the connections and developmental links which emerged between cookbooks and television in Britain after World War II, focused on television broadcasts in the period 1946 and 1976. In this paper, I discuss how early presenters of British television cookery programmes, and their publishers, had vision and marketing skills which enabled links between visual and printed media, and established a pattern of connected cookbook and television production which is taken for granted today. I examine the connected television and publishing careers of three early British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) television cooking pioneers: Marguerite Patten, Philip Harben and Fanny Cradock, who collectively dominated on-screen cooking programmes from the late 1940s until the mid-1970s. By analyzing their cookbooks, particularly their jackets and promotional materials, and interpreting archival research conducted in the BBC Written Archives and other documentary archives, their contributions will be discussed alongside the development of the television-connected cookbook in Britain. I conclude that these television cooks and presenters made a significant contribution on and off our screens during that period which established the connection between television cooking programmes and cookbooks in Britain.
The article proposes an analysis of family cookbooks from the perspective of memory studies. Its main goal is to show that these are objects that shape family memory, helping to preserve and transmit it from one generation to the next. The first section outlines the theoretical framework, discussing the multiple layers of content and meaning in homemade cookbooks, the similarities between them and scrapbooks, as objects that can elicit voluntary (or involuntary) memories. Other theoretical issues that are essential for the problem in question are also examined: the complex relationships between individual memory and family memory, the layers that make up family memory, how family meals shape family memory, and recipe books seen as Proustian devices. The second part proposes a case study that explores the particular way in which the aspects discussed in the theoretical section are illustrated by two recipes notebooks belonging to a woman who was born in a Romanian town in 1944. As regards the research methodology, the case study is based on a life-story interview and the qualitative analysis of the two notebooks.
Teachers and school librarians know that giving students the freedom to choose what to read from a variety of materials is the most effective way to foster a love of reading. Curiosity, pre-existing interests, or even a desire for connection cause students to reach for books that inform instead of entertain. But a genre of books is often left out of a school library's nonfiction collection: cookbooks. Of all the strategies used by teachers and school librarians to promote reading, finding a topic of common interest is one of the most effective. Because we all eat, cookbooks and stories about food are sure to entice readers of all ages. Everyone has a personal connection with food. Educators can take advantage of that fact. Culinary literacy resources are abundant in a variety of formats and can be used to support teachers and students across multiple disciplines.