Culinary Arts - History & Sociology: Sites

When it comes to South Asian food, there is a social hierarchy that qualifies certain dishes into “high” and “low” food culture–it’s a paradigm that shouldn’t exist. On Whetstone Magazine’s Bad Table Manners, Delhi-based anthropologist Meher Varma uses narrative storytelling to invite us into an intimate look at micro contexts of homey households, beloved restaurants, bustling streets and neighborhoods, and vibrant communities in South India. You’ll also learn about how global gastronomic trends are changing the food scene there.

There are scientific podcasts that talk about how global warming impacts the way we eat, and food podcasts that talk about the ways our food choices impact the environment. On Climavores, journalists Tamar Haspel and Mike Grunwald take what they know from their perspective fields (Mike studies ​​public policy; Tamar writes about the intersection of food and science) to tackle food and the environment from all sides—scientifically, culturally, and deliciously.

Early community and charity cookbooks from 1874-1961.

12,500+ cookbooks from the 1700’s to today, gathered by UCLA. The Cookbook and Home Economics Collection includes books from the Young Research Library Department of Special Collections at UCLA, The Bancroft Library at The University of California, Berkeley, and the Prelinger Library. These fascinating books take us back to an America in the early decades of the 20th century covering topics on cookery, textiles, family and home, budgeting, domestic sciences, and many other delightful topics.

Early American Cookbooks is a carefully curated collection of 1450 cookbooks published in the United States between 1800 and 1920. All of the titles in the collection are in the public domain and are available in full-text on the HathiTrust Digital Library. Browse the titles, read them online, and search through the contents of each book. Search across all 1450 titles to find a particular ingredient, recipe name, or anything else and go directly to the results in the full text.

From The History Channel, The Food That Built America tells the untold stories of American foods, viewed through a historical lens: how an ambitious salesman created a fast food empire, how TGIFridays went from a singles’ club to a family establishment, and the parallel rise of Pizza Hut and Dominoes. With a focus on the colorful characters with strange inventions that took off, quirky food combos that struck a chord with Americans, and cultural moments that created a perfect storm for a brand, restaurant, or recipe to go big, it’s a show for anyone who’s ever eaten.

Lynne Olver, a reference librarian from New Jersey, dedicated 15 years to almost single-handedly studying and cataloging culinary history in her online Food Timeline. Featuring more than 70 individual entries, the portal offers a wealth of information on foods ranging from lard to mock turtle soup and frozen orange juice. Olver’s write-ups are incredibly thorough: The page on ice cream, for instance, is more than 32,000 words long, observes Luke Fater for Atlas Obscura.

Gastropod tells stories about food through the lens of history and science. Every other week, co-hosts Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley present surprising facts and tales about everything from why ketchup is so thick to the almost unbelievable story of how we started eating eel. Each episode is an experience full of interviews, lab and file visits, and even archaeological digs. Cynthia and Nicola are having fun mining the food history books to help us better understand the world.

The Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture's mission is to preservie printed materials that reflect the public and private lives of women, past and present.
These vintage cookbooks speak to far more than just culinary trends.

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.

Browse and search through thousands of historical cookbooks and manuscripts dating back to the Middle Ages!

Dan Pashman’s show “for eaters, not foodies.” Dan covers food from outside the recipe box: issues food causes in relationships; religious, racial, and cultural issues in the food space, food etiquette, interviews with people doing interesting things in the space, and more.

UTSA’s Mexican Cookbook Collection is comprised of more than 2,000 cookbooks, from 1789 to the present, with most books dating from 1940-2000. In addition to broad general coverage, the collection includes concentrations in the areas of regional cooking, healthy and vegetarian recipes, corporate advertising cookbooks, and manuscript recipe books.

A selection of the materials from this collection have been digitized and are available online, including manuscript cookbooks from the collection. These handwritten recipe books provide an intimate view of domestic life and Mexican culinary culture. Also available online is the extremely rare 1828 cookbook, Arte nuevo de cocina y repostería acomodado al uso mexicano, once owned by Diana Kennedy.