Web Resource: Vintage Cookbook

www.honeylocator.com

Have you ever wanted to find a cookbook from your grandmother's or great-grandmother's generation? Or maybe a cookbook that's out of print, from a restaurant long gone, or from a cultural generation that's in the pages of history?

Chances are you may find it on Vintage Cookbook, a wonderful website with an impressive collection of rare, hard-to-find, out of print cookbooks from days long gone. It's always so interesting for us to flip through vintage cookbooks. They're a window into history. Some of the recipes and social norms are so vastly different and outdated, and somewhat offensive. At the same time, it's so interesting to see how much our food and culture has changed in the span of twenty, fifty, seventy, and a hundred years.

(Images: Vintage Cookbook)

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Comments (5)

I have a 50 year old copy of the Joy of Cooking that's quite a bit different than the current one. I've never been offended by it, though.

posted by Shawn on August 12th 2008 at 9:31am
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One of my favorite cookbook finds was the San Francisco Cookbook, first published in 1958. Tucked within the pages were dozens of recipes and cooking tips clipped out of the San Francisco Chronicle from the same era. It was an interesting hodge-podge of "space age" convenience foods and what would eventually become known as California cuisine.

I don't usually buy cookbooks unless I think I'll use 75% of the recipes, but I couldn't pass this one up!

posted by chowbella on August 12th 2008 at 1:27pm
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Any idea if there's a market for vintage cookbooks? My grandmother collected them, and now we don't know what to do with them. I'd like to put them on Craigslist (after we've gone through everything), but I have this need to ensure they go to someone who will appreciate them.

posted by KimberlyM on August 12th 2008 at 2:06pm
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Hi Kimberly,
Depending on what titles your grandmother had you donate them to a Library. The New York Public Library has a large culinary collection and often takes donations. http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/grd/resguides/culinary/

If you were interested in going that route, you could contact the NYPL culinary librarian through her blog http://cookedbooks.blogspot.com/

Or you could try to sell them to a cookbook store. In San Francisco, you could try Green Apple Books http://www.greenapplebooks.com (I've never been here, just found it online.) Or in New York, there's Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks http://www.bonnieslotnickcookbooks.com/

Or just send them out in the world and give them to Goodwill...

Good luck.

posted by AmyE on August 13th 2008 at 6:38am
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Vintage cookbooks are a great source of history. Not just a history of cooking, but also an archive of the history of graphic design, illustration, photography. I've been archiving my collection of vintage cookbooks and recipes on my site: http://www.retrocookbook.com/ perhaps you and your readers will find my site of interest. Best, Jim

posted by retrocookbook on October 25th 2009 at 10:01pm
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