Women's History Month 2019: Where to Find Community Cookbooks

While repositories have historically viewed community cookbooks as items not worthy of long-term, or even short-term, archiving, there are ways to find community cookbooks that document the locality you are researching.

In searching for possible community cookbooks, consider checking available bibliographies, archival/library collections, digitized book websites and online auctions. If you are in the area where your ancestor lived, you can expand your search to local library collections, used bookstores, Friends of the Library book sales, and thrift stores.

A few bibliographies do exist of community cookbooks.  These provide the researcher a foundation for finding published community cookbooks during a certain time period. 

Large collections of community cookbooks can be found around the United States.  These collections can be found at:

Los Angeles Public Library                                          

Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive, University of Michigan                                

Community Cookbooks: Selected Titles from the General Collections - Science Reference Guides – The Library of Congress                                  

Culinary Collections - Radcliff Institute - Harvard University - Schlesinger Library 

The Mississippi Community Cookbook Project  - University of Southern Mississippi 

Iowa Cookbook Collection - Iowa State University Libraries Special Collections 

Cookery and Food Collection – Michigan State University Libraries Special Collections 

Digitized Books and Auction Websites

Digitized book websites provide genealogists a convenient way to search  new and old books online.  

Internet Archive’s Text collection has a sub-collection, Cookbooks and Home Economics . The best way to search this collection is mostly by title, paying special attention to those titles that name a locality, church or organization.

Google Books. Search using keywords like “church cookbook.”  Google Books does books that are not available for a full preview but at least provides a title and author.

Library and archive websites to search include WorldCat  and ArchiveGrid.

While a library or archive in your ancestor’s locality might hold the promise of a collection another place to search is eBay. eBay as a genealogical source?  Yes! eBay is a source for finding thousands of items of historical and genealogical value. Community cookbooks are well represented on eBay. 
When searching on eBay, make sure to try various keywords so that your search is as comprehensive as possible.  Some search terms to try include: community cookbooks, church cookbooks, charity cookbooks, and fundraising cookbooks. You can also specify a type of cookbook in your search like “Grange Cookbook” or “Methodist Cookbook.” eBay will also suggest other search keywords that you can click on.