Reading Cookbooks

  • Bower, Anne L., ed. Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.
  • Claflin, Kyri W. “Representations of Food Production and Consumption: Cookbooks as Historical Sources.” In The Handbook of Food Research, edited by Anne Murcott, Warren Belasco, and Peter Jackson, 109–29. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.
  • Fleitz, Elizabeth. “Cooking Codes: Cookbook Discourses as Women’s Rhetorical Practices.” Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society 1, no. 1 (2010): 1–9.
  • Johnston, Josée, Alexandra Rodney, and Phillipa Chong. “Making Change in the Kitchen? A Study of Celebrity Cookbooks, Culinary Personas, and Inequality.” Poetics 47 (December 2014): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2014.10.001.
  • Klemettilä, Hannele. The Medieval Kitchen: A Social History with Recipes. London: Reaktion Books, 2012.
  • Leong, Elaine. “Collecting Knowledge for the Family: Recipes, Gender and Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern English Household.” Centaurus 55, no. 2 (n.d.): 81–103. https://doi.org/10.1111/1600-0498.12019.
  • ———. The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015.
  • Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham. “Cookbooks as Resources for Social History.” In Food in Time and Place: The American Historical Association Companion to Food History, edited by Paul Freedman, Joyce E. Chaplin, and Ken Albala. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2014. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebookbatch.PMUSE_batch:890089872.

Cookbook reviews

Find cookbook reviews in HOLLIS:

  1. Type in cookbook (or the name of a specific cookbook) in the HOLLIS Everything option.
  2. From the results list, from the refinement options on the right-hand side, under Resource Type, choose Reviews.

Cookbook author biographical information

Find book-length biographies of cookbook authors in HOLLIS:
  1. In HOLLIS, choose the Advanced Search option from the top of the page.
  2. Choose the Library Catalog option.
  3. In the first line, from the drop-down menu, choose subject and type in cooks biography.

You may also want to try other terms, such as Women cooks -- Biography or Food writers -- Biography or Cooks -- United States -- Biography.

 
Find article-length biographies of cookbook authors in HOLLIS:
  1. In HOLLIS, choose the Advanced Search option from the top of the page.
  2. Keep the Everything search option.
  3. In the first line, from the drop-down menu, choose title and type in the name of the person you're looking for.
  4. From the results list, on the right-hand side, under Resource Type, choose Reference Entries (or Show More, then Reference Entries).
 
Find biographies online

Notable American women. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971-2004. 5 v.
LOCATION: Widener: RR 1711. 34
--Covers women deceased before 1999. Articles include extensive source lists giving particular attention to unpublished sources. Classified index (by field) in each vol. Vols. 1-4 indexed in Biography and genealogy master index. Full text in Women and Social Movements in the United States: 1600-2000

World Biographical Information System includes full text of thousands of biographical dictionaries accessible by name of biographee. Largely online full text, partly microfiche or print. What to do if a biographical article is not available online and further information.

Further information is available on the Finding Biographical Information guide.