In addition to the Library's expansive collection of published culinary materials, we also hold a significant number of manuscript cookbooks written and compiled by home cooks from the 18th century to the 20th. In this case, "manuscript cookbooks" refers to handwritten or occasionally typed unique, unpublished collections of recipes, and not the draft "manuscript" form of cookbooks that later went on to be commercially published.

Manuscript cookbooks often include not only recipes and menus but also formulas for home remedies, guides to home brewing of wine or beer, household financial accounts, clippings from published sources like newspapers and magazines, and much more. They represent dense and multifaceted documentation of the everyday domestic lives of their creators, some of whom remain anonymous to us. Many of the examples at Schlesinger have been fully digitized and can be viewed online through their respective finding aids.

There is not a single specific search that you can use to definitively pull up all of Schlesinger's manuscript cookbooks, but a search for items with the word "cookbook" in the title with the resource type of "Archives/Manuscripts" will capture most of them.

The list below provides a few examples of manuscript cookbooks in the collection.