The Schlesinger acquired a collection of over 1,000 volumes focused on African American, African diaspora, and African cookbooks from Rosalyn and W. Paul Coates in 2025. W. Paul Coates is an American publisher, printer and community activist. He is the founder of Black Classic Press and BCP Digital Printing, specializing in republishing obscure and significant works by and about people of African descent. Rosalyn and W. Paul Coates are the parents of the American writer and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Marietta M. Greenough was a cookbook author who published under the pseudonym Mary Green and the wife of Harvard professor Chester Greenough. She bequeathed her cookbooks to the main Harvard College library, Widener, in her will in 1925. These were later transferred to the Schlesinger (then known as The Women's Archives) along with almost 2,000 other culinary texts deemed to be more "relevant" to Schlesinger's interests than to that of Widener's patrons. Many of the Schlesinger collection's foundational historic cookbooks were donated by Greenough, including a number from the 18th century.

Sophie Coe was a member of the Radcliffe College Class of 1955 and earned a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard in 1964. Her anthropological work focused on foodways and cooking traditions of indigenous populations in the Americas. She was particularly noted for her work on the history of chocolate as a food and crop. The large collection of culinary materials that she donated to the Schlesinger includes community cookbooks, international cookbooks, and a significant set of manuscript cookbooks (for more information about those, see the Manuscript Cookbooks page in this guide).

James C. Whitten was a collector of books, pamphlets, and ephemera relating to the history of vegetarianism. In 2006 the Schlesinger Library acquired his collection; books and other published material were cataloged individually while the James C. Whitten Ephemera Collection on the History of Vegetarianism (which includes things like postcards, menus, and product labels) is cataloged on a separate record.

The American Institute of Wine & Food is a non-profit organization dedicated to the enjoyment of good food and drink founded in 1981 by Julia Child, Robert Mondavi, Richard Graff and others. In 1990, they donated about half of their extensive Simon-Lowenstein Collection of Gastronomic Literature to the Schlesinger Library (the rest can be found at the University of California San Diego's Mandeville Special Collections Library).

Samuel Chamberlain was a printmaker, artist, photographer, and writer. His wife Narcissa Gellatly Chamberlain was a painter and a writer who also studied cooking at the École Cordon Bleu in Paris. Together they co-authored many popular books on gastronomy. In 1974 they donated their collection of over 800 cookbooks from France, Italy, Great Britain, and the United States to the Schlesinger. The Library also has a small collection of papers donated by their daughter, Narcisse Chamberlain.

The Library holds the extensive archives of Julia Child, cookbook writer, cookery teacher, and TV personality--see our separate Julia Child guide, which is dedicated to her materials. In addition to multiple copies of the many cookbooks that Child wrote herself, the Library also has her personal reference collection (over 2,400 items). Some bear her handwritten annotations.