Finding vintage cookbook downloads
Orange macadamia nut fudge, from the Imperial Sugar Company’s 125th Anniversary Cookbook in 1968.
Most of the time, the easiest source for online cookbooks is archive.org. It has its own search facility for finding titles. If you’re looking for an ingredient or term rather than a title, you can use a general purpose search engine. You can search for that term and restrict the search to archive.org. Most search engines have something like a site:hostname search. To find all mentions of old fashioned brown sugar on archive.org, for example, search for "old fashioned brown sugar" site:archive.org.
If you’re using macOS or iOS, you may find xSearch useful. With it, I can just type ia texas cook book to search the Internet Archive. I set the xSearch shortcut to “ia”, and the URL to “https://archive.org/search.php?query=%s”. The “%s” is replaced with whatever text comes after “ia” and the space. In this example, that means searching all of the titles at the archive for the words texas, cook, and book.
There are several collections at Universities also, and they have some great old cookbooks available for download. One of my favorites is Michigan State University’s Sliker Culinary Collection of Little Cookbooks. It is filled with wonderful old pamphlets and promotional books, such as Diamond Walnut Recipe Gems. Fair warning, browsing this collection can easily make hours disappear without feeling the time pass at all.
Often, university collections focus on the specific geographical area that the university serves. Even closer to my heart than MSU’s little cookbooks is their Feeding Michigan collection. This doesn’t collect commercial pamphlets, but community cookbooks dating all the way back to the 1800s—all from Michigan. Two great cookbooks if you don’t want to randomly browse it and lose those many hours are The Charlotte Cook Book and The Grand Rapids Cook Book.
Another great set of books comes from the Texas Agricultural Service Extension of Texas A&M, and their archive on OAKTrust. The Christmas bulletins are especially nice.
Texas A&M wants you to enjoy your Christmas time at home with your family.
Two pages of Michigan cookies from 1893.
Walnuts for everything from carrot sides to snacks and cakes!
If you’re interested in a specific region, such as your home state, check your local universities and colleges to see if they have any region-specific collections. And don’t forget your local library. While local libraries rarely have the resources to scan and post books, even the small town I grew up in has a history room with a small community cookbook collection. It’s a great way to spend an afternoon, especially since you’re likely to recognize some of the names. You might even find some old family recipes!
A handful of companies keep archives of their old books and publications. One wonderful example is Texas’s own1 Imperial Sugar. Their web site is filled with great old books from their own history. Look especially for their 125th Anniversary Cookbook, which collects recipes from their older books. Imperial Sugar not only encourages downloading them, but sharing them.
Oddly, for unexplained reasons Imperial Sugar’s Romantic Recipes of the Old South and the Great Southwest isn’t available here, but is on Little Cookbooks.
Also in Texas, the Adams Extract company keeps an archive of the recipe cards they used to publish.
There are, I’m sure, many other places to look for digitized cookbooks. These are the places that I’ve found most useful and most interesting. They’re also useful when buying books online. I used to almost never buy cookbooks online. Too often, online vendors display no more than the cover of the book at best. At worst, it will be a stock cover.
Nowadays, when I find a potentially interesting cookbook at an online sales site, I’ll look for that cookbook in these archives, as well as through general web searches, to browse through before buying. These archives allow me to better decide whether a book is worth buying sight unseen.
A very easy fudge made with cream cheese, from the 1958 Texas Agricultural Extension Christmas Time at Home.
These cookies from the 1893 Charlotte book use cooked egg yolk to make them tender.
A classic holiday snack from the 1967 Diamond recipe book.
Sometimes it even works the other way, although this is rarely deliberate. I ran across The Charlotte Cook Book while browsing Feeding Michigan. Only a few weeks later an inexpensive copy popped up on eBay. That’s been a fun find. I would never have thought, for example, of adding hard-boiled egg yolk to cookies to make them more tender. But that was Mrs. J.S. Moon’s trick for “white cookies” in that collection. They were so good I’ve chosen that recipe for this post!
But I even look on these sites after I buy a book. Every time I find a new vintage cookbook, I look for a downloadable version. While I vastly prefer to browse for recipes in physical books, and to follow recipes from physical books, I also enjoy cooking and baking while on the road, and I can’t carry my entire library with me!
These sites allow me to keep copies of my favorite vintage pamphlets on my phone and tablet for use when visiting friends and family.
Which leads me to the final of “my” favorite sites for finding vintage cookbooks: the Padgett Sunday Supper Club Vintage Archive. I’ve written a script to take scanned images and turn them into searchable PDF files. Now, whenever I can’t find one of these pamphlets online, I’ll be adding them to my own archive. I released the first of my scans just before Christmas, and have many more in the pipeline, so stay tuned to that page!
White Cookies
Servings: 48
Preparation Time: 45 minutes
Mrs. J.S. Moon
Review: The Charlotte Cook Book (Jerry@Goodreads)
The Charlotte Cook Book (Feeding Michigan)
Ingredients
- 8 oz butter
- 1 cup sugar
- 2 cups flour
- 1 hard-boiled yolk
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 2 eggs
- 1 tsp vanilla
- ½ cup chopped nuts (optional)
Steps
- Cream the butter and sugar.
- Add flour in a steady pour while mixing.
- Press the hard-boiled yolk through a fine sieve directly into the flour.
- Mix in with the baking powder.
- Mix in the eggs.
- Mix in the vanilla.
- Mix in the nuts if using.
- Drop from a teaspoon onto an ungreased baking sheet.
- Bake at 350° for 10-12 minutes.
- Rest 30 seconds before removing to cooling rack.
In response to Vintage Cookbooks and Recipes: I have a couple of vintage cookbooks queued up to go online.
Sort of. Since 2012 Imperial Sugar has been owned by Louis Dreyfus Group of the Netherlands. It remains headquartered in Sugar Land, Texas, however.
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archives
- Classic Original Adams Recipes at Adams Extract
- Adams Extract used to make wonderful postcard-sized recipes. This page reproduces many, if not all, of those cards.
- Community Cookbooks: An Online Collection at Library of Congress
- “One thing these cookbooks have in common is that they were—almost always—compiled by women for the purpose of raising money for a cause. Often, the funds were raised for church furnishings and other improvements, but many groups compiled recipes for more secular causes such as free kindergartens, establishing a library or planting trees in a new town.”
- Feeding Michigan at Michigan State University
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“Feeding Michigan is a digital archive of 68 cookbooks from the MSU Libraries’ collection, which were published in Michigan or produced by Michigan communities, organizations, churches, or individuals dating back to the late nineteenth century.”
- Imperial Sugar Free Digital Cookbooks at Imperial Sugar
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“We’ve gathered our favorite holiday recipes and compiled them into digital cookbooks for you to peruse. From holiday cookies to our most popular Thanksgiving recipes, you’ll find lots of tested and proven recipes in these books. Just download your favorite and view it online, or print it for future use. You can even share with your family and friends!”
- Internet Archive
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Includes an archive of some great public domain music, as well as an archive of the web back to 1996.
- Little Cookbooks at Michigan State University
- “The Alan and Shirley Brocker Sliker Culinary Collection… Little Cookbooks contains thousands of food and cookery related publications produced primarily by companies in the United States from the late nineteenth century up to the present.”
- Promotional cookbook archive
- I’ve managed to acquire several old promotional pamphlets and cookbooks that don’t appear to be available elsewhere on the net.
- Promotional Cookbook Archive
- I’ve managed to acquire several old promotional pamphlets and cookbooks that don’t appear to be available elsewhere on the net. I’m making them available here.
- Szathmary Culinary Manuscripts and Cookbooks at University of Iowa Libraries DIY History
- Cookbooks from the 1800s and early 1900s.
- Texas A&M OAKTrust
- Search the Texas Agricultural Extension Service Bulletins for their old cookbooks. Look especially for the Christmas bulletins.
- UNC Greensboro Home Economics Pamphlet Collection at UNC Greensboro Gateway Digital History Collections
- “The Paul and Janice Hessling Home Economics Pamphlets Collection consists of commercial and government publications on the subject of home management and nutrition and includes educational materials, recipes, household hints, and other materials. The pamphlets were originally published between 1826 and the present.”
reviews
- Review: Christmas Time at Home: Jerry Stratton at Jerry@Goodreads
- “Christmas seems to bring out the best in promotional cookbooks, whether it’s from the local electric monopoly or some government program like this, from the Texas Agricultural Extension Service and the United States Department of Agriculture.”
- Review: Diamond Walnut Recipe Gems: Jerry Stratton at Jerry@Goodreads
- “Walnuts are on their own a comfort food. I associate them mostly with the winter holiday season from Thanksgiving through Christmas.”
- Review: Imperial Sugar Company’s 125th Anniversary Cookbook: Jerry Stratton at Jerry@Goodreads
- This is a 1968 cookbook to celebrate the Imperial Sugar Company’s 125th anniversary. They started in 1843 in Sugar Land, Texas in the Brazos Valley. The book combines recipes from many of their earlier books, such as their No-Cook Strawberry Pie; and from the backs of their packages, such as their Sam Houston White Cake and Brown Sugar Apple Pie and Frontier Pecan Cake.
- Review: Romantic Recipes of the Old South and the Great Southwest: Jerry Stratton at Jerry@Goodreads
- The “Old South” is as late as Adlai Ewing Stevenson in the 1890s. Collected by the Daughters of the American Revolution, many favorite recipes of old politicians and military figures, from President Lincoln to Herschell Johnson. Because “the quickest way to a man’s stomach is pie.”
- Review: The Charlotte Cook Book: Jerry Stratton at Jerry@Goodreads
- This 1893 community cook book is a fascinating look at cooking and baking before much of the technology we now rely on, such as refrigeration.
tools
- Create searchable PDFs in Swift
- This Swift script will take a series of image scans, OCR them, and turn them into a PDF file with a simple table of contents and searchable content—with the original images as the visually readable content.
- xSearch for Safari: Lei Wang
- “xSearch is a Safari extension enables using multiple search engines, add a shortcut and a space before the search text to switch between search engines instantly.”
vintage cookbooks
- Baker’s Dozen Coconut Oatmeal Cookies
- The Baker’s Dozen coconut oatmeal cookies, compared to a very similar recipe from the Fruitport, Michigan bicentennial cookbook.
- The Charlotte Cook Book at Feeding Michigan (PDF)
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“A selection of tested recipes” from the First Congregational Church of Charlotte, Michigan, 1893.
- The Grand Rapids Cook Book at Feeding Michigan (PDF)
- “A reprint of The Old Congregational Cook Book by permission. Containing, also, many new and valuable recipes contributed by the ladies of Grand Rapids, to whom this book is respectfully dedicated, with the hope that it will prove a valuable assistant in domestic economy.”
- Vintage Recipes and Cookery
- Recipes and Hints from 1800s Cookbooks
More cookbooks
- My Year in Food: 2023
- From Italy to the Ukraine—some of it real, and some through cookbooks—this has been a great year for food.
- Refrigerator Revolution Revisited: 1928 Frigidaire
- The 1928 manual and cookbook, Frigidaire Recipes, assumes a lot about then-modern society that could not have been assumed a few decades earlier.
- A Bicentennial Meal for the Sestercentennial
- Four community cookbooks celebrating the bicentennial. As we approach our sestercentennial in 2026, what makes a meal from 1976?
- A golden harvest of sunflower seeds
- Golden Harvest Sunflower Seed Recipes is a fascinating bit of ephemera from the seventies and the tail end of the era of regional whole grain mills.
- Hope Lutheran 1950 Lenten fish au gratin
- One of the interesting things about old calendars that are also something else—such as a cookbook—is that they follow seasons that no longer exist.
- 61 more pages with the topic cookbooks, and other related pages
More food history
- Looking back over 1950 in vintage cooking
- While I didn’t make my goal of trying a recipe every month in the month it was meant for, following this calendar through 2023 was an interesting experience and provided some very good food.
- Refrigerator Revolution Revisited: 1928 Frigidaire
- The 1928 manual and cookbook, Frigidaire Recipes, assumes a lot about then-modern society that could not have been assumed a few decades earlier.
- Plain & Fancy in the seventies with Hiram Walker
- Enjoy a whole new world of fun, excitement and discovery in Hiram Walker Cordials, adding a personal touch to all your memorable moments and special occasions—plain or fancy!
- A golden harvest of sunflower seeds
- Golden Harvest Sunflower Seed Recipes is a fascinating bit of ephemera from the seventies and the tail end of the era of regional whole grain mills.
- El Molino Best: Whole grains in 1953
- El Molino Mills of Alhambra, California, published a fascinating whole grain cookbook in 1953.
- Eight more pages with the topic food history, and other related pages