Social History Resources: Food

Resources on the Web

The Food Timeline
The evolution of the foods we eat is depicted in timeline format.

Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project
An online collection of some of the most influential and important American cookbooks from the late eighteenth to early twentieth century.

18th Century Recipes
Presented by the Claude Moore Colonial Farm, a small, low-income farm just prior to the Revolutionary War, this website features a collection of eighteenth century recipes.

Vintage Recipes from 19th and Early 20th Century Cookbooks
Vintage California recipes from several nineteenth and early twentieth century cookbooks.

Foodways during the Depression: Farming in the 1930s
The Wessels Living History Farm provides a nice overview of foodways during the depression from a farm's perspective.

Food in America
An article that talks about the evolution of food from the colonial period through the twentieth century.

Frontier Foodways
Early frontier cooking from the trail to California.

Civil War Cooking
Recipes, tips and tricks, tutorials, and more regarding nineteenth-century cooking.

Feeding the Civil War Soldiers
Find out how and what the solders during the Civil War were fed, and how those back home provided for themselves.

Gode Cookery
A portal for medieval cooking.

Household Appliances Timeline
The invention of electricty led to electric stoves, washers, dryers, and dishwashers. In the second half of the twentieth century, advances in electronics yielded appliances that could be set on timers and even programmed, further reducing the domestic workload by allowing washing and cooking to go on without the presence of the human launderer or cook.

Research Questions

What types of utensils did they use?

What was their usual fare for breakfast? Lunch? Dinner?

Did they grow their own food or buy it at a market?

Did they put up food by canning, freezing, or pickling?

What were market like in their town?

What types of food did they eat?

Did they cook in a fireplace or on a stove?

Did they have a cook or housemaid to do the cooking?

Did the family eat at the kitchen table or dining room table?

Did the husband hunt to feed his family?

Who prepared the food? Did they use a fireplace or stove?

Did they raise animals for the purpose of providing food?

What was a typical family dinner?

Online Cookbooks
Recipes Tried and True
Online digitized cookbook published in 1894 with recipes representative of cooking in America in the late nineteenth century

The Dixie Cook-Book
Published in 1885, this cookbook is a "treasured family collection of many generations of noted housekeepers."

Mrs. Hill's New Cook-Book
Published in 1898, Mrs. A. P. Hill offers guidance "for private families in town and country especially adapted to the Southern States with directions for carving and arranging the table for dinners, parties, etc."

Dainties for Home Parties
Published in 1905, Florence Williams offers "a cook-book for dance-suppers, bridge parties, receptions, luncheons, and other entertainments."