Guide to historical recipes and collections

There are far more sources available in online library collections that you may wish to use instead, below is a sample of sources we found useful in Making and Knowing classes.

We also recommend scouring your institutional library’s holdings for historical items related to food and recipes.

Sources in English

Wellcome Ms. 213: A Booke of diuers Medecines, Broothes, Salues, Waters, Syroppes and Oyntementes of which many or the most part haue been experienced and tryed by the speciall practize of Mrs Corlyon. Anno Domini 1606.

Harleian Ms. 279 (c. 1430): Two Fifteenth-Century Cook Books.

Théodore Turquet de Mayerne (1573-1655, attr.), Archimagirus anglo-gallicus: or, Excellent & approved receipts and experiments in cookery (1658).

A Book of Cookrye (England, 1591) – see here for a transcription.

Hugh Plat, Delightes for Ladies (England, 1609).

Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook (1656).

Sources in French

Le Menagier de Paris (1393).

Le Thresor de santé, ou mesnage de la vie humaine divisé en dix livres (Lyon, 1607).

Online collections of recipes and culinary texts

  • Monumenta Culinaria et Diaetetica Historica. Corpus of culinary & dietetic texts of Europe from the Middle Ages to 1800 with a Focus on German texts, but also some other European texts, including in English.

  • Kookhistorie. Dutch Cooking History (with some English content).

  • See also the Rijksmuseum recipe book collection (a work in progress that already includes 583 titles), you can find the list here 

    • click “lists” in the top right and then “receptuurboeken”

  • For images of kitchen set up and implements,see Bartolomeo Scappi’s culinary treatise Opera (1570), which includes illustrations of kitchen set-up, equipment, and techniques (scroll to the end of the book).

Other Databases

  • You may also wish to search for period recipes on EEBO (English printed books), Gallica (for French sources), VD17 (for German sources), Europeana, Wellcome (mainly medical sources), ECCO (eighteenth century), Google Books, Archive.org, and Worldcat.

  • The digital database of the US National Library of Medicine (NLM). To find recipes in their online catalogue, see the interview with NLM staff

  • Universal Short Title Catalogue, including digitized editions.

  • EMMO Early Modern (English) Manuscripts Online, a searchable database of encoded semi-diplomatic transcriptions of all Folger manuscripts from the period 1500-1700.

Other relevant websites