Cookery
Our cookery collection is the largest collection of its kind that is available at a public university. Many of the community cookbooks represent a specific place and time, allowing researchers insight about the socio-economic status of the cookbooks' contributors as well as what ingredients were available in that location at the time the cookbook was published.
Topics and scope
This collection includes over 38,000 volumes related to cookery dating from 1487 to the present and represents nearly every country or region. In addition to contemporary cookbooks, the collection include personal papers from important food writers, cookbooks generated by American communities and churches and rare manuscript cookbooks from the 17th through 20th centuries.
Topics covered in the collection include:
- Cookery
- Community cookbooks
- History of domestic science at K-State
- Juvenile cookery
- Celebrity cookbooks
For more information about this collection contact Roger Adams.
Collection examples
Staff and volunteers are transcribing more than 20 manuscript cookbooks to make them digitally accessible to the public. The collaborative nature of this online project means that anyone in the world can view the cookbooks and help us transcribe and even translate them. The manuscript portion of the cookery collection contains over 250 cookbooks in many languages and countries of origin, from the late 17th century to the present. Our transcription project's goal is to make the cookbooks available to researchers around the world. The project is supported by the Caul Access to Cookery endowment.
The Clementine Paddleford Papers
A cornerstone of the cookery collection, these papers cover nearly 50 years (1920-1967) in the professional life of K-State alumna, Clementine Paddleford, who was one of the world’s pre-eminent food editors. The collection consists primarily of correspondence and newspaper clippings related to her publications. In addition to Paddleford's papers, her library of cookbooks is preserved in the rare books collection.