America in the Kitchen is a new project at Michigan State University that recently received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize 200 of the most important American cookbooks published from the 18th century through 1960. The team behind the grant includes Associate Professor of History Helen Veit, MSU Libraries Head of Special Collections and University Archives Leslie McRoberts, former MSU Libraries Head of Special Collections and Librarian Emeritus Peter Berg, and Associate Professor of History and Director of Matrix: Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences Dean Rehberger.
The almost $350,000 NEH grant will allow the team to modernize and expand Feeding America, one of the most-used digital resources on food history. Dr. Berg was one of the directors of the original project, which launched in 2003. Feeding America is comprised of 76 American cookbooks spanning the late 18th to the early 20th centuries.
“Feeding America is already an important resource for food studies scholars,” Veit said. “Now, with America in the Kitchen, we’ll be creating a beautiful new website that’s even larger and more user-friendly. We’ll not only be able to expand the number of cookbooks in the collection, but we’ll also push the collection’s chronology up to 1960 and emphasize how many different Americans have created and used cookbooks.”
The team at Matrix will create the new America in the Kitchen website, while the MSU Libraries team will be digitizing the cookbooks. The finished website will also include short author biographies and photographs of historic cooking tools, among other resources.
“Besides expanding the availability of historic American cookbooks online, this NEH grant will also allow us to provide context so that users can better understand where each cookbook came from and why it’s significant,” Veit said. “Our goal is to create a place where people can learn more about food history, American history, and humanities ideas.”
The website is aimed at scholars, researchers, students, cooks, and lifelong learners of all ages.
“The MSU Libraries is thrilled to receive this grant, which will be significant in helping us broaden the digital presence of our robust Cookery & Food Collection,” said McRoberts. “The Feeding America digital repository is already a fabulous resource for researchers seeking out these important and influential American cookbooks, and we are so excited to soon be able to offer additional access to cookbooks through 1960, thanks in large part to these NEH funds. We are proud as well that these publicly available collections can help support MSU’s position as a top-tier research institution by allowing researchers to browse our cookbooks across the globe.”
Berg said, “One of the wonders of the digital age is the opportunity to bring the resources of a world-class special collection of books to people throughout the state, nation, and world who otherwise could not afford to make a trip to East Lansing to see the cookbooks. While the means to deliver our knowledge and resources may be modern, our work remains traditional as part of the land grant mission, the founding principle of MSU.”
All cookbooks will come from the Murray & Hong Special Collections at the MSU Libraries, which has more than 40,000 cookbooks and food-related works and is one of the largest American culinary collections in the world.
The team behind America in the Kitchen previously created the What America Ate project, a digital archive and interactive website on food in the Great Depression also funded by the NEH.
Veit noted that she hopes the new website will entice people to cook from historic cookbooks as well as to read them. “We all have strong feelings about food, and it’s a great way to get people asking bigger questions about why things happen and how culture works,” she said.
Photo Credit: Austin DeRaedt