Your Online Bookshelf
Cookbooks, canning primers, garden manuals and horse books printed between 1825 and 1922, put back on the shelf one chapter at a time. Free to read, no account, no download.
52 books · 1128 sections in full text · every title in the US public domain. Pull a spine to open it; the red dot marks a book you can read cover to cover.
Open on the table
The archive kept these books page by page. Start at the preface or go straight to the recipe you came for.
Practical Cooking And Serving
Janet McKenzie Hill, 1919 · 825 sections, complete
This is the backbone of the shelf: 825 sections, and the archive kept every one of them. Hill opens with chemistry (the five food principles, how…
Begin with Preface To Practical Cooking And ServingMy Best 250 Recipes
Sarah Tyson Rorer, 1907 · 124 sections, complete
Rorer picked these 250 recipes herself in 1907, by then a quarter-century into teaching, and grouped them in tens and twenties: twenty soups, twenty…
Begin with My Best Twenty SoupsDainties
Sarah Tyson Rorer, 1912 · 67 sections, complete
Dainties is Rorer’s party book: cocktails in the old sense (an appetizer of oysters, fruit or vegetables, not a mixed drink), punches and frappés…
Begin with How To Make AppetizersThe Laurel Health Cookery
Evora Bucknum Perkins, 1911 · 47 of 447 sections
A large Adventist health cookbook of 1911, 447 sections long, on non-flesh cooking: utensils, measurements, flavorings, garnishes, salads and…
Begin with General. Cooking Utensils, Their Uses And CareEverywoman’s Canning Book
Mary B. Hughes, 1918 · 42 sections, complete
A 1918 wartime primer from Boston. Hughes wrote it out of the canning kitchen run for war relief, where she says 8,000 jars were sealed without a…
Begin with Foreword For Every Womans Canning BookThe White Ribbon Cook Book
Kathryn Armstrong, 1894 · 9 of 324 sections
A temperance cookbook of 1894. Armstrong’s preface sets out to prove that “no culinary requirement” needs wine or brandy, and the 324 sections, from…
Begin with How To Make Chicken Soup (Brown)Twenty Quick Soups
Sarah Tyson Rorer, 1894 · 6 sections, complete
A pocket booklet from 1894: six short sections, twenty soups in all, from cream of asparagus to a cold currant soup for summer lunches. Every soup…
Begin with Cream SoupsTested Recipes for the Modern Hostess
Daisy Wilson Barnet, 1906 · 4 of 57 sections
A hostess’s book of 1906: canapés, oyster cocktails, a run of soups (Palestine, pistachio, orange), entrées and party dishes. A handful of its pages…
Begin with Green Pea Soup RecipeThe Orange Judd Cook Book
Adeline O. Goessling, 1914 · 4 of 311 sections
A plain, large farm-kitchen cookbook from 1914, with 311 sections that start with eleven kinds of soup. Goessling’s introduction aims it at families…
Begin with How to Freeze Ices and CreamsThe card catalog
Four drawers, the same four sections the catalog used from 2011 to 2013.
Cook books
American and British kitchen manuals from 1894 to 1922: school-of-cookery textbooks, church and club recipe…
Gardening · 7Gardening and horticulture
Edwardian garden-making, rose and vegetable growing, ornamental trees and shrubs, and two early textbooks on how…
Animals · 4Books about animals
Horse books spanning nearly a century: buying a sound horse in 1825, stable wisdom from 1859, a farmer’s veterinary…
Health · 14Health and healing (historical)
Medical and dietary books from 1881 to 1918, kept as documents of their time. They describe treatments that medicine…
Lines from the shelf
Three openings, in the authors’ own words.
“A soup boiled is a soup spoiled.”
“Cookery is a necessary art, and an art that is worthy the attention of the most intelligent and cultivated women of the land.”
“Over-eating of meat has had its day, and has left us as a reminder much sickness and sorrow.”
Reading guides
Notes from the desk on reading, cooking from and writing about books this old.
Is it really public domain? Checking an old book before you copy it
A date on the title page answers most of the question. The traps are in the editions, the translations and the country you live in.
In the kitchenCooking from a 1900s cookbook: ovens, measures and what to leave alone
Most of a century-old recipe translates in five minutes. The canning chapters are the exception, and they are the ones that can hurt you.
For studentsWriting a review or essay about a book that is a hundred years old
The usual book-review advice assumes the author is alive and the reader can buy a copy. With old books, neither is true, and that changes what a good review does.
For researchersOld cookbooks as historical sources: what a recipe book can prove
A cookbook is a record of what someone wanted people to cook, which is not the same as what they cooked. Keeping that gap in view is the whole method.
What this shelf is
The address dates from 2008. Between 2011 and 2013 it held a small library of scanned and proofread books, most of them American cookbooks from the decades either side of 1900. The site later closed and its pages survived only in web archives. This is that collection, reset in a readable type and checked against the archived copies: the texts as the archive kept them, with broken characters repaired and nothing modernised.
Where the archive kept only a book’s contents page, you will find the contents and opening lines, plus a link to a complete copy at Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive or HathiTrust. More on how the shelf was put back together is on the about page.