Now readily accessible: 3 much-loved recipe and food collections

Great cookbooks don’t age (isn’t that one excuse many of us use to justify our large cookbook collections?). And at EYB we’re proud not only of making our members’ cookbooks more readily accessible, but helping cooks resurrect great food writing and recipes from the past. We have three great examples to talk about today.

First, we’ve now indexed the entire collection of Foods of the World from Time Life. As Google search results and this recent discussion thread at Chow show, many cooks have clung to their copies, remember them with fond memories, and/or are actively seeking copies to buy. We have  the most comprehensive list anywhere, and with our index, you can readily find recipes, bringing them to life and using them again. And if you don’t have a copy of a particular volume, just use our buying button to order one.

And, equally as much fun (or maybe for some even better), we can make the same claims for Time Life’s sister series, The Good Cook.*  If you can’t go to culinary school but want to learn the basics of fine cooking, this series is truly an education all by itself. And what’s best, you can follow it all on your own time and don’t have to pay extra for text books!

Finally, for something truly out of the ordinary, we wanted to give kudos to the New York Public Library  which is digitizing their archive of restaurant menus. This is one of the largest collections of historical restaurant menus in the world – around 45,000 in total. So far they’ve made 15,630 menus available online, starting from the 1850’s. The project is called “What’s on the menu?” and you can both access what they’ve done and help out. Forget Angry Birds, here’s a way to fruitfully spend some down time! 

*We know we have the complete U.S. series and think we have almost all the U.K. series. If any U.K. members who own copies want to compare theirs to the U.S. index to see if they’re the same, and let us know, you would have our unfailing gratitude.