Vintage cookbooks from Gutenberg.org

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AnnaInNC on 17 Dec 2010 at 03:58

This site is a gem !  An asbestos gas warmer from 1896,  a DIET bread with 9 eggs and 1 1/2 cups of sugar; cookies with citron - you figure out how much flour.

 

http://www.vintagerecipes.net/books/candy_makers_guide/asbestos_gas_batch_warmer_or_s.php

That's the old name for hamburger or ground meat.  Forced thru a meat grinder.

clicking on the various books, a couple from the mid 1600's, the spelling is hilarious. Pill = peel, limon = lemon. Also words I hadn't seen before, I had to look up searce (sifting) and gum-dragon, still not sure what that is exactly. Seems to come from a tree. 

I love the way they describe baking a good bread. Apparently, also in a covered dutch oven with scoring the tops and removing the lid after a few minutes. 

I'm a volunteer at Distributed Proofreaders (google for us); we prepare most of the free ebooks added to Project Gutenberg. I've worked on a few of those cookbooks.

Not too many cookbooks in the pipeline right now. If old cookbooks interest you, you might want to join DP and become a content provider. Find old cookbooks at Google Books or the Internet Archive and start them on their way to becoming text rather than image files (much smaller, searchable, reflowable -- reflowable means that they will fit nicely on any size display, from a smartphone to a 27-inch monitor, and that you can choose the font size). You would probably need to do some proofreading first, to get used to the way DP does things.

You can proof(read) while the bread is proofing :)

 

There are some tasks -- such as bookkeeping, programming, and text transcription -- where "incredibly anal" is exactly what is needed for the job.

You might consider using less loaded words for qualities such as "detail-focused".

that you should pick those exact professions to exemplify detail oriented tasks. I have been a tax accountant for more than thirty-five years. While working my way through college I put bread on the table by doing medical transcription for several groups of physicians (neurosurgery, oncology etc). Now, when I refer to the word Anal I am referring to Anal Retentive which basically means detail oriented to the point of annoyance. There are many good CPAs and MDs out there who are detail oriented without being annoying as well as many good publishers. I chose the word Anal in order to describe strict processes enforced by Gutenberg that didn’t necessarily guarantee a better product. Also it was a little tongue-in-cheek. A quick TFL search came up with at least 40 "anals". You might consider not taking yourself so seriously. 

This one is from Michigan State University (MSU). The title of the site is [u][i]Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project[/i] [/u]The link is...

[b][url]http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/index.html[/url][/b]

[quote][u][i]Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project[/i][/u][quote]The Michigan State University Library and the MSU Museum have partnered to create an online collection of some of the most influential and important American cookbooks from the late 18th to early 20th century. Digital images of the pages of each cookbook are available as well as full-text transcriptions and the ability to search within the books, across the collection, in order to find specific information.[/quote]

I love reading cookbooks from the link you posted as well as the link I've given.