Some more resources for food history

1.  Did you know that if you were searching library catalogs for cook books, it was best to use “cookery book” as you key word, not “cook book.”  I didn’t.

Compare libraries and Google.

NY Public Library (from Rebecca). Vegetarian cookbook 25         Vegetarian cookery book 467

Google (thanks Larry).                      Vegetarian cookbook 928,000             Vegetarian cookery book 3,300

I learned that and more in this post on on how to use libraries for research in culinary history by Rebecca Federman of the New York Public Library. And check out the rest of her blog Cooked Books while you are at it.  Always interesting and informed, it has an honored place in my Google Reader,

2. On the subject of cookbooks, if you don’t know it already, Cindy Bertelsen’s Gherkins and Tomatoes has an ever-growing list of bibliographies and other hints for the food historian.

3.  Hurrah. Henry Voigt, who has a superb collection of American menus that he likes to share with others, has started a blog:   Henry Voigt’s blog about his collection of menus.

You may remember that a few months back I posted on an incredibly poignant menu for a Hawaiian luau offered to the troops who had aided in the takeover of the Hawaiian Islands by the United States.

4.  If you have ever wanted to know what 6d worth of chips in 1930 might be worth today, go to Measuring Worth.   Not only does it have a ton of data but it also has an invaluable discussion of which conversion scale you might want to use.

5.  A reader asked me what system I used for taking notes and keeping references.  Well having been let down by Google Notes (no longer maintained, it said ominously on the site one day), I’ve been looking for something powerful, flexible, and and that will stay in business.  Zotero looks like the answer, a system from George Mason with lots of big money backing it up, and designed specifically with historians in mind.  You can add references or all kinds of texts (books, articles, web pages, newspaper pages, you name it), make notes, file under multiple categories that you create, tag, and export the references to notes and bibliographies in an eye-popping variety of formats. Read about it on the invaluable Lifehacker.

I didn’t find it immediately intuitive, perhaps because I haven’t used the play list type procedure much, but I’m the only person in the western world of whom that would be true.  But several universities, if you Google, have provided helpful introductory guides.

• ← Requests for help
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