Foodsville: Great Research Resource

If you ever need to do research, a new resource is now available. It's called Foodsville. It's another online community, but the thing of real value to culinary historians is that they are digitizing all food books and cookery books prior to 1923 and putting them online, where you can read them for free, plus making them available for purchase in print. They already have a few hundred books online, and their plans are to add 15 to 25 books per week, so the library will grow quickly. (They currently have 1,500 historic food and cookery books ready to be digitized, and then they will begin searching libraries and private collections for more books. And they take requests.)

Another useful feature is that the Mayor of Foodsville lists a daily feed of articles on a theme -- some recent ones include Burmese food, rice history, and the Great Plains. Further useful info for researchers.

It's a joint venture of the IACP Food History group, Andy Smith, Applewood Books, and Hewlett Packard (which supplies the printing know-how).

So whether or not you want to participate in yet another foodie community (this one international), you might want to sign on just for the research side of things. Plus they have plans to help any writers with out-of-print cookbooks to reprint their works.

Thought this would be of interest to at least a few folks out there.

It's at http://www.foodsville.com -- maybe I'll "see" you there.

This post reminded me of another resource that I've been meaning to mention on LTH. LibriVox is an online community dedicated to making available as free audiobooks works of all sorts--fiction, non-fiction, poetry, dramatic works--in the public domain. LibriVox was founded in 2005 by a web developer in Montreal, and it is a non-profit run completely by volunteers around the world. The Librivox catalog lists hundreds of audiobooks, completed and in progress, in a multitude of languages.

So, this isn't a food-specific resource, but through Librivox, I've gained easy access to some very interesting food-related works that I might otherwise be too lazy to seek out. There are etiquette books like Bigelow's Good Housekeeping Marriage Book and Beeton's Book of Household Management (in progress) that of course touch on food, but there are also food-centric works like:

Bullock's The Ideal Bartender
Edword's Bohemian San Francisco
Estes' Good Things to Eat as Suggested by Rufus
Green's How to Cook Fish
Lea's Domestic Cookery

I have a deep love for LibriVox. It's a very friendly community much like LTH, and I highly recommend their audiobooks for download as well as the forum for volunteers. They're not necessarily recordings by professional actors, though there are many gifted voice actors who read for LibriVox--most volunteers are just regular people. If you'd like to help make pre-1923 food books more accessible to the public, propose a project on LibriVox or just listen!