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Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by dariosalvi78 on Thursday February 16, 2023 @07:02AM (#34817632)
no recipes tho, only metadata
Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by stiray on Thursday February 16, 2023 @07:16AM (#34817734)
Not necessary, depends on the source, for instance I got this one: https://digital.slub-dresden.de/werkansicht/dlf/12114/7

(when you trigger the search or view the Works table, the links are in last column)

But it does help if you know the language... :D

Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by jdmtheNth on Thursday February 16, 2023 @08:05AM (#34818141)
Interesting, but not useful.
Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by xwdv on Thursday February 16, 2023 @08:29AM (#34818336)
Useless if you’re expecting to find ancient recipes
Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by fedeb95 on Thursday February 16, 2023 @11:48AM (#34821185)
Wrong expectations lead to uselessness
Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by vixen99 on Thursday February 16, 2023 @12:26PM (#34821886)
Given "Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Middle Age", one might be forgiven for expecting to find the odd recipe.
Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by jghn on Thursday February 16, 2023 @01:22PM (#34823074)
Even in the best scenario, recipes back then weren't like recipes now. A modern cook would find them useless as well, they left quite a bit up to assumed knowledge & experience.
Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by fedeb95 on Friday February 17, 2023 @08:07AM (#34834179)
sure, the problem is that some comments aren't forgiving to the service for their expectations
Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by xwdv on Thursday February 16, 2023 @09:48PM (#34830072)
“Search through historical cookbooks!”

*looks for recipes*

“No not like that”

Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by tokai on Thursday February 16, 2023 @09:20AM (#34818939)
For those that find this unuseful. Most of the works in the base has been digitized by google and others. Just look up any title you're interested in and you'll find the work.
Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by RajT88 on Thursday February 16, 2023 @11:25AM (#34820784)
I can see the complaints even then:

"Useless cookbook! My local grocer has never heard of Silphium"

Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by danielvaughn on Thursday February 16, 2023 @11:37AM (#34820988)
If I ever become fantastically wealthy, one thing I'd love to do is build a culinary museum. Imagine rotating exhibits where you can taste-test food from hundreds of years ago (or at least a close approximation).
Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by meee on Thursday February 16, 2023 @02:09PM (#34824037)
City Tavern in Philadelphia serves food made from 18th century recipes, using the tools available at that time. The prices are in line with typical casual dining (Applebees for example). It's fun if you are in the area but some recipes have improved in the meantime. IMHO, creme brulee benefitted from the appropriation of the butane torch (I think City Tavern uses an iron).
Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by teruakohatu on Thursday February 16, 2023 @07:09PM (#34828706)
I just Googled and apparently it is closed:

> After 26 years, Chef Staib has decided to not renew his contract with Independence National Historical Park as operator of City Tavern. He closed the doors to the patrons effective November 2, 2020 allowing time wrap up affairs before turning the building back over to the Park Service.

Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by thadk on Friday February 17, 2023 @03:52AM (#34832406)
The lunch cafeteria at the Museum of the American Indian in DC is fabulous sort of in this way.
Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by fedeb95 on Thursday February 16, 2023 @11:47AM (#34821167)
Very useful. I searched for "pasta" and almost nothing showed up but I think I am not yet very good at using the tool. Anyway it's very interesting to have a database of some old text about cooking to search.
Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by dom96 on Thursday February 16, 2023 @12:24PM (#34821849)
I just tried "chicken", lots of stuff came up
Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by giraffe_lady on Thursday February 16, 2023 @12:32PM (#34821984)
Pasta and its cognates is a real ball of culinary-taxonomic mud so that's a pretty unlucky first choice I think.

The word pasta and etymological relatives are also the words for all dough, sausage (pâté), porridge, pastry (pâtisserie), pesto, etc etc in different european cuisines and that's just what I know off the top of my head, in use in the last few decades. If you expand it out a couple hundred years who fucking knows what will have been known by that word or its variants.

I'm not even sure how long that usage dates in english either. Even as recently as mid-late 20th century american cookbooks referred to all noodles as macaroni and used that word generically the same way we use pasta now.

Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by perihelions on Thursday February 16, 2023 @05:56PM (#34827799)
I think pesto doesn't belong there: it comes from a different Latin word that seems unrelated.

- "From Latin pistus (“crushed, pounded”), from Latin pīnsō (“to pound, beat, crush”), whose frequentative also gave Italian pestare (“to pound”)."

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pesto#Italian

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pasta#Latin

Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by stonemetal12 on Thursday February 16, 2023 @04:59PM (#34827053)
>First attested in English in 1874, the word pasta comes from Italian pasta,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasta

Evidently it is a young word relatively speaking.

Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by wolverine876 on Saturday February 18, 2023 @02:20AM (#34844771)
Why do people keep using Wikipedia? From an actual historical dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary:

Earliest use as an English word: 1830:

J. P. Cobbett Jrnl. Tour Italy 214 Maccaroni, like vermicelli, is only one of the forms into which the Italians make what they call ‘pasta’ or paste. It requires a particular sort of wheat, a brittle, flinty grain, to make this pasta.

Earliest mention in English (i.e., as an Italian word): 1820:

W. A. Cadell Journey Carniola, Italy & France II. 152 The Italians prefer that [sc. Macaroni] which is fresh made, and made at home, and called pasta di casa, household paste.*

Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by stonemetal12 on Monday February 20, 2023 @11:22AM (#34869579)
For me, laziness mostly. OED isn't free, and I don't care enough to pay for it, or figure out how to get it free.

Even if the correct date is 1830 or even 1820, it is a distinction without difference. It misses the middle ages by more than a hundred years.

Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by dom96 on Thursday February 16, 2023 @12:31PM (#34821967)
There are some really amazing books in here. Like this one from 1390 written in Old English https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433078975988&vi...

Might give cooking a few of these a try

Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by macintux on Thursday February 16, 2023 @02:51PM (#34824769)
Nitpick: that’s definitely not Old English, which is mostly incomprehensible to most readers today. That’s Middle English.

Here’s an example of Old English. https://www.omniglot.com/images/langsamples/smp_oldenglish.g...

Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by dom96 on Thursday February 16, 2023 @03:38PM (#34825663)
Ahh! Thanks for the correction
Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by Herodotus38 on Thursday February 16, 2023 @01:27PM (#34823200)
I searched for beef, went through the list of results trying to find a recipe. I eventually got a link to a scanned google book called “Biscuits and Dried Beef, a Panacea” but then I started reading it and the first page had a quote from poetry. “Cool, these 1800 cookbooks were so well read”, but then as I continued it turned out to be a pleasant fictional work on the life of a poor young Episcopalian Priest with a young family. Nice find but seems like there’s a lot of noise in this.
Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by yamazakiwi on Thursday February 16, 2023 @03:32PM (#34825551)
You found the old version of modern recipe sites.
Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by Herodotus38 on Friday February 17, 2023 @03:58PM (#34840479)
I wish I had made that connection, nicely done.
Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by bakuninsbart on Thursday February 16, 2023 @01:33PM (#34823323)
Compared to some of these, it is not very old, but I regularly use a German cookbook from the 1800s. It was specifically crafted for young women learning to organize a household and contains detailed instructions about every necessary step to take.

The other big advantage is that it almost entirely relies on local ingredients, so it is very cheap to cook, as long as you reduce the amounts suggested for butter and eggs.

Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by f001 on Thursday February 16, 2023 @03:11PM (#34825172)
What book is this? I’d be interested in adding it to my collection.
Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by bakuninsbart on Friday February 17, 2023 @05:54AM (#34833176)
https://www.booklooker.de/B%C3%BCcher/Henriette-und-Marie-Hr...

I fear there won't be an English version of it though.

Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by wernerzeigler2 on Saturday February 18, 2023 @10:53AM (#34847781)
Libgen has the 1897 and 1904 in German, the 1904 in English, second to last result on this search page:

https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Davidis&lg_topic=libgen&ope...

Compiled and adapted for the United States, according to the Thirty-fifth German Original, with Weights and Measures in American equivalents, and an Appendix of Selected Recipes of Peculiar American Dishes Embracing also a Topically arranged List of over 550 Characteristic German Dishes in German, with English translation, giving page where these Recipes can be found ; also a Vocabulary of Culinary Terms in both languages, with full table.

Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by voytec on Thursday February 16, 2023 @02:59PM (#34824945)
There is a blog called Rare Cooking, which digs out old recipes, like John Locke's recipe for Pancakes[1].

[1] https://rarecooking.com/2021/12/14/john-lockes-recipe-for-pa...

Re:Search through historical cookbooks dating back to the Mi... by jwsteigerwalt on Friday February 17, 2023 @07:53AM (#34834050)
The Townsends YouTube channel is a fantastic look into the mechanics of early American cooking. https://youtube.com/@townsends