UFV Library digitizes 80 community cookbooks

There’s more to a cookbook besides its recipes. Community cookbooks provide a snapshot of a time and place. They are a primary document about popular foods, current technologies, and cultural norms.
Funded by the BC History Digitization Program at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre at UBC and the UFV library, researchers, students, faculty, and the broader community of the Fraser Valley and beyond can explore 80 digitized BC cookbooks covering the years 1911 to the late 1960s. The digitized BC cookbooks are open and freely available to all. The content is hosted in HarvestIR, UFV’s institutional repository: https://ufv.arcabc.ca/islandora/object/ufv%3Acookbook and is fully searchable and printable.
Dive into the King’s Daughters’ cookery book (1911) to understand the colonial home in Victoria prior to World War I. Notes to the chatelaine include how to be a good housekeeper and tips on how to manage the “help” as well as dozens of recipes. Take a walk through the 1920s with 300 ways to a man’s heart by the Charles Dickens Parent Teacher Association from Vancouver or discover quirky recipes like Fly Cemetery in the Centennial cook book, published in 1958.
“Many people are discarding their community cookbooks. So the preservation and dissemination of these valuable books is essential so they can be saved for future generations,” said Mary-Anne MacDougall, Special Collections Librarian.

https://ufv.arcabc.ca/islandora/object/ufv%3Acookbook

For more information, contact Mary-Anne MacDougall at maryanne.macdougall@ufv.ca

11/30/2022