Depending on where you and your grandmas are from, of course. Brought to you by Applewood Books, a publishing company dedicated to “build[ing] a picture of America through its primary source materials,” Foodsville is a food-focused virtual community with one feature that really stands out: the “Free Library” of digitized copies of public domain cookbooks.
Because these books are public domain, you’re likely to find most of them in other places as well, but Foodsville is useful because it brings them all together in a browsable collection. Also, if you sign up for a (free) account, you can review the books and discuss them with other food-minded individuals.
A few of the freely-available cookbooks are well-known, like Fannie Farmer’s A New Book of Cookery, but there are also less-familiar gems like A Treatise on the Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons. Yikes.
There’s more to Foodsville than just cookbooks; I found myself sucked in several times by the “Daily Feed” a collection of about five links on topics ranging from Dumpster Diving to Tamil Cuisine to Popcorn. There are recipes to try, books available for purchase, and groups to join. Even if you’re not looking for another social network, it’s worth taking a little tour of what Foodsville has to offer.
Email This Post to a Friend
Kate: Thanks for the nice mention of Foodsville. Just thought I’d let you know a couple of things about our plans for Foodsville. The Free Library will be growing regularly. There are currently 300 cookbooks in the pipeline, but we will be adding about 25 cookbooks each week. This coming Tuesday, for instance, you will find 27 more books in the Free Library. Many of the future books will not be available anywhere else on the internet, because Applewood Books will be digitizing these from Culinary collections, both private and public. Our goal (why think small?) is to have every cookbook published before 1925 available to be read for free on the site. In addition, every cookbook in the free library can be ordered in a print edition. These books are shipped within 24 hours of your order, and we are currently offering them at an introductory discount of 30%. In addition, nearly every other cookbook that is in print (about 10,000 titles) are available at the same discount through Foodsville. Thanks, again for visiting and writing about our new community.