The 76 cookbooks selected for Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project are from MSU's Cookery Collection, which totals more than 7,000 cookbooks and spans seven centuries. The collection, housed in Special Collections - a division of the MSU Library, features cookbooks written in many different languages from throughout the world
It is especially strong in early English cookery and in nineteenth and twentieth-century American cookbooks, thanks to two major gifts: the Mary Ross Reynolds Cookery Collection, and the Beatrice V. Grant Cookbook Collection. There is an important collection of Jewish cookbooks, and an effort is underway to collect community cookbooks, especially those with Michigan origins. Related to this is the Michigan Cookbook Project, an initiative to collect all cookbooks produced by groups and organizations with ties to Michigan.
Recently a new direction for collecting has been regions related to the African diaspora. As a result, there are growing collections of African-American cookery, Caribbean cookery, South American cookery, and West and Central African cookery. Besides cookbooks, the collection includes substantial numbers of cookery and food related ephemera, menus, and serial holdings.
Thanks to the generous support of the Beatrice V. Grant Cookery Endowment,
we continue to add important cookbooks to further strengthen the Cookery
Collection.