A look at a selection of cookbooks the Library of Congress digitized in 2025, including – a couple of community cookbooks, a 1928 Girl Scout camp and trail guide, an early Chinese-American recipe book and a book on candy-making.
Prior to 1930’s, the chocolate chip cookie, we know and love today, did not exist. The Library of Congress has a copy of Ruth Wakefield’s 1938 “Toll House Tried and True Recipes” (New York, M. Barrows and Company) that contains what food historians consider the first published chocolate chip cookie recipe.
The quintessentially American holiday, Thanksgiving evokes images of vast dinner spreads, centered on turkey, and as we cook and bake, prepare and labor on these elaborate feasts, who has time to think about breakfast? Well, some cook book authors in the 1900s didn’t forget breakfast when they shared their Thanksgiving day menus.
Today, our beloved bottles of ketchup are consistent and shelf-stable thanks to the work of Katherine and Arvill Bitting who examined over 1,600 bottles of ketchup, visited 40 canneries producing tomato pulp, and toured 20 ketchup factories to come up with a method to make a safe and preservative-free ketchup.
Remembering President Carter and First Lady Rosalynn Carter with recipes and stories from cookbooks that feature the Carter family and the community of Plains, Georgia.