This page is dedicated to focusing on projects that are similar to What America Ate (WAA), with both it’s content and functions. The projects that share similarities with WAA are: Early American Cookbooks and What’s on the Menu?. Both of these projects that I came across, I thought that they each were worth sharing because they hold similar components when compared to WAA in terms of appealing visual design and collections of historical cookbooks and recipes. Below you will read about each of the alike projects with connections that they have with WAA.
Early American Cookbooks
Early American Cookbooks, was created in January 2017 by Gioia Stevens, Special Collections Cataloger, at the New York University Libraries. As stated on their about page, this project was created as a capstone project for the Digital Humanities track of the Master of Liberal Studies program at the CUNY Graduate Center.
The primary purpose of Early American Cookbooks is to create a collection of American cookbooks that are free to the public for educational purposes. By doing this, people are able to search the online collection and locate specific cookbooks and recipes from American history. This project also utilized digital humanities tools to analyze trends and patterns, not just within individual recipes in books, but also the history of American culture. Just like What America Ate, this project displays recipes from the Great Depression era. Reading recipes from this historical moment, educates individuals about how people in that time lived their lives and got through their economic struggles. Early American Cookbooks relates back to What America Ate because they both serve almost the same purpose with the same era. With the use of both projects, people are able to observe how food was prepared and consumed by the public. It also explains how this was the turning point of diets and nutrition in the past. Both, What America Ate and Early American Cookbooks offer a vast collection of historical recipes from the Great Depression for educational purposes and opportunities for today’s society.
What’s on the Menu?
What’s on the Menu?, was created by The New York Public Library, one of the largest restaurant menu collections in the world. As stated on their website:
The New York Public Library’s menu collection, housed in the Rare Book Division, originated through the energetic efforts of Miss Frank E. Buttolph (1850-1924), who, in 1900, began to collect menus on the Library’s behalf.
Miss Buttolph had collected more than 25,000 historical menus to the library’s collection before she left in 1924. Similar to What America Ate, What’s on the Menu? consists of over 45,000 menus from between the 1840’s-2018. This collection is continuously growing and new menus are being discovered and created. This project allows users to navigate through the vast collection to find recipes from hundreds of years in the past. What America Ate utilized an interact map that allows users to narrow down recipes between states; however, What’s on the Menu? utilizes a timeline with the same function. With the help of the interactive timeline, you are able to move the arrow to the time period that you want to find recipes from the selected time period.
The project’s greatest strength lies in the amount of menus that have been transcribed by volunteers and are now digitally available for your convenience. Now that recipes are easily legible, historians, chefs, novelists and everyday food enthusiasts can effectively search and locate exactly what they are looking for.
