Community and Advertising Cookbooks Collection

The Community Cookbooks are produced by volunteers from organizations such as schools, churches, associations, etc. Normally these cookbooks were for fund-raising purposes, and some others were for publicizing the community, and some were used as a way to display local history and traditions. The books reflect the food habits of the local community and a lot of them contain historical stories and their own drawings which add a lovely character to the books and also give the readers lots of interesting background information along with the delicious local recipes. Special Collections houses over 300 community cookbooks.

The Advertising Cookbooks came in the form of recipe booklets produced by food or cookware businesses as bonus items for their customers. The recipes are created around and based on their products are a clever way of promoting their goods. They provided readers inspiration for change of cooking equipment and food brands over the time.