Cookbook Database Is History of People
Humans are recorders. We’ve been recording things for centuries. We drew everyday life on the insides of caves. We documented the number of livestock we owned. Today, we’ve evolved to journal every aspect of our existence, from the clothes we wear to the food we eat. We are what we eat, and as early as the 1st Century, we were recording what we consumed. For twenty-five years, it was Barbara Ketcham Wheaton’s job to curate the cookbook collection at the Schlesinger Library at Cambridge, Massachusetts’ Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. For twice that amount of time, she has been feverishly creating a database of all the recipes, ingredients, and cookbooks recorded in Europe and America.
