Photography. Productivity. Tricks. A Recipe for Collecting Cookbooks. Move over Hemingway, Steinbeck and Twain.
Humble cookbooks have become highly desirable in the book collecting world. The American cookbook genre truly began in the 1700s with two titles that can claim to be America’s first cookbook – The Compleat Housewife by William Parks (1742) and American Cookery by Amelia Simmons (1796). The Compleat Housewife was derived from an English book, while American Cookery - which is still in print today - features recipes using solely American produce. Many collectors are drawn to these older books because they catered for kitchens before electricity, microwaves, and refrigerators.