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Culinary History and Cookbook Collection at RBSC

About the Culinary Collections

The Cookbook and Menu collection was formed in the late 1960s and is primarily devoted to cookbooks and menus, although it is augmented by books dealing with related subject matters as well as archival material. The collection is particularly notable for its food-related ephemera and community cookbooks. It now contains over 5,300 titles and some 470 menus. The core of the collection is primarily twentieth-century material, but there are significant nineteenth-century holdings including a long run of editions and revisions of Mrs. Beaton's Book of Household Management (first published in 1859). The collection includes a large number of ephemeral items produced by flour mills, sugar refiners and manufacturers that include recipes. To the original collection have been added some 400 cookbooks collected by Vanna Garnier, as well as some 545 cookbooks donated by Soeur Berthe Sansregret, longtime director of the cooking division of the Ecole supérieure des arts et métiers in Montreal. The Doncaster Recipes Collection contains over 1,300 handwritten recipes and related material (including table settings presented as riddles), from various places in South Yorkshire, England, dating from around 1780 to 1860. Elsewhere, the Julian Armstrong Fonds represents Armstrong’s career as a food writer, primarily for the Montreal Gazette, including detailed research files on regional Quebec foodways.

 

Access to the collection: Researchers are able to request catalogued material directly via the McGill Library catalogue, while all other material, including material catalogued on the McGill Archival Catalogue, may be requested by contacting the librarian. Requests can also be made by visiting the Rare Books and Special Collections reading room. A number of titles have been digitized and are available via Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/mcgilluniversityrarebooks.

Librarian & curator: Jacquelyn Sundberg, Outreach Librarian (e-mail: jacquelyn.sundberg@mcgill.ca)

Guides

There are many other McGill subject guides that may be of use to you.

McGill Guides

External Guides

Reference Books

Selected reference sources for Canadian culinary history

Global Food History Sources

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