Culinary History and Cookbook Collection at RBSC

The McGill Library Catalogue uses subject headings from the Library of Congress. These subject headings act like hashtags by categorizing books and other resources according to topic, and can be used effectively as search words for finding material.

The subject heading used for culinary history that is most useful is Cooking—Canada. Searching this term, instead of others such as "culinary history" or "cookery"  or "Cookbooks" will yield wider results since resources in this category will include as many relevant titles as possible regardless of the term used by the author of a particular book.

Cooking—Canada can be further categorized according to subtopics. For example:

• Cooking—Canada—History
• Food habits—Canada—History
• Food—Social aspects—History—Canada
• Restaurants—History

If specifically searching for cookbooks, Cookbooks is the general subject heading to use. If looking for books from a specific province or city in Canada, then searching those terms will yield more relevant results:

• Cookbooks—Quebec (Province)—Sutton
• Cooking—Quebec (Province)

If you are looking for material on specific foods or ingredients, there will sometimes be more specific subject headings:

Other useful Subject Headings include:

• Community cookbook

• Cooking, Canadian

It is not necessary to know all the available subject headings in order to search. You can start with a keyword search using elements of the examples above. Then, look within the records of any books that seem useful to find out what categories the book is in and then select one in order to find others on the same topic. Subject headings appear in catalogue records, and can be clicked on like hashtags to bring up more results.