Quote:
Originally Posted by bgalbrecht
Just be aware that any Kindle or epub files you download from Internet Archive are not proofread, straight from the OCR and can be somewhat unreadable. Some of them may be found at Project Gutenberg Cookbook Bookshelf, where they have been proofread and reformatted. The Virginia Houswife can be found here. You might find that these cookbooks are more of interest to see what sorts of things they were making, but not like modern cookbooks where you get a more precise list of ingredients, times and temperatures. The ingredients used might be something you can only get if you special order it from a specialty butcher. When was the last time you saw a whole calf's head at your supermarket? |
Good reminder about possible issues with the quality of the printing. Hopefully the blog guy vetted all of the books at least to that extent, although it would take a while to flip through all of the pages.
Yeah, there are more and more sources now for the same old books, thankfully. If you find a bad one somewhere, you might be able to find a good copy somewhere else. And, on the Internet Archive I've noticed that there are often multiple copies of the same book, scanned apparently by different people from different copies from different libraries. Often I have to manually view all of the options to see which one is the best and, therefore, the one that I wish to download. Nice problem to have, though.
Yeah, I can see where the ingredients thing might be a problem. Maybe there's a website or modern book or something that would help out there, but I'm not specifically aware of it. It seems like one or more people have passed along information on this thread about such things, too.