Rare and Manuscript Collections

The Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections offers outstanding research materials on the history of wine, food, agriculture, cookery, gastronomy, and restaurants. Prominent among Cornell’s food history collections are: an assemblage of thousands of rare books on wine, cookery, and food production and consumption from the 15th century to the present; The Eastern Wine and Grape Archive, dedicated to preserving the history of the grape growing and wine production industry East of the Mississippi; and collections preserving more than 10,000 restaurant, banquet, airline, and ship menus from the 1850s to the present.

Other materials relevant to the study of food history include: early hand-written recipe books and household manuals; 18th century French pamphlets on food supply and distribution published during the Revolutionary period; collections of ephemera such as advertising broadsides and sales catalogs promoting food, beverages, kitchen and farming equipment, and cooking utensils. Substantial archival collections on agriculture, nutrition, food science, food sustainability and home economics provide additional resources for the study of food production and consumption.

The Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections also features significant materials on the history of wine and alcoholic beverages. In addition to materials in the Eastern Wine and Grape Archive, RMC preserves several hundred rare books and manuscripts on the consumption of wine, beer and alcohol for entertaining, and on the moral, economic and physical consequences of alcohol consumption dating from the 17th century to the present; rare books on wine making methods dating from the 16th onward; the papers and publications of American temperance societies and reformers; and materials documenting cocktail culture from the prohibition period onwards.