Using Google Book Search to Find Recipes

Despite its somewhat controversial start, Google's Google Book Search is proving to be a popular and useful service. With Google Book Search it is not only possible to easily find books, many of which are out of print, but to also purchase or locate a library that contains a copy of the book. Books on which the copyright has expired are usually available on Google Book Search to view in their entirety. In other cases, copyright holders have given permission to make the entire digital copy available to viewers. The My Library feature of Google Book Search enables users to build their own on line library by saving links to favorite books. In addition to links, users can attach notes and tags to the links for their own use as well as write reviews of the books for the world to see.

Just as with the free library movement (from which the present public library system in the U.S. and other nations is descended) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Google has had to (and still has in some quarters) overcome the fear that making books available for free will destroy the commercial market for books. Experience in both cases has shown this to be false. In fact by exposing people to greater numbers of books and encouraging reading by making books available for free, the opposite has occurred with book sales booming as a result of the availability for free books. People, by nature, tend to be acquisitive and as they encounter books they like, tend to purchase them. Libraries and services like Google Book Search (Google is not the only organization engaged in scanning entire books and making them available on line - there are many others) are, in effect providing free marketing for book publishers. With libraries this is more of an unintended by product of their service while, in the case of Google, they are providing links to sellers where readers can click and purchase any book they like. The result has been a large increase in book sales as users of Google Book Search and other similar services find books they like and decide to purchase them. In essence, Google Book search is no different than the practice of big bookstores providing easy chairs for readers to browse through books without requiring that they purchase them - but let them browse through enough books and they will buy.

One of the nice things about services like Google Book Search is the ability to easily find and browse through old books. Some of these can be found in libraries but most have been discarded. Anyone interested in old recipes and cooking can find a treasure trove of material using Google Book Search. In addition to old, out of print cookbooks there are also numerous new ones available as well. Since, most new books allow a snippet of text to be shown, one can usually find a full recipe using Google Book Search. Not only that, but in the old full text cookbooks available, as well as many of the new books, the search result will often display a section with related recipes as well as the one being searched. Thus, when I went to Google Book Search to see what was available for cranberry sauce for my Cranberries - History and Recipes Hub article one of the books that came up was Cranberry Cooking for All Seasons by Nancy Cappelloni, a 135 page cookbook published n 2002 and consisting solely of recipes using cranberries. In addition to a variation of the traditional cranberry sauce recipe which I already had, it had a seven page section devoted to cranberry sauces and relishes with 28 different cranberry sauce and relish recipes.

The old cookbooks can be fascinating. Anyone who is interested in doing things the traditional way will find recipes for making various dishes using whole ingredients rather than mixes. Reading through these old recipes one can also see how the instructions and ingredients have evolved over time (things like using shortening or vegetable oils rather than animal fats like lard as in times past). One can get an idea of the history of a particular dish as well as an insight into daily life in the days when our great and great-great grandparents were alive.

The Industrial Revolution and rise of the middle class tended to break many links to the past and its customs. In the agricultural era, young women were raised to become housewives and were taught basic cooking and household management by their mothers. Things were simpler in that homes were smaller on average (log cabins tend to be small and even traditional lumber farm homes were kept small due to need for heating - a close look at old farm homes that are large will probably reveal that most of the size is due to later additions to the home), available food choices small and limited, and household tools for cooking and cleaning simple and limited. With the Industrial Revolution came more leisure time and more options for using it, greater varieties of food and more tools available for cooking and cleaning. Also, with growing wealth and more leisure time there was more entertaining and the need for more elaborate food preparation. In essence, women in the emerging middle class were encountering many of the choices that had previously only been available in previous eras to wealthy women with servants. However, with servants limited to the wealthy, the women of the new middle class had to learn to make use of the new household tools which were increasingly becoming substitutes for servants. They also had to learn how to manage their more complex households. It was at this time that people began compiling and publishing recipes either as stand-alone books or as sections of larger household management books.

Reading these books, especially the household management books can be both enlightening as well as entertaining (as well as probably sounding trite and patronizing to modern women). Go to Google Book Search and run some searches to see what daily life was like a hundred or so years ago.