Fond of cooking? Check out this archive of old Filipino cookbooks from pre-1976
Fond of cooking and history?
Foodie and Lokalpedia founder John Sherwin Felix took to Facebook to share an internet archive of Filipino cookbooks from pre-1976 from a Reddit thread by user Chill_Boi_0769 in December 2024.
"So Erwan (Heussaff) shared this Google Drive link with me this morning, which he found on Reddit. I researched the original post by Chill_Boi, who compiled Philippine cookbooks dating as far back as 1908!" he wrote.
In the Reddit post, Chill_Boi_0769 shared that he has been a fan of Historical Cooking, and has started collecting Filipino cookbooks since. The user is a fan of YouTube creators: Tasting History, Townsends, How To Cook That, and English Heritage and this led him to look for cookbooks in the Philippines.
“Realizing the importance of sharing knowledge, I am going to allow access to my online collection of Filipino cookbooks all before 1976, almost half a century ago,” he wrote.
The compilation, which is also available on the Internet Archive website for easy navigation, features Filipino cookbooks, including one that dates back to 1908.
Some of the works included are Pat Limjuco Dayrit's Favorite Filipino Recipes published in 1975, which you can still buy a copy of online; Maria Santos Luna and Arsenia Ibita's Bagong Cookbook ng mga Putahe at Kakaning Pilipino; and the Life and Work of Maria Y. Orosa, a food technologist and war heroine who invented banana ketchup.
There are also old cookbooks for beginners, regional cuisines, cookbooks featuring Filipino foods cooked in other places like in the United States, and a compilation of recipes from the prisoners of the Japanese concentration camp during World War II in the Philippines.
If you wish to explore more cookbooks from foreign countries, the Redditor also compiled some here.
Chill_Boi_0769 personally shares that he has no ill intent in sharing the cookbooks. He hopes that it would awaken and interest the people in Filipino cuisine, especially historical ones. He also hopes that other people would search in their libraries for pre-1976 Filipino cookbooks, recipe books or home economics books, especially if they are uniquely provincial. Lastly, he notes to the public to spread the word about Filipino cuisine as much as possible.
