The culinary history collection is also known as the Peacock Harper Culinary Collection. The same people and same systems support both but we've carefully labeled all the original Peacock and Harper donations so you can tell them apart.
A committee governs and advises on all aspects concerning the collections. The participants promote, guide, and preserve the collection to maintain our rich heritage of recipe books and many other aspects of culinary history. The VT Image Base contains over 700 images pertaining to culinary history and the collection.
We also offer a newsletter with interesting and timely articles, The Virginia Culinary Thymes.
Many Internet sites provide recipes and food information. That's great and we encourage you to visit them, but our goal is different: we support the preservationof a rich culinary history for reference and for scholarly research. With over 2000 books cataloged and archived, we have already achieved much. Please consider donating your books or making another form of support to help us fulfill our vision.
A Dollop of Philosophy
As cooking becomes less and less a home-based activity and as our society moves into new patterns of feeding itself, we believe that the work of the Peacock-Harper Culinary History Committee becomes ever more crucial, to document and preserve material on the culinary trends that shape our world.
Please take a moment to look at our site, check out the links, and examine the opportunities we offer for people bother here in Virginia and around the world to enjoy one of the best things about daily life--the food we eat.
As Julia Child said so well, "Bon appetit!"