Hockey News

 There's Not Much
  I figure that the title will attract thousands since there has been no hockey news since the final game of the Stanley Cup was played a few days ago. A few days from now, the quest for the Cup will begin again. Until then, here is some Canadian hockey news to get you through the lean times. It will also allow me to push the post about Stalin down the page.
  Our Prime Minister played hockey and, if you are not impressed, I will add that he played for Harvard University. He did not play much, but was a dedicated and hard-working team member who was still able to graduate magna cum laude in 1987.
   I know all of this because of an article in The Athletic, which is the company that the New York Times bought to cover sports, which, let's face it, aren't as good as they once were. Still, the subject is valued by some and a subscription to the NYT necessary if you want to access the content provided by the sweat-stained wretches at The Athletic, who are probably located in another borough. The bits below about Carney and hockey at Harvard are from the following piece and they have been edited extensively so I won't be accused of stealing the prose for which you are unwilling to pay.
   I will say that the article is better than the title: "Cheap Beer and a Suspect Blocker: Before Mark Carney Was Canada's Prime Minister, He Was Harvard's No. 3 Goalie," [I suppose that some in the U.S would say that it was a demotion], Fluto Shinzawa, New York Times, April 30. 2025.

 Mark Benning knew his job. The Harvard defenseman’s priority was to retrieve pucks and deliver them quickly and accurately to Scott Fusco, Lane MacDonald and Tim Barakett, the Crimson’s talented forwards.
   To get to pucks first, Benning required timely on-ice arrivals. It was up to Harvard’s No. 3 goalie to open the bench door at just the right moment to let his puck-moving defenseman pounce onto the ice at full speed. Mark Carney took the job seriously. He did it well. 
   It was one of many things the future politician mastered during his time at Harvard. Hockey wasn’t his professional destiny, but the Canadian prime minister has deep connections to it, from his college playing days to his Oilers fandom to a close friendship with longtime NHL executive Peter Chiarelli....
   In the fall of 1983, Chiarelli moved into Straus Hall, his freshman dorm at Harvard. He met Greg Dayton, his new roommate.
  Two doors down, Chris Sweeney, Dayton’s best friend and fellow Belmont Hill grad, was settling in with an 18-year-old from Edmonton. Dayton went to visit Sweeney. Chiarelli tagged along and was introduced to Carney. The teenager that Chiarelli met in his first hour at Harvard would become his best man.

   “We would have connected even if we weren’t living that close together with each other,” says Chiarelli, who is from Nepean, Ontario. “Because we would be at the hockey rink.”
   Chiarelli was a forward. In 1983-84, the freshman played in 27 games. It was 27 more than Carney.
   That season, Carney was behind two goalies: Grant Blair, a sixth-round pick of the Calgary Flames, and Dickie McEvoy. Blair and McEvoy were very good NCAA goalies.
   Carney, meanwhile, was listed at 5-foot-9 and 160 pounds, undersized for the position. Regardless of his competitiveness and puck-handling touch, he had weaknesses his teammates could exploit.
   “I was going high blocker,” recalls Fusco when asked where he liked to shoot on Carney.
   “Low stick,” counters ex-teammate Randy Taylor.
   Carney’s situation did not change in seasons to come. John Devin entered the rotation, pushing Carney to practice part-time with the Harvard JV. 
   But on March 9, 1985, Carney got his chance. In Game 2 of the Eastern College Athletic Conference quarterfinals, Harvard was beating up on Colgate. Crimson coach Bill Cleary pulled Blair and replaced him with Devin. 
   Then in the third period, Devin got hurt. Carney came in. The sophomore stopped all five shots he saw. Harvard won 10-2.
   It was Carney’s first and final NCAA appearance.“His goals-against average is zero and his save percentage is 1.000,” Taylor says. “Let’s focus on that and not how many games he got in. For the chance that he got, he couldn’t have done any better.”
  In retrospect, Chiarelli, former general manager of the Boston Bruins and the Oilers and current vice president of hockey operations for the St. Louis Blues, believes Carney would have been good enough to be a No. 2 goalie elsewhere in the ECAC. 
  “He was realistic,” Chiarelli says. “He was good at the sport and he loved it, but he wasn’t going to change schools.”
Carney did not go to Harvard to be a hockey player.....
   After freshman year, Chiarelli, Carney and Dayton moved out of Straus. They lived together in Winthrop House. Their room became a second home for Benning. 
   The defenseman had started his college career at Notre Dame. Benning transferred to Harvard after the Fighting Irish shifted to club status in 1983. In 1984-85, his first year at Harvard, Benning lived off campus in Inman Square, a residential and commercial neighborhood in Cambridge. Instead of walking back to his apartment after practice, Benning became what he termed Carney’s adopted roommate. 
   On Saturday nights, after home games at the Bright Center, Carney and his teammates were regulars at the Piccadilly Filly. Funds were tight. Beverage quality was not the priority.
   “All of us were pretty cheap,” says Benning, now the founder of a venture capital firm called Excelsior. “The cheapest beer we could find.”
   Fusco, the founder of Edge Sports Center in Bedford, Mass., is Harvard’s all-time leading scorer with 240 points. He won the Hobey Baker Award as college hockey’s top player in 1986. He had help getting there.
   Fusco, 62, remembers wind-lashed walks from the Harvard quad across the Anderson Memorial Bridge to practice at the Bright Center like they happened yesterday. He liked getting to the rink early to work on his shot. 
   As Fusco crossed the Charles River, Carney was usually at his side. The goalie with no shot at playing was happy to stand in net while Fusco ripped off pucks for 45 minutes before practice.
Carney was there to serve."

   If you are interested in Carney and college hockey and politics see: "Mark Carney: College Hockey's First Prime Minister," Adam Wodon, College Hockey News, March 12, 2025. 

The Bonus: 
  His wife, Diana Fox Carney, also played hockey and lived on a pig farm, among other, much higher endeavours. 
   If you are more interested in music than sports, note that our Prime Minister likes heavy metal: "HEADBANGER TO HEAD BANKER: Heavy Metal Fan to Run the Bank of England," Steve Hawkes, The Sun, Nov. 27, 2012.
"5 OF MARK'S FAVE TUNEs
1 Back in the Black - AC/DC
2 For Those About to Bail Out Northern Rock, We Salute You - AC/DC
3 Rates of Spades - Motorhead
4 Number of the Beast - Iron Maiden
5 Cash-mir - Led Zeppelin.

Beyond the Palewall (7)

["Beyond the Palewall" is the title of this series because "Beyond the Paywall' is taken. Information for which you are not willing to pay, along with information you may not wish to know, is presented in abbreviated form without charge. What has caught my eye may sometimes feel like a poke in yours and, in that sense, be beyond the pale. Items will appear weekly, or perhaps monthly, or maybe semi-annually, if I can get started and the weather is bleak.]

   Another dreary day as we begin the new year and I have been reading rather than writing. This means I will be copying again rather than creating, but the result for you is higher quality content. The first of the two items relates to the "culture wars", so you may wish to skip to the second which is about Northern Ontario. A slight warning, however, there are also skirmishes up there. 

1. Day of Epiphany
   A note appeared at the top of my screen informing me that today is such a day and when I read two stories about the same subject, I thought that some might be having one, an epiphany, that is. The articles are about the situation at Harvard and the departure of the president, Claudine Gay. The one in the Globe & Mail by Adrian Morrow offers a basic overview and this quotation which suggests the squabble is about larger issues:

“This really isn’t about plagiarism and antisemitism – although those issues are real and they are serious – what’s really going on is a conversation about race and diversity and anger on the right wing against the direction that elite universities have taken,” said Derek Penslar, a history professor and director of Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies.

Later, one of the consequences of the dispute is noted:

"Billionaire donors held back their contributions. Chief among them was Bill Ackman, who alleged Dr. Gay got her job because of her race. Mr. Ackman and other opponents of DEI said Dr. Gay’s publication record of 11 articles in two decades was too thin for the job she held."

   The article in the National Post, is much longer (two full pages) and it is authored by the Mr. Ackman quoted right above. The large issue to him is DEI and one might conclude from it that perhaps we are witnessing a "Christine Gay Moment", somewhat like the "George Floyd" one. Here is a small portion of what he wrote:

"I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.

Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that diversity, equity and inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.

I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing and more.

What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology."

He is a Harvard guy, by the way, and here is his answer to the question he raised, "What should happen?" His answer, in addition to Gay, all members of the Harvard board should also resign.

"The ODEIB should be shut down, and the staff should be terminated. The ODEIB has already taken down much of the ideology and strategies that were on its website when I and others raised concerns about how the office operates and who it does and does not represent. Taking down portions of the website does not address the fundamentally flawed and racist ideology of this office, and calls into further question the ODEIB’s legitimacy. [Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging.]

   Some Canadian readers may be experiencing an "Epiphany Moment" after reading that. Although "DEI" is still being nurtured here and HR departments expanded, the enthusiasm south of here has been replaced by outrage and DEI departments are being dismantled. The Chronicle of Higher Education even created a tool to keep a record of state legislative efforts to restrict or shut down DEI programs and there are many of them. Last month, a legislative proposal was introduced in the House "that would strip colleges of federal funding if they require employees, students or applicants to write diversity, equity and inclusion statements." (At some universities, faculty members and job candidates are required to write diversity statements as part of the promotion or hiring process.)

  Perhaps the most important part of that article is the link to another Ivy League university, the University of Pennsylvania, whose president also was forced to resign. The link is to, "A Vision For a New Future of the University of Pennsylvania", which is a proposed new constitution for that university and it is supported by over 1,700 university faculty. If you go through the list, you will see some names from Canadian universities.

   If one assumes that the fervour in favour of DEI initiatives at Canadian universities subsides and student protests continue, those on the northern campuses might benefit from having a look at Penn's "A Vision For a New Future...". As well, a document written almost 60 years ago at the University of Chicago, "The Kalven Report", is useful. In both, to put it simply, it is suggested that the universities remain neutral and speech free. If you borrow from them, do so carefully. 

2. Ring of Fire
  I will now have to keep this short. If the phrase above rings a bell, it probably was in relationship to a Johnny Cash song, not the area well north of Thunder Bay. That Ring encircles a lot of minerals, the extraction of which is, or may, be problematic. Perhaps not for the Ontario government which "has thrown its weight behind the Ring of Fire, and has committed to paying roughly half of the at least $2-billion that is needed to fund the roads. Premier Doug Ford has even said that he’s willing to “jump on a bulldozer,” if that’s what it will take to get construction underway." There are other Nations up that way, however, and "One big concern raised by environmentalists about development in the Ring of Fire is that pollution may destroy fish habitats in the rivers around Marten Falls, and disturb carbon-storing peat that is ubiquitous in this part of northern Ontario." An added complication: although it was remembered this time to consult with the Nations up there, they disagree about whether the resources should be developed or the Ring of Fire extinguished. All of this information should be read as it originally appears in:
"In Remote Ontario, Marten Falls First Nation Hopes to Move Past More Than 100 Years of Subjugation, As It Opens the Doorr to Critical Minerals Development and an All-Season Road That Will Change Their LIves," Niall McGee, G&M, Dec. 31, 2023. [Some of those among the Neskantaga Nation, don't agree.]

A portion of boreal forest in northern Quebec

   Here is another piece which should be read with the one above. While one often sees articles against old-growth logging out west, those about tree removal north of us are rarer. Now a study from down-under has raised some issues. This article is based on that study:

   "Canada’s Logging Industry Devours Forests Crucial to Fighting Climate Change: A study finds that logging has inflicted severe damage to the vast boreal forests in Ontario and Quebec, two of the country’s main commercial logging regions," Ian Austen and Vjosa Isai, New York Times, Jan. 4, 2024.

"Canada has long promoted itself globally as a model for protecting one of the country’s most vital natural resources: the world’s largest swath of boreal forest, which is crucial to fighting climate change.

But a new study using nearly half a century of data from the provinces of Ontario and Quebec — two of the country’s main commercial logging regions — reveals that harvesting trees has inflicted severe damage on the boreal forest that will be difficult to reverse.

Researchers led by a group from Griffith University in Australia found that since 1976 logging in the two provinces has caused the removal of 35.4 million acres of boreal forest, an area roughly the size of New York State.

While nearly 56 million acres of well-established trees at least a century old remain in the region, logging has shattered this forest, leaving behind a patchwork of isolated stands of trees that has created a landscape less able to support wildlife, according to the study. And it has made the land more susceptible to wildfire, scientists say."

The Study:

   "Assessing the Cumulative Impacts of Forest Management on Forest Age Structure Development and Woodland Caribou Habitat in Boreal Landscapes: A Case Study from Two Canadian Provinces," Brendan Mackey et al.

Land 2024, 13(1), 6; https://doi.org/10.3390/land13010006.

The Bonus:

For information about Canada's "Maple League Universities."

For a Canadian example of perhaps over zealous DEI training.

Biking About

 

   It is still the Victoria Day weekend and still cold, but I may go out for a bike ride. But, I may not. That is because, while sitting around inside doing nothing, I noticed the book jacket pictured above. I think you will admit, it is a rather good one, illustrating well the subjects covered. 

   How I happened upon this good cover, I don't recall. Honest! I do now have an e-bike and ride more than I used to, but I can't say I have noticed any issue with the seat. If there is any issue with the other issue, I would not know, given my advanced age. 

    I also do not know Mr. Bekman and this is not a plug for his book. I did see that it is available for a modest price and if you are having any seating problems it is readily available. Given the intellectual level of this blog, and that I offer only bespoke suggestions and references, here is one from an Ivy league source which I also just happened to happen upon. The title is: "Biking and Sex - Avoid the Vicious Cycle" and it is from the Harvard Medical School. You can read the entire report, but here are the "simple solutions" offered:

Don’t use a racing seat with a long narrow nose. Pick a wide seat, ideally with plenty of padding. Special gel-filled and shock-absorbing seats are even available.

Don’t tilt your seat upward, a position that increases pressure on the perineum.

Be sure your seat is at the correct height, so your legs aren’t completely extended at the bottom of your pedal stroke.

For extra protection, consider wearing padded biking pants.

Raise the handlebars so you are sitting more upright.

Shift your position and take breaks during long rides.

   Now that it is a bit warmer and I have offered a bit of useful advice, as well as mentioned the word "SEX", which will assist me in attracting more readers, I will go for a ride. 

FOOD HISTORY

     Recently I rounded-up some resources related to SOUND for anyone who wants to listen to the Internet. Here I have gathered together major sources for those interested in cooking or eating and for those who wish to know more about the history of food. I will assure you that the links provided below are worthy of a better introduction than the one provided here. In short, if you are looking for an old recipe, or are curious about whoever thought of the Turducken, you can begin your search here. I admit that, apart from offering this as a public service, this is all somewhat self-serving. If my wife, who is a very good cook, discovers this post I will surely benefit.

   We might as well begin with menus. Some specifically Canadian resources are offered near the bottom.

Menus

Culinary Institute of America 

“About this collection:
This selection of menus from The Culinary Institute of America Menu Collection features historical menus that are relevant to the Hudson Valley region, including menus from CIA restaurants, from restaurants and hotels in New York State and New York City, and from the Smiley Family Menu Collection. View all digitized menus from the CIA Menu Collection .”

Menus- The Art of Dining. The University of Nevada -Las Vegas
“Menus provide a wealth of information beyond their purely aesthetic value and are a particularly rich resource for aspects of cultural and social history. They give us information on the most popular cuisine of a time period and region and are evidence of changing culinary tastes.”
This site is very visually appealing. You can also find 17 Canadian menus.

What’s On the Menu? -New York Public Library
“We’re transcribing our historical restaurant menus, dish by dish, so that they can be searched by what people were eating back in the day.”


Database of Menus - Los Angeles Public Library
A database of menus from Los Angeles, other cities, steamships, airlines and banquets. Images of the actual menus are being added. The address and telephone number of the restaurant is given, plus the menu date, cuisine type, meal, and price range.

Omnibus Sites

Food Timeline 
Although no longer updated, this timeline is well-designed and comprehensive. Click on 1830 and find out how to make Worcestershire Sauce, or 1894 to learn about Eggs Benedict.
“The Food Timeline was created and maintained solely by Lynne Olver (1958-2015), a reference librarian with a passion for food history. About it she originally said " Information is checked against standard reference tools for accuracy. All sources are cited for research purposes. As with most historical topics, there are some conflicting stories in the field of food history. “

The Old Foodie

"A Food History Story and Recipe Every Weekday of the Year"

What’s Cooking America?
https://whatscookingamerica.net/History/HistoryIndex.htm
A site by Linda Stradley that is wide-ranging and covers the history of beverages as well as food - everything from “Chitlins’ to Crepes Suzette.

HISTORICAL COOKBOOKS

Keep in mind that you are being served only an appetizer. For more resources search library catalogues using such subject headings as Food-History, Cooking-History, Gastronomy and various subheadings. At the university close-by (Western) you can find this bibliography: English Cookery Books to the Year 1850, by A.W. Oxford and even a work done by a former faculty member: The Culinary Recipes of Medieval England : An Epitome of Recipes from Extant Medieval English Culinary Manuscripts, by Constance Hieatt. As well, links to old, out-of-print cookbooks are often provided and one can even print a copy. See, for example, by Hannah Glasse,  The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy:To Which are Added, One Hundred and Fifty New Receipts, a Copious Index, and a Modern Bill of Fare, for each Month, in the Manner the Dishes are Placed Upon the Table. (c.1783).
There are also related periodicals. For example, see Food & History which contains useful articles such as this one: “Printed Cookbooks: Food History, Book History, and Literature,” by Henry Notaker, Vol. 10, No.2, 2012.


If you are interested in the food history of the United Kingdom, you will find plenty of options. See, for example, these two: History of Food and Drink in the Institute of Historical Research Library and the Guildhall Library “Wine and Food” collection. ]

Cookbook History
     For an understanding of how some culinary collections are created see this very interesting article about an octogenarian librarian who has spent most of her life preparing a database of cookbooks: “The Archive of Eating....”, Bee Wilson, New York Times, Oct, 29, 2015.


19th and 20th Century Cookbooks from LeMoyne
     This excellent website if from the Noreen Reale Falcone Library at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, N.Y. Provided are links to hundreds of historical cookbooks from a variety of places with directions for preparing all kinds of food.

Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project - Michigan State
“The Feeding America project has created an online collection of some of the most important and influential American cookbooks from the late 18th to early 20th century. The digital archive includes page images of 76 cookbooks from the MSU Library's collection as well as searchable full-text transcriptions. This site also features a glossary of cookery terms and multidimensional images of antique cooking implements from the collections of the MSU Museum.”

Home Economics - Cornell University Library
“HEARTH is a core electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines. Titles published between 1850 and 1950 were selected and ranked by teams of scholars for their great historical importance. The first phase of this project focused on books published between 1850 and 1925 and a small number of journals. Future phases of the project will include books published between 1926 and 1950, as well as additional journals. The full text of these materials, as well as bibliographies and essays on the wide array of subjects relating to Home Economics, are all freely accessible on this site. This is the first time a collection of this scale and scope has been made available.
   This part relates to Food & Nutrition.
   This section covers Food, Wine & Culinary History.

Manuscripts & Menus - University of Iowa
Guide to the Szathmary Culinary Manuscripts


“Summary: Among the more than 20,000 items in Chef Szathmary's culinary arts collection are just over 100 German, Czech, Irish, English and American manuscript recipe books. There is also a group of manuscripts related to food from the Chicago writer Nelson Algren.”
See also the Szathmary Recipe Pamphlet Digital Collection.
“The University’s collection includes more than 4,000 promotional recipe pamphlets, published mainly by food and appliance manufacturers and trade associations (the majority are listed in this index).  Dating from the late 19th century to the present, this advertising ephemera reflects the evolution of the modern American diet.”

Virginia Tech
Food & Drink History Resources @Virginia Tech (and Beyond): Digital Collections & Exhibits
As the title suggests, this guide links you to some of the websites presented here as well as many others.

Major Library Collections

Books About Food History - Library of Congress
“This guide, a revision of Library of Congress Science Tracer Bullet 04-1, focuses on works on food history. The intent is to assist researchers in identifying resources and trends in food history studies, through a broad sampling of writings and bibliographies. Rather than being a comprehensive listing, the titles listed here are intended to give an idea of the breadth of information available, with the focus being on works published in English, during the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, and mainly in the United States, though other time periods and areas have occasionally been included. Not intended to be a comprehensive bibliography, this guide is designed--as the name of the series implies--to put the reader “on target.”

New York Public Library
Culinary History - New York Public Library
“The field of food and cookery has always held a strong interest for The New York Public Library. The retrospective collection on gastronomy and the history of foods is unusually extensive, and the cookbook collection alone numbers well over 16,000 volumes. From the beginning, the Library has sought out culinary materials from all regions of the country, and from all parts of the world, in all the languages in which it collects. Some highlights of the collections are described in an article in Biblion, The New York Public Library's journal, in the issue of Fall 1993 (vol. 2, no. 1).”

Canadian Culinary Sites

Culinary Historians of Canada
 Apart from the section “Canadian Cookbooks Online” be sure to look at “Further Resources” where the major Canadian sources relating to food are listed. For example, one finds a list of historic kitchens found in Canadian museums.

British Columbia Food History Network
“Our intent is to share research into the history of food in British Columbia. Our inquiries are wide-ranging and include such topics as early food production, food products, and food practices as well as the social, economic, political and cultural significance of foods produced and consumed in British Columbia.”
Apart from cookbooks it contains essays relating to food history and book reviews.

Canadian Library-Related Collections: Guelph University
Guelph hosts a major culinary collection.Unfortunately you will have visit Guelph to access the material. “Throughout its history, the University of Guelph has been at the forefront of foodways education and research. Guelph's Culinary Collections feature an impressive variety of books as well as manuscript and archival resources. With more than 17,000 published volumes, some of which date back to the 17th century, it ranks as one of the largest collections of cookbooks in North America. Two collections are especially large and contain a variety of important historical works: the Una Abrahamson Collection and the Canadian Cookbook Collection. They contain publications from many countries and highlight the development of cookery not only in Canada, but also in other parts of the world|

Canadian Cookbooks

     

Culinary Landmarks: A Bibliography of Canadian Cookbooks, 1825-1949, Elizabeth Driver

Culinary Landmarks is a definitive history and bibliography of Canadian cookbooks from the beginning, when La cuisinière bourgeoise was published in Quebec City in 1825, to the mid-twentieth century. Over the course of more than ten years Elizabeth Driver researched every cookbook published within the borders of present-day Canada, whether a locally authored text or a Canadian edition of a foreign work. Every type of recipe collection is included, from trade publishers' bestsellers and advertising cookbooks, to home economics textbooks and fund-raisers from church women's groups.The entries for over 2,200 individual titles are arranged chronologically by their province or territory of publication, revealing cooking and dining customs in each part of the country over 125 years.

Recently McGill-Queen's University Press re-issued a new edition of a Canadian classic for the modern cook:


“What did you eat for dinner today? Did you make your own cheese? Butcher your own pig? Collect your own eggs? Drink your own home-brewed beer? Shanty bread leavened with hops-yeast, venison and wild rice stew, gingerbread cake with maple sauce, and dandelion coffee - this was an ordinary backwoods meal in Victorian-era Canada. Originally published in 1855, Catharine Parr Traill’s classic The Female Emigrant’s Guide, with its admirable recipes, candid advice, and astute observations about local food sourcing, offers an intimate glimpse into the daily domestic and seasonal routines of settler life.
This toolkit for historical cookery, redesigned and annotated in an edition for use in contemporary kitchens, provides readers with the resources to actively use and experiment with recipes from the original Guide. Containing modernized recipes, a measurement conversion chart, and an extensive glossary, this volume also includes discussions of cooking conventions, terms, techniques, and ingredients that contextualize the social attitudes, expectations, and challenges of Traill’s world and the emigrant experience.”

   See also this new book from the University of Manitoba Press:
Snacks: A Canadian Food History, by Janis Thiessen.

A Few Special Topics

BBQ
An Updated and Tasty Reference Guide from the Library of Congress: “American Barbecue: History and Geography”

Local Cook Books - Lackawanna Valley
Funded by a grant from the Willary Foundation, this is a collection of historic cookbooks produced by churches and communities organization often containing rare and ethnic recipes.

Local Cook Books - Indiana
Service Through Sponge Cake
“The digital collection of cookbooks is a collaborative effort between the University Library and the Indianapolis Public Library and will focus on Indiana cookbooks dating from the turn-of-the-century, with a special emphasis on fundraising cookbooks published by churches, synagogues and other community organizations. The University Library has created the community cookbook collection using unique materials from the Indianapolis Public Library's collection of historic Indiana cookbooks. The online collection includes digital images of each cookbook in its entirety, plus in-depth descriptions of each item. The collection is fully text searchable and broadly available on the Web.”

Presidential Food
This guide includes: Books on Presidential Food, Individual Presidents, Related Titles, For Younger Readers, Representative Articles and additional Selected Online Resources.

The History of Food and Dining at Harvard
Apart from menus, there is even a section on Food Fights.

Literary Feasts

From The American Scholar - "The 11 Best Literary Feasts: Our Favorite Fictional Culinary Scenes," June 17, 2017.