San Antonio's cookbook archive keeps the recipes families wrote by hand

The handwriting changes from one cook to another in a set of Mexican recipe notebooks held in San Antonio.[1] The library catalogue identifies their authors as women from one Durango family, writing in ink and pencil in the early 20th century.[1]

Their notebooks belong to UT San Antonio Libraries' Mexican Cookbook Collection.[1] It began in 2001 with more than 500 books donated by San Antonio librarian Laurie Gruenbeck, who had collected them during three decades of travel through Texas and Mexico.[1]

Among the collection's older manuscripts is a cookbook dated 1789.[1] Its title records an unusually precise finishing time: Friday, at eight at night.[1] The catalogue lists orange soup among its recipes, alongside main dishes and desserts.[1]

For readers curious about family cooking, those catalogue entries offer something a polished recipe alone cannot: a family connection, different handwriting, or a record of when someone finished copying a book.[1] The collection preserves those details alongside published cookbooks.[1]

The public can read a growing selection online.[3] In an April 2026 update, Special Collections reported that more than 170 Mexican cookbooks had been digitized.[3] That was still only a fraction of the collection, the library cautioned.[3]

The online selection includes handwritten books spanning the 18th through 20th centuries and printed works such as the 1831 El cocinero mexicano.[3] It also includes La cocina en el bolsillo, a series of pocket cookbooks from the 1890s.[3] Two issues have covers illustrated by José Guadalupe Posada.[3]

The library describes the digitized books as free to read and download.[3] Those scans let readers consult the historical pages themselves, rather than depend entirely on a modern selection of recipes or an editor's transcription.[3]

Cooking from them takes a different kind of reading.[2] In 2020, the library published a dessert volume in its bilingual Recetas series.[2] Its editors warned that early manuscript recipes often assumed an experienced cook who needed few instructions.[2] Handwriting, damaged pages and crossed-out text could also complicate transcription.[2]

The volume's rice pudding, taken from an 1831 cookbook, begins with milk, rice and cinnamon.[2] A second preparation builds on that base with spices, egg yolks and nuts, then layers the pudding with dry sponge-cake crumbs and cream.[2] Its optional topping is set beneath a heated comal.[2]

That preparation asks a reader to think about a cooking vessel, the arrangement of heat and the texture of a dish.[2] The editors present Spanish transcriptions alongside English versions, keeping the older wording available for comparison.[2]

At one point, the English rice-pudding instructions call for some egg yolks without specifying how many.[2] The cook has to supply the judgment the page leaves out.[2] Elsewhere in the San Antonio collection, a family supplied its own record in pencil and ink, each woman's handwriting still distinguishable in the catalogue's description.[1]