Eunice Tarr lives in a narrow brick rowhouse on Benefit Street in Providence, two doors down from the John Brown House Museum. She has lived there since 1974. The house is on three floors. The cookbooks occupy two of them.
The collection began with a single book, a 1902 edition of Fannie Merritt Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, given to Tarr by her aunt Pearl in 1968 as a wedding present.
Tarr did not become a serious collector until 1981, after she completed a master's thesis at Brown University on the rise of American home economics. The thesis sent her into the cookbook stacks at the John Hay Library, and she did not entirely come back.
The collection now numbers 3,612 American cookbooks, all of them first published between 1880 and 1950. There are also about four hundred related items — pamphlets, manuscript receipt books, advertising booklets from flour and shortening manufacturers, and a small group of community church cookbooks from across New England.
Tarr keeps the cookbooks in custom oak shelves built in 1985 by a Pawtuxet cabinetmaker named Henry Aubin. The shelves are designed for the average dimensions of an American cookbook of the period, which Tarr measured for Aubin from a sample of two hundred volumes.
The shelves take up the entire second floor, which was once two bedrooms and a sitting room. The walls between them were removed in 1984 with the consent of the Providence Historic District Commission.
Tarr's arrangement is by year of publication, then by author. She has resisted the urge to organize by region, cuisine, or social class, although she keeps a separate index that allows her to find any of those things quickly.
The index is on paper. It is a card file of about forty thousand cards, each cross-referenced to a book and a page. Tarr made the cards herself, in pencil, over a period of thirty-one years. She is now adding cards at the rate of about a hundred a month.
The strongest decade in the collection is 1900 to 1910, which contains 612 volumes. Tarr considers this the decade in which American cookbook publishing became an industry, and her shelves reflect the moment in unusual completeness.
She has every edition of Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book from the first in 1896 through the twenty-third printing of 1942. She has all eighteen editions of Mrs. Sarah Tyson Rorer's Philadelphia Cook Book.
She has the complete run of the Settlement Cook Books published by the Milwaukee Jewish Mission between 1901 and 1948. She has the 1894 first edition of The White House Cook Book by Hugo Ziemann and Fanny Lemira Gillette.
What she does not have, after forty-five years of looking, is a clean first printing of the 1881 first edition of Abby Fisher's What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking. She has bid on three over the years, in 1996, 2008, and 2019, and lost each time.
It is the one book I will keep trying for, she said. The others have come on their own time. That one I am hunting.
Tarr cooks from the books. She keeps a kitchen notebook of which recipes she has tried and what she changed. The notebook, started in 1981, is now in its eleventh volume. She estimates she has cooked from about two hundred of the books.
She prefers the small community cookbooks. The Newton Highlands Congregational Church Cook Book of 1908, she said, has the best yeast-roll recipe in the collection. The 1923 Hopewell Junction Methodist Ladies' Aid Cook Book has a baked-bean recipe she has used annually for thirty-eight years.
She has corresponded for over twenty years with Barbara Wheaton, the historian of European and American cookery whose own collection went to the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. The correspondence is kept in a single archival box on the second-floor landing.
Tarr's collection has been valued, most recently in October 2025, at $284,000. She does not insure it for that amount. She insures the building.
She has arranged, through her will, for the collection to be donated to the Providence Public Library on the condition that the books remain shelved together as a single named archive. The library agreed in February 2024.
I do not want them scattered into a general cookery section, Tarr said. The collection means something only as a whole. Separately they are old books.
She is seventy-eight. She is in good health. She continues to acquire about thirty cookbooks a year, mostly from a dealer in Hanover, New Hampshire who knows the gaps in her decade-by-decade run.
On the day of the visit, Tarr was reading a 1917 pamphlet from the Pillsbury Flour Mills Company on the use of war-substitution flours during the First World War. She had marked four pages with paper slips. She said the pamphlet was, by her current count, the 3,613th item.
I am behind on the cards, she said. The card for that pamphlet has not been written yet. I will write it tonight.