Favorite online food reference works

[Goat Hill Studio]

I live near the Culinary Institute of America, with its great library, but can't always make it there and am unfamiliar with online sites, especially when I'm on deadline and it's snowing, like this past week.

What are your favorite online food reference Web sites, paid or free? If you use free sites, which are the most reliable? If you can only afford to subscribe to a couple, which ones are they?

I hope this is the right forum for this kind of question. Thanks in advance for your help.

Frank

[Gifted Gourmet]

Could you be a bit more specific when you refer to online food reference Web sites, Frank?

In which areas? There are a bazillion websites devoted to various foods, countries, measurements, specialties, books, writings, etc. etc.

just one example of how exhaustive the sites are ... the Bibliography on Italian Food, Books, libraries & online resources thread ....

What kind of food sites do you enjoy reading?

[SuzySushi]

It depends upon what kind of information you're seeking, but here are a few of the sites I use when I'm seeking a quick fact:

The Cook's Thesaurus

Epicurious.com Food Dictionary

Food History Links

The Food Timeline

Gernot Katzer's Spice Pages

Online Metric Conversions

USDA Nutrient Database

[jgm]

For certain kinds of things, www.food411.com is great.

Credit should be given to andiesenji, who suggested it a few weeks ago.

[Gifted Gourmet]

Perhaps you'll find everything you need reference-wise in this thread ... lots and lots of information!

[Goat Hill Studio]

Thanks for these leads. I wasn't familiar with many of these.

I have used www.foodtimeline.org, but have run into questions about accuracy when I've tried to verify a fact and so wondered about its reliability. Same with www.whatscookingamerica.net. I also like www.epicurious.com and the USDA site.

I've had particular problems researching certain ethnic cuisines, in terms of trusting the sources' accuracy and reliability, that I've written about or wanted to write about. I've been unable to find much on Minahasan cooking and relied on sites by Indonesian restaurants and hotels, but this is a specialized topic.

For Jamaican cooking I found www.jamaicans.com and some restaurant sites but wondered if there were reliable one-stop-shop reference sites.

Do you rely on restaurant and other commercial sites when researching certain cuisines?

I know many books that are reliable food resources, but am less familiar with Web sites. I wondered if any of the world food history or similar food dictionaries, like the ones referenced in Melissa's link, were available online by subscription, for example. The few I checked didn't seem to be.

I hope this clarified my question and thanks for your help.

A

[Gifted Gourmet]

The online information is almost overwhelming when one uses the search term "world food history" ... one example came up from Yahoo which has a number of links:here .... but from there on out, it is simply a matter of sifting out the best and bookmarking the stuff which one considers reliable and useful.

[andiesenji]

There are a great many ethnic food sites but the ones to which I turn most often are these:

Carnige-Mellon Computer School recipe list

and Global Gastronomer

Which in turn, has a huge number of links for every cuisine you can imagine.

Edited December 19, 2005 by andiesenji (log)