Big News!  The New York Historical Society, which has been closed for renovation, will reopen tomorrow!  The reopening is from 11am-11pm on 11-11-11.  Kids under 13 are free all day, and adults get in free after 6pm.  There are special events, like a scavenger hunt, Big Quiz, and late night champagne party (swanky).  In addition, there’s the grand opening of the Dimenna Children’s Museum, and the new exhibit REVOLUTION! which has been recommended to me as a must see (the actual Stamp Act is there, for the first time outside of England !(thanks for the tip, Rachel!))

To celebrate the NYHS reopening, I’m going to celebrate their collections!  The library at the NYHS has immense culinary holdings, both in terms of a manscript collection and historic and vintage cookbooks.  And ANYONE can access them.  That’s the amazing and beautfiul thing about libraries: you can reqeust to look at a 200-year-old, handwritten manuscript, and they’ll BRING it to you, and you can TURN ITS PAGES.  It’s historic, yellowed, food-stained, love-worn pages.  Talk about a connection to the past.

Starting tomorrow, and continuing into next week, I’m going to feature a few gems from the NYHS collection: an historic New York manuscript, an ethnic cookbook from the turn of the 20th century, and a pamphlet entitled “Unusual Meats”.  I think I may have just summed up this blog in three books.

So join me in my mini-celebration, and learn more about the goings on at the NYHS here.