---
dataset: vintage-recipes-hf
annotations_creators: [found]
language: [en]
license: cc-by-nc-4.0
pretty_name: Vintage American Recipes (1940–1999)
task_categories:
  - text-generation
  - recipe-generation
size_categories: 1K<n<10K
source_datasets: []
---

# 🍽️ Vintage American Recipes Dataset (1940–1999)

This curated dataset features a selection of vintage American recipes extracted from unpublished church cookbooks, bulletins, and local magazines spanning 1940 to 1999. Each recipe is cleaned and structured in JSON format, including fields such as title, ingredients, instructions, category, and year.

Over the years, I’ve been collecting a large archive of 10,000+ pre-internet recipes from cookbooks, newspapers, churches, schools, and community contributors. This dataset represents the first public release, showcasing a small but meaningful portion of this collection.

If you're interested in machine learning, historical analysis, or culinary projects and would like access to the full dataset, feel free to reach out!


## 📦 Dataset Structure

- Format: JSON
- Number of records: 77 (in this version)
- Fields:
  - `title`
  - `ingredients`
  - `instructions`
  - `category`
  - `year`

## 🔍 Use Cases

- Recipe generation
- Historical food analysis
- Fine-tuning models (GPT-2, GPT-J, LLaMA)
- Text classification or clustering

## 🔖 License

This dataset is licensed under [CC BY-NC 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

## 🙋 Author

Created and curated by **Donglin Xiong** (@donglin1608)

## 🧠 Example

```json
{
  "title": "Grandma’s Apple Pie",
  "ingredients": [
    "6 apples, sliced",
    "1 cup sugar",
    "2 tsp cinnamon",
    "1 pie crust"
  ],
  "instructions": "Mix all ingredients. Place in crust. Bake at 375°F for 45 minutes.",
  "category": "Dessert",
  "year": 1955
}