Edna Staebler biography

Edna (Cress) Staebler was a celebrated author of cookbooks and creative non-fiction.

Born January 15, 1906 in what is now known as Kitchener (then Berlin), Staebler spent most of her life in the Kitchener-Waterloo region and remained a resident there until her death in Sept. 2006.

She attended the University of Toronto, graduating in 1929 with her Bachelor of Arts and went on to become a teacher after graduating from the Ontario College of Education in 1931. Her teaching career was short lived, however, as she was dismissed after performing back-flips for her physical education class.

She married in 1933, but her amateur writing was not supported by her husband. The two divorced in 1962, with no children.

Staebler did not start writing professionally until her forties. Her career began when she published an article in Maclean's magazine (1948), about a trip she had taken with her husband to Cape Breton. This blossomed into twenty years of writing for magazines and newspapers such as Maclean's, Chatelaine, the Toronto Star, Readers Digest and others.

A Maclean's story about old order Mennonites won the Canadian Women's Press Club award in 1950. Staebler had spent the previous year living with a Mennonite family in Woolwich Township, where her Mennonite great-great-great-grandfather had been the first permanent settler. It was her experience with the tasty food of the old order Mennonites that led Staebler to write Canada's best selling hardcover cookbook, Food That Really Schmecks (1968). This grew to become a trilogy with More Food That Really Schmecks (1979), and Schmecks Appeal (1987).

Staebler wrote five major historical books. For each she spent time living with the various peoples on whom her books were based. She lived with miners of Northern Ontario, an Italian family in Toronto, and members of a Hutterite colony on the Prairies, to name a few. Her first major historical book was Cape Breton Harbour (1972), a work of 'creative non-fiction' that had taken five years to write.

Staebler received numerous honours in recognition of her outstanding accomplishments, including a Doctor of Letters from Wilfrid Laurier University (1984) and the Order of Canada (1996), the highest non-military honour in the country. She established an annual award for a book of creative non-fiction, administered by Wilfrid Laurier University, and the Writer-in-Residence program at the Kitchener Public Library, of which she was a board member for twenty-three years.

An avid birdwatcher and cook, Edna Staebler still found time to continue her writing in her later years.