Canadian Cookbooks (1825-1949): In the Heart of the Home

By Elizabeth Driver

© Elizabeth Driver

This text was delivered as one of the Savoir Faire lecture series at the National Library of Canada, Ottawa, on 22 January 2002. It concerns the author's research for Culinary Landmarks: A Bibliography of Canadian Cookbooks, 1825-1949 (forthcoming, University of Toronto Press).

When people hear about my Canadian cookbook bibliography, they invariably ask me how I became involved in such a project. Serendipity is the simple answer, but the explanation goes back to the late 1970s, when I was living in London, England, and working as an editor for Dorling Kindersley on The Good Housekeeping Step-by-Step Colour Cookbook. Conversations with a friend about food and cooking led to my being asked, in 1979, to join a team compiling a bibliography of 19th-century British cookbooks. This was the beginning of my interest in the history of cookbooks, but before this invitation to join the British team, I had two experiences that I now realize shaped the way I approach them. The first experience was when I couldn't find a Canadian cookbook, for my own personal use, in London bookstores, then bought a copy of The Joy of Cooking as an alternative, only to discover there were no recipes for butter tarts or date squares, for which I was yearning. In my mid-twenties, it hadn't occurred to me that Irma Rombauer wouldn't include these classic Canadian recipes in her encyclopaedic American work. If these favourite goodies weren't in The Joy of Cooking, then other, subtler differences between Canadian and American cooking wouldn't be reflected either. The second experience was observing the editorial process behind the Good Housekeeping cookbook, where it was designed for the American Institute, using American recipes, then the British edition produced, based on the American version. The compromises were significant: Roughly equivalent British recipes were substituted, but the American colour photograph kept if it looked enough like the British dish to fool the eye. The content was largely determined by the American text, although sections about preserving and game were added for the British cook. This raised in my mind the question of how publishing exigencies might affect the evolution of culinary traditions within the family of Western nations. In the process of editing the Good Housekeeping cookbook, I also developed an antipathy for its colourless, formulaic way of writing recipes, e.g., With wooden spoon, in medium saucepan, over high heat, cook the vegetables ...

I left Dorling Kindersley after the Good Housekeeping job to compile one volume in a series of bibliographies of British cookbooks published by Prospect Books. My contribution was A Bibliography of Cookery Books Published in Britain, 1875-1914. Prospect Books was founded and run by Alan Davidson, who some of you may know as the author of the 1999 Oxford Companion to Food. Alan, probably more than anyone, was responsible for inspiring a growing interest in food history, not just in Europe, but also in the U.S., and Australia. He co-founded the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery in 1979, and, under the Prospect imprint, he published reprints of historic cookbooks, modern cookbooks of special interest, cookbook bibliographies, and a periodical for food-history buffs called Petits Propos Culinaires (with the early support of the famous English food writer Elizabeth David). If I hadn't been drawn into Alan Davidson's magnetic sphere of influence, I never would have had the idea to compile a bibliography of Canadian cookbooks - I knew nothing about them; however, since I am Canadian, as I carried out the British research, I was sometimes asked about Canadian cookbooks and my curiosity was aroused: How many old ones were there and had anyone done any work on them? In 1990, after the British bibliography was published and I was again back home in Toronto, Ontario, I plunged into the new project.

My aim was to identify every cookbook published in Canada, up to 1950, the mid-point in the century when the war years were clearly behind us and new conditions were about to reshape Canadian society; 1950 would also take the story of Canadian cookbooks up to about the time when the National Library of Canada was established (in 1953) and the copyright-deposit system ensured that cookbooks were preserved. I would give a full description of each book (the full title with line breaks, dimensions, pagination, whether illustrated, type of binding, and an account of the contents), and provide locations where the book could be consulted. In addition, there were to be indexes to find items by subject, date of first edition, place of publication, and short-title. I later decided to arrange the entries for the cookbooks chronologically and by the province in which they were published, so that the bibliography would, in effect, present individual histories of cookbook publishing for each province, moving from Newfoundland in the East to British Columbia in the West. As for the British bibliography, I wanted to record the foreign editions of cookbooks published in Canada, and to include biographical information about the authors.

Fuelled by an enthusiasm for the subject and fortified with confidence from the successful completion of the British bibliography, I began the search for Canadian cookbooks, not realizing how different they were or how much more difficult the hunt would be. And what made the search such a challenge? I soon discovered that most Canadian cookbooks up to 1950 were produced outside of the conventional publishing world, for example, by food companies, kitchen equipment manufacturers, and women's groups, not by regular publishers, such as McClelland and Stewart. Many are physically unimpressive, almost like ephemera: small items of under 100 pages, with paper covers, stapled rather than sewn, and with a hole punched at the top left corner for hanging up in the kitchen, on a nail. Until the founding of the National Library, no institution in Canada consistently collected and recorded cookbooks as did the national copyright-deposit libraries in Britain, France, and the United States, although I should mention that for a brief period earlier in the century, a small number of Canadian cookbooks were deposited for copyright purposes at the British Library. These joined a part of the collection known as the 'Colonial Dump,' but - in a cruel twist of fate - the cookbook section was hit by a German bomb during World War II and many were destroyed. Another reason that older cookbooks are poorly represented in libraries is, I have come to believe, unintentional prejudice. They are too often categorized as simply 'how-to' manuals and not recognized as rich repositories of social and cultural history. On the totem pole of literary genres, they slip to the bottom when librarians must decide which titles to acquire or which to catalogue on a limited budget. Some university libraries are almost devoid of old cookbooks, clearly an impediment for scholarly research. Although the National Library is filling the gaps in its collection with purchases from dealers, it is difficult for the library to benefit from the donations that flow naturally to small local-history museums across the country, where I found many rich caches of material. Thank goodness I was able to find books in local museums, but the process was laborious, and many places have not yet catalogued their holdings, let alone placed their records on-line.

And how to identify cookbooks that might survive only in private homes? This was the big unknown. A press release about the project generated a lot of publicity and elicited thousands of letters from individuals, then the new information had to be followed up. Of the over 2,000 different titles that are described in the bibliography, more than one-quarter were found only in private hands. I don't know of a more dramatic example in the realm of Canadian literature of ordinary citizens being the keepers of our printed heritage. I sub-titled this lecture 'In the Heart of the Home' partly because the books were written for use in the home, because their authors were often homemakers, and because the books illuminate that intimate and normally private world; however, 'In the Heart of the Home' is also where many of the books survive. On the gruelling research trips I took East and West from Ontario, I would rent a car and visit institutions large and small, plus hundreds of individuals who asked me into the warmth of their homes to see their treasured volumes.

The challenges were daunting, but the research was fun and satisfying in many ways. Visiting individuals was time-consuming, but I would often be served a tasty delight: once in the Maritimes, a memorable lobster-salad lunch, followed by mock cherry pie made from wild bog cranberries; or a dinner out West, where every dish was made faithfully from a 1940s charity cookbook, including the Log Cabin Potatoes, potatoes cut in a French-Fry shape, partly cooked in fat, laid in the casserole dish, covered with cheese sauce, then finished off in the oven.

Many of the individuals I contacted subsequently decided to donate their cookbooks to a public institution, often the Canadian Cookbook Collection, specially set up for the purpose, at the University of Guelph, where my project was originally based. The gift to Guelph of Una Abrahamson's magnificent private collection, was sparked by my visit to Una's home at the outset of the project. One of the most exciting donations to arise from the research is on display at the back of the room: a rare copy of the first edition of La cuisinière canadienne, the first French-language cookbook written in Canada. There had been a copy at the Séminaire de Québec, but it was lost, missing for years; however, its title-page had been reproduced in a 1950s book. Julian Armstrong, a friend and Food Editor at the Montreal Gazette, wrote an article about the project for Canada Day 2000 and, at my request, reproduced the title-page of La cuisinière canadienne and asked members of the public to come forward if they had a copy of the book. To our amazement, a man called to say he probably had what we were looking for. A few months later, I travelled to Montreal to meet André Sylvestre for lunch and catalogued the book at the table, in between courses! A few months later still, Michel Brisebois accepted the donation of the book to the National Library. As the story unfolded, we realized that it wasn't so surprising that the donor had this rare book. His grandfather had been a collector of Canadiana and donated his collection to the National Library in the 1950s, minus the cookbook, which was subsequently bequeathed to the grandson. I later discovered one other copy, at the Archives des Ursulines in Trois Rivières, Quebec.

Another satisfaction of the research has been solving mysteries of date or attribution. The decision to arrange the entries chronologically meant I had to be as precise as possible in dating the many undated items. This led to delving into corporate histories and the development of new products and technologies. 'Please Make Us a Cake,' for example, which contains recipes for Harris Abbatoir's Domestic Shortening, was published before Harris Abbatoir merged in 1927 with other companies to form Canada Packers; and Margene Recipe Book could not have been published before 1948, when margarine was legalized. I subsequently fixed the date of publication at September 1949, based on an advertisement for the book in Chatelaine magazine. Dating a church cookbook might involve establishing when the church was founded or when a particular priest or minister served.

I was also determined to identify the professional women who toiled anonymously behind such corporate pseudonyms as Rita Martin for Robin Hood Flour, Martha Logan for Swift Canadian Co., Brenda York for Canada Packers, or Edith Adams for the Vancouver Sun. Today, professional cooks are often celebrities, but before 1950 in Canada, there were only a few high-profile women, such as Kate Aitken. With the help of older members of the Canadian Home Economics Association, I have been able to identify most of the real women who filled the fictional shoes. It was a thrill to speak to the first Brenda York, who told me that the Art Director for the Margene Recipe Book was A.J. Casson of the Toronto design firm Sampson-Matthews and formerly a member of Canada's most famous band of artists, the Group of Seven. I stumbled across the identity of Edith Adams in a recent review of her adult son's documentary movie, where he referred to his mother's job at the Vancouver newspaper. To secure birth and death dates for authors, I had great success making cold calls to people in the telephone directory with the same last names. I first thought the 1930s writer Jessie Read might be using a pseudonym, but then came across a reference to her as Mrs Hately in the Canadian Catalogue of Books. On my third phone call I was speaking with her daughter in Florida, who had a scrap-book of her mother's career, tragically cut short by a fatal illness, but which included her starring, in 1936, in the first cooking-school movie made in Canada, called Kitchen Talks. Miraculously, I reached Dora Fairfield's great granddaughter, who gave me a photograph of the author of the 1888 Dora's Cook Book. All these findings have been incorporated into the bibliography.

* * *

In the time remaining, I would like to give you a tour of Canada's culinary literature. It's helpful to consider its evolution in roughly three stages: 1. The beginnings, from 1825 to 1876, i.e., about the first fifty years; 2. The emergence of new types, 1877 to 1900; and 3. The proliferation of cookbooks in the 20th century.

1. The Beginnings, from 1825 to 1876

The Cook Not Mad

The early history of cookbook publishing in Canada belongs almost exclusively to the provinces of Quebec and Ontario. The first two cookbooks to appear were editions of foreign works: The first was La cuisinière bourgeoise (Quebec City, 1825), a famous 18th-century cookbook from France, by Menon; the second was The Cook Not Mad (Kingston, 1831), an edition of an American work, originally published in Watertown, New York, the year before and probably not well known outside its region.

These were followed, in 1840, by the first French-language cookbook and the first English-language cookbook to be written in Canada. It's remarkable that these two seminal events occurred in the same year, but it was coincidental and the character of their texts was very different. The first in French was the already-mentioned La cuisinière canadienne. The author is unnamed, but an advertisement in Aurore des Canadas says that the recipes were 'extraites du Journal d'un ancien confiseur de Montréal' and some are attributed to persons in the circle of the publisher, Louis Perrault. There are recipes using local ingredients, such as passenger pigeons and whitefish, country-style dishes such as Ragout de pattes de cochon, and several English puddings, adopted, one assumes, from Montreal's English community. This first French Canadian cookbook must have filled a need for it was republished eleven times, up to the mid-1920s, as Nouvelle cuisinière canadienne, and there was even an American edition in Worcester, Massachusetts.

In the same year that La cuisinière canadienne appeared, The Frugal Housewife's Manual, by the anonymous 'A.B. of Grimsby,' was published in Toronto. This slim volume is distinguished by the charm and simplicity of its arrangement. It has just 100 numbered items in two complementary sections: first, a 'Housewife's Manual' of recipes, then a section of entries for vegetables, arranged alphabetically from Asparagus to Turnip, which include instructions for both cultivation and cooking. The idea of marrying directions for cultivation and cooking is a tradition in English-language culinary writing that goes back to the 17th century. The Frugal Housewife's Manual will soon be reprinted, with editorial comments prepared by a team of researchers, all members of the Culinary Historians of Ontario. No one has been able to identify A.B. (if the initials do stand for a real person's name), although team member Mary F. Williamson will make a suggestion. Mary has also determined that the gardening instructions are from an American seed catalogue.

Whereas the French-speaking market was well served in this early period by several editions of La cuisinière canadienne, The Frugal Housewife's Manual was not reprinted and was followed by a succession of foreign titles: in 1845, Modern Practical Cookery, by the Edinburgh cookery teacher Mrs Nourse; in 1846, Every Lady's Book, uncredited but by the American Mrs Crowen; in 1848, The Skilful Housewife's Guide, uncredited but extracted from a text by the American Mrs Abell; in 1865, the American Dr Chase's Recipes; and in 1868, The Dominion Home Cook-Book, actually an edition of The American Home Cook Book. In 1861, Henry Richards of Hamilton, Ontario, published The Canadian Housewife's Manual of Cookery, selecting his recipes 'from the best English, French & American works.'

There were only two notable exceptions to this reliance on foreign texts: Catharine Parr Traill's The Female Emigrant's Guide, of 1854; and Household Recipes or Domestic Cookery, by a Montreal lady [Constance Hart], of 1865. After A.B. of Grimsby, Traill and Hart are the only English-language authors up to 1877 whose voices were clearly local and female - Canadian women writing for Canadian kitchens. Traill in particular deserves every accolade for her effort to characterize for immigrants the unique aspects of cooking in Canada, especially in the backwoods. No Canadian cookbook before 1854, in English or French, had presented its recipes in a Canadian context with Traill's convincing narrative force. In addition to instructions for growing and cooking, she describes eating and dining customs, telling us, for example, which type of pancake is a favourite breakfast dish (Buckwheat) or how often meat is eaten (twice or thrice a day in farmhouses). I love her comment that 'Canada is the land of cakes.' As a modern reader, I know I can trust her judgment when she counters a doctor's assertion that Dandelion Coffee is 'equal in ... flavour to the best Mocha coffee.' Trail comments, 'This is going too far: it is the best substitute that has been found, but certainly not equal in flavour to really fine coffee.' The Female Emigrant's Guide was republished in several editions, up to 1862, but its focus on the backwoods meant that it became increasingly out-of-step with the progress of Canadian society toward the end of the 19th century. Hart's Household Recipes is notable as the first Canadian cookbook by a Jewish author, although the only typical Jewish recipe is Ball Soup. Constance Hart's father and her husband were both early advocates for Jewish civil liberties in Quebec.

2. The Emergence of New Types, 1877 to 1900

The last quarter of the 19th century saw the emergence in Canada of new types of cookbook. The publication in 1877 of The Home Cook Book, 'compiled from recipes contributed by ladies of Toronto and other cities and towns ... for the benefit of the Hospital for Sick Children,' was to prove a momentous event in the history of our culinary literature. The Home Cook Book was a new kind of recipe collection, now familiar to generations of home cooks and commonly called fund-raising, charitable, or community cookbooks. The first fund-raising cookbooks appeared in the United States during the Civil War, as a means of raising money to help the injured. This type of publication is always a group effort: Recipes are solicited from the community; the text is usually edited by a committee; then the book is sold by members of the organization (a church, hospital auxiliary, or other service group) to raise money for a charitable purpose. Typically, each recipe is credited with the name of the person who contributed it - the names attached to the recipes act as a sort of guarantee, for who would submit a recipe that wasn't useful or didn't work? The process bypasses the conventional publishing world and empowers 'ordinary' women to produce their own recipe collections, so that each fund-raising cookbook is an authentic reflection of the culinary practices of a particular community. The Home Cook Book became the best-selling Canadian cookbook of the 19th century. By 1885, over 100,000 copies had been sold, when Canada's population was only four and a half million. It was reprinted about forty times and it was the first Canadian cookbook to be published outside of North America - in Australia in about 1889. This year marks the 125th birthday of its first edition and, to celebrate, Whitecap Books is issuing a reprint. The book's intriguing history, which includes charges of piracy by a Chicago publisher, is told in my Introduction to the new reprint. [Editor's note: The reprint was published in March 2002 by Whitecap Books, 351 Lynn Ave., North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V7J 2C4].

The Home Cook Book's success encouraged imitators, inspiring a long-lasting tradition in Canada of fund-raising cookbooks. One year after its first edition, in 1878, the ladies of Saint John, New Brunswick, produced a humble, 28-page booklet called Cuisine, its profits likely intended to relieve the effects of a catastrophic fire that had destroyed almost a third of the city. Soon, other fund-raisers appeared, such as The Canadian Economist, in 1881, by members of Ottawa's Bank Street Church, and, in 1888, the Church of England Institute Receipt Book, in Halifax, and Clever Cooking for Careful Cooks, from Montreal's Church of St John the Evangelist, followed by others in the 1890s.

The Canadian Economist

Fund-raising cookbooks were primarily an English-language, Protestant publishing phenomenon; relatively few were produced by English Catholic institutions or Jewish groups. So far as I can tell, they are virtually unknown in the French language up to 1950, despite the fact that many were produced by Quebec's English community. The reasons seem to have more to do with religious denomination than with language per se.

The signal event for French-language Quebec cookbooks in the last quarter of the 19th century was the publication in 1878 of Directions diverses données par La Rev. Mère Caron. Emélie Caron was one of the seven foundresses of the Institute of Providence, established in 1843, and the one assigned to be cook and baker, among other responsibilities. It is said that she was 'Always on her guard against excessive comfort,' and that she furnished the convent with 'old cracked iron stoves; mended kitchen-ware, and even ... discarded razors converted into use for table knives!' In the 1860s, in between her two terms as Mother Superior, she organized 'une école ménagère' for the Sisters and children. Directions diverses, which may be a distillation of these cooking classes, is the first recipe manual written by a member of a religious order, for use in the province's Catholic institutions. In Quebec, even after 1950, cookery instruction, like female education in general, was usually delivered by teaching nuns; and like future cookbooks from Quebec's écoles ménagères, Directions diverses sets out the moral dimensions of cooking, which, Mère Caron tells us, offers many opportunities to exercise virtue. One cook, for example, who carried out her culinary duties perfectly, was asked why she always cried; she answered, 'Le feu de la cuisine que j'ai toujours sous les yeux ... me fait penser aux flammes de l'enfer que j'ai si souvent méritées.' Directions diverses quickly became popular beyond the walls of the Mother House, running through eight editions up to 1913. It includes typical French Canadian dishes such as tourtière and fourteen recipes for beignes (doughnuts), plus English Canadian recipes for Plumpudding, Sponge Cake, and Johnny Cake.

In Ontario, Adelaide Hoodless, whose baby son had died from drinking bad milk, was the most vigorous promoter of the teaching of domestic science in schools. In 1894, she opened a domestic science school in Hamilton's Y.W.C.A. and was responsible for securing funding to establish the Macdonald Institute in Guelph in 1903, for training teachers in the subject. The bibliography describes her 1898 book called Public School Domestic Science, but it also includes the work of a lesser-known Halifax teacher, Helen Bell, whose Elementary Text-book of Cookery was published in the same year.

At the beginning of the lecture I alluded to how food traditions flow across borders through cookbooks. The transmission may be through foreign editions or through the inclusion of recipes or text from an outside source. A bibliography is a useful tool for tracking these influences, thereby helping to understand a cuisine's evolution. My research uncovered one surprising example where recipes from a school for training cookery teachers in London, England, were incorporated in a Toronto text. The clue was this poem in an advertisement in the Toronto World newspaper for Mrs Clarke's Cookery Book of 1883. Called 'She Does Not Know Chicken from Turkey,' it begins:

Helene is the handsomest girl of her race,
She's an elegant form and an exquisite face,
And she dresses with perfectly consummate grace,
But she doesn't know chicken from turkey;
She knows many languages, living and dead;
In science and fiction is very well read,
But she cannot cook meat, and she cannot make bread,
And she doesn't know chicken from turkey.

When I read to the third line of the third verse, where Helene 'knows every stitch of the Kensington school,' the metaphorical light bulb flashed in my head. South Kensington, in London, was the location of the South Kensington School of Art (which gave its name to Helen's stitch) and also of the National Training School for Cookery, founded in 1874. The school's Lady Superintendent from 1875 to 1919 was Mrs Edith Clarke - same last name as my author! I rushed to compare my 1877 copy of The Official Handbook for the National Training School for Cookery with the Toronto volume and, sure enough, I found several of the English recipes. Further research revealed that one of the persons living at the author's Toronto address, possibly her husband, was called George Clarke and that he was an English immigrant and tea importer. Still to be proven is whether George and Edith Clarke are related or whether the same last name is coincidental. Nevertheless, it was a revelation to discover a direct link between London's preeminent training school for cookery teachers and a book that appeared to have a pure Toronto pedigree and whose more common later editions, from 1898 onward, bore such titles as The Dominion Cook Book, The Hudson's Bay Cook Book (after the department store), and The New Canadian Cook Book.

One other type of culinary manual - the promotional cookbook - was defined in the last quarter of the century. From the mid-1850s, patent medicine companies had published advertising brochures that contained a few recipes. Sometimes they called the brochures 'almanac cookbooks' when pages of recipes alternated with calendars and astronomical information. Strictly speaking, almanacs with recipes are promotional cookbooks, but from the 1880s, there was a new development: the advent of cookbooks promoting cooking ingredients or kitchen equipment. It is not surprising that the early ones advertised baking powder because, at the time, this raising agent was concocted by druggists, the same people who distributed almanac cookbooks and other patent medicine literature. The Art of Cooking Made Easy, 1890, for Strong's Baking Powder, made by a London, Ontario, druggist, is an example. In about 1892, an American manufacturer published a recipe collection in Montreal called Cottolene the New Shortening, for a product it described as 'a pale yellow material, of the consistency, texture and substance of lard ... a simple preparation of cotton-seed oil and beef fat ... [that] meets the public demand for a pure, healthful, digestible substitute for swine fat.' The earliest cookbook I have found from a stove maker is the Happy-Thought-Range Cookery Book from Buck's Stove Works in Brantford, Ontario, about 1890-5. In 1897, the first cookbook for Church and Dwight's baking soda appeared, a product still sold today. By 1899, the first recipe collection promoting Canadian flour was published by McAllister Milling Co. in Peterborough, Ontario. As the 20th century dawned, therefore, Canadian housewives could obtain, often for free, advertising cookbooks for most of the essential manufactured baking ingredients: raising agents, fat, and flour.

3. The 20th century

After 1900, cookbooks were published in increasing numbers and covered a wide range of subjects. The concept of the fund-raiser was well established in the Maritimes, Quebec, and Ontario by 1900; in the decades that followed, they were published in all regions of the country, by all sorts of women's organizations. The increase corresponded in part to the founding of influential charitable and social groups, such as the Women's Institutes (1897) and the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (1900). In the West, churches had to be built in new settlements; in the East, growing congregations had to be accommodated in new or enlarged buildings. Every well-established town needed to build and run a hospital, supported by a women's auxiliary. Cookbooks were also published to boost tourism, and to aid temperance causes and missionary work, and the war effort during two World Wars.

Cover Title-page Photograph of outdoor oven "The Black Whale" Cook Book

One of my favourite fund-raisers is the 1948 'Black Whale' Cook Book, for a community craft shop in Percé, decorated with wood cuts by V.C. Wynn-Edwards, André Bieler, and Irene Tuzo. Another is the 1944 Canadian Favourites, by the female members of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the precursor of today's New Democratic Party. The grassroots phenomenon of fund-raising cookbooks, sparked by The Home Cook Book in 1877, flourished through the 20th century. These books are a testament to the ways women helped to build our civil society. They are also the best source for anyone wanting to know what people really cooked and ate, and they can be a valuable record of the food traditions of a special community, such as the Jewish women who belonged to the Naomi Chapter of Hadassah in Toronto, or the Icelandic immigrants who worshipped at Winnipeg's First Lutheran Church. Despite my best efforts, I know I have not identified every fund-raising cookbook published in Canada and it is impossible to know for sure how many were produced. One can say, however, that they are sadly under-represented in the collections of our public institutions.

Five Roses Cook Book

Of the promotional cookbooks, none were more influential or more typically Canadian than the flour-company ones. Canada is famed for its wheat - the crop that opened up the West. Bread-making was a daily chore in those days, and, as Catharine Parr Traill explained in The Female Emigrant's Guide, 'the making and baking of REALLY GOOD HOUSEHOLD BREAD [her capital letters] is a thing of the greatest consequence to the health and comfort of a family.' Huge milling companies fought for market share, and cookbooks were an essential part of their arsenal. Ogilvie's Book for a Cook of 1905 was the first widely distributed flour-company cookbook, but the one that reached the most homes was likely the Five Roses Cook Book of 1913, by Lake of the Woods Milling Co. Reprintings surpassed 950,000 copies. As the publisher's blurb boasted, there was 'practically one copy [of the Five Roses Cook Book] for every second Canadian Home.' Starting in 1917, Western Canada Flour Mills, which made Purity Flour, published a series of cookbooks. The year 1932 saw a head-to-head 'battle of the flour-company cookbooks' when both Lake of the Woods Milling and Western Canada Flour Mills issued new recipe collections - for Five Roses Flour, A Guide to Good Cooking, and for Purity, The Purity Cook-Book. The millers of Robin Hood Flour had published a cookbook in 1917, but they had their biggest impact in the 1940s, producing ones by the fictional Rita Martin (a name easy to pronounce in English or French).

The Magic Baking Powder Cook Book

There were cookbooks to advertise every kind of foodstuff. In the case of baking powder, the still-popular Magic brand came to dominate the market and the Magic Baking Powder cookbooks were ubiquitous: multiple editions spanned the first half of the 20th century. There were cookbooks for Crisco, a new American vegetable shortening that began to be made in Hamilton, in about 1915. The 1949 Margene Recipe Book had foil endpapers showing through cut-outs in the cover, to mimic the packaging of a real block of the new margarine. Firms often paid for special artwork, for example, a Toronto chocolate company hired Augusta Helene Carter to do the beautiful illustrations in Cowan's Cocoa Recipes of about 1921. Most of the Cowan's books were fittingly printed in the colour brown. Madame Benoit, whose work on television after 1950 brought her national fame, wrote her first cookbook, Chocolate around the Clock, for Fry-Cadbury in 1941, under the last name Patenaude-Benoit.

Through advertising cookbooks one can follow the introduction of new technologies. About the turn of the century, gas companies in Ottawa and Vancouver published cookbooks to promote the use of the new cooking fuel. The teens and twenties were a period of transition for stoves. As the 1915 Moffat Standard Canadian Cook Book explained: 'Just think of it, a woman can obtain every conceivable style, size and finish of range she needs. The variety includes Coal Ranges, Gas Ranges, Electric, Combination Gas and Coal, Gas and Electricity, or all three, Coal, Gas and Electricity.' About 1929-32, Kelvinator published The Miracle of Cold, for those lucky enough to have the company's new electric refrigerators.

Canadian Grown Apples

Federal and provincial government departments published cookbooks that often aimed both to promote locally produced foods and to educate the public. A good example is the Use of Honey and of Maple Sugar in Cooking published by the Quebec Department of Agriculture in 1920. Titles in the Manitoba Farmers' Library included The Beef Ring, which explained a system where families take turns butchering an animal and sharing the meat, and Cheese-Making on the Farm. The still-life of apples on the cover of the federal government's 1924 Canadian Grown Apples is especially seductive, and the recipes are classic - Apple Pie, Brown Betty, Baked Apples, and more. Improved canning and pickling methods developed by Edith Elliot at the Experimental Farm in Ottawa, Ontario, in the 1930s were disseminated to the public through cookbooks. In 1931, in London, England, the federal Department of Trade and Commerce published The Maple Leaf Canadian Recipe Book to encourage British housewives to use Canadian products. In 1937, the Nova Scotia Bureau of Information and Publicity published Set a Good Table! to encourage businesses to 'put distinctive Nova Scotian menus on ... hotel tables,' after an American publicly criticized the province's inns and hotels for 'a hodge podge of the traditional dreary British cooking combined with the worst aspects of the United States variety.'

After 1900, cookery became increasingly organized as a subject of study for school girls, in tandem with the development of Home Economics in the new university departments and colleges established for the subject. As early as 1900, the Quebec Department of Agriculture published La bonne ménagère, lessons for girls in rural schools, but the preeminent school textbook in French was Manuel de cuisine raisonnée, produced in 1919 for the students of the École normale classico-ménagère de Saint-Pascal. Like Mère Caron's Directions diverses, it set out the moral context for cooking and home-making. Later editions, right up to the 1970s, were called simply La cuisine raisonnée. French and English ladies flocked to the Montreal Cooking School run by Sister St Mary Edith at the Congregation of Notre-Dame. Unlike the plainer Manuel de cuisine raisonnée for school girls, her 1928 Secrets of Good Cooking, or Les secrets de la bonne cuisine in the French edition, was lavishly illustrated.

The leading textbook in English was the Canadian Cook Book, by Nellie Pattinson, Director of Domestic Science at Central Technical School in Toronto. It was republished multiple times from 1923 to the 1940s, and had a new life after its 1953 revision by Elinor Donaldson and Helen Wattie. Both La cuisine raisonnée and the Canadian Cook Book made the leap from being classroom texts to trusted kitchen bibles in the home. A close second in popularity and longevity to Pattinson's work was The M.A.C. Cook Book by the Winnipeg teacher Mary Hiltz, first published in 1922, but there were also other textbooks in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Toronto that had a long-lasting influence in their jurisdictions.

Another notable development in the country's culinary literature blossomed in the 1930s and 40s: the cookbook author as a personality, even media star. Several factors increased the opportunities for women to build a public profile, such as the advent of radio and photographically illustrated women's magazines, the popularity of cooking demonstrations, the advertising needs of food companies and other businesses, and a more developed and mature publishing industry. Kate Aitken remains the best-known celebrity cook of her era. At the height of her culinary career, she divided her time between Montreal, where she was Women's Editor of the Montreal Standard, and Toronto, where she became Director of Women's Activities at the Canadian National Exhibition in 1938. In a typical day at the CNE, she would give cooking demonstrations, run competitions, do two daily, live, one-hour radio broadcasts, and supervise three restaurants. She also delivered radio broadcasts for Canada Starch, Ogilvie Flour, and Tamblyn Drug Stores. Kate Aitken's Canadian Cook Book was first published in 1945 by the Montreal Standard and then in several later editions, the last in 1992. [Editor's note: In February 2004, Whitecap Books reprinted the 1945 edition].

So many books and so many stories, from 1825 to 1949! It's a rich, varied, sometimes even astonishing body of culinary literature. Cookbooks are an essential source for understanding Canadian food history, but I also hope the bibliography will have a wider application in the fields of women's studies, social history, archaeology, museum studies, folklore, ethnology, even English literature (Nathalie Cooke, an English professor at McGill University, for example, has been studying the fictional personas of cookbook authors). In all the years that I have been absorbed in tracing the publishing history of Canadian cookbooks, I have never ceased to enjoy them. My main aim in compiling the bibliography is to foster an appreciation for this remarkable heritage and to encourage the preservation of the books.