Business and Branding

Promotional cookbooks, aimed at marketing a particular retailer or product, have existed since at least the mid-1850s, as patent medicine companies produced advertising brochures and almanacs that also contained recipes (Driver, “Canadian Cookbooks” 33). Taylor’s Calendar Cook Book is an excellent late example of this genre; the booklet was little more than a vehicle for drugstore advertising. Far from arbitrary, the association between food and medicine dated back centuries, and early twentieth-century druggists often mixed leaveners and sold extracts.

Other advertising cookbooks soon appeared on the market, usually associated with manufactured food products. Often distributed for free, with stylized images and an authoritative tone, they achieved deep market penetration and were a powerful influence on Canadian cooking practices. These cookbooks illustrate every stage in the food production cycle, from The Vegetable Cook Book (promoting Manitoba-based McFayden’s seeds) to the Country Cook Book (demonstrating a farm woman’s Depression-era entrepreneurship) to the Shamrock Cook Book (celebrating the products of a Calgary-based meat-packing company). Many of these cookbooks, particularly the smaller, more ephemeral examples, fall into the category that Nathalie Cooke calls “cookbooklets”; their first appearance at the end of the nineteenth century was indicative of home cooks’ need for guidance in the face of “soft and hard technological innovations” (“Cookbooklets” 25). Such booklets were also increasingly feasible as literacy rates rose and print costs fell.

Many promotional cookbooks were written by Prairie companies, at the epicentre of much Canadian food production; others were written elsewhere by corporate bodies, but still drew heavily on Prairie products and imagery. The latter is especially true of many flour cookbooks. The first Canadian flour cookbook was launched in 1899 in Ontario, and these books would soon become some of the most innovative, artistic, and expensive contributions to Canadian culinaria (Driver, “Canadian Cookbooks” 33). Both Five Roses and Robin Hood invested heavily in colour lithography, professional writing, and extensive advertising campaigns. Robin Hood also created the glamorous yet technologically savvy character of Rita Martin, seen in Bread Baking Made Easy, making both the domestic comfort and laboratory sophistication of the product accessible to French and English readers alike. Flour, made of grain grown and often milled on the Prairies, was big business in Canada, worth the investment of distributing sometimes hundreds of thousands of free cookbooks.

Advertising cookbooks also offer important insight into new trends and technologies. Many advertising books from the first decades of the twentieth century focus on their products’ healthful and sanitary qualities, a growing concern as new nutritional and germ theories rose to prominence and more Canadians bought foods prepared by distant strangers. Other books point to new household utilities: Reddy Makes Salads and Home Canning and Freezing exemplify the full customer service offered to early users of electricity and gas who might still need training to be fully convinced of these utilities’ usefulness in the home. Media also changed dramatically in the twentieth century, as radio and television infiltrated Prairie homes. Broadcasters quickly realized that women were a vast market for specialized programs, usually based around an authoritative female host, and branded cookbooks swiftly followed, including CJCJ’s Radio Cook Book and Laura’s Recipes. Similarly, the new technologies of travel engendered new food cultures. The menu was a key branding tool for the Canadian National Railway, for example, while the fiftieth anniversary of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s first passenger train was celebrated with a piece of commemorative fruitcake. Food was central to social experience, and promotional cookbooks’ recipes (like many others) were exchanged and modified, illustrating food’s central role in constructing communities. The huge investments made in business-related culinaria, particularly playing on food’s strong associations with health, sociability, comfort, and status, testify to cooking’s important role in any national economy and cultural dynamic.