Health and Education

Domestic science emerged as a scholarly discipline in the 1870s, with anchor institutions such as the National Training School for Cookery in Britain (emphasizing teacher training) and Mrs. Rorer’s Philadelphia Cooking School in the United States (emphasizing dietetics). These schools tended to break household work into its component actions with the aim of establishing correct and efficient procedures, and they also emphasized good nutrition and scientific standardization and professionalization. In Canada, several small schools of household science (see Nettleton 44) were already operating when Lillian Massey set up the Lillian Massey School of Household Science and Art in Toronto in 1900. Massey was also instrumental in establishing the country’s first four-year degree program in household science at the University of Toronto in 1902 (Roberts). A domestic science program was implemented at the University of Manitoba that year as well, and by the 1910s domestic science (also called household science or, later, home economics) had emerged as a full-fledged subject in Western Canadian public schools (Glenbow, “Alberta”). Provincial and national home economics associations soon followed.

Home economics textbooks, of which the University of Alberta’s H.T. Coutts Education Library has an outstanding collection, are still some of the most common cookbooks used by children. While few of these textbooks were published in the Prairie provinces, they were widely used in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba schools and inculcated the values of rational food preparation among their young readers. Many of these texts emphasized health, taking a quantitative, empirical approach to food—often including information about calories, fats, vitamins, and other nutrients. They encouraged young cooks to measure and monitor, and to apply the rules of factory efficiency to their domestic labour. The British Columbia government’s Foods, Nutrition, and Home Economics Manual, used as a text in Alberta schools, included tables for food values and oven temperatures, while the Saskatchewan government’s Recipes for Household Science Class outlined methodical directions for young students.

Not all educational books were purely instruction manuals. How the World is Fed and How We Are Fed used food as the basis for geography instruction, recognizing its core place in domestic and foreign affairs. Food is indeed one of the most tangible ways to access the culture and produce of other nations. Educators and governments also produced didactic texts for adults. A Physical Atlas … of the Dominion of Canada, for example, was intended to debunk myths about the Canadian landscape, particularly with regard to farming potential in the West; again, food, geography, and national interest were closely entwined. On a smaller scale, Potatoes: Facts and Recipes, produced by the Extension Department of Manitoba Agriculture, taught women about varieties and uses of potatoes to encourage their domestic consumption.

The dessert pages show the heaviest use in many children’s (and adults’) recipe collections, and the Kids Cook Book, a junior community cookbook based on children’s contributions, is made up almost entirely of recipes for sweets. Children might cook outside of school and home as well. The Boy Scouts (now known as Scouts Canada) strongly emphasized food and cooking as an all-important part of camp life, and Scout handbooks and other publications included information on safe camp cooking. But camp cooking did not necessarily mean wilderness survival food: the Boy Scout Calendar had Klim as a sponsor. Such corporate infiltration in otherwise educational material was not uncommon: the B.C. Sugar Refinery Co. and its offshoots published Recipes for Young Adults (meant as a home economics text) in multiple editions for at least three Canadian provinces, including a metric edition after the Canadian government adopted the new system. But readers were not necessarily followers, and these texts show the reality of use, with sometimes heavily edited pages. Cookbooks are the site for the ongoing negotiation of fantasy and reality, preference and practice.