The Real Home-Keeper: A Perpetual Honeymoon for the Winnipeg Bride

Brandow Publishing Co. - 1914

Clearly serving as a local business advertiser as much as a household guide, the first edition of this series was published in Vancouver around 1911–13, but versions soon followed for Winnipeg, Hamilton, Toronto, and Montreal (Driver, Culinary 1094). The series was retitled The Bride’s Book in 1928. It highlights forgotten food products like Hudson’s Bay Tea and suggests the novelty of electric cookers and dried pasta in the early decades of the twentieth century. Elizabeth Driver ventures that the recipes may have been taken from an American source (Culinary, 1082). Titles such as “Chicago Sponge Cake” seem to suggest as much, and the San Francisco Sunday Call for 16 June 1912 carried the same recipe. Advertisements in The Real Home Keeper also reveal concerns about germs and sanitation in this period: the Arctic Ice Company advertisement assures customers that its product is safe.