Blue Ribbon Cook Book

Blue Ribbon Limited - [1936?]

The Blue Ribbon Company was established by George Frederick and John Galt in Winnipeg around 1897; the cousins had already established a wholesale grocery business in 1882 (Driver, Culinary 928). Though the copyright for this book was apparently entered in 1905, the actual date of issue for this edition was probably around 1936. Women might have distributed the tear-out coupons to their friends and neighbours, illustrating how the company tapped into an extant community and brought them together around a common product. As in many company cookbooks, this publication includes a section for women to add their own recipes, which they usually did in messy handwriting stocked with their own abbreviations. The book also includes a section on invalid cookery, commonplace in earlier household tomes. But while older recipe books might also include home remedies for serious illnesses, late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century publications usually deferred to doctors for such medicinal treatments. Still, their invalid cookery recipes reinforced women’s continued importance as healers through food.