Canadian Cook Book

Nellie Lyle Pattinson - 1925

Used as both a reference book and textbook in Alberta junior and senior high schools from 1940 to 1984 (“Alberta School”), the Canadian Cook Book, which started as a prescriptive textbook, eventually became a staple in Canadian households (Ferguson and Fraser). First published in 1923 by Nellie Pattinson, Director of Domestic Science at Toronto’s Central Technical School, it went into its twentieth printing in 1949; this copy is a third edition from 1925. Pattinson’s cookbook, the authority of which was confirmed by her affiliation with the school (Cooke, “Cookbooklets” 23), was a Canadian addition to the “rational school” of domestic science, which gained popularity with Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896). The rational school took a rigorous, orderly approach to cookery, with high standards for accurate measurements and instructions. Reflecting on the book in a 5 December 1942 article in Toronto’s Star Weekly, Jean Brodie noted that “The recipes for desserts and other sweet dishes call for less sugar than many American recipes—to suit the tastes of Canadians who do not like their foods as sweet or as rich as the folks who live ‘South of the border.’” Measurements used the Canadian 40-ounce (rather than 32-ounce) quarts, and flour was measured in keeping with Canadian milling practices (qtd. in Driver, “Cookbooks as Primary” 262). Even so, there are few dishes that we would recognize as distinctively Canadian among the recipes for “Boston Brown Bread,” “Kentucky Salad,” and “Chicken a la King.” There is a large section for invalid food, and another additional section for diabetic food, reinforcing the health emphasis of the text. After Pattinson’s death in 1953, the book was revised in several editions by Helen Wattie and Elinor Donaldson. The new editors included a chapter on “Regional Dishes,” which Elizabeth Driver calls “the first attempt by anyone to define regional cooking in a Canadian cookbook” (Culinary 621).