A Guide to Good Cooking

Jean Brodie - 1932

Jean Brodie was a popular Toronto-based food writer in the 1930s, responsible for 100 Tested Recipes, produced for the Farmer’s Dairy in Toronto. She also edited a food column for the Toronto Star: as one early ad put it, “To further its qualities as a meeting ground for producer and consumer, The Star Weekly has taken pains to establish a cookery department second to none, in which Jean Brodie, advisor in matters culinary, provides cooking methods which link up food with tastes and are invaluable to both” (“Will the World”). The recipes in A Guide to Good Cooking were solicited from the community in a nationwide campaign, but unlike the earlier Five Roses Cook Book, contributors’ names and hometowns were stripped away and the recipes were cemented into the national culinary canon. Western Canada still took a central role, however, as Five Roses flour was advertised on the back cover as “The Pure Produce of Western Canadian Hard Spring Wheat.” A Guide to Good Cooking was also aimed at a more sophisticated audience than the earlier Five Roses book: gone was the string for hanging it on the kitchen wall, and the book contains recipes for elegant sandwiches and modern “Vitamin Salad.” Still, the wholesome tone was not totally lost: the editor admitted that “Princess Pudding” was “merely a new name” for a familiar kind of shortcake. This copy was particularly well used: some of the coupons, which could be distributed to friends and neighbours so that they could send for their own free copies of the book, are torn out.