Cultural Groups and the Opening of the West

Food was central to the settlement of Western Canada. After the Dominion Lands Act of 1872 opened the Prairie provinces to homesteading, immigrants began to trickle and finally flood into the region, encouraged by the efforts of Clifford Sifton, Minister of the Interior from 1896 to 1905. Recruitment literature, often generated by railway companies that had made massive investments in Western Canada’s development, emphasized the area as “the Granary of the British Empire” or “the Bread Basket of the World.” Grain and bread were Biblical symbols of plenty, and they were often in short supply for farmers and labourers in Eastern Canada, the United States, and Europe. Materials promoting settlement thus used grain as the central motif in promising abundance in the West.

The immigrants who arrived were of diverse cultural backgrounds: British, German, Ukrainian, Scandinavian, Doukhobor, Jewish, French-Canadian, Chinese, Arab, American, and many others. In addition to distinctive language and customs, each group brought its own food traditions. But many staple ingredients were initially scarce on the Prairies, and cooking required innovation and adaptation. Flour was not always readily available, eggs could be very expensive, and multiple families might share a single dairy cow (Barss 31–34). Departures from printed recipes were probably common; many cookie recipes from the Happy Hustlers of Mayfair United Church call for “fat” or “shortening,” for example, which were cheaper alternatives to butter. Early settlers might also have learned to hunt, gather, and prepare wild animals and plants from First Nations peoples.

Community cookbooks were not often produced by the first generation of immigrants. These pioneers, frequently isolated and illiterate, were fighting to eke out a living, but their daughters and granddaughters took up the charge, codifying both their cultural traditions and new adaptations and defining their shifting identities (indeed, most of these books were written in English, regardless of their origins). In fact, with Western Canadian publishing still in its infancy, the majority of Prairie cookbooks until the mid-twentieth century were community cookbooks, often prepared as fundraisers. Many are displayed in “War, Politics, and Social Engagement”; the items in “Cultural Groups and the Opening of the West” are unique for their basis in ethnic or religious groups. Women managed almost every step of publication, and the process empowered them as homemakers, writers, publishers, and builders of civil society. Although they tend to feature showpiece recipes rather than the everyday cooking that sustained many families, fundraising cookbooks are an authentic reflection of local culinary practice, down to the individual names and hometowns that appear beside many of the contributed recipes: these acted as a personal endorsement or guarantee (Driver, “Canadian Cookbooks” 35 and “Cookbooks as Primary” 271). Recipes calling for cabbage and rhubarb, cheap and readily available local ingredients, were also commonly included. The recipes, moreover, illustrate sharing between cultural groups, as with the Czech and Jewish recipes in the Ukrainian Ladies’ Goodwill Organization cookbook. Later books, like Culinary Treasures, show the blend of new products and traditional recipes, bridging the gap between worlds and eras.

Not all cultural groups, however, wrote cookbooks. Teresa Spinelli, whose family has owned Edmonton’s Italian Centre grocery store since 1961, says there were no Italian community cookbooks in her family: “We’ve just done the same thing for generations. Nothing’s really written down.” Francophone community members echo similar words, although many have begun to produce community cookbooks in the last few decades. Chinese-owned restaurants also sprang up across the Prairies as railway workers settled, but Chinese community cookbooks are scarce. (Elizabeth Driver unearthed only one example in her bibliography of Canadian cookbooks from 1825 to 1949.) Most restaurateurs and their families probably cooked their recipes from memory or wrote them only for private use. Both in its presence and absence, culinaria speaks to the complex history of food on the Prairies.