Browse Items (73 total)

Capitalizing on the casserole craze of the 1940s and '50s, this publication from the Vancouver Province was one of a series of eight booklets, perhaps available by order to the newspaper’s readers. Allowing the cook to “stretch” a…

The 1970s dim sum ticket from the My Lai Garden restaurant, in contrast to the Golden City menu, features many clearly Cantonese dishes, including water chestnut cake, egg tarts, green peppers stuffed with shrimp paste, and pig’s liver rice crepes;…

The age of this book is not clear. A calendar stuck in one of its leaves suggests it might have been published as early as 1936. Elizabeth Driver estimates a date during World War II, based on “Help Win the War” coloured plates pasted on…

The Girl Guides were founded in Britain in 1909, with the first Canadian unit formed in St. Catharines, Ontario, in 1910. By 1912, there were units in every province (Girl Guides, “History”). The Wascana Girl Guides were based out of Regina, the…

This sixteen-page cookbook comes from Mayfair United Church in Saskatoon, which still exists today. It is clearly compiled by a predominantly English community: recipe donors have names such as Goodwin, Fraser, and Swift, and a number of the recipes…

Another example of a wartime cookbook, Cook to Win was produced by the Good Cheer Club of Wesley United Church in Calgary. The cover shows a housewife focusing on key cooking goals, not unlike a military strategist. The foreword appeals to Prairie…

The British Women’s Co-operative Guild was first founded in 1883, and it became a model for the retail co-operatives that were founded across the Prairie provinces in the early twentieth century. These retail co-ops joined to form provincial…

Much about Mrs. Mary Berkner’s life is elusive. A Saskatchewan farm woman, perhaps with Hungarian roots, Berkner’s goal was to encourage Depression-era women to produce delicious food while saving money and driving down the price of…

Elizabeth Driver has argued, with respect to francophone cookbooks, that “Before the Quiet Revolution in Quebec in the 1960s, the influence of the Catholic Church permeated French society and entrenched the traditional subservience of women.…

Dedicated to the German-Canadian housewife, this book bridges the gap between immigrant families and English-speaking Canadian society. The “Deutsch–englisches Wörter-Verzeichnis” (German–English Glossary) at the end of the book may have…