Country Cook Book: With Special Recipes for Making Cookies and an Improved Method of Making Sugar-Beet Syrup

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 sugar—all through the use of homemade sugar beet syrup. Her book includes correspondence from Mrs. Ethel B. Rutter, head of the University of Saskatchewan’s school of household science, and Dr. Frank Hoffman, editor of the Az Otthon Hungarian monthly, who encouraged her to publish the recipes. The recipes, named by and for Berkner and her daughters, creatively employ sugar beets in jams, coffee, and baking. Berkner adds that the sugar beet pulp, mixed with crushed oats or shorts (a by-product of milling) and mashed potatoes, makes excellent chicken feed. Whether the book’s price was twenty-five cents (as indicated on the cover) or one dollar (as indicated in the foreword), its advice is an invaluable measure of a Prairie woman’s ingenuity and enterprise.