The Way to a Man’s Heart Cook Book: A Collection of Recipes of Real Merit

Featuring a plethora of brand-name foods, this cookbook is a snapshot of 1936 cookery. Recipes call for Eagle Brand or Borden’s condensed milk, Knox gelatin, Keen’s mustard, Sunkist oranges, Heinz ketchup and other sauces, Swans Down flour, Miracle yeast, Jell-O, Crisco, and Gillespie Maid, a local cereal produced by the Gillespie Grain Company from the 1920s to perhaps the late 1940s (Glenbow, “Oddments”). Food colouring was another novelty, recommend to dye the fruit in “Blushing Pear Salad,” for example. Another notable recipe is an inexpensive “Half-Pay Pudding,” and the book also includes a “Cocktails” page without alcohol. The advertisement for buying spices at the drug store illustrates a still-common practice in this period, and the book also includes an endorsement from a home economist encouraging the use of gas cooking in the home. Although Edmonton had natural gas as early as the 1920s (Atco Gas), the service was still relatively untried in this period. The Rebekah Lodge, which now admits both sexes, originated as the female auxiliary to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, allowing women to participate in the social and service components of the organization. In keeping with this service mandate, the book opens with a “Recipe for a Happy Day”:

Take a little dash of cold water,
A little leaven of prayer,
A little bit of sunshine gold,
Dissolved in morning air.

Add to your meal some merriment,
Add thought for kith and kin,
And then as a prime ingredient
Aplenty of work thrown in.

Flavor it with the essence of love,
And a little dash of play;
Let the dear old Book, and a glance above
Complete the well spent day.

The title page also implies that good cooking is “The Way to a Man’s Heart.” Such additions and folk humour were common in community cookbooks, and would carry on in more recent publications like the Best of Bridge series from Calgary.