Five Roses Cook Book

The Lake of the Woods Milling Company, which produced Five Roses flour, was founded in 1887 in Quebec, but the company proudly celebrated its grain, “from the sun-flooded prairie lands of Western Canada.” The first edition of this book was published in 1913; this version, with its colour plates, is from 1915. Multiple printings and editions in both French and English ensured that the book, distributed for free, was available in nearly a million Canadian homes. Though belied by the handsome colour lithographs and aggressive exhortation to “Remember the Brand,” testimonials and contributed recipes gave the book the feel of the already well-established community cookbook. As Elizabeth Driver explains, such “participatory advertising cookbooks” created “a national repertoire of recipes, which was then disseminated to the population at large through the company’s marketing channels” (“Cookbooks as Primary” 266). The string to hang on a kitchen nail and this copy’s messy annotations (including adding eggs back into an eggless recipe) speak to its human uses. The book also celebrates the flour’s purported “hygienic” quality, as the Victorian emphasis on cleanliness evolved into early twentieth-century germ consciousness. Five Roses grain was supposedly more sanitary and kept longer, as it was “cleaned, scoured, ground gradually by modern process, bolted many times through silk, packed automatically into absolutely new full-weight bags and barrels.” The book declared, “Five Roses comes to particular housewives immaculate, untouched by human hands. Where else can you get so pure a flour?”