Cooking the Co-op Way

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 wholesale co-operatives in 1928, which eventually merged to form the Federated Co-operatives Limited, which still have stores across rural Western Canada. The preface to this cookbook notes that “While the guilds from other countries are mostly connected with the consumer movement, Canadian guildswomen, particularly on the Prairies, are interested and active in all phases of the co-operative movement—marketing, consumer, financial, and service.” In keeping with this active spirit, the Co-operative Women’s Guild of Outlook, Saskatchewan, compiled the first Saskatchewan Co-op Cookbook in 1946. It was revised by popular request in 1952 and underwent five reprints. The Manitoba Women’s Co-operative Guild similarly selected a cookbook for its first major project. It too, was successful, and Cooking the Co-op Way was compiled from these earlier books, “using many of the recipes which are family treasures and adding many different ones, in the hope that it will be of even more assistance to the modern homemaker.” In addition to generic North American classics like “Lemon Chiffon Pie,” “Ham Steaks,” “Celery Pinwheels,” and “Potato Salad,” this book follows a trend from the period in including “Foods from other Lands” (albeit heavily Westernized and even bowdlerized), which might tempt the bored family cook. This was a process of “mainstreaming the foreign foods until they were no longer considered dangerously foreign yet still retained enough of the exotic to make experimenting with them worthwhile” (Iacovetta, Korinek, and Epp 20–21). The cookbook also includes basic nutritional information, table service tips, weights and measures, and substitutions in the case of missing ingredients. Tucked between the pages is a newspaper clipping with various desserts recipes, as well as another for “Chewy Raisin Squares”; these speak to the cookbook’s place as a go-to kitchen reference, and to the tenacity of these ephemeral articles.