The UFWA was created in 1915 as a women’s parallel to the United Farmers of Alberta. Nanci Langford’s Politics, Pitchforks and Pickle Jars notes that the first UFWA cookbook was produced in 1928 from recipes donated by members from across the…
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…
A recurring theme in wartime community cookbooks is the kitchen as home front. An ad for Eaton’s specifically celebrates “Soldiers of the Kitchen Front,” the women whose knowledge of nutrition and food preparation would help them nourish their…
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…
Anthropometric approaches to health and nutrition thrived in the twentieth century. Cookbooks and home economics manuals, including this volume (used as a high school textbook from 1964 to 1978 [“Alberta School”]), contained graphs highlighting…
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 Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire was founded in 1900 to support the British Empire during the Boer War. The Military Chapter of Calgary was formed in 1914 (Glenbow, “IODE”). Likely published around 1927 (Driver 1054), this…
In addition to its standard nutritional information, this book provides detailed instructions on how students might carry out experiments on rats in the classroom, feeding them deficient diets and observing the results. Students might also chloroform…
First introduced in the United States in 1897, Jell-O initially struggled to find a market, so in 1904, the company introduced the “Jell-O Girl.” She was based on four-year-old Elizabeth King, the daughter of one of the advertising…
The domestic science movement, which arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and encouraged women to apply scientific knowledge to their household work, is exemplified by this American textbook. This edition was used at the…