Canadians at Table – Food, Fellowship and Folklore: A Culinary History of Canada (review)

Few topics are better suited to study by diverse groups of historians than culinary history. By virtue of the subject matter alone, the history of cooking practices, eating traditions, recipes, and meals engages readers with a familiar and accessible glimpse into the origins of some of their most routine social and cultural practices in a way that most other histories cannot. Dorothy Duncan’s Canadians at Table does not fail in this regard and is very much a welcome addition to popular Canadian culinary history.

One of the greatest strengths of Canadians at Table is Duncan’s ability to deftly navigate a culinary landscape which has, historically, been characterized more by its daunting regional, ethnic, and linguistic divisions than by its common traditions. Faced with so many fragmented and often disconnected eating cultures, Duncan successfully draws out a common narrative of adaptation to changing social, political, and environmental realities across a vast and often harsh landscape. The reader is, therefore, introduced to the varied culinary responses of both native and newcomer groups as diverse as early Viking explorers, North West Company voyageurs, Inuit hunters, Chinese railway workers, members of various national Women’s Institutes, and present-day organic farmers. Moreover, eschewing a strict chronological narrative, the book is instead quite effectively organized into thematic chapters that focus on some of the key institutions and traditions that helped define the Canadian eating experience. The impact of different waves of immigration, Confederation, and industrialization are all examined alongside the changing menus at the holiday dinner table, in work camp cookhouses, and at charity fundraising dinners through the generations.

One of the main advantages to Duncan’s thematic approach is its ability to provide readers with detailed and revealing snapshots of the kinds of meals eaten in the past, whether they were at the rowdy banquets held by the ‘Beaver Club of Montreal’ in the late eighteenth century or the simple meals eaten on the road by early travellers on the CPR. In places Duncan relies, perhaps, too heavily on long block quotes to provide such examples, but these vignettes from the past are, overall, relevant and entertaining. However, there are some drawbacks to Duncan’s thematic approach, the most noticeable being that it tends to leave some significant historical gaps. For instance, while the book is quite heavy on nineteenth-century content, scarcely more than a few pages are devoted to the revolutionary changes in eating habits that took place in the post-1945 period. Such criticism is, in part, unfair because Duncan never really presents Canadians at Table as the definitive work in culinary history and quite explicitly states in the introduction that ‘every topic touched on here deserves to be explored and recorded in greater detail’ (11). Even so, it is at times unclear why so much space was devoted to some topics, while others were left out completely.

Overall, Canadians at Table is a clearly written and engaging culinary history but it does share some of the fundamental problems of historical context and depth common to many works of popular history. The treatment of the foodways of marginalized racial and ethnic groups, in particular, proves to be an issue throughout the book. In Duncan’s discussion of the West Coast native tradition of the potlatch, for instance, the banning of the ceremonial practice between the years 1884 and 1951 is mentioned in passing but is never placed within the context of a larger coercive state program of forced assimilation. The same is true of Duncan’s discussion of Chinese culinary traditions in Canada. While the important role of Chinese cooks in mining and railroad construction camps and the important place of Chinese restaurants in the Canadian cultural imagination are discussed at length, these facts are never placed within a context of a racist and coercive legal regime that severely limited immigration to Canada for most of the twentieth century and that channelled Chinese and other non-white workers into...