Baking As Biography: A Life Story in Recipes (review)

Diane Tye begins her excellent critical biography of her mother, Laureen Tye, with something of a contradiction. Despite having devoted much of her life and energy to baking for her family – and to the unending series of church functions that came along with being the wife of a United Church minister – Tye’s mother admitted later in her life that she did not enjoy baking. The book then begins with the question: “How could it be that she spent so much time at an activity that held – at least apparently – so little importance for her?” (p. 4) In her attempt to answer this question, Tye presents one of the best recent Canadian works in food studies as well as a thoughtful and important feminist contribution to the social history of postwar Canada, and the Maritimes more specifically.

At the heart of Tye’s narrative is the box of recipes left behind by her mother after her death in 1989 at the age of 58. Whether it’s through an engaging and original analysis of the charity cookbook put together by her mother and other local church women; the meaning behind her family’s changing tastes for sweet foods over time; or an exploration of the ways in which she and her two siblings made very different uses of their mother’s recipes in their adult lives – Tye’s five chapters always use her mother’s recipes as a starting point and, to this end, include dozens scattered throughout the text. The work, overall, shows a strong critical grasp of contemporary food studies literature but is also, importantly, grounded in Tye’s quest to better understand her mother’s life and struggles. What emerges is a thoughtful and thought provoking study of the folklore and meaning of food as well as an often touching portrait of one woman’s life and times.

A folklorist by training, Tye pays particular attention to the stories embedded in her mother’s cooking and her recipes. Memory, in particular, is a key character in her narrative. She frequently tries to disentangle her own personal memories from the story that her mother might have told about her own life. These tensions in Tye’s narrative are often made explicit through the frequent asides embedded in the text – indicated by the switch to a sans-serif font – which represent Tye’s own memories and experiences. To this end, Baking as Biography draws extensively upon the literatures of folklore, anthropology, history, and women’s studies to offer a compelling discussion of the difficulties inherent in reconstructing the lives of ordinary women in postwar Canada, particularly the millions who left behind little more than their recipes as archives of their life.

Acknowledging the problems of relying on her own memory alone, Tye goes to great lengths to situate her mother’s life and recipes within their specific historical and geographical contexts, particularly how social position defined and constrained Laureen Tye’s foodways and the course of her life. From her early life in rural Cape Breton and her parents’ Scottish heritage to her later life in PEI and New Brunswick as a middle-class minister’s wife, Tye draws a fascinating portrait of the social and economic changes that took place in the Maritimes during the mid-twentieth century through her mother’s baking. In doing so, Tye not only deepens the reader’s understanding of her mother’s everyday life, but also provides fascinating genealogies of her changing recipes and tastes for household staples like biscuits, cake bread, oat cakes, oatmeal, and ginger snaps. Just as modern tastes begin to change, for instance, Tye’s mother’s baking gets sweeter and lighter over time, to the point where Tye was unable to recognize some of the recipes her mother adopted after she left home; yet these very recipes were central to the memories of her younger siblings.

Perhaps what comes across most clearly in Baking As Biography – and its greatest strength, overall – is its important...