Culinary Landmarks: A Bibliography of Canadian Cookbooks, 1825–1949 (review)

A few years ago, my great aunt gave me a set of old cookbooks called The Maple Leaf Cooking School. She told me that she had ordered them by mailing in coupons from bags of flour when she was newly married in the early 1930s. At the time, I had no way of learning anything more about these books, as no secondary source mentioned them. I wasn’t sure where they were published, or how widely they were available, and I wanted to know more about them. The publication of Liz Driver’s new bibliography of Canadian cookbooks has solved my problem and also filled a gaping hole in Canadian culinary history.

The book is an immense achievement. It took over ten years to complete and provides information on every cookbook over sixteen pages printed in Canada between 1825 and 1949. There are entries for 2,276 books, and the lovely, massive tome is about the size and weight of a volume of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Driver is one of the world’s, and certainly Canada’s, foremost experts on culinary history, a small but growing field. She is past president of the Culinary Historians of Ontario, current curator of Campbell House Museum in Toronto, and teaches a course titled Applied Food History: A Toronto Museum Experience, at George Brown College.

Her previous experience compiling A Bibliography of Cookery Books Published in Britain, 1875–1914 (1989) did not entirely prepare her for putting together a bibliography for Canada. In the United Kingdom, cookbooks were collected by the national copyright-deposit libraries. This is not the case in Canada; Driver had to search high and low for cookbooks that survive often only in peoples’ homes. Of the 2,276 individual books profiled, over 1,000 were found in private collections. This may be the most important aspect of the project, as many of these books have since been donated to archives or libraries, and/or microfilmed.

The book begins with a thoroughgoing introduction in which Driver records ‘The Evolution of the [Cookbook] Genre in Canada.’ She concludes that cookbooks are ‘expressions of the values and aspirations of the people who produced them,’ and this is perhaps why historians are increasingly using them as primary sources (xxix). Cookbooks can be used to learn about women who worked as cookbook writers, or for educational institutions or government; women’s role in community associations and their attempts to contribute to society; and aspects of Canada’s early economic and industrial development (xxix–xxx). These sorts of topics are being pursued by culinary and women’s historians, as evidenced by new publications and recent conferences.

This bibliography makes cookbooks easier to find and access, and so, it is to be hoped, more historians will make use of them. Each cookbook entry includes the author or editor, a biography of the author or corporation, the edition date and number, a transcription of the title page, a physical description, the contents, citations of the cookbook, a list of where copies are available, additional notes, and information about other editions. The entries are arranged by province and territory, and then chronologically so that the reader can see the development of culinary history in a particular region. There is a lengthy introduction to each section where Driver gives an overview of the culinary history of the region and notes important books and food trends. Aside from the cookbook entries that make up the bulk of the book, it also includes lengthy biographies of cookbook writers and corporations that published cookbooks. The book has maps and twenty colour plates with images of cookbook covers and photos of some of the authors. It is clear that Driver has made every attempt to make the book as user friendly as possible.

Upon receiving Culinary Landmarks, I first looked up the Maple Leaf Milling Co., which published my cookbooks (741). The series promised to be ‘A Complete Home Study Course...