Category Archives: Series: Canadian Studies

Experimentation, Family and Household, Modern, Series: Bread, Series: Canadian Studies, Series: Politics and Propaganda, Series: Wartime Recipes

Canadian Women, War, and Wheat Bread

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By Sarah Cavanagh

Image courtesy of Archival & Special Collections, University of Guelph Library.

While rustic sourdoughs and fancy homemade bagels have filled Canadian kitchens during the pandemic, another way to pass the time (and give even the dodgiest sourdough boule a respectable look and taste by comparison) is to recreate the thrifty bread of wartime. Many of these feature in a 1917 Canadian collection of First World War recipes, Ethel Chapman’s War Breads: How the Housekeeper May Help to Save the Country’s Wheat Supply. This 16-page recipe pamphlet, jointly produced by the Ontario Department of Agriculture and the Women’s Institutes, instructed housewives to save wheat for soldiers and cook with alternate grains–corn, barley, oats, and rye–some of which carried the unfortunate stigma of being livestock feed.[i]  

 

“Vision Your Sons, Mothers of Canada!”, The Grimsby Independent (19 September 1917): 7.

The War Breads publication flowed from the Canadian government’s decision to support Allied efforts overseas via a domestic food conservation policy in June 1917 that included domestic rationing and ensuring the continuous export of food to Britain. Subsequent propaganda campaigns targeting women were tinged with emotion, premised on patriotism and moral duty.  Housewives were asked to symbolize their commitment to King and country by signing and displaying “Food Service Pledges” in their front windows. A September 1917 food pledge advertisement headlined “Vision Your Sons, Mothers of Canada!” urged women to think what would happen if one morning, there was no breakfast for the “valiant boys” and “word went down the line that Canada had failed them.” The solution, the ad reads, was for women to forgo white flour and vary their baking by using one-third oatmeal, corn, barley or rye flour.[ii]  Meanwhile, an Ontario farmer took the unusual step of mailing his wife’s war bread by parcel post to the editor of The Toronto Daily Star to prove that less expensive oatmeal grain was not just delicious, but economical for the household and a service to the nation.[iii]

The pamphlet’s physical appearance matches the bread’s frugality, with few images, save three rather pathetic photographs of unappealing dark and deflated brown loaves on the title page. I opted to recreate a recipe for a steamed Boston Brown Bread, mainly because the cooking technique was unfamiliar to me. The recipe looked easy – a handful of ingredients like flour grains, cornmeal, baking soda, milk, molasses – and brief instructions; however, like many historical recipes, it contained tacit knowledge from the era, with puzzling terminology requiring substitutions and improvisations – some more successful than others.

One challenge was finding a mould for the bread. The recipe suggests using a one-pound baking powder can, a testament to the ubiquity of the beautifully decorated baking powder cans produced by American manufacturers like DeLand & Co. and the frugality of the housekeepers who saved the containers for alternate purposes.[iv] I opted for a modern-day metal coffee can.  Graham flour proved difficult to find, and soured milk? I keep my milk in the fridge, so the addition of lemon juice turned my fresh milk into a lumpy substitute. Adding molasses to the flour/soda/milk mixture produced a gorgeous soft-brown coloured dough. 

Image courtesy of Sarah Cavanagh

The recipe instructs placing the mould in a “kettle” of boiling water, allowing the water to rise halfway up, trapping the steam with a tight-fitting lid. How big is a kettle? The only kettle I have boils my morning tea, so I substituted a large steel pot; the coffee can sat just below the rim inside. As the water began to boil, the coffee can bobbed up and down like a sailboat in the Atlantic, knocking the lid off the pot. Precious steam exited like a genie out of a bottle. Eyeing the nearby closet, I grabbed a metal coat hanger to quickly secure the lid in place, bending the wire through both pot handles and across the top of the lid, which was (mostly) successful. After the suggested three-and-one-half-hours of steaming, I removed the can from the water, wrestling to free the bread from its mould, resorting to an inauthentic can opener to remove the can bottom. The bread itself was a rich rusty brown colour, exceedingly dense and moist. My husband, whose parents lived through the Depression and the Second World War, adored it. It reminded him of his mother’s cooking, proving the sensory power of food and its connection to memory. For me, the texture was coarse, and it lacked flavour. The experience of making the bread was more satisfying than the actual eating of it.[v] 

Image courtesy of Sarah Cavanagh

This historical recipe highlights elements of wartime cooking: uncomplicated, practical, frugal. The bread preserved well on the counter for five days, a tribute to the power of the working-class staple, molasses. The four-hour time commitment illustrates domestic structures which bound women to their home. And while there was friction between urban and rural women about who was making the greater sacrifice, government-mandated food substitution was generally embraced by Canadian housewives. Interestingly, Chapman later wrote that a promise made by the government Food Controller to remove “the thing that troubled most women” was the key to securing their cooperation. The quid-pro-quo? A government Order-in-Council banning the use of grain of any kind for the distillation of potable liquors.[vi] Temperance and patriotism, it seems, went hand-in-hand. Alas, little chance of washing that coarse brown bread down with a shot of whiskey.

 

[i] Ethel M. Chapman, War Breads: How the Housekeeper May Help to Save the Country’s Wheat Supply (Ontario Department of Agriculture: Women’s Institute Branch, 1917). 

[ii] “Vision Your Sons, Mothers of Canada!”, The Grimsby Independent (19 September 1917): 7. 

[iii] “Maist Economical Is Oatmeal Bread: Another Experiment in Wheat Substitutes Which May Be Tried on Hubby,” Toronto Daily Star (30 July 1917): 8. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

[iv] Advertisement for DeLand & Co’s Chemical Baking Powder, Wikimedia Commons.

[v] Diane Tye, “‘A Poor Man’s Meal,’” Food, Culture & Society 11, no. 3 (1 September 2008): 344.

[vi] Ethel M. Chapman, “Voluntary Rationing at Home,” Maclean’s Magazine (1 January 1918): 42-43, 62-63. 

 

About 

Sarah Cavanagh is a senior History/Canadian Studies student at Brock University.

Culinary History, Food and Drink, Libraries, Archives & Museums, Modern, Posts, Printed Books, Series: Canadian Studies

You’re Invited! Brunch at the CLGA

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Today, Michael Pereira of the Canadian Lesbian + Gay Archives shares some of the outstanding items in their Toronto-based collections, including a wide range of recipe books. A version of this post will also appear on the CLGA blog.

Michael Pereira

When it comes to meals, brunch is the queerest of them all. I may not have the empirical evidence to back up this claim, but I would bet that brunch is itself a queer invention. It’s not quite early enough to be breakfast nor does it have the requisite midday feel to be lunch. It’s boldly in-between. It foregoes traditional boundaries and crosses widely agreed upon lines—just like the queer folk among us.

It was clear to me  where I needed to look when asked to feature the Canadian Lesbian + Gay Archives’ collection of cookbooks. With heavenly hybrids of breakfast and lunch fare, brunch is the most versatile meal of them all. It’s also a perfect opportunity to pop open your finest (or cheapest—we don’t judge) bottle of champagne before 11am! Catch your local drag queens and kings for drag brunch at a queer-friendly cafe, restaurant, or early-rising bar on a Sunday morning for a different kind of spiritual experience.

Fig. 1. Illustration from Out of Our Kitchen Closets: San Francisco Gay Jewish Cooking (San Francisco: Congregation Sha'Ar Zahav, 1987). Image courtesy of CLGA.
Fig. 1. Illustration from Out of Our Kitchen Closets: San Francisco Gay Jewish Cooking (San Francisco: Congregation Sha’Ar Zahav, 1987). Image courtesy of CLGA.

 

The CLGA is the world’s largest independent LGBTQ2+ archive. Established by The Body Politic’s editorial board in 1973, it maintains a vast collection of records, artifacts, artwork, periodicals, and books generously donated by members of our communities that are available for the public to learn from. Our collections have been meticulously archived largely by and for LGBTQ2+ people, many of whom dedicate their time on a volunteer basis. The cookbooks featured here are held in our James Fraser Library, named in honour of the late James Fraser, an early member of the Canadian Gay Liberation Archives who logged over 500 hours of volunteer service in just one year.

 

Fig. 2. Cover of Lou Rand Hogan, The Gay Cookbook (Los Angeles: Sherbourne Press, 1965). Image courtesy of CLGA.
Fig. 2. Cover of Lou Rand Hogan, The Gay Cookbook (Los Angeles: Sherbourne Press, 1965). Image courtesy of CLGA.

 

You can find cookbooks that range from informative to campy by a wide range of authors in and out of drag. This includes:

  • The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book by Alice B. Toklas (1954)
  • Out of Our Kitchen Closets: San Francisco Gay Jewish Cooking by Congregation Sha’ar Zahav (1987)
  • But Can She Cook? by Christopher North (1993)
  • Healthy Eating Makes a Difference: A Food Resource Book for People Living with HIV by Sheila Murphy (1993)
  • Be Gay! Eat Gay!: The Gay of Cooking by The Kitchen Fairy (1982)
  • The Gay Cookbook by Chef Lou Rand Hogan (1965)
  • Cookin’ With Honey: What Literary Lesbians Eat edited by Amy Scholder (1996)
  • La Gay Gourmet by Carl Mueller (1983)
  • The Drag Queen’s Cookbook & Guide to Sensible Living by Honey van Campe (1996)

Fig. 3. Covers from Out of Our Kitchen Closets: San Francisco Gay Jewish Cooking (San Francisco: Congregation Sha'Ar Zahav, 1987); Be Gay! Eat Gay! The Gay of Cooking (Laguna Beach: Fairy Publications, 1982); Honey Van Campe, The Drag Queen’s Cookbook & Guide to Sensible Living (New Orleans: Pontalba Press, 1996). Images courtesy of CLGA.
Fig. 3. Covers from Out of Our Kitchen Closets: San Francisco Gay Jewish Cooking (San Francisco: Congregation Sha’Ar Zahav, 1987); Be Gay! Eat Gay! The Gay of Cooking (Laguna Beach: Fairy Publications, 1982); Honey Van Campe, The Drag Queen’s Cookbook & Guide to Sensible Living (New Orleans: Pontalba Press, 1996). Images courtesy of CLGA.

 

So call up your besties, try-out some of the recipes that follow, and have a gay ol’ time!

 

“Kaffi’s Corn Bread” from But Can She Cook?

Don’t be afraid to get a little corny for your brunch party! A fabulous line-up of drag queens pose for glamour shots alongside their favourite eats in this cookbook published in support of Casey House Hospice, established in 1988 as Canada’s first stand-alone hospital for people with HIV/AIDS.

Fig. 4. “Kaffi’s Corn Bread,” from Christopher North, “But Can She Cook?” (Toronto: Bittersweet Press, 1993) 45. Photography by George Leet. Image courtesy of CLGA.
Fig. 4. “Kaffi’s Corn Bread,” from Christopher North, But Can She Cook? (Toronto: Bittersweet Press, 1993) 45. Photography by George Leet. Image courtesy of CLGA.

 

“Oeufs Francis Picabia” from The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book 

Fig. 5. Cover of The Alice B Toklas Cook Book (London: Brilliance Books, 1987) and Alice B. Toklas, photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1949. Images courtesy of CLGA.
Fig. 5. Cover of The Alice B Toklas Cook Book (London: Brilliance Books, 1987) and Alice B. Toklas, photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1949. Images courtesy of CLGA.

Alice B. Toklas’ cookbook is a charcuterie board of the who’s who of 20th century art and culture in France. It includes recipes and anecdotes featuring Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and, as the name of this dish suggests, Francis Picabia. “The only painter who ever gave me a recipe was Francis Picabia and though it is only a dish of eggs it merits the name of its creator,” Toklas explains.

Break 8 eggs into a bowl and mix them well with a fork, add salt but no pepper. Pour them into a saucepan—yes, a saucepan, no, not a frying pan. Put the saucepan over a very, very low flame, keep turning the eggs with a fork while very slowly adding in very small quantities 1\2 lb. butter—not a speck less, rather more if you can bring yourself to it. It should take ½ hour to prepare this dish. The eggs of course are not scrambled but with the butter, no substitute admitted, produce a suave consistency that perhaps only gourmets will appreciate.

 

The Cooking Fairy’s “Queerberry Crepes” from Be Gay! Eat Gay!

On a cold wintry morning wrap yourself up in the warm, tender love and care of these silky strawberry crepes.

Fig. 6. “Queerberry Crepes” from Be Gay! Eat Gay!: The Gay of Cooking by The Kitchen Fairy (Laguna Beach: Fairy Publications, 1982). Image courtesy of CLGA.
Fig. 6. “Queerberry Crepes” from Be Gay! Eat Gay!: The Gay of Cooking by The Kitchen Fairy (Laguna Beach: Fairy Publications, 1982). Image courtesy of CLGA.

 

Michelle DuBarry’s “City Park Apple Tart” from But Can She Cook?

Any good meal must be topped off with a sweet treat. For dessert we have a recipe for a delectable apple tart from the legendary Canadian queen Michelle DuBarry.

Fig. 7. “Michelle DuBarry’s City Park Apple Tart,” from Christopher North, “But Can She Cook?” (Toronto: Bittersweet Press, c. 1993) 53. Photography by George Leet. Image courtesy of CLGA.
Fig. 7. “Michelle DuBarry’s City Park Apple Tart,” from Christopher North, “But Can She Cook?” (Toronto: Bittersweet Press, c. 1993) 53. Photography by George Leet. Image courtesy of CLGA.

 

Bon Appétit!

That’s all we have on the menu today friends! Join us at the CLGA to feast your eyes on the rest of our collection and visit us at clga.ca for more information. You can sign-up for our newsletter and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, too, to follow along as we continue to preserve and tell the stories of LGBTQ2+ people in Canada.

Family and Household, Modern, Series: Canadian Studies, Series: Politics and Propaganda, Series: Wartime Recipes, Women and Gender

Recipes for Waste Reduction

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Kesia Kvill

Fig. 1. "Waste Not - Want Not," 1914-1918. Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada, MIKAN no. 2894436
Fig. 1. “Waste Not – Want Not,” 1914-1918. Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1983-28-706, MIKAN no. 2894436

In June of 1917, the Canadian Government introduced the Office of the Food Controller under the direction of Conservative Ontario politician and businessman, W.J. Hanna. The introduction of Food Controller during the First World War was part of Canada’s recognition that they were one of the main sources for food staples to Great Britain.

One of the Office of the Food Controller’s main goals was to educate the public on how to reduce their use of essential foodstuffs like beef, bacon, and wheat, that were high in energy source and easily shipped overseas. The government encouraged women to voluntarily free up these essential food products by changing their food consumption and diets. The Food Controller encouraged the use of less popular cereal grains and flours, cheaper cuts of meat, and larger amounts of fresh and persevered local produce. Kitchen managers were also encouraged to free up food for the Allies by reducing their food waste.

As part of their educational efforts, the Office of the Food Controller published a variety of pamphlets that explained the importance of food control through careful meal planning and thoughtful waste reduction. While these pamphlets did not include specific recipes, they clearly emphasized the threat of food waste and encouraged Canadian women to alter their families’ eating habits from the extravagant diets that had been a feature of the pre-war era.

Fig. 2. "Waste Means Defeat," 1914-1918. Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1983-28-710, MIKAN no. 3667237
Fig. 2. “Waste Means Defeat,” 1914-1918. Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1983-28-710, MIKAN no. 3667237

The “Waste Not – Want Not” section in the government-published Food Service: A Handbook for Speakers called food waste in a time of war a crime. It professed that Canadians wasted at least $50,000,000 in food every year and warned women to guard against “waste in the kitchen and pantry” and in the dining-room. They suggest that instead of throwing bones into the garbage that that “every scrap of marrow” should be boiled out and made into soup. As a handbook for speakers, the suggestions for waste reduction made in Food Service focused on using the facts to demonstrate the importance of food control to the war effort.

War Meals, another Food Controller published pamphlet, aimed to provide more practical suggestions for saving beef, bacon, wheat, and flour through waste reduction. This publication suggests that careful planning and meal preparation “will enable a housekeeper to make her food purchases go as far as possible.” Several suggestions for meals were made, with attention paid to the type of work performed by men and what they should eat and the age of children. To feed a family of five (with children’s ages ranging from 3-12) for a week it was suggested that the woman of the house plan for meals with 10 lbs meat/substitute, 20lbs cereal product, 20lbs potatoes, 28lbs of veggies and fruit, 3lbs of fat, 14 quarts milk. This, it was noted, would fulfill the family’s nutritional needs, but left no room for “the waste of anything usable.”

Fig. 3. "Sign the Food Service Pledge," 1914-1918. Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1983-28-719, MIKAN no. 3667246
Fig. 3. “Sign the Food Service Pledge,” 1914-1918. Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1983-28-719, MIKAN no. 3667246

The government suggestions in War Meals include ideas for conserving wheat, like diluting wheat flour with other grains, potatoes, and cooked breakfast cereal. War Meals provided some ideas on reducing food waste by preventing food spoilage and through transforming one food product into another. Bread, it was noted, could be saved by cutting no more than needed and drying it thoroughly to save from mould if it could not be finished. Leftover cooked breakfast cereal could be added into batters and doughs, and leftover bread could be made into “new bread, cake or puddings.” Cooks were encouraged to waste no ham and salt pork (used as a bacon substitute), as “even the rind and bones … [could be conserved] for the flavour” they provided to other dishes. Locally grown vegetables and fruits could be preserved to prevent their spoilage and to lengthen their enjoyment into the winter months.

The Office of the Food Controller knew that its primary audience was women and that their work as kitchen managers was essential to reducing food waste. Throughout their literature, it acknowledged the pride that women took in providing plentiful and varied diets for their families. The Food Controller’s appeal asked that the “foolish notion that carefulness in serving food without waste is ‘stinginess’” be abandoned in the name of duty and common sense. The Office reinforced the expertise of women by suggesting that cooks use and modify their favourite recipes; their “ingenuity will devise many ways of saving” important foodstuffs for the Allies. By recognizing the importance of women to the food situation, the government was simultaneously reinforcing gendered boundaries of work while also encouraging women to participate fully in the war effort as citizens.

Food and Drink, Ingredients, Series: Canadian Studies, Students, Teaching Resources

Scarborough Fare: Recipes at the Culinaria Research Centre

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In this post, Jeffrey Pilcher explains the development of a dynamic research initiative, the University of Toronto Scarborough‘s Culinaria Research Centre, an interdisciplinary program in food studies, history, and culture.

Jeffrey M. Pilcher

Recipes provide an endless source of discovery. Although I began my research more than twenty-five years ago, poring over the cookbook collection at the Condumex Archive in Mexico City, I continue to be amazed by the diversity and historical change in Mexican cuisine that are documented in recipe collections. In re-reading the first Mexican cookbook signed by a woman, Vicenta Torres de Rubio, I noticed that for the nineteenth-century elite, guacamole was not a dip of mashed avocado with chile but rather a European-style salad, carefully diced and garnished with oil and vinegar. Likewise, mole poblano, which is now considered Mexico’s national dish because of its mixture of New World chiles and chocolate with Old World spices, was once a colonial concoction made primarily with European ingredients such as lamb, pork, almonds, and sesame seeds, but seldom with the Indigenous turkey, and never, in the eighteenth century at least, with chocolate. Only after the Revolution of 1910 did Mexican elites embrace the Indigenous culinary heritage and its ingredients.

University of Toronto Scarborough by Loozrboy. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons via Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0.
University of Toronto Scarborough by Loozrboy. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons via Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0.

 

Students in the Food Studies program at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, actively participate in the discovery of historical food and culture. Daniel Bender began teaching a course called “Edible History” a decade ago using a portable heating unit to provide cooking demonstrations. The class came into its own with the construction of the Culinaria Kitchen Laboratory, funded through an Ontario provincial infrastructure grant, which allowed students in lab sections to prepare recipes at their own cooking stations, thereby gaining an experiential understanding of culinary labor. Homework assignments reinforce this process of discovery by asking students to independently reconstruct historical recipes and reflect on what their successes — and failures — in the kitchen reveal about foods from the past. As the highpoint of the class, students run a pop-up curry kitchen in place of a midterm exam, preparing a range of historical recipes for people across the campus, thereby exploring the genealogies of a globe-trotting dish.

Other colleagues at UTSC have used recipes and cooking for community-engaged education. Donna Gabaccia first taught a women’s studies class called “Gender in the Kitchen” while the Culinaria Kitchen Lab was still under construction. Unable to do lab exercises with the students, she sent them out to create a community cookbook called “Scarborough Fare,” named for the suburb of Toronto in which our campus is located. Many collected recipes from their mothers and grandmothers. The cookbook reflects the rich diversity of Scarborough’s immigrant communities and helps to build ties between these groups as people sample their neighbors’ dishes. The innovations that result from these exchanges are creating the future of Canada’s multicultural cuisine. Jayeeta Sharma added yet another dimension to this community engagement in a class called “Cuisine and Culture Across Global Asia” by taking students to the UTSC campus garden together with members of the Access Alliance Rooftop Garden. Students interviewed the community gardeners to learn about the global recipes they prepared from their Toronto garden plants, thereby gaining cross-cultural competencies not only by learning about the foods of other lands but also by interacting in the garden and kitchen with the bearers of these traditions.

Lanzhou Beef Noodle Soup. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons via CC by 3.0
Lanzhou Beef Noodle Soup. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons via CC by 3.0

The capstone of the Food Studies program is an intensive research seminar such as the “Culinary Ethnography” class that I teach. Each week, we spend the first half of the seminar discussing a reading about some aspect of food and culture, for example, Sidney Mintz’s essay “Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom,” which offers a concise history of Caribbean cuisine while reflecting on the meaning of food choices for enslaved Africans. Afterwards, we prepared a dish of callaloo with plantains to experience and reflect on the tastes of early modern globalization. For their major project, students had to research and write about some element of Toronto’s food system or culinary cultures such as a dish, restaurant, or cook. One student reconstructed the origins of Lanzhou Beef Noodles, a hugely popular hand-pulled noodle dish that originated in the provincial capital of Gansu in northwestern China and has now spread across the country and throughout the Chinese diaspora. Beginning with a legendary recipe attributed to an eighteenth-century scholar, the student looked critically at how the noodles evolved over time and were spread — not by the inhabitants of Lanzhou but rather by migrant cooks from an impoverished nearby town. For the final seminar meeting, students prepared their chosen dish and shared it with the class. Thus, students in UTSC’s Food Studies program not only learn about food through reading recipes but through the embodied, experiential processes of preparing and tasting food from them.