Food For Thought: A Community of Taste

Community cookbooks are treasures worth saving

My aunt invited me to brunch on Sunday to celebrate my birthday. It was a few days early and I generally don’t do much to mark my annual trip around the sun, but it’s been a long cold winter of COVID and with indoor dining banned for the last month it had been a while since I’d contemplated a printed menu or had a table with a view.

But better than the smoked salmon Eggs Benedict (which was delicious and not something I usually make at home) were the presents. My aunt has a particular knack for finding books I like and this time was no exception - she gifted me a couple of old cookbooks that had belonged to my grandmother. One (the green and yellow cover above) was produced by the Federal Women’s Committee of the New Democratic Party of Canada to celebrate Canada’s centennial in the late 1960s, and the other a collection of recipes from the staff and residents of the care home where my grandmother lived for the last years of her life.

I love cookbooks and have a ridiculously large collection of them, everything from stylish hardcovers with exquisite photography better suited to the coffee table than the kitchen, to handwritten folders of recipe cards. No one likes to help me move because half the job is carting around boxes of books.

But some of my favourites are the community cookbooks I have picked up along the way - the books from the local church, the bridge club, the workplace charity fundraiser, and many more. Each book has a special nostalgia about it.

I’m also a big believer in rescuing these books from the rubbish bins of time. Even with millions of recipes at our fingertips there is something very different about these books - they capture how people ACTUALLY cook far more than any bible of technique or oeuvre from a celebrity chef ever can.

Community cookbooks are connections to a particular place in the world at a particular time.  Cookbooks from the 50s and 60s have recipes for casseroles, gelatin “salads” and creamed things that are deeply unfashionable and mildly freaky today.  Books from the 70s show some hints of “health foods”, substituting brown sugar and honey (no more healthful, honestly) for plain white sugar. Some of the attempts at what were considered “exotic” dishes like spaghetti, curry, or the much-maligned chop suey are almost offensive to us today in their ridiculousness, but they represent well-meaning efforts to broaden horizons even with the limited availability of ingredients.

The covers and photos in these cookbooks reveal a certain something about the aesthetic of the year the book was published. The forwards, the chapter headings, and the acknowledgements are a peek in to the zeitgeist - what were people talking about? Who was it important to thank? The ingredients show us what was in the stores and growing in the gardens. The directions reveal the expectations on their readers of the skill level common at the time.  These books reveal what was actually going on in home kitchens and how people thought about the food on their tables.

So I try to be a collector and keeper of these books when I can find them, and they are fascinating reading even if I’m not planning to cook anything from their pages. You ain’t finding this stuff on Pinterest, let me tell you.

But how do you pick ones worth reading from the dozens at the thrift shop or in the yard sale bins?  Here are some tips:

1.       Consider the time period when they were written. 

Despite my brain’s insistence, 1960 was 62 years ago, not 42 years ago.  If you find books much older than that, you may find the book of historical interest but less of practical value as a cookbook.  The ingredients themselves may not be hard to find, but the current versions may be different that when the cookbook was written.  Pork is leaner than it used to be. Cans and packages may be a different size.  The cooking methods and terminology can be quite different as well.  Do you know what it means to “bake in a slow oven”?  I had to look that one up! But if you’ve got a particular affinity for a decade or period in the past, consider seeking out cookbooks from those eras as a complement to your collections.

2.       Consider where the book was written.

The books I enjoy the most are the ones where I have some connection, however tenuous, to the group or demographic.  My family connections to places like the Saskatchewan prairie or the Ottawa Valley make cookbooks from those places particularly special. That kinship of history and ethnicity lends a familiarity to even the most outlandish recipes because even though they are not my Grandma’s recipes, they were probably made by someone just like my Grandma, my great aunts, or the neighbour one farm down the road. They also speak to me about the changing of the seasons and the rhythms of the year - spring planting, strawberry season, holidays, and other touch points on the calendar. Look for books that are local to where you live, where you’re from, and where from you’d like to live.

3.       Consider the book’s intended audience

There are a wealth of church-produced books, but also be on the lookout for books produced as fundraisers for schools or children’s organizations, particularly if you have kids or grandkids. Families (Moms usually, who are we kidding?) usually submit recipes their kids enjoy, and so can be an excellent inspiration for child-friendly meals and treats that you may not have considered. I’m pretty sure my Mom still makes more than a few cookie recipes from my Grade One class’ Christmas cookbook. If you regularly have friends over for game night or other group activities, consider the books overflowing with ladies lunches and bridge club recipes. It’s fun to see how notions of hospitality have evolved along with tastes.

Whether you intend to actually make canned soup casseroles, raisin tea buns, or lemon Jello tuna mold really isn’t the point. The recipes may be fun to read, the ingredient lists a marvel (or a horror), and the themes hokey and old-fashioned, but the common thread through every single one of these books is community. They are stories about people as much as they are recipes for food, and that alone make them worth saving.

So gather up your loose change and hit the used book stores, the garage sales, and the church basements and snap up these little bites of history.