Introduction to What's to Eat? Entrées in Canadian Food History

Library Considerations for the Colonial Impacts of Indigenous Cookbook Publishing

“…This early Canadian food writing and publishing landscape had an ethnocentric focus on European influenced cuisine from confederation until the mid 20th century. As Cooke (2009) explains in her book titled What's to eat? Entrées in Canadian food history, most published early Canadian cookbooks explicitly used the word "Canadian" in the title, which worked to achieve a kind of unification of "Canadian" identity; this is much like the American idea of a "melting pot" where identities and cultures merge to create a consolidated national identity.…”

“…Early Canadian cookbooks such as The Female Emigrant's Guide (1854), La cuisinière canadienne (1840) and Canadian Housewife's Manual of Cookery (1861) act as settlement and consolidation cookbooks, which were published for settler women to cook in a Canadian context while also dictating what that context should taste like. The consolidation phase resulted in books that compiled information from other colonial books about cookery (Cooke, 2009). Cooke connects affiliation and articulation cookbooks to institutions that worked to achieve a constructed homogeneous Canadian identity.…”

“…While the hegemonic focus on "Canadiana" as a cultural identity persisted into the 1960's, a noteworthy tide of recognizing increasingly diverse foodways began to populate the collective "Canadian" psyche. The world's fair that was held in Montreal in 1967 ( Expo67) is considered to be the catalyst for a period of "intense introspection" for Canadian food writers, cooks and publishers (Cooke, 2009;Meyers, 2011) that continues to the present day. Expo67 presented Canadian cuisine as regionally based with a focus on endemic ingredients to each region.…”

“…As Canadian society continued to diversify so too did Canadian culinary scholarship, publishing and writing. However, the academic study of Canadian domestic foodways remains a particularly understudied field when compared to food scholarship within the American context (Cooke, 2009). Books from the differentiation period, which ranges from the sixties to present day, have a focus that has shifted away from the nationalistic "Canadiana" identity and towards a more inclusive focus on regionalism, immigrant fusion cuisine and the beginnings of Indigenous voices and representation within Canadian cookbook publishing.…”