Don't throw out . . . the cookbooks

I learned to cook out of a Purity Flour book similar to this one. First published in 1917, the version we had at home was probably from the 1930s or 1940s. Yes, it was getting pretty shabby by the 1970s, but I still regret not ending up with it.  

It had hard red covers, it was splattered and old, and it had every recipe – from tea biscuits to beef stew to angel cake – that any farm kitchen of the 1950s and 60s needed. I learned to cook out of it in my teens, on my parents’ wood-and-coal-fired stove in rural Alberta, and when they sold the family farm in the 1970s, I kept a sentimental eye on that reminder of a long-gone time and place. Sometime (not quite yet), I planned to ask my mother if she would – someday when she didn’t need it any more – pass it along to me.

 I was a city person by then, a career person who’d adopted the trendier eating habits of my place and time, but seeing that battered red book in my mother’s subsequent kitchens was a touchstone with the past. It was a reminder of the chocolate pudding made of cocoa instead of Belgian chocolate, the lemon sponge out of endless farm eggs, the potato salad with home-grown radishes and peas.

My parents had moved out to B.C. by then, and one day when I visited them, I realized the cookbook was … gone. “Oh,” my mother said breezily, “it was a dirty old thing after all those years. I got a new one – very clean.” The new version had shiny soft covers and modern graphics instead of the familiar faded heads of wheat barely visible against a dark-red background. It lacked the heft, the significance of the old book; gone was the decades-old splodge on the upside-down cake recipe.

I thought of my missed chance when my niece Michelle wrote me about a recent blog involving another of mom’s cookbooks. This book was home-made; after leaving the farm, mom began copying her favourite recipes into a blue ledger to consolidate them into one place. That ledger, held together with masking tape and so old that some page edges have turned to lace, was one of the mementoes I saved when she died in 2014. “Whatever you do – please don’t get rid of that blue ledger!” Michelle wrote after I blogged about mom's hot-cross bun recipe from it. “I would love to take a look through it one day.”

I don’t think Michelle, who has some interest in family history, will be disappointed. Like any good cookbook, it contains a multitude of hints about its owner’s interests and times. There are the recipes, yes, but there is also a 1990s list of the premiers of all the provinces of Canada, paired with stamps of each of their provincial flowers. There is a map of my parents’ Chilliwack garden with names and locations of all the plants they put in (grapes, pears, cherries, roses). There are recipes reflecting different eras – sugar-free rice pudding from when my father was diagnosed with diabetes, for example, and a copy of my extravagant trifle recipe from the time of big family Christmases. There are newspaper clippings that caught her eye – about plant origins, water shortages, the physical impacts of aging (“Women lose bone mass faster than men,” Surrey Leader, 1990). And, curiously – although she did always have a head for math – an explanation of how to figure out the square root of a number, complete with example.

As mom showed, a recipe book can be far, far more than a description of how to make certain dishes. I promise not to throw it out.

This is the new version of the Purity cookbook, published in 1967, that mom got after she tossed the old one. Judging from the state of its pages, it wasn't nearly as well used as the original one. 

Here's the ledger that mom consolidated her best recipes into. It was getting pretty rickety by the time I inherited it in 2014, but it's still usable. It's also full of other mementoes from her life.

Some of the page edges have nearly disintegrated into lace.