National Post Book Review: “Catharine Parr Traill’s The Female Emigrant’s Guide”

Editors Nathalie Cooke and Fiona Lucas’s book Catharine Parr Traill’s The Female Emigrant’s Guide: Cooking with a Canadian Classic (Spring 2017) has received a wonderful review by Laura Brehaut in the National Post (June 9, 2017).

Management of fire and wool, candle- and soap-making – Catharine Parr Traill’s The Female Emigrant’s Guide is a blueprint for survival in the backwoods of 19th-century Upper Canada. But most of all, it’s a cookbook.

Innovations of our time – 3D food printing, meal kits and UberEATS – coexist with contemporary cooks experimenting with time-honoured processes. Once-crucial skills such as harnessing wild yeast for bread-making and cooking over an open fire are still very much alive today.

“We’re very interested in what we’re doing now at this particular moment,” English professor Nathalie Cooke says. “But it’s important as we start to rethink the stories we’re telling ourselves through our food and about our food that we … recuperate historical texts and bring them back into the discussion.”

In a new edition – Catharine Parr Traill’s The Female Emigrant’s Guide: Cooking with a Canadian Classic (McGill-Queen’s University Press) – Cooke and co-editor culinary historian Fiona Lucas present what they refer to as a “historical toolkit.” Their study of Traill’s world provides the context and resources necessary to unlock the Guide and other historical cookbooks.

Click here for the full review.