Podcast
Transcript to the Podcast:
[Piano Music]
Sarah: Hello and welcome to Influential Canadians in Food History. I’m your host Sarah Gammage, and this is the show where we talk about food history and the people who created it. On today’s episode we are going to discuss Rose Murray. She was an internationally published food writer, tv and radio personality, cookbook author and teacher and that was involved in the Canadian food scene for over 30 years. She wrote 12 cookbooks, the first one in 1979 and the last one in 2012. Additionally, she contributed to over 40 other cookbooks, consulted for a number of food companies and government bodies and has written for many national magazines and newspapers, including The Toronto Star, The Globe & Mail, Canadian Living, and Australian Woman's Day. She appeared often in both radio and television on stations such as CBC and TVO and was the resident cook for many years on Kitchener's CTV Noon News. She taught cooking classes at Conestoga College, at the University of Waterloo and a food and culture course at Wilfrid Laurier University. On top of all of that she was incredibly well liked, and everyone mentioned how friendly and welcoming she was.
Sarah: Murray was a very accomplished woman! She has won many awards for her cookbooks including gold for best cookbook and bronze in culture in the 2004 Cuisine Canada/University of Guelph National Culinary Book Awards for her book “Hungry for Comfort”, and Gold in the Taste Canada national cookbook awards in 2013 for “Canada’s Favourite Recipes” cowritten with Elizabeth Baird. Personally, Murry was the recipient of the Toronto Culinary Guild's Silver Ladle Award for her unique contribution to Ontario's food industry for 1993-1994, In 2009 she was awarded the Ontario Hostelry Institute's gold award for her contributions as a writer and author with a focus on Canada, its food and culinary heritage and in 2015 she was inducted into Taste Canada Hall of Fame. The Taste Canada Hall of Fame is an award that “recognizes lifetime achievement in Canadian culinary writing (Taste Canada).” It is described as “Celebrating the personalities who have shaped Canadian culinary writing and made a lasting contribution to our culture (Taste Canada).”
Sarah: Rose Murray was born in 1941 and wrote her first cookbook in 1979 at 38 years old. Let’s look at how she got there. Murry grew up on a farm, south of Collingwood. It was a mixed farm where they grew crops, had animals, butchered their own meat and made their own butter. Murray was the second youngest of six and the only one of her siblings to go to university. She studied English at Trinity College at the University of Toronto where she graduated in 1962. Soon after that she started teaching at Collingwood Collegiate. In late 1964, one of her colleagues introduced Murray to her nephew because she thought they would be a good match. I guess she was right because that man Kent Murry became her husband, and they became engaged within a month. Murray left teaching to raise her two children. She had a passion for cooking starting from helping her mother cook as a child. Her husband introduced Murray to Monda Rosenburg who worked as a food editor at the Toronto Star. Murray and Rosenburg because friends and, Rosenburg was impressed by Murray’s cooking and writing skills, so she hired her as freelancer. Murray started publishing articles and worked to refine her skills though studying at Cordon Bleu, La Varenne and Ecole de Gastronomie Française in Paris as well as taking classes in Costa Rica, Hong Kong and Thailand. She also started teaching local cooking classes. When Elizabeth Baird came to Rosenburg looking for more authors for cookbooks, she suggested Murray and her first cookbook “The Christmas Cookbook” was published in 1979.
Sarah: “The Christmas Cookbook” was a book about Canadian Christmas cooking. It combined different ethnic traditions, such as stollen, a German fruit bread, and improvisation based on the availability of ingredients. It offered information about the ingredients, methodology, equipment and storage for the recipes. The book is quite focussed on baking with additional sections of holiday feasts, that include menus with courses and drinks.
Sarah: To set the scene in the 1980s in Canada it was a time of political and economic change, and Terry Fox ran the Marathon of Hope. In the 1970s there was an oil crisis that caused stagnation and inflation resulted in two recessions in the early 1980s. This caused increases in unemployment rates and people needing to save money. In 1982 the Constitutional Act was passed giving Canada full independence by allowing it to change its constitution without approval from Britain. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms was also passed at this time. It guarantees political rights to Canadians and civil rights to everyone in Canada. The Quebec referendum also took place in 1982. Murray was writing her recipes during this time, and these political and economic factors would have impacted her ingredient and stylistic choices.
Sarah: Another one of Murray’s books was called “Comfortable Kitchen Cookbook” which was published in 1991. She described comfort food as “food that tastes good, food that’s soothing, like a hearty soup on a cold winter day. A recipe becomes comfortable when you make it over and over again, knowing it will be good every time.” Murray separates the cookbooks into categories such as soothing soups, comforting main courses and exquisite endings. In many recipes she focuses on how they can be used when entertaining guests. This book does include some international flavours especially Asian inspired dishes.
Sarah: In 1996 she wrote “Rose Murray’s New Casseroles and Other One-Dish Meals”. This book had a focus on making good food simply and showing how dishes could be made ahead. Like her other books it focused quite heavily on meat but does have a vegetarian section, which provided more options. A lot of these dishes offered suggestions for things to serve with it which was not as prominent in “Comfortable Kitchen Cookbook”.
Sarah: In the early 1990s there was a recession due to the weakening of the Canadian economy because of large cutbacks in manufacturing. Inflation was high and the Bank of Canada raised its interest rates significantly in an attempt to combat this. As a result, Canadians decreased spending overall. This was also in combination with other factors such as increased taxation and increased unemployment. This had lasting effects on the Canadian people. Murray’s cookbook focusing on casseroles is indicative of the economic environment.
Sarah: In 2001 Murray published “A Year in my Kitchen”. This book followed a much different format than her other books. Instead of being sorted by type of dish or meat used, it was sorted into categories, based on the seasons of the year. It focused on when produce was available and included lots of traditional dishes. She also used international flavours, such as Greek style chicken burgers and jerk chicken and ingredients such as mangoes, kiwis and passion fruit. The last section of the book is about preserves showcasing how food can be made to last.
Sarah: Growing up on a farm really shaped Murray’s opinion of food. She said “I try and support my local farmers as much as I can, and avoid the supermarkets if I can, because that way, I know how my food is produced, and the love and respect these people have for what they do. And I think that has shaped a lot of the way I write.” She wrote a lot about local and seasonal food and recipes. She focussed on the enjoyment of making food and sharing it with others. Murray aimed to make a personal connection to the people making her recipes by sharing stories. She believed that this was an old ideology and when the book the 100-mile diet came out she was against it for that very reason. She believed it was poorly written and that they didn’t know what they were talking about.
Sarah: Murray came out with “A Taste of Canada” in 2008. It is organized similarly to her other books but has a few differences. It included a lot more personal anecdotes about her connections to the food. She also discussed foods that are eaten in Canada such as potatoes and corn, their history and how they are consumed. Interspersed within the book are pages on different regions in Canada referencing her travels, the history of the region and how it relates to food and dishes in the cookbook from the region.
Sarah: Murray was very passionate about Canadian food and “wanted to explore how Canada’s land, climate and people shaped its food.” She was a hands-on learner for example when she needed a car to drive to work, she took night school classes and finished top of the class and as said by her husband “she can fix a car better than any of my male friends.” When looking into Canadian food she took a very similar approach, traveling across Canada to learn about food. She “fished for salmon off Vancouver Island, enjoyed fall suppers in northern Saskatchewan, gathered wild rice in northern Ontario, picked berries on the Gaspé and on Cape Breton Island and dug for clams in Prince Edward Island (Rose Murray).”
Sarah: Canadian cuisine by definition is one of fusion. It also includes many regional variants across the country in part due to its large size. The indigenous people have their own food-based traditions that over time merged with ones from European settlers predominantly from Britain and France. This involved the blending of recipes, cooking techniques and ingredients.
Sarah: Food, the way people eat and how it changes over time can tell a lot about people. The driving factors that change what people from a specific area eat are demographic, economic and trade changes, as well as health messages from various sources. Cookbooks also offer information about the culture and social norms surrounding food and cooking. Over the course of time Murray wrote her books, the Canadian diet was changing, and she was able to adapt to the change of food and food habits. There was an increase in international flavours, as people immigrated, and ingredients became available people started trying new foods. As Murray had studied cooking in many countries, she was able to add recipes from different cultures into her books.
Sarah: Some of these changes included the change from potatoes to wheat flour as the main carbohydrate source Canadians were consuming. In the mid 2000s wheat flour surpassed potatoes. In 2004 rice overtook corn as a much smaller third carbohydrate source which is in part related to increased immigration from Asian countries. Starting in 1977, the consumption of beef was also decreasing being replaced with chicken and turkey. This was due to a combination of factors including the rising costs of beef and more information becoming available about the environmental and health issues surrounding beef. Another very important trend is the globalization of the food industry and the increase in convenience. This can be seen in the rapid increase in consumption of bananas and melons in the last 20 years. In more recent years especially with the increased popularity of internet diets specific food items and dishes have seen rapid increases and decreases. Overall, people are eating a wider range of foods due to the globalization of the food industry and increased immigration resulting in more exposure to different culture’s foods.
Sarah: In conclusion, Rose Murray has been doing farm to table cooking since before it was a trend. She believed in the importance of locally sourced ingredients and supporting farmers. She created recipes that were easy to follow, tasty and comforting. They allowed anyone to get into the kitchen and create food that was enjoyable. Murray really encouraged the sharing of a meal as a way to create community. Her secret to success included easy to follow recipes, that were often quick to make and with ingredients that were easily available across the country. Overall, Rose Murray encouragd people to have fun cooking and to share food with those you love. Next week on Influential Canadians in Food History we will be discussing Anita Stewart’s legacy.
[Piano Music]
Created by Sarah Gammage
Hosted by Sarah Gammage
Music: “Piano Loops 132 Octave Long Loop 120 Bpm.” By josefpres
https://freesound.org/people/josefpres/sounds/707009/.
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