Transcript (Full episode)

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      Hello and welcome to episode 6 of Culinary Milestones of Canadian Cooking. I'm Zoe Fink and today I'm here joined with my partner Breah Snow. We're both third year history students at the University Of Guelph where we are recording this interview today. Today is Monday November 20, and we are delighted to be talking with Liz Driver who is joining us from Toronto. Liz is a food historian who specializes in researching the culinary history of Canada and Britain. She is best known for Culinary Landmarks: A Bibliography of Canadian Cookbooks from 1825 to 1949, which helped shape Canadian culinary writing and won the Bibliographical Society of Canada's Tremaine Medal. Liz was also the very first person inducted into the Taste of Canada Hall of Fame, in 2009. Welcome Liz, it is an honor to meet you.

Liz Driver       Hello.

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      And then just for our first question; Why did you agree to take part in this interview with us?

Liz Driver       I think it's very important to capture history, as you historians would agree. Um, you know, when people are busy doing things that they think matter, they don't realize that necessarily have time to think about the import of what they're doing. And so for me this is a wonderful moment to reflect back on all the things that have happened in the Canadian culinary world. Um, and I mean a bibliography is, ah, is a record right, in it in the first place. So your audio tapes are also a record.

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      Wonderful! Thank you. And could you just please tell us a little bit about your background and how it led you to become a food historian?

Liz Driver       Oh my goodness. So this was long before there was anything called “food studies”, and in fact, I had my undergraduate degree in English literature and art history, and then I went to work at the National Gallery of Canada in the department of prints and drawings and from there after a short time I went over to do my master's degree in London, England again on an art history topic. But when I was there, I ran into an old Queens friend who had happened… um, she'd gotten to know, a wonderful person who was very… ah formative, um, very interested in British food history and he'd started a small press called Petit Propos Culinaires, and at the time was also publishing a bibliography of British eighteenth-century cookbooks. And I'd been working very hard at my job that I'd gotten after doing my art history degree, and it was an editorial job in a publishing company, I thought: I've made enough in overtime, I'm going to take a couple of years off and do this research project on British nineteenth-century cookbooks which my friend proposed to me. And by the way, the person who was so instrumental in the United Kingdom in sparking an interest in culinary history is Alan Davidson. So, um why did I say yes to my friend? [laughs] Because I had been… the big book that I'd been put onto to be a junior editor was called the step by step… The Good Housekeeping Step-by-Step Colour Cookbook. This was way distant from scholarly stuff, okay? It was like learning the rules of putting a yellow glove on your left hand and you know a wooden spoon in another, whatever you were doing, and it was very formulaic. But in the process of editing that cookbook, I had come to realize that Canada, Britain, and the United States share culinary traditions.. but how are those ideas and recipes and rituals passed around? Who gets to influence whom? And in the case of The Good Housekeeping Step-by-Step Colour Cookbook by the Americans, they wanted the British to do a new edition for them. I saw that, ah, this British edition which was going to follow the American one, of the Color Cookbook, um… that they would have to use American photographs, so they would substitute their English recipes, and hope to choose a recipe that looks sort of like the American one, and use the American photograph. Also, they couldn't have a chapter on jams and jellies, or pickles, or even on game. You know, like rabbits and deer and things that you know, are a very particular part of British cooking. Um, another interesting thing was, that the Americans wanted a cover that just looked like boring old horrible burlap, which they in their wisdom, knew would ah, resonate with their audience, their American cooks, whereas the British actually had a really wonderful exciting, ah, colour front cover design. Very trendy, cutting edge design. And I'm only mentioning this because this is still an issue today. You know, whose recipes… who uses which recipes and why, and what's the role of cookbooks in disseminating that information. So, hey, I was working on the American cookbook but I saw the British were getting a short shrift because the Americans had all the money. So I decided to take a couple of years off, and I would work on this independent research project called “A Bibliography of Cookery Books Published in Great Britain: 1875 to 1914.”. I knew pretty much nothing about bibliography, about old books generally, and how you would go about it. But, um, I was working with a team of people, I learned a lot just by doing, and all the time, all the time I was thinking… hmm, what about Canadian cookbooks? You know, how many were they? What were they like? How were they the same or different? Um, so to your question, which I think was “how did you get involved in culinary history, or food history”? That's how. But I think for a lot of… for me anyway, it's also childhood memories because, um, at our family cottage in the 1950s, at the beginning of the 50s, we had no power, like no electricity. We used kerosene lamps and my grandmother got up in the morning, ah, lit the the wood stove, which was a cook stove, and made us breakfast that way. And we often had, you know, my grandfather would fish for lake trout and bring them in for breakfast. So, those kinds of, I think “elemental food experiences”, also contributed to my interest. I do wonder if people who only buy prepackaged food have the same… would have the same interest as I have. [laughs]

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      That was really interesting. Thank you for sharing that. And then just going off of Canadian cuisine, and getting into that, in your opinion does Canadian cuisine exist, and if so what defines it?

Liz Driver       Well, I mean on the simplest level, of course it exists, because “Canadian cuisine” is what Canadians eat, what they cook and eat. But the degree to which it is the same or different from anybody else's cuisine is another question. Um, it is distinctive in that it has its own history. Um, its own products, natural products, farmed products. Um… it’s its own interesting evolution from different groups, right? The way they settled across the country, and of course including Indigenous ingredients, and how Indigenous people shared their knowledge with, um, the settlers. And I will name one particular book, Catharine Parr Traill's The Female Emigrant's Guide. If you want to understand how important, um, Indigenous knowledge and food sources were to people living in the backwoods near Peterborough [laughs]... just take a look at Catharine Parr Traill's book and see the role of corn and, um, and how to fish through the ice, and all that kind of thing. Maple syrup too.

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      Perfect, thank you! And then within your Culinary Landmarks, which we're very impressed by all the work you've put into it, you note that you began your research in 1990 and it took over ten years to complete the book. Can you describe what it was like to work on this project for over ten years and could you describe what a typical day in your life would have looked like?

Liz Driver       Mmm! Well… it was an amazing wonderful journey. Nobody had done any work in this field before. And… it was not possible to find these books in the normal way. Ah, and I'm sure even now these books are not in normal places. [laughs] You know, it's a wonderful thing that there's now a “Culinary Collection” at the University of Guelph, that um, the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library is expanding its collections, and there are a few… there have been collections growing across Canada. But where I found most of the books, was in private collections. And that sounds grand. Actually, in people's kitchens, right? Individual families passed down like, books passed down from mother to daughter, or held onto by an older person. Or, the other place was in museums, because museums understood that cookbooks, um, captured so much social history. They understood their value. Whereas in a regular library, with regular collecting practices, they just saw these as how-to manuals. “Oh, they were by women.”, “Oh, you know, what on earth could be valuable about these things.”, “What could they tell us?”. Um, so how was I going to find these books? I did radio interviews. I contacted women's organizations of all kinds and had them put little advertisements in their newsletters, or whatever. Word of mouth. Canadian Living, the national women's magazine, had an article. And it was… real networking. [laughs] That's all I can say. And so… that's having ah, sort of generated this interest, and also giving talks over time, everywhere I went over this whole period of doing the book. Ah, people would tell me about their books. They'd write me letters. Um, and this was also pre-email. And pre-internet. And so, I would receive letters, I've got all the letters which I intend to donate to the University of Guelph, which are an amazing record of what people felt about their books, how they got the book, their favorite recipe, and so on! So, I got letters and then people would send me books, because they could see that I was expressing an interest in them. And I felt, um… I felt that it was unethical for me to just keep those books, and I don't know if you are… getting to this question but I'll just answer it straight off: that is how the Canadian Culinary Collection happened at Guelph, because I also was told, “oh there's a woman, Una Abrahamson, and she's got an amazing collection.”. I'm going to say, Una was one of the few people in all of Canada who actively collected cookbooks in a… with a scholarly understanding of getting them from all these different corners of the world and different times, and I went to her house, there she was, she had her collection down in the “rec-room”. Anyway, ah, her donation, which really established the core of the Canadian Cookbook Collection at Guelph, and then the fact that I just kept sending books to Guelph as I received them, that's how it all started. So, to say what a regular day would be… sure, I can tell you because I was an independent researcher. Okay? Um… and I didn't have a university position, I wasn't getting any money from teaching, my kids were in school so I had a young family, so I was very happy… um, to still be… not taken away from my family's life. I was in charge of my own day. So first of all I would walk the dog. The kids would go off to school, and I would walk the dog, and that signaled to me “I'm going to sit down and work”. So I had a desk in my bedroom and… that's, where I did everything. And I planned trips, right? So, I had to travel across Canada to go and see these books. One day, perhaps they will all be digitized… and people wouldn’t have to travel [laughs]. But um… so I would plan the trips. Um, they'd have to be as economical as possible, staying with people wherever I could, and sometimes I'd be going off to places that were quite extraordinary. One time I was going to a trip to Manitoba and I was going to see a private collection outside of Brandon, okay? So I arrive in Winnipeg, I take a bus to Brandon, I get off the bus and dusk is falling, and I am picked up by um… an older man whose sister had just died, and he had her collection of cookbooks. And I got into his truck and he took me off like literally into rural Manitoba. Okay, there were no street lights. It was dark, and off we go and I think “hmmm”. Anyway, I spent a couple of nights there because his sister had amassed like, a huge number of cookbooks. And I saw Saskatoon berries for the first time [laughs]. I had amazing experiences traveling across the country and visiting private collectors, and I call them pri-, they're individuals who happen to have some books, okay? And sometimes I'd go and see them because they had only one book that I'd never heard of before and it sounded so, you know, important or interesting.

            I'd also like to just tell you how talking about a research project and getting it out into the public sphere, and this would be the very same in social media too, but um, an article about my project appeared in the Montreal Gazette and Julian Armstrong wrote the article and she said, you know, “Liz Driver's doing this research. There's a very important book called La Cuisiniere Canadienne. She's never been able to find the first edition of the first cookbook written in French in Canada.”. And the reason was that there had been a copy in Quebec City, at a library there, but it had been lost! So this is a very important book! Well, someone wrote to Julian! And it was this guy who had a copy of the book, and I went to Montreal to visit him. It was so important to see this book. And I never knew if I'd be able to see it again. It could disappear into his private collection. And, um, I was able to see the book, and it's not that I persuaded him but we were very much of a mind that this book was so important; he donated it to the National Library of Canada. So… like these are the satisfactions of doing research, not just like capturing the information that had never been captured before, but also to… make sure that these books are preserved for, forever really, in public institutions. Um, so there are always highs and lows. Um, you know, we don't- we didn't have any air- we still don't have air conditioning in our house in Toronto and that's a sustainable way to live [laughs]. Um, but there were times when it was so hot and I was having to- I had all my binders out and everything, you know. It was physically demanding as well as intellectually yeah, exciting.

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      That's really great, thank you. And just kind of going off of some of the points you said, what role can the general public play in preserving culinary history?

Liz Driver       Well first of all recognizing that how they… how they cook for themselves and for their family, and for their friends is… an important act. It's a cultural act. It's, you know, it's feeding the body and the soul. And um… that it means something, and you know, hold on to things that your family, like your family's recipes, your family's books. Um, remember how people cooked for you and then share that, share that with other people. I think that's important… um, and I think the terrible thing is that in the past, one thing that I did rescue and I want to… this is related. You know, so many Canadian cookbooks were published by women's groups as fundraisers for institutions that they cared about. Whether it was the church, whether it was the red cross, um, a temperance group. So they went through this very sophisticated exercise of gathering recipes, putting them into a manuscript, sometimes selling advertisements to raise money to actually print the book, and then they marketed the book. Well, this was all outside of the formal, official publishing sphere. And these, for the longest time, women, they treasured these books personally and within their community, but they didn't think they had any importance. So one thing that my research did was to draw attention to what may seem like small acts of people in communities. Um, but actually were incredibly important. So I think of brave Catharine Parr Traill, I think of all those women who worked to build their communities through cookbooks. Um, there's all kinds of people who I think are heroes in our culinary landscape. You know, including people who worked for the government, and who went and did anthropological surveys of how Indigenous people cooked and ate, and the home economists. You know, all of this is part of a sphere, um, that deserves a great amount of respect.

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      That's great, thank you. That actually goes into one of our other questions, if you could just touch a little more on it; of how culinary history is connected to women's history.

Liz Driver       Oh my goodness! I hate to tell you, history students at the University Of Guelph, I wanted… um, I knew that the work that I was doing was… would have earned a PhD and I went to speak to a history professor at the University Of Guelph in the very late eighties, and ah… I was discouraged. I was discouraged and I pretty much left the room crying. And, um, he didn't understand at that time, the importance of the work. And it is often women who carry forward this study of women's history to try and capture it, and preserve it, and to interpret it, and I've recently just read about um, and you may know about, a museum of women's history that someone has proposed in Ottawa, it is of course a woman leading it. And I feel… I am with her. I have got a little um, a little sign, I was part of the marches on Ottawa for abortion rights, and it's a little sign that says “my uterus belongs to me”. If they establish that museum, I am donating that placard [laughs]. Um anyway, that is a bit of a digression. But, women's- I'll tell you something else; how hard we fought to get this project done, Culinary Landmarks. It was another woman at the University Of Guelph, not a male history professor, Jo Marie Powers, and she supported me in this independent work. And so um, although I had started it on my own, Joe Marie Powers, who was I think an associate professor in the School of Hospitality at the time, she brought the project under the umbrella of the University of Guelph, so we could get grants to support some of the travel. There's still, I know the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the SSHRC Grants… I think we tried three times under history. We were not successful. I think it was on the fourth try, for a SSHRC Grant that we were successful, and that was because we put it under the category of “folk”, of “folk history” or “folklore”. I don't care what category it is. We got the grant. [laughs] But isn't that appalling? Think about it! Hist- and I don't think that the early 1990s is that long ago. I just think it was unacceptable at the time for that to happen. So… I'm glad that ultimately… that the project came under the University of Guelph, that the library’s Special Collections is developing a fantastic collection, and also oral histories. That's very important, so there will continue… there will continue to be women's history and culinary history to capture. And it will ever be evolving, so you've got jobs ahead of you. [laughs]

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      Great, thank you so much for sharing that. And why are cookbooks such unique primary sources to use?

Liz Driver       Well, I mean they're very close to how… they’re right at the heart of the family, right? Or even if it's not a family… they're so close to people, in their daily lives. So part of the issue when you're studying them is to… try to interpret that sphere; you know, how much is coming from say, marketing, commercial sources? How much is it bubbling up from the grassroots? Um, how much is somebody's policy that's coming down on you about nutrition? [laughs] But nevertheless people use cookbooks in their personal lives, and that makes them very special resources for understanding society.

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      Perfect, thank you. And then, in your books you describe the evolution of the cookbook genre in Canada. Do cookbooks have value in the twenty-first century, and what is the difference in getting recipes online, versus from a printed cookbook?

Liz Driver       Hmm… you know, I don't think anybody knows the answer to that question yet? [laughs] Um, people you know, people share recipes. Whether they write them on a piece of paper, whether they send them in an email, whether they tell you over the phone or at the dinner table. Um, they're still sharing… sharing recipes and advice. So, I think that the job of capturing that information will just maybe be a little different? I mean, even the media landscape, not counting social media, but um, television, podcasts. You know, you look back at Julia Child or any of the um, kind of early cooking shows on CBC. Um, it's always changing so I really I don't know how to judge sharing recipes over the internet. I personally like to know where my recipes come from and… people share things with me and I think: “where'd you get that? Like whose recipe is that?”. [laughs] I would prefer a real personal trusted source myself. But yes, your job [as a food historian] will just be different.

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      And then online recipes. Do you think there's a way to preserve them?

Liz Driver       Hmm… do you mean when people download them? Or like, I actually think people don't necessarily even record them or keep them. I think they go to their laptop, they check something out, and then they make it, then they forget it because they know they can always go back to something similar online. Is that? Yeah yeah.

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      Yeah. I guess, ah, like looking from a physical cookbook, how does it differ from like an online recipe that can just be discarded. Like is there a way to preserve that online content?

Liz Driver       Oh I think there is, and I don't think the recipe itself will change, right? The recipe is, whether it's… whether you see it on a screen, or you see it printed on the page, um… there it is. It's a recipe. Um, you know there'll be more visuals of foods, which will be incredibly interesting and incredibly useful for researchers, to be able to see the foods because that would- that's one issue about studying Canadian cooking, um, over the past couple of centuries is, I mean there didn't even use to be color photography at one point, okay? And up until fairly recent times, at one point there weren't photographs. There were just line drawings, or some kind of color plates. So um, I think there's just a lot more different ways to understand how people cook and eat these days, and a lot more personal commentary, which is really interesting. And then when you think of how people are sharing amongst themselves, their own food ways. From their own, you know, family groupings. That is fascinating. Um, with regard to how what was called “ethnic cooking” traveled across Canada or was captured. Um, obviously people brought their own food traditions to Canada from very early on, but it wasn't until the late forties that those recipes really started to be captured, uh, in a book, even a little book. So, um, there's some really interesting evolution happening right now, and it'll be much easier to see it and read it because of the internet and online sources.

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      Interesting, thank you. And then, have you ever heard of AI recipe generators, such as DishGen, and do you think this type of technology works well?

Liz Driver       I have not heard of it, I am not surprised it is um, happening. Um… [laughs] I really don't know what to say about that. Because I believe in human agency, right? I myself, even if you- just think about it, even if a recipe comes to you, you the person are reading it, understanding it, and you might decide to alter it. So there's nobody to say that you're gonna take a recipe from a book or online and just reproduce it thoughtlessly. Uh, most people like… you know that brings up the whole other like, you might say people fall into two camps. There are the scientists; the people who follow the formula. And then there's the people who are creative with the formula that they're given. So I'm in the other camp. I also, you know, I've done a lot of historic cooking. Um, cooking from recipes that don't even have temperatures, even amounts, and I love using my intuition. I like to just decide like: “Hm, I think that cake might be ready now” or “that stew’s had long enough stewing”. [laughs] I don't like slavishly following a recipe myself. So I would encourage, um… whether AI can generate recipes, hopefully there will always be human mediation.

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      Great. Thank you. And then your book, ah, kind of going off of how we talked about, like immigration and stuff like that, your book Culinary Landmarks categorized Canadian cookbooks geographically. How much do cookbooks vary by province?

Liz Driver       The books themselves? Over the twentieth century and even now, a lot. A lot. Because um, if you're interested also in, you know… there's a history of food. There's also the history of publishing. And Canada is a small country. Publishing is under a terrible pressure, you know, a strain at the moment. Um, and so there's only so many publishing companies and where are they located, and what are they focused on, who are their markets? So yes, what comes out of a province… it's hard for me, listen I'm in Toronto. I'm in the center of the universe [laughs] for all kinds of media, right? But if you go to other parts of the country, it's very important that they have regional publishers, or regional outlets for this kind of material. So naturally, the evolution of cooking has partly followed the growth of our biggest cities, our most powerful provinces, and it's taken quite a while for other provinces… to be able to express their difference. There always is difference. But it's to be able to express their difference through publishing. Um, I'm going to ask you a question; when was the National Library of Canada founded?

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      Zoe: Ah, that is a good question! Breah: I'm not sure. Zoe: I'm not either.

Liz Driver       Okay, well just to show you what a young undeveloped country we were, 1953!

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      Zoe: Interesting. Breah: Yeah, a lot later than…

Liz Driver       Now here's another question: when we needed to, when there- when it was important to keep a copy of every book published as sort of like a copyright record… well I'll answer for you: these books went to England. Okay? They went to the British Library. And they were like our copyright deposit library, just the way there's the Library of Congress in the US. And where were the cookbooks held? [laughs] They were held, in this period before the National Library of Canada, our cookbooks were sent to Britain, the ones that were sent at all, to they called it the “colonial dump”. Yes! The British Library called it the “colonial dump” and that's where they put our copyright deposit books, and in the Second World War, a bomb fell on the cookbook section for Canada, [laughs] so we lost a lot of our cookbooks in the “colonial dump”. Um, I only mention this because um… you know, we are a young country, and it's taken us quite a while to get to recognize that we have our own traditions, and indeed we have a very, and as my research showed, a very specific publishing history of cookbooks. And it was because that very specific publishing industry, um, that's how- that's how our traditions got passed on. So, it was different from the US, it was different from the UK. Um, and French Canadian books themselves had a different trajectory. So yep, we are distinct.

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      Wonderful, thank you. And then just kind of going off of what you just said; how do Canadian cookbooks transmit cultural values, and could you give some specific examples?

Liz Driver       Um, well I think the fundraising cookbooks show how self-reliant our communities were, in a time before, say, the social welfare state, like before OHIP and so on. And… you know, women were- like women in groups did a lot of work and they, they used cookbooks to raise money to do their work, to support their communities. So in that way fundraising cookbooks show a cultural value, of being rooted in community and very self-reliant. Um, and then, I think that our home economic textbooks are more interesting than they look at first. Um, they look like textbooks. But if you take… it wasn't really until 1923 in Nellie Lyle Pattinson's Canadian Cookbook that there was any national home economics textbook that reached into classes all across the country. And I think it's funny, that cookbook in a way shows how before- up until 1950 or so, how homogenous Canada apparently was. It certainly was homogenous. Um, in the way it sort of identified standard recipes and shared them. Um, but then you see the change in that cookbook after 1950. Um, and the… and the influences from other ethnic groups coming in, the recognition of the contribution of those ethnic groups. Um, and then from a commercial point of view, I think I will say a cultural value, would be the flower company cookbooks. Because we are- okay, we're known for our wheat, therefore we're known for our flour too. And those companies, um, they mimicked the fundraising cookbooks. They decided, these companies, that they would follow the example of the women's groups, and they did a competition essentially, hey, a call out for recipes. And women sent their recipes in to the flour companies, and it was women in these first sorts of jobs, real jobs, um working for a flour company and developing recipes and putting together cookbooks, um, that then these flour company cookbooks, which actually reflected what happened in the home, and were given out more or less for free, um, they themselves sort of represent Canadian cooking. And Canadian pride in our, you know, in our wheat and so on. Um, so it's a bit of a web, because it was women early on, in the early twentieth century who went out and studied home economics, who got the jobs, who then were communicating with women in the home, and providing a service to the women in the home with this cookbook, right? So um, the cultural values are all wrapped up in that sort of web of interactions and relationships.

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      Perfect, that’s really interesting, thank you. And then just, could you go a little further into certain factors that you think caused changes in food trends? I know you mentioned a couple of them.

Liz Driver       Well, I would say the prosperity after the Second World War was a massive change. Um, there was the prosperity post-war, but also the fact that so many people had gone off to fight overseas, not just in Europe. Think of all the wonderful um, foods in Europe; France, and Italy, and so on. But they also went off to Japan, and Asia, and so on. So when they- when mainly the men came back, but also some women, um, their eyes had been opened to different cultures, and different tastes. And there was- there was money after the depression and the war, uh, and also I guess you would say that the food industry really ramped up with new products and so on. Eating out, another big thing. And, um, just sort of feeding the consumer demand. And television, also with the TV shows. So what happened post- what happened post-war was a profusion of cookbooks, a profusion of products, the ability to buy all these different foods, and that was a very, very big change. Now, did you want to- I don't know how far back you want to go in terms of changes in food in Canada.

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      No, I think, ah, going from World War Two is perfect. I think that's actually the scope we're looking at for this, so that was absolutely perfect. Um, and then, if you had to recommend a cookbook that clearly showcases Canadian identity, what cookbook would it be and why?

Liz Driver       Okay, it's the post-war edition of Nellie Lyle Pattinson’s Canadian Cookbook and it was edited and updated in a revision by Helen Wattie and Eleanor Donaldson. And that was where… it was the very first place where they recognized that there were a lot more people contributing to Canadian cooking, and we need to recognize these different ways of cooking in the different provinces. So they put, ah, they had a section for, you know, what makes Newfoundland cooking what it is, what makes Saskatchewan or the prairies and so on, and in Ontario they had a section for Italian cooking, and Jewish cooking, and so on. And then the interesting thing is, that after that first version, a decade passes or so and they say: “Well we're all Canadians, so we're just going to integrate those ethnic recipes into our main text.”. So I think that if you look at Nellie Lyle Pattinson's cookbook from 1923, right up towards the end of the twentieth century, which is when that ah, the Donaldson-Wattie edition ended, pretty much. Um, you can see the evolution of Canadian cooking in those books.

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      Wonderful, thank you. And then, what is one of the most unique ingredients or cooking methods that you've come across in your research?

Liz Driver       I am going to make a pitch for donuts. [laughs] Because, I personally don't think people make donuts very much anymore and, they were a mainstay at one time. Um, and they are now almost exclusively a commercial product. Um, but one version of what I would call almost a kind of donut that I came across in Catharine Parr Traill's The Female Emigrant's Guide, and surprised me… is she there she was, living in a log cabin. And she was making something called “Canadian croquettes”. And when you follow the directions, what you get is almost like an egg pasta, because it's a little bit of flour with an egg yolk, and some, um, almond flavoring, I think, or lemon flavoring. You roll it out “thin as paper”, she says, and then you make fancy shapes, like you cut out leaves, or you create flowers. Um, and then you drop them in boiling lard, okay? And they float to the surface. And miraculously, they keep their shape, and then you can sprinkle them with sugar. So I'm actually going to say Catharine Parr Traill’s Canadian croquettes are a unique and interesting technique and recipe, which I haven't seen anywhere else, I haven't. And um, it's like a twist on, everybody was making donuts because they're delicious, and they make you feel full when it's cold out, especially, deep fat frying. But I've never seen a deep fried pastry like this, and there she was making it in the backwoods. And it's a very sophisticated thing. It's not like a rough and ready dessert. It's a very delicate thing and I've done it often with groups of children and of course they love to make their initials, and fish, and animals, all kinds of things. You can braid it together, actually I think she says you can braid it, so you know, roll out a rectangular piece, cut it into three lengths and then braid it like you're doing a braid in your hair. Pinch it, and then throw it into the hot fat. It's unusual in another way, because she calls them “Canadian”. And, um, croquettes I should say, they were popular in the nineteenth century. They're almost like meatballs, like a little ball of meat, ground up turkey, or something. And you would deep fry them. But this is like little bits of pastry deep fried. It's not a Beaver Tail, it's a “Canadian croquette”.

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      Great, thank you. We read that you're a collector of cookbooks and antique kitchenware. What are your favorite items or cookbooks in your collection?

Liz Driver       I mean, I love a good iron frying pan. Everyone should have one. You have to look after them, right? You have to season them. Um, but they’ll last forever, they're the most sustainable piece of cookware you could ever have. And I do treasure, on the cookbook front, I've got a very early copy of the Home Cookbook which is of course, has a very interesting story again from a women's group at Toronto Hospital for Sick Children, originally, and then became- was picked up by a publisher and they made a whole bunch of money out of it. But I treasure having an early copy of that.

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      Great, thank you. And then, do you have any advice for an aspiring food historian?

Liz Driver       Never think that everybody… never think that everything is known. Just start looking for yourself. Yes, don't be deterred, um, speak to people, get them feeding you things. [laughs] Pick up on all the clues, as you're doing your research into culinary history. Um, don't only depend on the books, get out into people's homes, and speak to people, and travel So the internet is incredibly useful, but um, you also… you also have to cook things yourself, right? So if it's a historic recipe, find a kitchen of the right era, use a historic recipe, use the right tools, you get a whole other appreciation of recipes when you do that.

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      Wonderful, thank you. And do you have any current projects that you're working on yourself?

Liz Driver       Well, um, I've been trying, um, my husband and I have a place in Prince Edward County at the moment and, um, to my great regret our house is only 1860, so it only has a cook stove. We have a cook stove. Um, so I have to go and seek out open hearth kitchens in Prince Edward County, and luckily there are a few. So um, my biggest pleasure is creating events and finding opportunities to cook over the open hearth for people, share historic recipes with people, and I do this for projects that I'm involved in. So I'm the president of the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario, Prince Edward County branch, and we recently had a member social in a log house, and I cooked historic soups from, um, Mrs. Norris’s Modern Practical Cookery Book which was published in Montreal and other places in Ontario in 1845. So that, like by sharing these historic recipes, getting people to taste them and eat them, and sharing a bit of the story of the book, I feel it's building an appreciation for the past. And um, I will continue doing that kind of thing.

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      Wonderful, thank you. We just have one more question for you, um, might be a tricky one. What is your favorite ice cream flavor?

Liz Driver       [laughs] Vanilla. Because, you can change it up in so many ways, right? I do not like the icky ones that are so full of things. Now strawberry is a sure- you know, a close second favorite.

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      Zoe: I would also say that vanilla is probably one of my top ones, too. And then finally, just before we conclude the interview, is there anything that we've discussed that you would like to elaborate on, or anything that you would like to address that wasn't covered in the interview?

Liz Driver       Well… I hope first of all, you know we're very lucky in Toronto, and in various places across Canada, to have working historic kitchens. And there, for a long time, there was a tradition within the museum community, of using those kitchens, um, and partly that was all passed down from one person to another, and I'm very worried that um, we'll lose that access to those working historic kitchens, we'll lose people who know how to work in them, know how to fire up a cookstove, make a bake-oven work, et cetera. Um, so this is one thing… it's an issue that I feel quite acutely here at, you know, I'm at Campbell House Museum. We've got an 1822 hearth and bake-oven. Um, but I would like to see the City of Toronto museums, um, use their kitchens more, like get the programs going. Um, I worry post-pandemic that we’ll lose that connection. So if you can't… yes, you can reproduce a historic recipe in a modern kitchen, it is not the same. So we need to be very careful to preserve these heritage places with working kitchens.

Zoe Fink and Breah Snow      Wonderful. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us today, Liz. We'd just like to thank the University Of Guelph Department of History, and McLaughlin Library for making this interview possible. In addition, we are also grateful for the support of Kyle Ritchie, our media studio technician, and Curtis Asar, head of Archival and Special Collections. And we thank you all for listening to this episode of Culinary Milestones of Canadian Cooking, and we hope to see you all again.