Introduction

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The Cobalt Souvenir and Cook Book is a community cookbook, written by the Ladies of the Presbyterian Church of Cobalt, Ontario, who collected and submitted recipes from their own collections. The cookbook contains two-hundred and one recipes from forty named women of the Ladies Aid. The cookbook was published between 1908 and 1909 by Cobalt Nugget Print, where it was sold as a souvenir to the visitors of the small mining town, to raise money for the church and to help improve the town. The cookbook was written in English, and is easy to follow, though some important steps including exact temperatures and cook times are not included, as ovens were unable to perform these tasks. The recipes contained in the book are relatively simple, opting to be filling rather than complex, but still undoubtedly tasty. There are some dessert recipes that call for more exotic ingredients, such as pineapple, lemon, coconut, oranges, and oysters. A decade prior, these recipes would have been nigh impossible to make in the far north of Canada, but these recipes act as a testament to the rail and refrigeration technologies developing and being used at the time. Alongside recipes, the cookbook contains photographs of the town and life in Cobalt, filling out the souvenir portion of the book and acting as a good source for the history of Cobalt. Overall, the cookbook represents a change that Canadian mining towns were undergoing, as well as recording some of the history of Canada’s largest silver rush.

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