Introduction

Good Food, Good Health, Good Friends is a community cookbook written by the Evening Group of the Ladies' Aid and Cookbook Committee of the Chippawa Presbyterian Church and published in Niagara Falls, Ontario in 1955. Community cookbooks are useful for understanding the state of small communities in terms of their society, culture, and economic systems. In particular, these cookbooks gave a voice to women who often struggled to be heard. Since women are often the ones curating these cookbooks, they offer a glimpse into the pressures and expectations women faced during the periods when they were published. Good Food, Good Health, Good Friends offers readers important insights into the foodstuffs and cooking techniques that were common in the Niagara region in the 1950s, and how this may have reflected the social climate of the time. In addition, the many advertisements strewn throughout the pages of the cookbook offer a vivid look at the types of businesses and services found in and around the community of Chippawa. The variety of advertisements suggests the town was established enough to support different kinds of businesses and they were important to local community members. The title indicates that this cookbook was written with the concept of healthy eating in mind. In this way, it is also a useful resource for understanding what constituted healthy eating and health in general in postwar Canada. 

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