Recipe Cards

An image of a recipe card for "Buffet Casserole" found in the cookbook Good Food, Good Health, Good Friends.

This Buffet Casserole recipe is one of the few dinner recipes included in the cookbook as  most are for baked goods and desserts. This recipe is a clear reflection of the types of dinner recipes in the book, with many being casseroles and one-pot meals. The ingredients used in this recipe are all ones that would have been readily available in most Canadians' homes and cheap and easy to acquire. In addition, the directions don’t require any specialized equipment or knowledge. An interesting fact regarding the cooking instructions is that the temperature of the oven is not given in a degree measurement, and instead simply says “hot.” Prior to the invention of temperature-gauge ovens, "hot" would have been used to describe a range in temperatures that the person cooking would set their oven to. Use of this as a temperature indicator is another way of making this recipe more accessible and indicates that not everybody in the community, including the contributor of the recipe, would have a temperature-gauge oven.

An image of a recipe card for "cocoanut lemon bars" found in the cookbook Good Food, Good Health, Good Friends.

This recipe for Cocoanut Bars is one of many dessert recipes contained within the book. Like most dessert recipes, it uses fairly standard baking ingredients: flour, butter, sugar, and eggs, which were kept in most homes. This is one of the more demanding recipes in the book in terms of additional ingredients since it requires nuts, raisins, coconut, and lemons. These would have been less commonplace and may have required a special shopping trip. Contrary to the title of the book, none of the ingredients contained within this recipe suggest that it is healthy and good for weight management as there is no reduction in butter or sugar amount, which is common in healthy versions of recipes today. Interestingly, in the cooking methods section, the recipe is written to include both a temperature in degrees, as well as one along the spectrum of temperatures (i.e. “moderate”). This may have been done to make it more accessible for cooks who didn’t have thermostat ovens, but also may have been done to modernize an old recipe that didn’t include a specific temperature. 

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