A great way to tell a culture’s story is through its food, something that the staff at the Western Development Museum certainly recognizes.
A display in the museum’s front entrance focuses not so much on what rural Prairie residents ate over the decades as o n how this culinary knowledge was preserved.
Called Cookbook Connections, the display features a variety of old cookbooks published by women’s groups, educational institutions and communities.
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There are also interpretive panels that explore Culture and Cookbooks, Community Cookbooks, Women and Cookbooks and Marketing Cookbooks.
I’m not sure how long the exhibit will be on display, but if you’re ever in Saskatoon, try to find time to visit the museum and take a look.
It wasn’t just community organizations that saw the value in preserving their culture’s food history in cookbooks. My mother also recognized the importance of gathering her family’s favourite recipes and publishing them in a book.
It wasn’t the most sophisticated publication, but it certainly got the job done.
Called Bits n Bites From Mom’s Kitchen, the book comprised 48 pages, photocopied and kept together with a coiled binder.
She made one for each of her three children and gave them to us for Christmas.
It was a labour of love, gathering recollections of her childhood on the farm in the 1940s and 1950s south of Herbert, Sask., and old family recipes, many of them from her Mennonite heritage, including rulkuchen, pepper nuts, pluma mouse and soma borscht.
Reading through these old recipes is like stepping back in time to my own childhood.
My favourite parts of the book are the pages on which she hand printed her memories of time spent in the kitchen back on the farm.
There are also family photos, mostly taken on the old homestead three-quarters of a century earlier.
Her message to her children at the beginning of the book speaks volumes to what motivated her to embark on this project.
“It has been said that you don’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you came from. I trust in some small way my musings will perhaps help you understand a bit where I came from and help you know where you are going.”
In a world of celebrity chefs and glossy-paged books, this little tome will always remain my favourite cookbook.
