How to cook like a 19th-century (female) settler

What did you eat for dinner today? Did you make your own cheese? Butcher your own pig? Collect your own eggs? Drink your own home-brewed beer? Shanty bread leavened with hops-yeast, venison and wild rice stew, gingerbread cake with maple sauce, and dandelion coffee — this was an ordinary backwoods meal in Victorian-era Canada.

A new edition of Catherine Parr Traill’s The Female Emigrant’s Guide: Cooking with a Canadian Classic will likely interest many genealogists, especially those with an interest in gaining a better understanding of the way of life for their female ancestors who settled in the countryside in the early to mid-19th century in Canada.

Originally published in 1855, Traill’s classic The Female Emigrant’s Guide, with its recipes, advice, and observations about local food sourcing, offers an intimate glimpse into the daily domestic and seasonal routines of settler life in Upper Canada. Traill wrote the book as a guidebook for women immigrants to 19th-century Canada.

The new edition has been redesigned, edited, and annotated by Nathalie Cooke and Fiona Lucas for use in contemporary kitchens.

The result is more a toolkit for historical cookery than a reprint of a textual source. It provides readers with the resources to actively use and experiment with recipes from the original Guide. Containing modernized recipes, a measurement conversion chart, and an extensive glossary, this edition also includes discussions of cooking conventions, terms, techniques, and ingredients that contextualize the social attitudes, expectations, and challenges of Traill’s world and the emigrant experience.

You can look inside the book, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, on Amazon.ca.

Traill’s book is featured in historian Andrea Eidenger’s blog post, Upcoming Publications in Canadian History – June 2017.

Catherine Parr Traill’s sister, Susanna Moodie, wrote another Canadian classic, Roughing it in the Bush, an account of life as a Canadian settler in Upper Canada in the 1830s.