“‘The Queen of Curds and Cream!’”

This project engages in historical analysis of The New Galt Cook Book, a cookbook popular in the vicinity of Galt, southwestern Ontario, published in 1898. It proposes that the cookbook encouraged housewives to adhere to traditional culinary and domestic habits, illuminating aspects of family dynamics and domestic culture in the region at the end of the nineteenth century. This project is as much a study of local social history as it is a demonstration that cookbooks can be riveting sources for study. As cookbooks have been perceived as inaccessible in relation to other documentation, this project displays some approaches to access cookbooks as a way to reconstruct aspects of Canadian food history, and Canadian social and economic history at large. This study has also been conducted in the hopes that it may be translated into curiosity about The New Galt Cook Book in spheres of public history, where it has yet to meet the attention it deserves.
“‘The Queen of Curds and Cream!’”

Valeria Mantilla Morales

University of Toronto

Toronto, Ontario

Home cooking, tradition, and invention in south-western Ontario

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