Tea for Two: a celebration of baking!

Do you love eclairs, petits fours and chocolate cake?  The Abbotsford campus library has a treat for you: a display of all things baking.  The cookbooks on display are from the Newman Western Canadian Cookbook Collection.  Throughout the summer this display will highlight community cookbooks and company cookbooks devoted to the topic of baking.  Titles on display have been published between 1913 and 2015. 

Titles on display include recent publications such as Butter Baked Goods : nostalgic recipes from a little neighborhood bakery and Butter celebrates! : a year of sweet recipes to share with family and friends.  These books are a feast for the eyes with delectable recipes and photographs.  Old time cookbooks such as Real home-keeper : a perpetual honeymoon for the Vancouver bride, published in 1914, and Fair and square : 100 recipes for dessert squares from the 1940s give readers a snapshot in time of preparing and baking for the family.  Community cookbooks such as Feast days of the Orthodox Church published by the Ukrainian Women's Association of Canada and Family favourites from the Gals with God of the Greendale Mennonite Brethren Church, both published in 1983, were used as fundraisers and community builders.  Finally, examples of company cookbooks such as Selected recipes by noted cooks for everyday use in the home by the Codville Company of Winnipeg and New Royal cook book, published in 1912 and 1922 respectively, promote new products of convenience to help the home baker.

The UFV library has begun digitizing selected titles from the Newman Western Canadian Cookbook Collection.  The titles are available in the UFV institutional repository, HarvestIR.  All titles are searchable using optical character recognition software (OCR).  Our latest addition to the digitized content is the Royal Yeast Bake Book published in 1925 promoting Royal yeast cakes.

Posted July 4, 2019
Mary-Anne MacDougall