Active History

Kesia Kvill

An earlier version of this post appeared on Potatoes, Rhubarb, and Ox.

This summer I came across the information booklet for the Fergus Fall Fair. After flipping through it I decided that I would like to enter some items into the handicraft and culinary arts categories. I figured it would give me a good reason to finish some planned sewing projects and to showcase some recently finished ones. I also decided I would like to test the definition of lemon bars by submitting my mom’s recipe for graham lemon squares. However, I spent the bulk of my pre-fair prep-time practicing cakes for the “Robin Hood Flour Special Category: Family Favourites: Cake.”

I love cake, so this seemed like an ideal category for me. It was easy to decide that I would make my grandma Myrtle’s chocolate cake for the base of this cake,as its not only a family favourite, but I was able to find it in her old recipe box! In her box it was titled “Rose’s Chocolate Cake.”

Recipe boxes, unlike published cookbooks, are curated selections of recipes collected over a lifetime from magazines, cookbooks, friends and family. Recipe boxes more accurately reflect the personal tastes of a home cook and their family and, as Diane Tye explores in her book Baking as Biography,recipes “represent a site where women are able to tell some of their life stories in their own words.”[1]

My grandma Myrtle’s box and cooking style is filled with items particular to a wife in post-war Calgary who was involved in community organizations and the lives of her children. The box also reflects different periods of my grandmother’s life and the evolution of popular culinary influences and the changes in her family life. The presence of“Rose’s Chocolate Cake” in my grandmother’s recipe box reflects the intersection of women’s friendships with their everyday kitchen labour. By attributing the origin of the recipe to Rose we know its provenance and also receive a personal endorsement for the quality of the recipe.[2]  

The different names attributed to recipes in the box demonstrate that my grandmother’s cooking evolved with the time (though I know her techniques and practices remained firmly grounded in the period in which she learned to cook based on antidotal evidence from my mother). For example, the presence of my uncle’s wife’s lasagna recipe and my own mother’s cheesecake recipe in Myrtle’s box shows that her adult children became important culinary influences in her life.

Cookbooks and recipe boxes passed from generation to generation are what Tye calls “a tangible connection to a female past.”[3] Exploring my grandmother’s recipe box and finding the origin of my family’s favourite chocolate cake connects me not only to my long-passed grandma, but also to a larger network of women and their shared skills and experiences.