By Alyssa Noel
Before peanut butter and jam there was tongue.
It may not sound like an appetizing part of a balanced breakfast, but according to one of the 120 cookbooks on display at the National Library and Archives, some resourceful Canadians used to boil, grind and sprinkle animal tongue on their toast.
They also enjoyed fish heads, calf’s foot jelly, and beaver tails from real beavers, unlike the deep-fried, doughy descendants that are served on the Rideau Canal.
After 10 months of showcasing Canada’s culinary history, Bon Appétit! A Celebration of Canadian Cookbooks is coming to an end. The exhibit is not just a collection of cookbooks and artifacts, it’s a new way of exploring Canada’s diverse culture, says curator Carol Martin.
“Food and cooking are so ordinary for us we don’t really look at them in this historical way,” she says. “Because we haven’t gone the melting pot route we’ve retained a lot of food from other countries.”
Besides including cookbooks filled with cabbage rolls and won-ton soup, the exhibit also incorporates Canada’s national history. A wartime display, complete with food stamps and a rationing book that instructs women to “keep fighting the good fight,” gives visitors a glimpse into a time when sugar and coffee weren’t readily available.
Pauline Portelance, a spokesperson for the archives, says the exhibit gives people a new understanding of Canadian history.
The exhibit offers more than national history, the history of the cookbooks themselves is interesting, says Gay Cook, a writer with a modern-day cookbook in the display.
“Cooking evolves with the situation or the state of the world.”
Writing current-day cookbooks proves just how much the world of cooking has changed, she says. Cookbooks today must be filled with detail for a growing population of incompetent cooks.
“A lot of people don’t know how to cook so you have to be very explicit,” she says. “That wasn’t the case 50 years ago.”
But with more women choosing the workforce over the home, it was only a matter of time before cookbooks evolved with society.
Martin says the changing role of women in society could be part of the reason the history of cooking is now being studied.
“It gives significance to areas women have been major figures in. What women have been doing is important even though we ignored it,” she said.
The exhibit pays homage to women figures such as Jehane Benoit, a Canadian cooking show icon and symbol of French-English unity in Canada. Benoit’s mural is painted on a wall along an ode to her written by Margaret Atwood published in the Globe and Mail.
Martin says she has received plenty of positive feedback on the exhibit. While some people enjoy the historical aspect, others simply enjoy cookbooks.
“Some people just love cookbooks and it’s a way for them to see a broad selection of them,” she says.
Cook agrees.
“It made me appreciate my heritage,” she says.
Even if that heritage does include ground tongue for breakfast.