Flavours of Prince Edward Island: Classic Recipes and Historic Photographs

Zita Murphy is a Social and Political Sciences librarian at the Ryerson
Polytechnical Institute.

“The garden of the Atlantic” provides the setting for this alluring
little album of local recipes, accompanied by black-and-white
photographs. The photos are not the usual illustrations of completed
recipes, but historical photos of Prince Edward Island.

Sharp, a professor of English at Memorial University, has merged his
interests in history and cuisine to create this and two previous titles
of regional cooking, Flavours of Newfoundland and Flavours of Nova
Scotia. In this latest book, he includes recipes procured from local
sources, including York United Church Women, the Women’s Institute of
PEI, and so on. The recipes include an eclectic smattering of
ingredients available from the local “garden”: mussels, smelts,
rhubarb, cranberries, and, of course, the famed potatoes.

The black-and-white photos that accompany the recipes give an engaging
snapshot of PEI life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Some are marvelous; some, unfortunately, lack clarity or are
poorly reproduced, And the connection to the accompanying recipe is
sometimes dubious. I do not see, for example, the connection between the
recipe for potato candy and the photo of “Charlottetown Waterworks.”
More closely related, however, is the delightful-sounding recipe for
wine-baked smelts and its adjacent photo entitled “Simpson’s Mill,
Cavendish 1898,” and “The Fishing Party” beside the humble recipe
for planked trout. A favorite of mine is the wonderful photo “Mowing
Hay Near Peakes Road,” adjoining a simple recipe for fiddleheads.

This book will be a small treasure in any Canadiana collection.