The Everyday Gourmet Kitchen: Great Canadian Brand Name Recipes

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Brand-name cookbooks are more than advertising for which the reader is
expected to pay: because manufacturers want their products to be
associated with successful results, you can be certain the recipes have
been tested many times. If a brand-name recipe doesn’t turn out to be
satisfactory, there’s no question whose products get abandoned at the
supermarket. Manufacturers would not let their products be associated
with a less-than-great recipe.

This characteristic accounts for another aspect of the book, which is
either a strength or a weakness, depending on the reader’s interests.
As a result of being tried and proven, the recipes in the collection
tend to be “old favourites.” There’s the Bacardi rum cake,
Bisquick’s “impossible” pies, M&M’s peanut butter cookies, fancy
Jell-O mixtures, banana bread made with Kraft Miracle Whip, and so on.
Reader who clip and file recipes from women’s magazines will find
little that is new here. Those who intend to clip and file, but never
do, will find this collection a great substitute.

The 260 recipes are all easy to make, and most are for the types of
food average Canadians eat: pizza, tuna casserole, pasta, brownies, chip
dip, even gooey concoctions of condensed milk and chocolate chips at
Christmas. The ingredients and the results are all comforting in their
familiarity.

The recipes are organized in an easy-to-follow format, and give both
imperial and metric measures. The book is colorful, nicely designed,
easy to read, and, overall, approachable.