Country Flavors: 60 Years of Great Home Cooking

Greg Turko is a policy analyst at the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and
Universities.

The term “country cooking” has over the years been stretched to
cover the territory from fast-food fare to French farmhouse cuisine. Any
meaning that the term once had has long since been diluted by over-eager
advertising copywriters with a taste for nostalgia and a healthy
contempt for accuracy. It is, therefore, a pleasure to report that
Country Flavors is the real thing; the country is the Canadian prairies
and the cooking is genuine prairie fare.

This is not a dice-black-truffles-finely and add-a-cup-of-fine-burgundy
style of country cooking. Instead, this cookbook offers dishes such as a
lobster casserole that requires canned lobster, a barbecue sauce that
has as one of its ingredients barbecue sauce, and wild duck with a white
sauce. As I said, it is genuine, but it may not be to everyone’s
taste.

All the courses are covered, including breads. There is also a section
devoted to pickles, which have a role in prairie meal planning roughly
similar to that of wine in French meal planning or rice in Chinese meal
planning. The recipes are robust, usually easy to make (though some
people may find wild duck, moose, or venison a tad hard to come by), and
often flavorful. There is a nod to ethnic cooking, most notably
Ukrainian.

Well-laid-out, colorful, and often chatty, this recipe book is a must
for prairie natives with a hankering for home-style cooking, If you’re
a non-native, the book may well reform your view of food.