Mennonite Cookbook

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.

Carbohydrate heaven! Hundreds of heavy, high-fat recipes clog the pages
of this revised 1978 work. Although it is called a Mennonite cookbook,
apparently only 74 recipes are Mennonite. The remaining 350-plus are
traditional Canadian country home cooking for the 1950–70 era. The
Mennonite chapter includes several mystery recipes: Ikra, Schnetki,
Wurst Bublat, Hallapse (no translation given). Others are more widely
known: Paska, Shoo-fly Pie, Pickled Pigs’ Feet, Piroshki, Pluma Moos,
and Borscht, for example.

In the three-quarters of the book devoted to non-Mennonite recipes,
there are lots of breads, buns, muffins, pancakes, fritters,
over-the-top cakes, icings, candy, cookies, pies, and jams. This load of
baked and fried treats is cut by a few recipes for beverages, soups, and
pickles. A few salads from the marshmallow-and-whipping-cream school
have also been included.

Finding ingredients for some of these recipes may be a problem. Many
call for lard, potash, heavy cream, and ammonia; others ask for potato
water, safflo, or fruitlets. Next comes the measurement challenge: how
much is “some” or “a bunch”? Other ingredients are given in both
metric and imperial (“standard”) measures. Eight
professional-quality colour photo plates struggle to brighten the
collection.