Five Roses: Guide to Good Cooking

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

If you can remember Expo ’67 or the last time the Maple Leafs won the
Stanley Cup, you will likely remember this cooking classic. First
published in 1913, the Five Roses Cookbook started as a marketing tool
to induce Canadian homemakers to use more flour by taking the fear
factor out of making biscuits. More than 90 years later, the book can
still be obtained directly from the Lake of the Woods Milling Company.

This faithful reproduction of the 1967 version is a poignant snapshot
of Canada in its centennial year. It was a time when Chicken Chop Suey
and Crкpes Suzette were listed in a chapter called “Foreign Fare.”
There are no recipes for tofu, and the “Deep Fat Frying” chapter
advises readers to use hydrogenated vegetable oils, which are now on the
culinary no-no list. The introduction gives great advice on how to
remove the printing from the 50-pound cotton flour bags (no one had to
teach our ancestors how to recycle), and the reader is also warned that
the recipes were developed for Five Roses flour and are “not designed
for use of flours of inferior quality and absolutely unsuited for
so-called SPECIAL or PASTRY FLOURS.”

Quaintness aside, the volume is packed with sound advice for the novice
cook of any era. Baking, not surprisingly, dominates the front of the
book, with chapters on cakes, cookies, desserts, pastries, and pies.
Subsequent chapters cover beverages, sandwiches, soups, fish, cheese and
eggs, meat, poultry, variety meats, vegetables, salads, and freezing
foods. A few black-and-white photos are scattered through the text, and
an index is provided for easy reference. If your roots are white-bread
Canadian Gothic, this book is a perfect time machine back to mom’s (or
grandma’s) kitchen.