The Canadian Heritage Christmas 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.

With a just-plain-folks tone, more than 100 recipes, and an equal number
of snippets of prose about her family, McCann bumbles and stumbles
through her subject.

In assembling The Canadian Heritage Christmas Cookbook, she dispensed
with anything resembling conventional organization. As a result, the
recipes are apparently presented as they came to mind. This original
approach means that the book starts with cake and cookie recipes, jumps
to soups, moves on to muffins and a few vegetable dishes, detours back
to cookies, then moves on to dips and surprise soups, before revisiting
dips once again. The offerings range from macaroni and cheese to lobster
baskets, appetizers, and pizza. Along the way we learn to mash potatoes
and make a wreath. Random verses from Christmas carols and a scattering
of uncaptioned murky photos add to the clutter.

The recipes, which ignore the metric system, are basic and easy to
follow. Once you find them. It is not apparent to me how this book
contributes to our knowledge of either Christmas or cooking.