Eat It...It's Good For You!: How I Fed 5 Children and Survived to Write a Best-selling Cookbook!

Maggie Helwig was a freelance writer and Professor of Pre-Industrial Arts, UPRPU, Peterborough, Ontario.

Patricia Collins, as she explains in her introduction, always dreamed of writing a cookbook. In 1983, she married her second husband, who was able to finance its publication. It is nice that she has been able to fulfill her ambition; indeed, the book is so overwhelmingly nice that one feels cruel to criticize it. But it is hard to see much benefit from its appearance to anyone aside from Ms. Collins herself.

Not that the recipes are especially incompetent or unappetizing. They are just very, very ordinary — a sort of survey of the standard diet of the average Middle Canadian. But probably most Middle Canadian cooks already know how to make meat loaf, macaroni and cheese, breaded chicken breasts, and Sloppy Joes, and those who do not need a more comprehensive guide, along the line of Kate Aitken or The Joy of Cooking.

I might also mention that I find it hard to take seriously a cookbook that makes use of Cheez Whiz, Kraft Dinner, and frozen potatoes, and that includes no fewer than eight Jell-O salads. I assume, as well, that the recipes featuring shrimp, crabmeat, and fresh mushrooms do not stem from the days when Ms. Collins was raising five children alone.

Eat It, It’s Good for You is decorated with a number of folksy homilies (“A tiny chip is too heavy to bear, if you carry it on your shoulder”) and full-page colour photographs of some of the dishes, alongside family memorabilia carefully identified in the captions (“The reading glasses were worn by my mother... the letter is from my second son, Floyd, when he was completing his course in air traffic control”). It is all as nice as you could possibly dream.