The Canadian Treasury of Cooking and Gardening

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Our lives have become so compartmentalized in recent decades that the
concept of a book on both cooking and gardening seems novel. Not long
ago, however, kitchen and kitchen garden were inseparable. Mary Alice
Downie and Barbara Robertson have set out to recapture that past in this
book, which combines culinary and horticultural suggestions, recipes,
and literary excerpts redolent of lost lifestyles and country roads.
This is a cookbook to read by the fire or in a garden chair.

The book is organized by season, beginning with autumn. Autumn is a
time for bringing in houseplants, picking apples and mushrooms, planting
bulbs, drying flowers, and feeding birds. In the kitchen, it is the
season for making pickles, jellies, jams, chutneys, and chili sauce.
Recipes in the Autumn section include apple and pumpkin desserts,
cranberry and cucumber yogurt salads, plum gin, and mulled cider.

Charming black-and-white pen and brush sketches appear throughout, and
household tips fill the margins (for example, “A slice of apple in
your brown sugar will prevent it from hardening so much that you have to
attack it with a hatchet”). The book is further enlivened by poems and
quotations from works by Canadian writers past and present. Catharine
Parr Traill (“A good garden is a civilizer”) is a favorite.

Only a dyed-in-the-wool Instant Cook could fail to be interested in
this happy blend of topics. A delight.