Mrs. Restino's Country Kitchen

Barbara Robertson is the author of Wilfrid Laurier: The Great
Conciliator and co-author of The Well-Filled Cupboard.

In the early 1970s Susan Restino, with her husband and two small
children, settled in the Cape Breton highlands of Nova Scotia. The aim
was to achieve a high level of self-sufficiency, and in this the family
was largely successful, even though later years have brought such
modifications as a telephone and electricity. From this experience has
come Mrs Restino’s Country Kitchen, a cookbook that shows readers some
of the tactics by which good fresh food can be secured.

The surest route to food that hasn’t been overdosed with pesticides
or jet-lagged through travel is to grow it yourself. For those unable to
maintain a garden, Restino sensibly suggests buying food grown locally.
Her section on vegetables, divided into seasons and including tempting
and achievable recipes, is one of the most attractive in the book. Also
included are sections on breadmaking, butter- and cheese-making, brewing
and winemaking; there is even a section on how to operate a woodstove.

Though clearly influenced by Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small
Planet, Restino is not a vegetarian. (“Whenever I think of becoming a
vegetarian,” she writes, “I remember chicken.”) Nor is she
fanatical about nutrition. Though preferring whole-grain breads, she
includes a recipe for French Bread, along with the comment, “Everybody
agrees about French bread. It’s great.” Some of Restino’s
judgments are questionable (she says, for example, that lemon meringue
pie “isn’t difficult to make”), but more often than not she is
dead right.

Reading this book is a delightful experience, and using it should be a
profitable one, even if producing yogurt is the closest you ever get to
cheese-making.