Product Description

The Purity Cookbook has long been part of family traditions in many homes, and rare first editions are collector's items. Carefully reproduced from the original 1967 edition, this cookbook contains the recipes for an incredible variety of dishes, as well as tiny gems of kitchen wisdom that have been passed on from generation to generation. Handy charts detail the times for cooking vegetables, roasting turkeys, and cooking meat. With the Purity Cookbook, you can create an era of good, wholesome food just like your grandmother used to make.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #33483 in Books
• Published on: 2001-02-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .56" h x 6.26" w x 9.28" l, .86 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.ca
Read this brave little reprint and realize what Canadian gastronomy sprang from. The 1967 edition of The All New Purity Cookbook was the latest of a sequence of competent promotional texts sponsored by the same company that began publishing them in 1917 and continued to do so through several editions until it amalgamated itself out of existence in 1961. From first page to last, the reader of this book is in a time warp. The recipes come from kitchens of a more homogeneously WASPy Canada, with instructions (despite the subtitle's claim of completeness) for only six pages of vegetable dishes and preparations with such names as "Barbecued Supper Surprises" (chicken in foil steamed over coals, with veggies), "Cheese Dreams" (broiled, crustless bread fingers topped with cheese), or the politically incorrect "Chinese Chews" (date-nut bars rolled in confectioner's sugar). Oh yum yummy.

As Elizabeth Driver points out in her introductory note, some successful recipes and other hints have been carried down through the years, notably the methods for baking bread and biscuits. She's right, of course. These haven't changed much since 1967, or since the first edition of this text for that matter. Given the overwhelming amount of information about baking that is available today, beginners would be wise to choose this simple little book instead of the huge, glossy, expensive volumes that cram bookstore shelves. Some cooking fashions change for the better, however. We know more now about how other cultures feed themselves--and some of them really do eat more healthily and interestingly than Canadians did 40 to 80 years ago. Use The All New Purity Cookbook for retro parties and for having fun and imagining life in Granny's day; you'll be wise to stick to the baked and roasted items: the breads, biscuits, cookies, cakes, and the big cuts of meat and fish. --Ted Whittaker

Review
The Purity Cookbook is a Canadian classic, part of the cooking tradition that I grew up with. (Jean Pare )

About the Author

Elizabeth Driver is an editor and writer who has spent over twenty years researching the culinary history of Canada and Britain. She is fascinated by the history of food and an avid collector of cookbooks and antique kitchenware. Elizabeth lives with her husband and two children in Toronto, where she is the Foodways Program Officer at Mongomery's Inn museum. She demonstrates such historic techniques as cooking on an open hearth, returning home most days with the smell of wood smoke on her clothes.