Canadian housekeeping

Catharine Parr Traill wrote about Canada even before she and her sister Susanna Moodie emigrated from England with their husbands in 1832. Traill’s 1826 book The Young Emigrants told of a fictional English family’s experiences with pioneer life in Canada. Both women were writers of poetry and children’s literature who married former British military officers, and both families settled in the area of what is now Peterborough, Ontario.

Life in Canada was harder than had been anticipated, and the Traills relied in part upon the relatively meagre returns from Catharine’s texts on natural history and her practical writings about colonial living, including The Female Emigrant’s Guide, and Hints on Canadian Housekeeping, first published in 1854–55.

While reprinting the latter book and offering additional insight into the conditions faced by settler householders, Catharine Parr Traill’s The Female Emigrant’s Guide: Cooking with a Canadian Classic is shaped foremost as a book of culinary history. Editors Nathalie Cooke and Fiona Lucas are both food historians and include an appendix of period recipes that have been updated so as to be “achievable dishes in today’s kitchens.”

The core of the book, however, is Traill’s remarkable guide for mid-nineteenth-century newcomers to Canada, and it is from there that the following excerpts have been selected.