The section for Newfoundland and Labrador,¹ Canada’s easternmost province, begins this bibliography, which is arranged from east to west to reflect the first contact by Europeans and the pattern of their gradual settlement of the land. It was in the tenth century, a millennium ago, that Viking explorers lived for a short while at L’Anse aux Meadows, on Newfoundland’s north shore. The earliest known European visitors to North America, they arrived long before the ‘discovery’ of Terra Nova by John Cabot in 1497. The majority of Newfoundlanders are descended from later immigrants from southwest England and southern Ireland, although there...

Nova Scotia was one of the four founding provinces of Confederation on 1 July 1867, along with New Brunswick, Quebec, and Ontario. The first cookbook published in Nova Scotia –Church of England Institute Receipt Book, an Anglican fund-raiser from Halifax (NS1.1) – appeared only in 1888, a decade or so after the first cookbook published in New Brunswick, about six decades after the start of cookbook publishing in Quebec (then Lower Canada) and Ontario (Upper Canada), and long after Bartholomew Green set up the first press in Halifax in 1751. Yet, recipes were printed and circulated as early as...

New Brunswick became a separate colony in 1784, when Britain divided Nova Scotia at the Chignecto Isthmus, and it joined in Confederation with Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Ontario on 1 July 1867. New Brunswick cooking has been shaped by the same pattern of immigration as in Nova Scotia: first the Acadians of French origin; the British, who arrived from the mid-eighteenth century on, bringing their varied food customs (Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and some of the regional differences within England itself); and the settlers from New England (pre–American Revolution and the Loyalists fleeing the Revolution). Fish caught off the north...

Canada’s smallest province joined Confederation in 1873. Although blessed with rich agricultural land and fishing grounds, it was without the resources to develop an industrial base, and by 1891 its population was in decline, dropping from 109,078 in 1891 to 88,038 in 1931, as people left to search for jobs in Central and Western Canada and the United States. Only in the fourth decade of the twentieth century did the population begin to grow again, to 98,429 by 1951. It is not surprising, therefore, that only a small number of cookbooks appear to have been produced in Prince Edward Island,...

Quebec is the only province where the vast majority of the population is French-speaking, their origins going back to 1608, when Samuel de Champlain established the first permanent French settlement (the Habitation of Quebec) where Quebec City now stands, and the ensuing one and a half centuries, when French settlers colonized the fertile St Lawrence River Valley. After the Conquest of New France by the British in 1759, the French population remained the large majority, despite the ongoing arrival of immigrants of British origin. The first significant influx of English-speakers were Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution, who settled the arable...

Before 1950, 1,240 culinary titles were published in Ontario¹ – almost four times as many as in Quebec, and more than the total number of culinary titles published in all of the rest of Canada, Quebec included. In 1825, the yearLa cuisinière bourgeoise(Q1.1) was published in Quebec City, the population of what is now Ontario was lower than that of its eastern neighbour, but by the first Census of 1851, the tables were turned.² Moreover, since Quebec has always had a francophone majority, Ontario’s mostly English-speaking population has long outstripped the number of anglophones in Quebec, as it...

In 1882, twelve years after the founding of the province of Manitoba on 2 May 1870, the Canadian Pacific Railway reached Winnipeg. The city quickly became the gateway for east-west trade and for the flood of new settlers to the West in the period 1897–1930. Between 1881 and 1901, Manitoba’s population grew from 62,260 to 255,211; by 1911, the province had reached 461,394, and Winnipeg, 157,000. The city was the largest in the West and it remained the preeminent urban centre for a long time. The strength of Winnipeg’s industrial and commercial sector, its well-established press, the influence of...

The pattern of cookbook publishing in Saskatchewan is distinct from that of the neighbouring provinces of Manitoba and Alberta. The story begins in 1901, after the earliest cookbooks published in Manitoba, which appeared in the nineteenth century, but a few years before the first Alberta cookbook, an evolution in step with the westward migration of new settlers. A total of 126¹ different culinary titles were found to have been published in Saskatchewan before 1950. Although this number is close to that for Alberta, the proportions of types published differ. In Saskatchewan, an astonishing 104 of 126, or 83%, were community...

The first cookbooks compiled in Alberta appeared after full provincial status came into force on 1 September 1905: at least three were published in 1907; one undated work may be from 1906. Earlier cookbooks have surfaced, but they were editions of texts produced outside the province, the first being one published in Medicine Hat in 1904, when Alberta was still part of the North-West Territory. As the population boomed – growing from 73,022 to 374,295 between 1901 and 1911, and to 588,454 by 1921 – the province’s charitable groups, private companies, and government departments began to produce a steady stream...

British Columbia was created as Canada’s westernmost and third-largest province on 20 July 1871. After the last spike was driven in the transcontinental CPR rail line at Craigellachie on 7 November 1885 (realizing the promise made at Confederation), growing numbers of people arrived at the terminus in Vancouver, on their way to settle mainly in the southwest corner of the province, a region blessed with natural resources, especially the bounty of the sea and rich agricultural land with a long frost-free growing season. The Okanagan Valley in the interior was another destination by the 1890s (although the orchards only flourished...

The Yukon Territory was established in 1898, soon after the discovery of gold in 1896 at Bonanza Creek brought thousands of people to the area and an instant town was born – Dawson, which became the first capital (in 1953, the capital moved to Whitehorse). A San Francisco company published US1.1,Helpful Hints for Klondike Gold Hunters, probably at the height of the Gold Rush, which contained culinary, medical, and other ‘useful information.’ Only one cookbook was found from the Yukon in the period covered by this bibliography, and it was published in 1942, the same year as the Alaska...

The Northwest Territories was created on 15 July 1870 from land previously owned by the Hudson’s Bay Co. and Great Britain. Between 1870 and 1912, parts of the huge swath of land were reassigned to form the new prairie provinces and the Yukon Territory, and to add to the areas of Ontario and Quebec. In 1999 the eastern part of the Northwest Territories became a new territory called Nunavut. There were few non-native inhabitants until the 1930s, when mineral exploration attracted more settlement, but even so, by 1941, the population was only 12,028, and by 1951, only 16,004. The only...