The Royal Winter Fair opened with a bang, Emeril style, for Liz Driver and University of Toronto Press as author Driver won the Canadian Culinary Landmarks Hall of Fame Award at the Fair’s opening ceremonies on Friday, November 6th for her book Culinary Landmarks: A Bibliography of Canadian Cookbooks, 1825–1949, a rather fitting award, as if the two were made for each other!
Members of the Press were on hand to offer congratulations and see Driver happily accept her award (and bring me back a meat calendar!).
Driver told the audience that her book was twenty years in the making and that it could not have been completed without the help of the University of Guelph’s comprehensive Canadian cookbook collection.
Culinary Landmarks is a definitive history and bibliography of Canadian cookbooks from the beginning, when La cuisinière bourgeoise was published in Quebec City in 1825, to the mid-twentieth century. Over the course of more than ten years Elizabeth Driver researched every cookbook published within the borders of present-day Canada, whether a locally authored text or a Canadian edition of a foreign work. Every type of recipe collection is included, from trade publishers’ bestsellers and advertising cookbooks, to home economics textbooks and fund-raisers from church women’s groups.
