Humble Pie

When it comes to Canada’s grassroots food icons, you can judge a cookbook by its gucked-up cover.

By Ilana Weitzman

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Photo by Normand Robert

You don’t pronounce Jean Paré’s name with anything approaching Parisian pretension (the last name rhymes with “ferry”). And there’s little temptation to apply adjectives like “Iron” or “Naked” or other Famous Chef-isms to the 78-year-old mom and former caterer from Vermilion, Alberta. But that hasn’t stopped her from selling more cookbooks in her Company’s Coming series than Emeril Lagasse and Rob Feenie combined (23 million and counting).

Take an imaginary snapshot of our all-time cookbook bestseller list, and Paré is at the top, grinning in her bottle-thick glasses, arm wrapped around an aproned old lady named Madame Benoît, the late Quebecoise cooking queen whom Margaret Atwood called “an elfin little dynamo.” Beside her is Edna Staebler from Kitchener, Ontario, who once found herself as the filling in a Duncan Hines vs. Nabisco cookie-war sandwich. (Both companies wanted the secret of her Mennonite friend’s stay-chewy biscuits.) She lived to be 100, so she must have been eating something right. Down in front, I picture the Podleski sisters bringing down the av­erage age and quipping, “Say Cheesecake.”

These ladies are not flash-in-the-pan chef celebrities but good old-fashioned slow cookers. “Our culinary celebrities all share a common trait: They’re homey and approachable,” explains culinary historian Elizabeth Driver, who spent the last 10 years criss-crossing the country to check out Canadians’ own collections for Culinary Landmarks, her bibliography of Canadian cookbooks. “While the home economics movement in the United States was pushing professional techniques, Canadians were more interested in the traditions of home cooking.” Jehane Benoît may have studied at the Sorbonne, but she’s best known for cataloguing and popularizing her down-home edible Canadiana in Encyclopedia of Canadian Cuisine. But then, you can also chalk their popularity up to practicality. As Paré tells me, trying to explain how her first book, 150 Delicious Squares, sold 15,000 copies in three months, “If you’ve got some squares in your freezer, you’re all set if somebody stops in for the evening.”

Crack open Staebler’s cookbooks, and you’ll get recipe encomiums that run along the lines of “Whenever Norm serves this cake, I hear someone say, ‘Gee this is good cake’” or “Kit and Vern and I demolished an entire cake with our afternoon tea.” Her Food that Really Schmecks is the bestselling hardcover Canadian cookbook of all time and was reissued this fall. I’ve never met Kit or Vern, but I do intuitively trust the kind of people who will eat an entire cake in one sitting.

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