Students tasked with showcasing library’s collection of WWII recipes
For a rather unusual course, the class of one of this semester’s First-Year Seminars has spent the bulk of the term planning McLaughlin Library’s annual “What’s Cooking in the Archives” event. On Tuesday, Nov. 19, their final project was revealed as the class hosted their interactive showcase in the library’s Academic Town Square.
“What’s Cooking in the Archives” has now been run for four years. The annual event exhibits pieces of the library’s extensive collection of historic cookbooks to the public by preparing some of the recipes they hold.
The library has one of the largest archives of cookbooks in North America, containing approximately 14,000 items.
This is the first time a class has been responsible for orchestrating the event, and students decided to theme this iteration around recipes originating from the Canadian homefront during the Second World War.
The university has run First-Year Seminars intermittently since 2003 under the UNIV*1200 course code. The seminars are intended to provide discussion-based classes to first-year students and are focused on the instructor’s particular area of interest, whatever that may be.
Kathryn Harvey, the instructor of the course, “A Seminar on Event Planning,” is also the head of Archival and Special Collections at the library.
The university has recently been keen to support its First Year Seminar experiment – 13 seminars were on offer this semester, covering everything from human rights, to sleep patterns, to Facebook – yet Harvey’s course is the only one that centres around an extracurricular assignment.
“After last year’s [What’s Cooking exhibition], I got to thinking, the preparation of this event might be something fun for first year students to do and actually learn something in the process,” said Harvey. “So I decided to do a class on event planning, and this is the culmination of the first year student’s work.”
During the Second World War, Canada undertook a series of unprecedented measures aimed at altering the diets of Canadians on the homefront. With that regime of austerity came the publication of new recipes and cookbooks, printed for the purpose of teaching housewives how to – as the title of one 1943 pamphlet suggests – “get the most out of your refrigerator.”
Sarah Bennett, a first year Art History student in the class, came up with theme of wartime meals.
“I wanted to focus on the ingenuity that happened in cooking; how they had rations and how they had to cut down on sugar and meat,” said Bennett. “[I was interested in] how they had to work around that and make creative recipes.
The class divided the event responsibilities among themselves evenly, delegating groups for publicity, building the exhibits, and organising the cuisine.
The Woolwich Arrow has partnered with the library for the past four years to provide the food for the event, free of charge. Jason Waterfall, the general manager, joked that this year’s theme of wartime austerity certainly met his criteria for “keeping it simple.”
Three recipes from the archives were presented at the event: a maple spread (only two ingredients in that one), a bacon cheese sandwich spread, and a rudimentary meatloaf.
“The meatloaf was very basic, the only difference was canned peas and carrots – which they probably used a lot in the 40s – which they don’t use very much nowadays,” said Waterfall.
The theme of the event was formally called “Take a Picnic to the Past.” Students took the time to decorate the square with red-and-white-check tablecloths, propaganda posters, a photo booth, and dress in period attire.
A supplementary exhibit on wartime theatre, of which the library also has a substantial collection of archived materials, accompanied the recipe showcase.