Food, cooking and eating as universal experiences have always been an important part of our identity. As a necessity for survival, food knowledge, traditions and techniques have been taught, learned, changed and passed down between family members, friends and strangers for generations, forming the distinct flavour profiles and defining cuisines that we are familiar with today.

Recipes have long since been the vessels for the transportation of this knowledge, with some of the earliest recipes discovered dating back to 1700 BC. They provide a unique view of a specific time and place. They are a record of our predecessors’ place in the past and how they interacted with and used their surrounding environments.

But recipes are not stagnant. They are flexible and adaptable, able to be tweaked and substituted to suit new environments, climates and ingredients. Some of our favourite recipes that we enjoy in the modern day are in fact ancient. They are a product of knowledge and tradition that span millennia.

The Cook Not Mad; Or Rational Cookery Book is a collection of recipes that was first published in 1830 in Watertown, New York before it was reprinted in Kingston, Ontario in 1831 by Scottish immigrant James Macfarlane. Today, it is considered Canada’s first English-language cookbook. This historical cookbook is an excellent record of what everyday life would have been like for many Canadians living in the early 19th century. Though this cookbook emphasizes the American character in its "good Republican dishes,” this book also shows how its collection of food knowledge has been taken from different cultures — including First Nations, British, American, Italian, French and Middle Eastern. As such, these collected recipes reflect the diverse peoples that were present in the development of Canada’s early culinary identity.

The food knowledge provided within The Cook Not Mad was collected and published with the purpose of helping new immigrants to North America adapt to the unfamiliar environments, climates and ingredients that now surrounded them. Many of the ingredients featured are wild and farmed meats and locally grown agricultural products that were native to North America. Some of these ingredients include turkey, squash, cornmeal and cranberries, which may not have been easily recognizable to many newly arrived European immigrants. The recipes provided in this book are extremely useful to help us understand the seasonality and utility of the surrounding produce to settlers during early colonialism. These recipes would have also served as instructions for settlers on how to incorporate the available local ingredients into their already existing food knowledge, which they would have brought with them from their homelands.

The new knowledge required to work with these unfamiliar ingredients and to survive in Canada’s harsh environment would have been learned from the Indigenous peoples who already had an ingrained relationship with the land for 10,000 years. First Nations’ food knowledge can be found in numerous recipes throughout this book. One example of this can be seen in recipe No. 205, titled “For Brewing Spruce Beer.” This recipe is a combination of medicinal food knowledge that was incorporated from First Nation peoples (which aided colonists in their survival) and European brewing traditions brought over from settlers’ homelands.

A record of the transfer of this Indigenous knowledge appears in 1536 when French colonist Jacques Cartier and his crew were dying of scurvy while wintering at Stadacona (now Quebec City). They were saved by the Haudenosaunee people who showed them how to steep spruce tips to make a medicinal tea that cured them of their ailments. One cannot help but notice the irony and injustice here between the life-saving knowledge provided by the First Nations people and Jacques Cartier’s later betrayal and abduction of Chief Donnacona, his two sons and several other Iroquoian people who would be forcibly taken from their homeland and never returned.

The piney, aromatic qualities of spruce allowed it to become a popular flavouring agent for brewing beer in many Canadian colonies. Spruce beer was coveted for its ability to stave off scurvy and was used by the British Navy as a staple for long sea voyages. It was also recognized as a hallmark of the North American identity as it was a cheaper option to produce, and its flavour profile was quite different from other European beers. This beverage fell out of favour in the latter half of the 19th century as ciders and meads surpassed beers in popularity. Today, however, there has been a resurgence in this distinctive North American beer as many craft breweries have become interested in reproducing it.