This Five Roses cookbook is an interesting example of the ingenuity and progressiveness of Canadian businesses in the early 1900s. Five Roses Flour was an early Canadian brand of flour, established and owned by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company in 1888. The first edition of cookbooks like this was published in 1913, and is the longest-running recipe collection from a Canadian flour company. The original edition also had a collection of recipes that were submitted by women from across Canada, something reminiscent in this particular object, with family recipes written and stored in the pages of the book.
They were also one of the first companies to print a cookbook with coloured images, which would have been a great selling feature.
This particular cookbook belonged to Emily Marguerite ‘Greta’ Scott, and while there is no official publication date on the book itself, two personal calendars were also found tucked inside. One, a single calendar page from May 1936, and the other, a tear-away calendar used until September 1939, after which no pages were removed. To those of us familiar with Canadian military history, you’ll know that on 7 September 1939, Canada declared war on Germany and officially entered the Second World War.
