Kronau Marvelous Museum & Creative Corner

*I say bake off – I’m really just competing against myself haha, we’re not that exciting!

Since getting access to the Sask Collections site through the Museum Association of Saskatchewan, I’ve been hard at work in the archive documenting our collection. Recently I unearthed a box filled with old recipe books! As New Grown Ups™ my partner and I are always looking for dinner recipes so I’ve been combing through them trying to find some good ones. I thought it could be fun to try some out and report back.

The recipe books that I’ve found used to belong to the Vilcu Family and are from the 1970s. Since they’re from the 70s there are lots of recipes for Jello salads which I find…. interesting. However, I’ve since been informed by multiple sources that Jello dishes are a prairie classic. As much as I’m trying to embrace Saskatchewan as my home I’m not so sure that I’ll be adding those into the dinner rotation!

As a Jello hater (and a ham and Jello salad hater doubly so) I thought I’d start off my archive culinary journey with something a little less gelatinous. Since it’s the season for all things pumpkin I tried out a recipe for pumpkin loaf from the Sherwood Remembrance 1978 Cookbook (If you have any information about Sherwood Remembrance please let me know! I tried to find information on the church but I don’t think it exists anymore and I’d be interested to hear about it).

This recipe for pumpkin loaf was submitted to the recipe book by Olga Martin, a member of the church group that put together the book. Props to Olga, this was so easy to make and yielded lots of loaf (objectively too much for two people)

I was able to whip this recipe up in about ten minutes and had it in the oven for exactly one hour. Half of the loaf in the pink pan got a little crispy but I’m choosing to blame that on my weird oven. I liked this recipe a lot as I already had all of the ingredients in my kitchen so I didn’t need to go out and get anything. As well, it used oil instead of butter which I like as we never buy any. My partner gave this loaf 5 pumpkins out of 5 so I’m quite pleased.

Finding all of my recipes in the archive as opposed to just picking up one of my own cookbooks is interesting because it makes you think a lot more about who came up with it. The woman who owned this book, Elsie, and the woman who submitted this loaf recipe, Olga, are both no longer with us. I wonder what they would think of some random woman finding their recipes at work and trying them out. I’m sure they never expected anyone to pull them out of an archive!

Going through all of Elsie’s cookbooks, and finding more from other people as I move things around, does make me a bit sad. I think you can tell a bit about a person by going through their personal cookbooks and seeing how they annotate things – what things they liked and what they didn’t. Seeing personal notes jotted in the margins or on scrap paper in-between pages. It’s an interesting way to get to know someone. And it makes me wonder if one day a twenty-something archive intern will find my recipe books and pore through them wondering who I was and stealing my recipes – I’d better try and write a bit neater.

I intend to try this again one of these days, perhaps with something a bit more substantial than a loaf – make this into Kroanu Masterchef instead of Kronau Bake Off. See you then!