If recipes are a form of memory, then leafing through Whistler Recipes is as fun a flashback as a scrapbook you stumble upon in the basement of your best friend from high school and as informative as a midden — in this case, one made of food that’s part local, part true-blue Canadiana right down to its multi-cultural roots.
Published by the Whistler Museum & Archives Society as a fundraiser back in 1997, it’s still available today at Rogers’ Chocolates. You can also get it and a second release, Festive Favourites , at the museum. Either way, you support the museum and its good works and get a living slice of history that’s perfect for Canada’s birthday and ensuing get-togethers, or those beyond.
I mean, with a recipe like Maggot Annie’s Pie Crust (page 103), how can you go wrong? All the recipes were submitted by people connected to Whistler or the museum and this one, submitted by Ruth Gallagher, is the undisputed winner for the recipe with the wickedest name. (Turns out it produces a great pie dough that can withstand many a bruise or other indignity, a quality no doubt useful to someone with a lifestyle like Maggot Annie must have had.)
But before you get serious about something for dinner, flip to “A Christmas Make You Can Cake” that takes a bottle of whiskey, a few checks of it for tonsistity, a bobblespoon of brown sugar, the straining of your nuts and a lot of wixing mell. Wexing mill?
“Yes, we had a good laugh over a few things that got in here,” says Florence Petersen, founder, past-president and long-time supporter of the museum and the main instigator behind Whistler Recipes . She first came to Whistler Valley in 1955, building a summer cottage with fellow school teachers.
Florence was also one of the lucky hikers so enthralled with the beautiful summer evening in August 1958 that they forgot all about the beef stew they had cooking in a billy can dangling from a stick over the campfire, forever naming the spot Burnt Stew Basin.
Besides the fun (like Dinosaur Stew, “a crowd pleaser”, found on page 139), the cookbook stands as testament to Whistler lifestyles and trends in cooking. Case in point: the Seven Bean Casserole, submitted by one “88-year-old lady”. With its reliance on canned goods and lack of expensive meats or other perishable ingredients, it’s typical dinner fare for 1940s mountain cabin dwellers up on vacation or out on a fishing or camping trip in the great Canadian wilderness, a time before refrigeration, corner grocery stores or even a highway out of the valley.
“We had no electricity until ’64 when they put the sub-station in to provide power to run the lifts. Until then, people had coal oil lamps, unless it was a lodge and they had their own generator. So we had no means for refrigeration,” says Florence.
“In fact, what we girls had in our little cottage was a hole dug under the house about a foot and a half square about three feet down. It was lined with wood planking, and we had a big, old, five-gallon clay crock in there. Once a week we got our food order delivered by the train and we’d have fresh meat for a day or two — that would be all it could be kept — and maybe a bit of butter and eggs we would put in that crock.
“The big wooden lid would go on and we had a big rock on top of that so no bear could get into it — not that we had any bears get into it — and that’s how we kept our perishables. So people used all these things that were packaged or tinned because they didn’t have fresh stuff.”
You can also time-travel by whipping up a batch of oatmeal cookies Edna Stockdale used to make in the 1930s while living at Parkhurst Mill, where her husband, Ken, worked — a mill that operated on the east shore of Green Lake 1926-56 and at one time was the largest wood supplier to PGE railway.
Or enjoy a recipe from Granny Cosgrave, including one for cheese soufflé (page 71). “The beauty of that recipe is it only uses three eggs,” says J’Anne Greenwood, granddaughter of Granny Cosgrave, who first went up to Alta Lake in 1924 to stay at Rainbow Lodge because J’Anne’s mother was “pale and they needed to go to the mountains.” But her favourite Granny recipe is the one for scones.
“There were no stores in the early days, except the small one at Rainbow Lodge, so if you ran out of bread, you usually had buttermilk and you could make those scones,” she says.
As time and lifestyles move on, so do the recipes. There are hearty, fast dishes that can be whipped up for a ski crowd, like Ruth Howell’s Hamburger “99” with tons of hamburger, sharp cheese and onions, or Maureen Provencal’s Mogul Potato Casserole oozing butter, sour cream and cheese. And Whistler’s international style doesn’t get short shrift, with recipes like Suzanne Malone’s Moroccan chicken, Joan Gross’s satzivi and Florence’s own chapati bread.
You couldn’t get more local than the recipe from Andy Petersen, Florence’s husband, for perfect fried trout. But in the true spirit of Whistler, I nominate Myrtle Philip’s Bacardi Rum Cake as the official and unofficial Canada Day cake — one that Florence promises was once very famous at the Rainbow Lodge the Philips ran, and deserves to be so again. After all, when else could you use an ice pick with impunity?
Myrtle Philip’s Very Famous Bacardi Rum Cake
1 c chopped pecans
18.5 oz yellow cake mix
3.75 oz Jell-O vanilla instant pudding
4 eggs
1/2 c cold water
1/2 c oil
1/2 c dark Bacardi rum
Glaze:
1/4 c butter
1/4 c water
1 c granulated sugar
1/2 c dark Bacardi rum
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease and flour a 10-inch tube cake pan or a 12-cup bundt pan. Mix all ingredients together except the nuts. Chop the pecans and sprinkle them on the bottom of the pan. Pour the batter over the nuts. Bake one hour. Invert the pan onto a serving plate. Cool the cake and prick the top. (Myrtle used an ice pick to prick holes all over the top of the cake.) Drizzle and smooth the glaze evenly over the top and sides. Allow the cake to absorb the glaze; repeat until it’s all used up.
Glaze: Melt butter in saucepan. Stir in water and sugar. Boil 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and stir in the rum. (Note: Myrtle used half this amount of glaze, but in the spirit of the Christmas bake you might want to go whole hog.)
Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer with more than a few tinned goods and packages of Jell-O on her shelves.
