Why Cookbook Author Edna Staebler Remains So Beloved

“Mother loves cake; she’ll eat it for breakfast, dinner and supper.” So begins a chapter titled “A Cake in the House,” illustrated with a charmingly angular specimen. The prose flows on, chatting convivially about someone named Bevvy, someone else named Salome, drawing you headlong into another world. When I posted this cookbook page to my Instagram stories, messages came flooding in. “What is this?” people asked. “Does something this charming truly exist?” Yes, and the author wrote not just one but three iconic Canadian cookbooks. The bad news is, they’re out of print.

All of Edna Staebler’s cookbooks read this way, populated with characters you feel you’re in the room with and mouth-watering dishes you can practically taste. They weren’t the only books she wrote. In fact, she started out in fiction, but Staebler’s cookbooks were her only bestsellers. I first encountered them as a kid in my grandmother’s rural Alberta kitchen—I doubt many kitchens in the area were without them at that time. Brightly coloured, with intriguing titles (I mean, Schmecks Appeal?!), they were full of the sort of comforting, achievable food that I could imagine making even as a teenager.

I copied down all of the recipes in the books for baking with my favourite ingredient, rhubarb, before I found my own copies at the thrift store. I still have her recipes for rhubarb crunch and rhubarb roll copied out in my adolescent handwriting.

A cookbook author, however, was never something Staebler aspired to be, and perhaps this accounts for her laid-back, personable approach in writing them (and, hence, their success). It was work she, an aspiring novelist, took on very reluctantly.

In 1948, Maclean’s sent her to write about Old Order Mennonites, pacifists who fled religious persecution in Switzerland and settled in Pennsylvania and eventually near Waterloo, Ont. After staying a week with a Mennonite family (a journalistic method she would employ frequently thereafter), Staebler wrote a beautiful piece chronicling their lives without sensationalizing the aspects that might seem strange to outsiders.

Readers were intrigued by the delicious cooking that she described so well, and a publisher convinced her to compile a cookbook series of their recipes. It turned out to be a sure bet, with the books becoming Canadian classics beloved around the world. It did lead to people assuming Staebler was Mennonite, but she wasn’t even a churchgoer by that time. Her friendship with this typically insular group simply attests to her amiability and non-judgmental nature.

Reading her in 2023, it’s obvious that Staebler’s three books are pretty far removed from our current notion of what a cookbook should be. That an author would insist so intently on her status as rank amateur, going so far as to describe herself as a culinary fraud, seems counterintuitive in our era of self-styled experts. This insistence also seems almost criminally self-effacing. She goes on to list the desserts she made for a modest dinner party: “Baba au Rhum, Plum Crumble, Grand Marnier Cake, Sour Cream Peach Pie, mixed fruit in a bowl and Seed Cake.”

As a cookbook author myself, it’s also unthinkable that she never tested a good portion of the recipes in her books. There are no serving sizes, ingredient lists are often imprecise and instructions are, as she was once told, “delightfully vague.” But Staebler invites new cooks to use the recipes in the spirit that she embodies, to make the best of things if they don’t turn out, to simply enjoy the process and learn through experience. (That said, one should avoid the canning recipes, as the food safety of most is highly suspect.)

On the other hand, much of what’s contained in her books is very much aligned with modern interests: zero-waste cooking and simple, delicious food made with local ingredients. In many ways, she is Canada’s answer to Alice Waters or Richard Olney. Her essay on farmers’ markets at the beginning of More Food that Really Schmecks (my favourite of her books) is the closest I’ve ever come to seeing the feeling I get at the market described: an awesome sense of wonder, abundance, gratitude and possibility. “The market is marvellous,” she writes. “Nowhere else in the world that I’ve seen is there such fresh, clean, lush profusion. It gives me a feeling of security, abundance and anticipation of joy. It gives me deep satisfaction.” She reminds us that good food is for the people, and local food is delicious, healthy and affordable—something we still have to work at championing more than 50 years later.

Although a lot of the old-fashioned observations in Staebler’s books are charming (“We were taught we’d be sick if we didn’t eat jam-bread at the front part of every meal,” one of her Mennonite friends is quoted as saying), there is some reckoning to be had with typical ideas of the era, mostly that food is for filling up men and is cooked by women. Happily, this particular framing falls away after the first book, unlike the unfortunate fatphobic comments.

The old-fashioned misogyny of that first book belies the details of Staebler’s life story; she was a victim of those attitudes, trapped in a bad marriage until her divorce at 56. However, the relationship did afford her a degree of freedom uncommon for middle-class women in the mid-20th century. She travelled across Canada and to Europe, alone or with friends, sometimes for pleasure, but also as a journalist writing for the country’s biggest magazines. The first piece she ever sold was an article about swordfishing to Maclean’s; she went on to write for Saturday Night, as well as this very magazine about people and communities all across the country. And she also wrote four non-fiction books and novels.

In spite of her great talent, Staebler feared becoming known “just as a cookbook author”—which I admit rankles me a bit. But with the critical reception of her cookbooks, she finally abandoned dreams of becoming a novelist, content that her cookbooks gave people so much pleasure.

And they certainly do, whether or not one ever uses the recipes. She gives us permission to play in the kitchen, to invite others in—not to impress, but simply to please. And she was well aware that many readers wouldn’t cook from them at all and, instead, simply read her books in bed. A Toronto-based doctor even prescribed the practice as an antidote to neurotic thoughts before the publication of Food That Really Schmecks. That’s the kind of balm a lot of us could use just now.

In many ways, Edna Staebler—who died in 2006, at the age of 100­­—is what we should all hope to be: curious, light-hearted, never too self-serious, always in pursuit of the pleasures of company, community and culinary delights. Let’s not let her cookbooks fade into obscurity.