About the Book
The Five Roses Cook Book was not written by a cookery writer. It was assembled by the advertising department of the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal, and its title page says exactly what it is: “a Manual of Good Recipes carefully chosen from the contributions of over two thousand successful users of Five Roses Flour throughout Canada.”
So this is a crowd-sourced cookbook from 1913, and a national one. Forty-six of its recipes are still signed on the page — Mrs. A. W. Fraser of Iron Springs, Alberta; Mrs. A. Aspdin of Victoria; a seventeen-year-old cooking for a family of ten in New Brunswick. The mill's own writers supplied the essays that open each part, and the advertisements that interrupt them.
Its measurements were the hard part of this edition. Five Roses sets its quantities with printed fractions (½, ¼, ¾) as single characters, and scanning software drops them: one engine loses a fraction that starts a line, the other loses it too, and between them they had left more than eight hundred quantities in this book reading “cup sugar” or “pound butter” with no amount at all.
Four hundred and eighteen were recovered by playing the two engines against each other. The rest were recovered the slow way: every remaining line was cut out of the photographed page and read by eye against the original. Four hundred and twelve quantities were put back that way. Fourteen more were not missing but wrong — a page that prints ¾ teaspoon of soda in one recipe and ½ in the next had been given the same figure twice — and those were corrected against the print.
Two quantities in the whole book are still blank, and they are blank in the 1913 printing itself: those two recipes say so on the page. Nothing here is a guess. Where the original gives no amount, this edition gives none either.
This edition is built from a dual-engine reading of the original pages, checked line by line against the scans.