Jean Paré

Jean Paré (1927–2022) was a caterer before writing her first cookbook, 150 Delicious Squares, in 1981. She founded Company’s Coming, now with over 200 cookbooks, among them such enduring familiars as Muffins & More (1983), Kids Cooking (1995), Slow Cooker Recipes (1998), Easy Entertaining (1998), and Simple Suppers (2007). Paré is one of the world’s most successful cookbook authors in terms of sales. Her recipes use ordinary daily ingredients and “make mealtimes more manageable for millions” because of her Golden Rule: “never share a recipe you wouldn’t use yourself.” She is a Canadian culinary icon. Taste Canada and the Culinary Historians of Canada honour Jean Paré and her lifetime of culinary writing by inducting her into our Hall of Fame.

Anne Lindsay

Anne Lindsay is widely known through her cookbooks with the Heart and Stroke Foundation and Canadian Cancer Society. She changed Canadian diets by sharing recipes with nutritional information the whole family would eat and advocating for heart-healthy cooking in Smart Cooking (1986), The Lighthearted Cookbook (1988), Lighthearted Everyday Cooking (1991), Light Kitchen (1994), and New Light Cooking (1998). In 2010, Lighthearted at Home: The Very Best of Anne Lindsay, a compilation of her life’s work, was an instant bestseller. She was one of the first Canadian cookbook authors to reach global success and to be appointed to the Order of Canada. For over forty years Anne Lindsay was a leader on the Canadian culinary landscape and a champion of healthy eating.

Micheline Mongrain-Dontigny

Micheline Mongrain-Dontigny is the author of 14 cookbooks on contemporary and historical Quebecois cuisine. She began cooking as a teenager; then, as a newlywed, she discovered a real passion for cooking, so graduated as a chef from the Hotel and Tourism Institute of Quebec in 1980. She taught cooking classes, worked in restaurants and hotels, wrote for Châtelaine, Ricardo and the history magazine Cap-aux-Diamants, and lectured on Quebec culinary history. Since 1998 she has communicated with followers via a website. She was a jury member for the Canadian Grand Prix New Product Awards and Taste Canada’s predecessor Cuisine Canada, for which she chaired the French-language cookbook committee for six years. She was also president of the Association pour la Presse Gastronomique et Hôtelière.

Her earliest cookbook, in 1988, was the self-published La Cuisine Renouvelée. Her latest cookbook is Les Grands Classiques de la Cuisine d’Ici of 2016. Travelling the regions of Quebec for local research, she was welcomed into homes and restaurants to converse with many cooks. Two cookbooks feature maple syrup. 

Mongrain-Dontigny’s cookbooks celebrate traditional and contemporary recipes as they are actually prepared in Quebec today in both home and professional kitchens. We are pleased to recognize her lifetime achievement in culinary writing.

Savella Stechishin

Savella Stechishin (1903–2002) is inducted for her book Traditional Ukrainian Cookery. Written in 1957 and reprinted a remarkable 18 times, it is still internationally acknowledged as the definitive English-language guide for Ukrainian cooking. Not simply a recipe collection, it includes sociological commentary and endures as a reference for Ukrainians while sharing their cuisine with cooks of other heritages.

In 1913, nine-year-old Stechishin arrived in Saskatchewan within a great wave of immigrants. She married at 17 and bore three children, then, unusual for her time and society, pursued a B.A. in Home Economics from the University of Saskatchewan. She never looked back: she became a cooking teacher and university lecturer, a founder of the Ukrainian Women’s Association of Canada and the Ukrainian Museum of Canada, and a writer for the federal government’s Consumer Information Service. For 25 years she wrote the column “Around the House” for The Ukrainian Voice newspaper. 

Stechishin received multiple awards and honours for a lifetime of leadership in community advocacy, journalism, education in home economics, and for establishing several national organizations for Ukrainian-Canadians. Her 1989 Order of Canada recognized her “dominant role as a teacher, writer and extension worker in strengthening Ukrainian heritage and in preserving and sharing the treasures of cuisine and folk arts…”. 

We are especially pleased to honour Savella Stechishin in 2022, when Canada and Ukrainian-Canadians stand in solidarity with Ukraine, as it fights Russian aggression.

Bonnie Stern

Bonnie Stern needs no introduction to Canadians! Her first was 1987’s Bonnie Stern’s Cook Book and her twelfth was Friday Night Dinners, which highlights her Jewish heritage. In between were her four famous and best-selling Heart Smart cookbooks, with one of them winning a Taste Canada award in 1998, and Bonnie Stern’s Essentials of Home Cooking, winner of an International Association of Culinary Professionals award in 2004. In 1971, Bonnie was an early graduate from the George Brown College chef school. She soon launched her career by opening a cooking school, which operated for 37 years, but she also wrote a national newspaper column and hosted three national television cooking shows. In a 2016 TEDx talk, she summarized her life of communicating flavourful everyday cooking by introducing herself as “a home cooking warrior.”

Noorbanu Nimji

Noorbanu Nimji was born in Kenya in 1934 into an educated, entrepreneurial Ismaili Muslim family originally from Gujarat, India. When she married at 19 she couldn’t cook yet, but she quickly demonstrated talent. In 1974, the Nimji family settled in Calgary. Noorbanu’s unintentional cooking career began while teaching Ismaili recipes to homesick students. Her four cookbooks, collectively entitled A Spicy Touch, have been called “community connectors.” Volume one was published in 1986, followed by the others in 1992, 2007 and 2015. The last was subtitled Family Favourites from Noorbanu’s Kitchen and co-written with Karen Anderson. Over 250,000 A Spicy Touch books have been sold. Noorbanu’s cooking embraced her North Indian ancestral roots, her East African upbringing and its British colonial influence, and her life in urban Alberta. Noorbanu died in 2020, but her self-published Canadian cookbooks have preserved the oral culinary culture of the dispersed Gujarati-Kenyan Ismaili people in Canada and beyond.

Norene Gilletz

Norene, known as “Canada’s queen of kosher cuisine,” died recently (age 79) still writing and blogging about Canadian food. Her first cookbook, Second Helpings, Please!, (1968), reprinted seventeen times, is now subtitled The Iconic Jewish Cookbook. Her final cookbook, The Brain Boosting Diet, appeared last December. She wrote ten others, plus many food columns and blog posts for the Canadian Jewish News. Her Facebook group boasted over 10,000 members, who happily called themselves “Noreners.” 

Gilletz was famous for her humour, culinary knowledge, and generous mentorship of food writers, teachers, and fundraisers. Her recipes were delicious and reliable; thousands still make her Sweet and Sour Meatballs and Carrot Cake. Gilletz’s books united communities as varied as Jews, food processor owners and thyroid cancer sufferers. 

Stephen Yan

Stephen Yan was an ambassador of Chinese cooking. He was the first Chinese-Canadian chef to host a cooking show, CBC’s wildly popular “Wok with Yan” (1978 to 1995). From Hong Kong, Yan emigrated to Vancouver in 1967 at age nineteen, where he eventually opened restaurants and self-published many cookbooks. His syndicated show and cookbooks encouraged home cooks to experiment with Asian ingredients, techniques and equipment, especially the cleaver and the wok, his specialty. 

People young and old fondly remember the show and books. His delicious stir-fry recipes were simple, colourful and quick. Stephen Yan’s world-wide fans loved the puns emblazoned on his aprons: “Don’t wok the boat” and “Wokkey Night in Canada” are but two. 

Naomi Duguid

Naomi Duguid is a prolific cookbook writer, culinary journalist, photographer, teacher, and world traveler. Her eight cookbooks have won multiple awards from the IACP, James Beard Foundation, and Taste Canada. Her first six titles were co-authored with former husband Jeffrey Alford between 1995 and 2008. Her two solo cookbooks are Burma: Rivers of Flavor (2012) and Taste of Persia (2016). A renowned storyteller and celebrated photographer, Duguid has traveled extensively through Southeast Asia and Persia with local people. Her exemplary body of work shares these culinary experiences through gorgeous images, an anthropological perspective, and uncomplicated recipes that encourage creative cooking at home.

Jessie Read (1905–1940)

Jessie Read was a home economist who wrote a column called “Three Meals a Day” for the Evening Telegram. These recipes were subsequently published as a series of books with the same title in 1934, 1935 and 1938. Read trained in dietetics, then worked for the Consumer’s Gas Company in Toronto. She became known for her cooking demos, weekly broadcast for the Radio Cooking School, and starring role in Canada’s first cooking school talking picture, Kitchen Talks. Intended for the average or aspiring home cook, Three Meals a Day was enormously successful. Her life was a mere three and a half decades, but her influence was briefly bright.

Graham Kerr

The Galloping Gourmet was North America’s most popular 1970s TV cooking show. Graham Kerr, the show’s irreverent and glamorous host, paired food, wine and travel, and pioneered an in-studio audience. Kerr grew up in English hotel kitchens, then joined the New Zealand Air Force. To his surprise, he found himself demonstrating cooking on television. The success of his 1967 New Zealand cookbook led the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to invite him and his business-partner wife, Treena Kerr, to produce a cooking show in Ottawa from 1969 to 1971 (Le Gourmet Farfelu in Quebec). For the TV show, Graham wrote a series of seven books called Graham Kerr’s Television Cookbooks, with psychedelic-pop inspired cover designs and published in Ontario. The recipes demonstrated his love for rich textures and flavours. In the following decades and while living elsewhere, Graham produced many more cookbooks and cooking shows — all of which moderated his early reputation for nutritional excess. Throughout his long and international career Graham Kerr never lost his energy and joie de vivre, as can be seen even today in his public appearances, but it is The Galloping Gourmet that endures in our collective Canadian memory.

Constance Hart (1826–1898)

Constance Hart was the first Jewish person in Canada to write a cookbook. Household Recipes was published in 1865 by “a Montreal lady” born into a prominent Jewish family who were early advocates for Jewish civil rights in Quebec. It is one of only two cookbooks that were not reliant on foreign texts prior to the first Canadian community cookbook of 1877. Hart’s simple and straightforward recipes “combine[d] the greatest novelties in the art of cooking with those approved Recipes, which have generally entered into ordinary use,” as her preface claimed.

Edna Staebler (1906–2006)

Award-winning literary journalist and author of twenty-one books. These included the Schmecks series of cookbooks: Food That Really Schmecks (1968), More Food That Really Schmecks (1979) and Schmecks Appeal (1987). Her cookbooks were full of wonderful descriptions, colourful anecdotes and flavourful dialect, as we peek into the cooking pots of her friends and family. Ms. Staebler was also among the very first cookbook authors to celebrate regional cooking and as a result, was primarily responsible for bringing the Waterloo region with its good food and drink to the attention of the rest of Canada.

Beulah M (Bunny) Barss

Ms. Barss is a Calgary-based food history writer and cookbook author whose nine books preserve and celebrate the rich heritage of ranching and pioneer experiences in the Canadian West. Her lively scholarship – rich with anecdotes, interviews with surviving settlers, archival photographs – garnered her an enthusiastic readership among prairie home cooks, making her a best-selling author.