Have you ever searched for a recipe for tongue toast? Likely, not. But if you did, and it turns out that some people do, you can find a few online. However, most of these recipes are based on older versions of recipes from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including one by Auguste Escoffier, who wrote about serving beef tongue on star-shaped toast in his 1907 English translated cookbook, The Escoffier Cookbook and Guide to the Fine Art of Cookery. There is even a reference to sliced tongue on a toasted sandwich in various editions of The Joy of Cooking.

Closer to home, long before Escoffier or Irma S. Rombauer published their recipes for tongue toast, Canada’s first community cookbook, The Home Cook Book, featured several recipes using beef tongue, including one that served it on toast. Initially published in 1877 to help raise funds for the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, The Home Cook Book is considered one of the best-selling cookbooks of the 19th century. It was released again in 2002 in honour of the hospital’s 125th anniversary and includes original family recipes contributed by women from Toronto and the surrounding areas.

The tongue toast recipe, located in a chapter titled “Breakfast and Supper,” is brief with no measurements, which was common back then as home cooks didn’t rely on specific measurements for savoury recipes.

Tongue Toast submitted by M.A.P.
Take cold boiled tongue, mince it fine; mix it with cream or milk, and to every half pint of the mixture, add the well beaten yolks of two eggs; place over the fire and let it simmer a minute or two; have ready some nicely toasted bread; butter it; place it on a hot dish and pour the mixture over; send to the table hot.

We’re not expecting you to rush out to buy beef tongue to make this recipe, but no judgement if you do. Well, maybe a little — have you seen what beef tongue looks like? The point here, is that this particular family recipe, along with many others included in community cookbooks across Canada since the late-1800s, played a significant role in shaping our cultural heritage and culinary history as well as the cookbook publishing industry.

Community cookbooks refer to cookbooks published as a way to raise funds for churches, schools, charitable organizations and in this case a hospital. Although community cookbooks had already been around in the United States since the Civil War, it wasn’t until a plucky group of women in Toronto came together to raise needed funds for the hospital they had helped build two years earlier, that this type of cookbook existed in Canada.

Elizabeth Driver, who wrote the introduction to the revised edition of The Home Cook Book, believes that it “served as an example to Canadian women of how culinary manuals could be useful tools for civic improvement, both as a way of raising money and promoting a cause.” She also saw the book as an important part of the cookbook publishing story in Canada. “It represented a new kind of recipe collection, now familiar to generations of home cooks and commonly called fundraising charitable or community cookbooks,” says Driver, the author of the scholarly reference book: Culinary Landmarks: A Bibliography of Canadian Cookbook,1825–1949 (2008).

Through extensive research and her passion for Canadian cookbooks, Driver has forever changed how we now view community cookbooks and their place in our history. However, these earlier cookbooks are not without their own drama as there have been questions about the authenticity of some of the locally contributed recipes. That aside, The Home Cook Book still set the stage for other charitable organizations to use this process to raise funds and awareness as it sold more than 100,000 copies by 1885.

“No other cookbook found its way into so many Canadian kitchens in the last quarter of the 19th century. Its wide distribution guaranteed that many dishes in the book would be made and eaten; if good, the recipes would enter the cook’s standard repertoire, and the recipes would be shared with friends and relatives, and passed down in the family,” Driver writes in her introduction.

Via a Zoom interview, edible reached Driver at her 1860 farmhouse in Ontario. With a 1905 Royal Jewel woodburning cookstove in the background, Driver, a recently retired culinary historian with the Campbell House Museum in Toronto, is pleased that her work has contributed to helping others take community cookbooks more seriously, properly acknowledging their historical contributions.

“These books were disregarded for so long,” Driver says. “They were only by women; they were only community cookbooks and they weren’t done by professional publishers. Libraries didn’t even collect them and they weren’t represented in the record. They lived completely apart in people’s homes.”

As a result of the sophisticated grassroots approach taken to compile these cookbooks, they are now considered an important reflection of what people were cooking and eating collectively during a specific period in their respective communities across Canada. And because many of these cookbooks included paid advertising, they also provide a unique record of the local economy and commercial businesses that have come and gone.

But more than that, Driver reminds us that these cookbooks also have sociological importance. “Most community cookbooks were usually put together for the social good and were a collective effort that represented the community.”

Driver believes these women, “who were considered to have a secondary role in our society back then, helped to shape the future of how cookbooks were published.” They were innovative and entrepreneurial, coming together to collaboratively collect recipes while also selling advertising to raise the money to publish the books, often contributing their own artwork and then finding creative ways to sell the books to further raise funds for their charitable causes. According to Driver, “These women from 1877 and onward, were acting out the full role of publishers.”

Despite not being considered important or official until recently, community cookbooks represented 45 per cent of the 2,275 culinary titles documented in Driver’s comprehensive bibliography of Canadian cookbooks. Given that most community cookbooks were not listed or held anywhere publicly, Driver had to use creative strategies to reference as many Canadian community cookbooks as she could find. This included conducting radio interviews and writing articles for local papers, asking people to send her information about any community cookbooks they might have in their possession. She then spent several years compiling the bibliography, organizing it geographically.

“If I hadn’t gone and tried to hunt them down,” Driver says, “this genre of cookbook, which is so important for our history, would have just disappeared gradually.” Because of her commitment to including these books in her bibliography, community cookbooks are now being recognized for their significant contribution to our culinary history and are actively collected by libraries and museums across Canada, with several special collections devoted to making community cookbooks accessible to view in person and digitally.

Driver also received well-deserved recognition for her work. The Culinary Landmarks Hall of Fame/Le temple de la renommée du livre culinaire Canadien award for culinary writing was created by Taste Canada in 2009 to honour the publication of her Culinary Landmarks, its first recipient. Now called the Taste Canada Awards Hall of Fame, this award continues to be administered by the Culinary Historians of Canada to honour people “who have shaped Canadian culinary writing and made a lasting contribution to our culture through their influential and inspirational cookbooks.”

These cookbooks often also have a sentimental connection when recipe contributions derive from relatives and friends, making them a cherished family heirloom passed down for generations. Driver was pleased to discover a 1901 community cookbook at her family’s farmhouse that included three recipes submitted by her grandmother, giving her a glimpse into what her relatives were eating back then. She has since made those three recipes for her family (turkey croquets, tomato soup and lemon pie), and was pleasantly surprised when they all worked out.

When asked if there is still a place for community cookbooks today, Driver believes there is: “It doesn’t matter how they’re published; it’s about sharing recipes that someone else could benefit from.” It’s also about celebrating our diverse and rich heritage in a way that truly reflects who we are and what we are eating and cooking at any given point. And who knows, preparing tongue toast for breakfast may make a comeback.