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At the time of Canadian Confederation, many Canadians were their own doctors, cooks, farmers, veterinarians, beekeepers, and even rat catchers. This survival guide, compiled fifteen decades ago, is a fascinating glimpse into Canadian life before modern conveniences.

Melissa McAfee's fascinating preface notes that "receipt" is an older term, a set of instructions not only for cooking, but also for medicine and food preservation. In The Canadian Receipt Book, these "receipts" cover many tasks, some of which may be hair-raising to the modern reader: removing worms from a cow's bronchial tubes may have been as important in 1867 as knowing how to make English-style tea cakes. Recipes for lemon pudding and rice "snow-balls" are found in one chapter; remedies for pig leprosy and a cow's "mad staggers" in another. The Receipt Book also contains business advertisements, a dizzying array from the moderately recognizable (insurance and jewellery) to the more dubious (a "drug warehouse" advertising "cocoaine" and "liver syrup").

Set to become a classic of early Canadian cooking and household management alongside Catherine Parr Trail, this page-turning collection reminds Canadians of the long road we have travelled in 150 years.