The Best of Mme. Jehane Benoit: A Collection of Some of the Most Famous Recipes and Ideas From Canada's Best Known Cook and Most Competent Authority of Canadian Foods

HARDBACK, uncommon edition, in VERY GOOD condition in a very good dust jacket. The binding is sound and square, the text block clean and unmarked, and the jacket remains bright and complete, with only the light, honest wear expected of a fifty-year-old cookbook that has been kept rather than cooked from. For the collector of Canadian culinary history, or for the cook who still reaches for tourtiere, maple, and the old family methods Madame Benoit set down, it is a handsome and increasingly difficult volume to find in this state. The Best of Mme. Jehane Benoit gathers a selection of the most celebrated recipes and kitchen ideas of Jehane Benoit (1904?1987), the Westmount-born culinary author, broadcaster, and teacher who for a generation defined Canadian home cooking. Best known simply as Madame Benoît, she wrote some thirty books, among them the landmark Encyclopedia of Canadian Cuisine, and appeared regularly on CBC television, speaking in both French and accented English on the foods of Quebec and of the country at large. This compact volume, about 160 pages with an index, draws on that lifetime of work: a practical treasury of dishes and counsel from the cook named an Officer of the Order of Canada the following year for her contribution to the art in Canada. Issued under the Modern Canadian Library imprint (a companion Pagurian Press issue appeared the same year), copies are now scarce, and a hardbound example is rarer still.…