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ON WITH YOUR APRONS AND UP WITH YOUR SLEEVES I ThoFbvivr Behind the Cook WESTERN CANADA FLOUR MILLS CO. LiMITEDi When it comes to clipping and collecting recipes, I'm a pro. My considerable accumulation is stowed away in a shabby shoe box and every now and then, I drag it out and add or subtract. The 'adds' are trendy and nutritious, heavy on yogurt and pine nuts, and the 'subtracts' are birthday party cupcakes with gum drop noses and jelly bean eyes once intended for two little girls who have managed to reach their forties while my back was turned. On a recent search and destroy mission, I almost surrendered to an uncommon recipe for a pretty common bird - the turkey. Take one turkey and stuff it with a chicken; stuff the chicken with a Cornish hen; and stuff the Cornish hen with a Spanish onion. I resisted and then along came another temptation in the form of a Purity Flour Cook Book. Well, it didn't quite 'come along'. It reached me on loan from Bas Collins who'd had it given to him by Len Ormiston, whose Mother's cook book it had once been. TORONTO and WINNIPEG 'T”'"*;" The cook book, put out by Western Canada Flour Mills, is dated 1917 and bears a foreword tantamount to a crash course in wheat production, storage, milling and flour manufacturing. It states that: "The Company is in constant touch with every phase of wheat crops, from the seeding to the final harvesting. Only men of wide experience and keen judg-nt can ever hope to gain a responsible position in charge of a PURITY FLOUR elevator. Upon these carefully selected experts rests the responsibility of delivering to the Company's mills the first grade wheat demanded by the millers of PURITY FLOUR. From the elevators the golden flood of No. 1 Northern Wheat is hurried by rail and water to the Company's modern mills, of which the St. Boniface (Winnipeg) mill looms up as the milling establishment par exellence of the world's flour industry, and to this date the largest single mill in the British Empire. Through floor on floor of machinery and battery after battery of complicated mechanisms operating at high speed, with here and there a skilled mechanic in a supervisory capacity only, the golden grain is cleaned, scoured, crushed and recrushed and sifted and resifted, passing through these many delicate and intricate processes without the touch of human hands. The very best selection of this product, of the very highest grade of wheat, is finally placed in bags and barrels for sale to consumers all over the world under the celebrated brand 'PURITY FLOUR'." Western Canada Flour Mills most assuredly crammed a lot into two pages, superfluous information guaranteed to daunt the novice housewife about to test her culinary skills with half a pound of flour from the company's daily output of 10,000 barrels. The text of this household reference book was the work of Miss E. Warner in collaboration with two expert analytical chemists in charge of the Winnipeg laboratory of the Western Canada Flour Mills Company. Within the space of two years, the indefatigable Miss Warner, who no doubt had to test all of the recipes, brought forth the wonder of its day - a 158 page cook book having been reviewed and approved by no less an authority -5-