U of M professor using the kitchen to show students the past

University of Manitoba students took part in a lesson where they cook recipes from a 1940s cook book.

Taking a trip back in time through the taste buds. That is what a history professor at the University of Manitoba is doing to teach her students about the past.

The era she was tackling Tuesday was the 1940s, exploring what it was like to stretch food during a time where multiple supplies were rationed due to the Second World War.

“We’re looking at historic recipes and making them to try and think about how cooking was different in the past. What types of ingredients people had access to, what types of equipment people had in their kitchens,” said Sarah Elvins, a professor in the department of history at the U of M.

Students were tasked with making a variety of recipes, including meatless sausage patties and orange drop cookies.

The patty is teaching the students about how to stretch ingredients and what it would have tasted like back then. Meanwhile, the cookies are being made without sugar due to rationing during the war, which is teaching them how other ingredients were used as substitutes.

“They’re using eggbeaters and their own labour to cook these things because people didn’t always have access to electric beaters and other conveniences that we have today.”

Elvins likes the cookie recipe, saying they are “pretty tasty,” but even if the food doesn’t make the taste buds dance, she said that’s all part of the learning experience.

“If it’s not tasty, if our palate is different, if people use different spices, if they had access to different ingredients, like the flour was different, those kinds of things—that’s also, to me, a really rewarding thing.”

It was a learning curve for students who had to get used to using a manual eggbeater for the cookies or a potato masher to squish lentils down for the patties.

Elvins said it’s important for students to put themselves in the shoes of people from that time, to really understand the history and how times have changed.

“I often want people to imagine themselves in the past and to think how people lived. Cooking history and food history is a really good way to access social history, to think about how ordinary people’s lives and experiences were, and to really make history come alive.”

Elvins has explored a number of time periods over the years with classes, including the Great Depression and recipes from the 19th century.