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“One man's cookbook,” Margaret Atwood wrote, “is another woman's soft porn.” You wouldn't suspect this browsing through Elizabeth Driver's just-released 1,008-page opus Culinary Landmarks: A Bibliography of Canadian Cookbooks, 1825-1949. The history of Canadian cookbooks shows the British influence (60 Marmite Recipes), a governmental concern (The Department of Agriculture Cookbook, published in 1923, followed by the long-awaited sequel, The Department of Fisheries Cookbook, in 1936, and, curiously, a cookbook published by the Department of National Defence in 1940), and a religious influence (cookbooks by Congregational, United, Anglican and Baptist churches). There are cookbooks published by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (the bluntly life-affirming Family Food Supply and Three Meals a Day), and everywhere a sense of modesty and unadornment (The Spartan Cookbook and the lower case reliable cookbook). But pornography, even at its softest, is in short supply.

As Ms. Driver writes in her introduction, “Food is at the very heart of living. It determines our health, defines our cultural and ethnic identity and binds us together socially.” Cookbooks are a barometer of society; an indication of our priorities, our desires even. You could map the romantic history of the country through its cookbooks; every era gets the cookbook it needs.

THE AGE OF OPTIMISM

I grew up in a culinary age of frozen packages and dehydrated soup, of brand names like Swanson, Lipton and, most prominently, Kraft. People my age sometimes reminisce unfondly about this era, and Kraft is singled out for its misguided recipes, which were sent in from people across the country and retailed on our black-and-white TV and involved a pretty much arbitrary combination of Kraft products, including, most famously, miniature marshmallows, often referred to simply as Kraft Miniatures. The genius of Kraft was to create a brand that overwhelmed the food itself – I rarely heard the term “macaroni and cheese,” for example; it was replaced utterly by “Kraft Dinner.” Kraft re-engineered both the name and the food.

Kraft published a cookbook in 1965 titled Treasury of Good Food Ideas that had recipes for Tropical Fruit Ring and other wobbly, unlikely dishes. Brands were, in a way, a school of cooking, like Thai or Cordon Bleu. A cookbook titled Sunday Suppers was entirely brand-based, featuring recipes from Lipton, Duncan Hines, Campbell's and Velveeta, among others.

From the Joys of Jell-O cookbook (Jell-O, unsurprisingly, was owned by Kraft, and the first Jell-O cookbook surfaced in 1922 – Jell-O: Canada's Most Famous Dessert) came Shrimp Salad Surprise (shrimp, orange-pineapple Jell-O, garlic salt, grated onion, mayonnaise, apples, celery, olives and one grapefruit, sectioned) pointing to a future that was processed but open-minded. I assumed all marriages of that era were like Kraft party snacks: shimmering, mysterious, colourful and fun (as opposed to, say, toxic, conveni-ent, wobbly and inauthentic).

THE DARK AGES

If this kind of cooking lacked a name, if it wasn't in any real way cooking, it had a kind of innocence. There was none of the political and cultural baggage that cookbooks often carry now, no imperative toward health, or local foods, or even food. People ate what was put in front of them, from both a culinary and romantic perspective. Then – if the commercials could be believed – they did a corny version of the twist in front of the living room hi-fi.

My grandmother was part of the visceral, labour-filled food world that had come before. I can remember those steel meat grinders that clamped onto kitchen counters or tables into which blood-flecked grandmothers fed inexpensive cuts of meat and then hand-ground them into something digestible.

My grandmother was Scottish, a woman who boiled vegetables for safety rather than flavour and roasted meat until it was asphalt. Cooking was a time-consuming chore for her, like cleaning the eaves or taking down the storm windows. She distrusted spices, which she thought were subversive and used by foreigners to disguise rather than enhance. She relied on salt and lard and heat, and, early in her marriage, a Scottish cookbook that was so dour I don't think it had a name. There was a recipe for Black Pudding (“Clean and wash one sheep's stomach inside and out. Mix in 8 oz. of suet, 8 oz. of oatmeal, one pint sheep's blood…”). There were recipes for cormorant – eventually to become a protected species – and for Sheep's Head Broth (“Using a red hot poker, rub over the sheep's head until a nice brown colour, remove ears, horns and burn off any remaining wool. Split head with an axe. Remove brains and soak overnight. Add barley.”) Most of these recipes remained in the old country, but their spirit infused her cooking – the idea that food was an issue of survival rather than pleasure.

My grandfather was on a disability pension because of a war wound and so was home all the time. He and my grandmother had arguments that went on for weeks: Was the kettle boiling when the steam came out? Or was it beginning to boil? They argued for a month over whom the dog liked best and finally had a duel in the backyard, sitting Pal down and marching off 10 steps in opposite directions, then turning and calling him simultaneously. Pal went to my grandmother, who fed him.

Long after my grandfather had died, I was at my grandmother's for dinner with my Uncle Jim, my grandfather's brother. My grandmother made her usual blackened, germ-free roast, and made a salad using vegetables from her garden, which she smothered with Kraft French dressing two hours before dinner and then let sit in the fridge. As she was walking from the kitchen to the dining room with what was now effectively orange compost, Uncle Jim leaned to me and whispered, with no hint of humour, “She killed my brother, you know. Poisoned him.” In that landscape of lard and suet, perhaps she did.

THE RENAISSANCE

My first cookbook of any import was La Cucina di Pasquale, written by a local Italian chef who had his own TV show in the 1980s. I gravitated to Italian because it was the Mediterranean antithesis of all that lay behind me, culinarily speaking, and because it was my baptism into the world of real food. When I was a teenager, my family went to Italy, and in Venice we went to a great restaurant filled with glamorous women in black dresses who were smoking and laughing like the women in Fellini's La Dolce Vita, their cleavage, in memory, heaving in slow motion. I had filet mignon, a salad, a plate of spaghetti and a glass of red wine. It was easily the best meal I had ever eaten. Dinner was a sensual experience, and it spoke of a life that was more profound than the one glimpsed in Scottish cookbooks. Though we carry our past with us.

THE REFORMATION

I later lived with a woman who was pretty much hopeless as a cook. I did almost all the cooking and gradually got better at it, and, after a few years, more resentful.

Culinary resentment simmers like Pollo en Mole, becoming richer and more complex. What happens is this: On occasion, you make something ambitious, with varying degrees of success, but something that involves exotic ingredients, timing and a certain culinary wit.

And then the rest of the time, your cooking gets increasingly rote and repetitive. And it gets that way because there is no reciprocity, and after a while you ache for a brilliant dinner, or even a brilliant attempt, because that is one of the things that underlies the sensuality of cooking, its Babette's Feast aspect, the idea of bringing someone pleasure.

That is what Nigella Lawson is selling: the illusion that she is making that lemon roast chicken (from Feast) for us, be still our hearts. When no one ever makes that lemon chicken for you, food remains linked with romance, but in a corrosive way. You begin withholding interesting dinners. But it was also true that I lacked ambition and imagination. In that relationship, I relied too heavily on La Cucina di Pasquale and went through it with the esprit of a pack mule. My liberator became my oppressor.

Oppression is a theme in Canadian cookbook history. Consider the war era, which, according to Ms. Driver's bibliography, produced the Wartime Economy Cookbook, the Victory Cookbook, the ambiguously titled Our Pet Recipes and the East York schools win-the-war cookbook. There was a sense that everyone was singing from the same hymn book. The Depression gave us the stripped-down Cook book, the drought-themed Health and happiness from whole meal waterless cooking and the dismal-sounding Daily Wants.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Where are we now? Food seems to be overtly linked to romance, to a sensual, fulfilling life. Cookbooks are sublimated sex. Ms. Atwood was right. Perhaps there was some chaste foreshadowing in the Westdale United Church cookbook (1948), which opens with the ditty, “Some women are loved because of good looks/ But everyone loves the woman who cooks.”

I am now married to a non-cook and have made my peace with it. A good meal, like a good deed, as my grandmother would have reminded me, is its own reward. There are six people coming for dinner tonight. So I stare at the shelves of cookbooks, with their personalities and celebrity and philosophies and drug confessions, and wonder what brand of romance I will embrace this time.

Will it come from a book by celebrated French Chef Bernard Loiseau, who put a shotgun to his head and killed himself? It was reported that he was dispirited when the guidebook GaultMillau took away two of his 19 (out of 20) points. His cooking was loved, but it wasn't loved enough. At some level, all that effort and invention was unrequited.

There are Nigella's books, of course, but our relationship seems to have run its course. It's not her; it's me. There is a cookbook titled Intercourses: An Aphrodisiac Cookbook. Trying a little too hard perhaps. At the other end of the spectrum, there is Shredded Wheat Dishes (1910) or The Truth About Baking Powder (1915), both cited in Culinary Landmarks. In the end, I choose Lucy's Kitchen by Lucy Waverman. Perhaps I'll find love in the Duck Breasts with Blood Orange Sauce.

Don Gillmor is a writer living in Toronto.