In Baking as Biography, Diane Tye goes through her mother’s recipe box as a means to better understand the older woman’s life, to examine mid-20th-­century Maritime food and domestic culture, and to consider connections between food and nostalgia. Tye, an associate professor at Newfoundland’s Memorial University, situates her book at the crossroads of folklore and women’s studies, and the resulting narrative is  fascinating.

Tye reads between the lines of her late mother’s recipes to show how baking defined her as a minister’s wife and mother. Baking, Tye suggests, had subversive implications: it was a form of self-expression that brought women together socially and enabled them to record their histories in the form of recipe books. As convenience foods came into fashion, women ingeniously repurposed things such as graham crackers and Jell-O in ways their male creators had never envisioned.

The recipes Tye uncovers reflect changes in 20th-century food culture. For example, her mother’s biscuits (a staple of Maritime meals) became lighter and sweeter over time. Tye connects this change to the falling price of white sugar after the turn of the century, and a move away from foods sweetened by the more traditional molasses, which came to be viewed as a low-class ingredient. By contrast, as “exotic” items such as orange and coconut became more widely available, they began to be used in baking as an assertion of middle-class status. Chocolate-chip cookies were invented in the 1930s, and Tye’s mother’s were famous in her neighbourhood by the 1970s. Her recipe, however, had unremarkable origins: the back of a package of Nestlé chocolate chips.

Tye’s original notion of recipes being passed down through generations is abandoned as the author comes to understand that technology and fashion changed so rapidly during the 20th century that recipes were more often acquired via women’s magazines or exchanged between friends.

Baking as Biography deconstructs the myths of mid-20th-century housewifery right from its first pages, beginning with Tye’s observation that her mother didn’t even like to bake. How and why, in spite of this, she turned out baked goods so prolifically for nearly 40 years reveals surprising and illuminating details about her life, and about the circumstances of her contemporaries.