Clara Jefferson - a Wolfville diamond in her own right

Clara Jefferson, seated, with Acadia University librarian Jennifer Richard, left, student Carlie Cormier and archivist Pat Townsend

Just lately there was a celebratory event to honour a special person at the Vaughan Memorial Library. It was held for Clara Jefferson, a much-loved Wolfville resident.

    After graduating from Acadia in 1948, Clara took further study in food and education from Cornell University. That led to her becoming a faculty member in the School of Home Economics until she retired in 1971.

    In 2010 on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Acadia's alumni association, Clara was awarded a Doctor of Civil Laws. Just recently at the inaugural Science Atlantic Nutrition and Foods Conference, held at Mount Saint Vincent University, a new Clara Jefferson Award was handed out to a research student in food science and nutrition.

    I remember that Clara was a key political staff member in her brother, MP Pat Nowlan’s office on Main St. The daughter, as well as the sister of an MP, Clara knew her way around the corridors of power. 

    But her most recent recognition was all to do with her contribution to the library’s special collections of 200 historic cookbooks. A number of Clara’s favourite coffee party recipes were on the menu March 27. I’m waiting to try a batch of her ‘Aggression Oatmeal Cookies.’

    The sweet treats were fresh baked by students at the School of Dietetics and Nutrition. One of them, Carlie Cormier, spoke of the photos of graduates from Clara’s era on the walls near her classroom and how she wished to know stories about them.

    Here is one of Clara’s tales, A Black Market Diamond, which she told to the Women of Wolfville for their food show, Stirring the Pot, in 2012.

From Stirring the Pot

Clara on her 90th birthday

The Home Management House was where the Dean lived and a couple of other faculty members; it was to give us experience in running or managing a home. So there were always four students in that house. We moved from Tully into the home management house for four weeks and went through rotation each week. You started out as a maid, junior cook, cook and hostess. The last week you were the hostess you were in charge of everything. But part of that week you had to entertain someone at a dinner at the dining room table and you had to arrange for the centre piece and the menu and then you had these other students under you who were coming up through the ranks and they were your cook and your assistant cook and you’d have a maid who would wait on the tables. But the hardest part was finding the guests. But I confess I had an advantage because I lived in Wolfville and I knew quite a few people in Wolfville, and I just thought it would be nice to ask the minister and his wife and Dr. Longley and his wife.

    We had to be careful and plan what we wanted versus what was available and I can remember my hostess stint where I had invited these people for dinner and I wanted baked ham and I was going to garnish it with pineapple slices like I saw in the picture in the magazine and the cherry in the centre of each pineapple slice. These menus had to be approved before you could go ahead. The woman who taught the course on home management lived in the house. Her name was Miss Shand, from the Windsor Shand family and she said “you won’t be able to get pineapple to dress your ham, you’ll be lucky if you can get a ham” and I said “oh I think I can get a pineapple” “If you get ham we’ll have ham for dinner without the pineapple.” Well it happened that there was a man in town who worked for the Wolfville fruit company, he was their manager, and his name was Frank. I was telling my mother that I wanted this canned pineapple and she spoke to my father, who spoke with Frank. I guess it was a black-market diamond. So we served the meal that night and I didn’t tell Miss Shand, we brought the ham into the table and I can remember her coughing at the table, just choking. I wish we had a bet on or something, but neither one of us was a gambler, not at that time anyway.

Among the cookbooks in Clara’s collection

    Back in 1954 the good women of the Social and Benevolent Society at the Wolfville Baptist Church put out a cookbook. Clara’s mother was among the organizers, she told me.

    Cookbooks were a fairly common form of fundraising during that time period. Certainly the Women’s Institute of Grand Pre produced a fine one too and there were many others in the Valley.

    The Wolfville version was dedicated to the ‘modern home,’ where the centre of life was, as always, deemed the kitchen. My grandmother and her sister contributed recipes. The last homemaker alive who took part was Jeanette Denton. She died at 95 in 2017.

    It was a different world 70 years ago and the recipes that made the grade certainly offer some perspective on that time. For example, heroic Halifax Explosion nurse Georgina Miner’s Imperial Salad would never be prepared today. It was full of marshmallows, but in the early 1950s marshmallow technology was just allowing for mass production. Jell-O was new then too and well represented, along with food colouring for margarine. Who cooks with margarine today?

    A friend, who studied home economics, sat down with the cookbook and reflected on the freedom that casseroles offered housewives in the 50s. She said men had been conditioned to three square meals a day with meat, potatoes and veg on the table when they got home. Combining ingredients changed up that tired kitchen rule.

    I got a big charge out of the poem, ‘Say It with Saucepans’, written by the late president of Acadia University Dr. Watson Kirkconnell. He suggested, “to cooks is given the wondrous art to speak through stomachs to the heart… Through studied craft grow absolute in perfect style to ‘feed the brute.’” Kirkconnell could poke fun at his sex.

    Family dining in my childhood was, it seems now, governed by the Peg Bracken school of cooking. Bracken published ‘I Hate to Cook’ in 1960. Her classic comment was, “Some women, it is said, like to cook. This book is not for them.”

    My mother was one of the millions who happily tossed cans of Campbell soup and powdered mixes into casseroles. Before becoming an author, Bracken worked as an advertising copywriter in Portland, Oregon. The mother of one conceived of her cookbook from the exchange of recipes with other professional women - women who didn’t have time for fussy dishes or doting on husbands. Her proposal was rejected by six different male editors, but was eventually approved by a female editor at Harcourt. It went on to sell more than three million copies.

    But even more interesting to me than the recipes in the church cookbook were the pages full of advertising from close to 30 local businesses. The reader was exhorted to patronize local merchants. Back in the day there were two dress shops, two variety stores, a dairy, two apple exporters and a dry goods and furnishings store in Wolfville where one could shop locally. All are gone today.

Herbin’s Jewellers, the Acadia Theatre and Sears were all in operation – fortunately only Sears has left the Valley. The Blomidon Lodge, today’s well appointed Blomidon Inn, then offered a TV in its main lounge.

    Community cookbooks certainly date, but with them you can see into the domestic life of the times. That local home economics focus wasn’t prevalent in newspapers, but it sure makes for interesting conversation today in the church parlour.

    The 1954 cookbook collected by the Social and Benevolent Society is an insightful historical account of one town seven decades ago. I don’t know what the fundraising of the day was about, but I am sure that it continues. The new metal roof on a 103-year-old church has to be paid for.

    Today we continue to share menus with friends, but we Google recipes and go to Pinterest just as often. Fundraising cookbooks, however, continue to be published and that’s a good thing – if only for historians.

A portion of this blog entry was published by the Kings County Advertiser.