SaskBooks Reviews

Culture in the Kitchen: Recipes from a Multicultural Cooking Seriesby Saskatchewan German CouncilPublished by Saskatchewan German CouncilReview by Toby A. Welch$25.00 ISBN 9780969401698 What the Saskatchewan German Council undertook with this labour-of-love book is to be applauded! Culture in the Kitchen: Recipes from a Multicultural Cooking Series is a cookbook that is broken into 13 chapters, each one focused on the meshing of German food with food from another country or culture. (For example: Germany meets China, Germany meets Ukraine, Germany meets Saskatchewan – you get the picture.)  The true test of any cookbook is its recipes so I gave a bunch of them a try. From the Germany meets Brazil chapter, the arroz carreteiro (wagoner’s rice) was delicious! It tasted similar to a red beans and rice dish that is on my regular rotation and the recipe is a keeper. Next up was the stuffed tomatoes from Germany meets Vietnam. I haven’t had a stuffed tomato in over two decades, something I now regret. This one was full of so many ingredients that melded together perfectly inside the plum tomato – vermicelli, pork, mushrooms, green onions, and a handful of other yummy stuff.  To satisfy my sweet tooth, I…

German Settlements In Saskatchewanby Alan B. AndersonPublished by Saskatchewan German Council Inc.Review by Madonna Hamel$20.00 ISBN 9780969401674 Growing up I heard stories about my grandmother’s job as the postmistress of Krupp and of the acres of sunflowers planted by German farmers surrounding my grandparent’s land just North of Fox Valley. When my sister and I went looking for Krupp we found no evidence of it, although someone speculated that a large feed bin was once the old post office. I could have used this meticulously researched history of the province’s settlements in my searches. It would have explained to me that many of the Russian-German settlements spanning an expansive territory bordered by Medicine Hat, Leader and Maple Creek, including my French-Canadian-Metis-Scottish-American grandparents farm, had changed their names after both world wars. When Leader became the “de facto centre of the settlements” in 1913 it was actually named Prussia. But during World War I the town name was changed along with street names like Berlin, Kaiser and Hamburg. No doubt Krupp suffered the same fate. Prelate was also a name I’d heard as a child. I knew there was a church there, just ten kilometres down the road from Leader, and…