Welcome to the Food, Glorious Food blog series. This new, limited series is a companion blog series to the Museum’s temporary exhibition of the same name, now on display in the Museum’s lobby and Burgoyne Room through autumn 2025.

Throughout the series, Curator Kathleen Powell and Public Programmer Abbey Stansfield (both the expert bakers here at the Museum), will be exploring Victorian-era recipes and local food history to help us all appreciate the importance of food and its history in our daily lives.

In this edition of Food, Glorious Food, Kathleen tries a recipe for Cheese Timbals from the St. George’s ACW Jubilee Cookbook.

Bon Appetit!

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Cheese Timbals
Publisher: H.E. Mullin
From: St. George’s Anglican Church Women Jubilee Cookbook, 1886-1936

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½ cup grated cheese, 1 cup milk, 2 eggs, ½ teaspoon salt (scant) and a little paprika. Beat eggs, add cheese, salt and paprika. Add milk. Pour into buttered timbals and bake until set. Turn out on a hot platter and serve with a white sauce and chopped parsley.

– H. E. Mullin.

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The 1930’s in Canada are most commonly connected to the Great Depression, economic hardships, and unemployment across the country. In 1931, the population of Canada was 10,376,786. R.B. Bennett was Prime Minster and would remain in that position until he was defeated by William Lyon Mackenzie King in 1935. King would lead the country through the rest of the 1930’s and to the end of the Second World War.

By 1933, the height of the Great Depression, Canada experienced a 30% national unemployment rate. Canada’s economy was still very heavily dependent on natural resources and agriculture and immigration policy favoured an over-resourcing of workers (both Canadian citizens and immigrants) to ensure enough were available during the peak demand – harvest as an example – and little work in the off-season. For this reason, in 1930-31, a staggering 58% of all male unskilled workers were unemployed for more than six months of the year. Canada was considered an “eight month country” which could not provide work on a year round basis for most of it’s citizens.

While St. Catharines was one of the luckier communities in experiencing a less severe economic downturn on average, the community was still heavily impacted by the Depression. The local economy’s strong focus on heavy industry meant that seasonal fluctuations in work were less common. At the same time, large scale infrastructure projects such as the construction of the hydro canal in Niagara Falls and the Welland Ship Canal in St. Catharines (and across the region) helped take the pressure off local businesses to absorb all the soldiers who had returned to the community looking for work after the First World War, leaving less transient workers through the end of the 1920’s.

According to the 1931 census, the population of St. Catharines was 24,753, including Port Dalhousie, Merritton, and Grantham Township. The community had a high literacy rate at 96% who could read and write English. The average earnings for workers in the city was $1,076 per year for men and $631 per year for women.

But the Great Depression did impact the community. Unemployment was high and while some local industries had expanded their workforces in the early 1930’s many employers used the glut of available workers as a reason to cut wages, speed up work requirements and undermine organizational labour efforts at the time. After all, if one worker was not willing to work under those conditions, there were many others waiting in line at the door to take those jobs, despite the conditions.

In Canada in the 1930’s social assistance was considered a local matter. Relief for the unemployed, sick, or elderly were the responsibility of local government and relief organizations. As noted in the last blog post, many churches took up this call and provided a large proportion of the community’s relief assistance.

The City of St. Catharines took on the responsibility for relief for its citizens during the Depression. Relief took the form of food, clothing, shelter and medical aid. Both the Federal and eventually the Provincial governments, provided relief allocations to assist municipalities in providing direct relief where needed. The St. Catharines Welfare Committee provided direct relief payments to workers in exchange for work crushing stones along the abandoned canal. City Council also provided relief in the form of make-work projects throughout the 1930’s with road building and sewer building the most common projects employing out of work men. For the week ending February 24, 1930, as an example, Council paid out $248.16 in direct relief in the form of groceries, clothing, and payment of utilities. Throughout the 1930’s relief expenses would continue to show up on the weekly Council financial reports and Council would eventually have to appeal to higher levels of government for support to keep up with the growing ranks of the unemployed. Many municipal governments across the country went bankrupt during the Depression due to their efforts to keep up with the staggering relief payments to their citizens.

The Recipe

With this economic reality as the backdrop, St. George’s Anglican Church on Church Street celebrated its 50^th anniversary in 1936. The Women’s Auxiliary of the Church chose to publish a cookbook to celebrate this milestone, and women of the church contributed recipes for the book. For that reason, the book has an eclectic mix of recipe styles but is still heavily skewed towards desserts. Likely a cook’s favourite recipe was submitted for consideration, and in many homes often a dessert was that favourite.

Interestingly, there is no effort made in this book to provide recipes that can be made on a budget or that would use less expensive ingredients. If you took this book completely out of its context, you would not think that there was a severe depression happening.

It took quite some thinking to decide on which recipe to recreate from this cookbook but since I was testing this recipe on Shrove Tuesday, I decided to try out one of the Meatless Recipes and went with Cheese Timbals. I had no idea what a timbal was so at the very least thought it would be an interesting experiment.

After a quick internet search, it turns out timbals are a custard-like egg dish cooked in the oven in a ramekin style container. I could not find a single recipe online with Timbals spelled in this way. All the recipes I found that were similar were called Timbales.