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 and 20th century-era recipes and local food history to help us all appreciate the importance of food and its history in our daily lives.
Things are about to become a whole lot sweeter with Part 7: Calla Lillies, written and baked by Curator Kathleen Powell.
Bon Appetit!
Calla Lillies
Published by CKTB 620.
From: Tips and Tunes Radio Recipes, c. 1950’s, submitted by Mrs. L.A. Furry, Wainfleet, Ont.
3 eggs beaten, 1 cup white sugar, 1 cup flour, 1 tablespoon water, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon vanilla.
Beat eggs, add sugar, water and vanilla. Sift baking powder with flour. Grease cookie sheet and make as pancakes. Put in a moderate oven as in a jelly roll. Remove from pan quickly and quickly roll in shape of a lily or hornshape. Fill with whipped cream and a dash of yellow cake colour for centre to resemble a lily. Put on as many as possible on each sheet but do not crowd.
Canada in the 1950’s saw the country return to a prosperity they hadn’t experienced since before the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Wartime industrial growth and additional government regulation of the economy resulted in a country better able to bounce back from expected economic slumps as the country resumed peacetime production.
The 1951 census reports the population of St. Catharines, Merritton, and Port Dalhousie combined as 45,314. Those who served in the Second World War made up 3,144 of the local population. There were plenty of jobs and the community was booming and family values were considered a high priority for the local population. At the time it was assumed that this meant that young couples wanted a family, a savings account, and a house with a yard. The Census data also shows that there were 10,380 occupied dwellings in the city of which 71.9% were detached homes, 5.1% were single attached homes and 23% were apartments. Browsing through The St. Catharines Standard in 1955 for homes would yield the listing for a new stucco home near Niagara Street with three large bedrooms, a living room, family sized kitchen, and divided basement with oil heat would cost the new homeowner $9900. Alternatively, an all-brick home of new design off Carleton East with five large rooms and completely modern throughout could be purchased for $10,975.
The average weekly earning in Ontario in 1951 was $58.60 for men and $33.66 for women.
By the end of the 1950’s St. Catharines was thriving, there were plenty of good jobs with high wages, families could enjoy modern conveniences such as drip-dry fabrics for clothing, coloured tissues, nylon fabrics, polyester, packaged detergents, and a wider use of plastic and synthetic materials. After the austerity of the Depression and the war, the world must have seemed brighter in colour!
For entertainment, there were many new local restaurants amongst the tried and true favourites, although alcohol could not be served with meals in St. Catharines until the late 1950’s. In 1950 there were 5 movie theatres including the Lakeshore Drive-In which all showed the latest Hollywood offerings.
In addition, after living with rationing for most of the war, sugar was back in the Canadian diet with many pre-packaged options such as sugary cereal, bubble gum, soda pop, and candy easily purchased at one of 81 grocery stores located within the city.
CKTB radio station provided the soundtrack for many people’s lives. Their music programming included options for all demographics and they published their weekly programming schedule in the St. Catharines Standard for readers to clip out or make note of their favourites.
While the cookbook used in this blog post has no published date, it appears to date from the 1950’s as the station’s frequency was changed to 620 kHz (as noted on the cover of the cookbook) in 1950 and then changed again to 610 kHz in 1959.
The introduction to the book, written by morning hostess Elda, addresses the audience as “Hello Ladies!” and promises tested recipes submitted by listeners. The uptake to submit recipes was so high that not all the submissions could be used. The publishers noted, however that at least one recipe from each contributor was included. The book includes 53 pages of recipes of all variety, including baked goods, canning, dressings and fillings, pies and puddings, meat dishes, meat substitutes, and salads.
The Recipe
This recipe appears on page 24 in the Cookies section of the book and was submitted to the station by Mrs. L.A. Flurry of Wainfleet, Ontario.
Calla Lillies
Ingredients
- 3 eggs, beaten
- 1 cup white sugar
- 1 cup flour
- 1 tbsp. water
- 2 tsps baking powder
- 1 tsp vanilla
Method
1 – Beat eggs until frothy and yellow. Add sugar, water and vanilla and continue to beat until light and fluffy.
You should beat this mixture for at least 3 minutes.
2 – In a separate bowl, sift together flour and baking powder.
Add the sifted dry ingredients to the wet and stir until well incorporated.
3 – Grease cookie sheet.
This instruction was the most difficult to figure out successfully and is the linchpin around whether these cookies will work for you. At first, I tried using parchment paper thinking it should be fine and won’t stick, but I was wrong. Second, I lined my cookie sheet with non-stick aluminum foil and while this worked just slightly better, the cookies still stuck to the surface. What finally worked for me was to grease the foil lined cookie sheet before every batch, almost like you would do with your griddle when making pancakes.
Greasing your cookie sheet is the key to this recipe. This was learned with some trial and error.
4 – Drop the batter onto the cookie sheet like you would make pancakes.
Put as many as you can on the cookie sheet while avoiding crowding them together. These cookies flatten out quite a bit and expand in size when cooking.
5 – Bake in a 400 degree oven and bake until the edges are golden and the cookies are set – approximately 3 minutes.
As my oven got hotter over time, it took a bit less time for these to cook, so keep an eye on them as they are cooking.
6 – Remove from pan quickly and quickly roll in shape of a lily or hornshape.
As soon as you remove them from the oven, before they cool down, roll them into flower / horn shapes and hold them together either with toothpicks or the handle of a wooden spoon until they are cool and hold their shape. These are hot when you get them off the cookie sheet so be careful that you don’t burn yourself!
7 – Fill with whipped cream and a dash of yellow cake colour for centre to resemble a lily.
Fill with yellow-tinted whipped cream so it looks like the centre of a calla lily. You could also fill with buttercream frosting coloured yellow. I chose to go with buttercream frosting and since I didn’t have any yellow food colouring, I used red so my cookies have a pink centre.
8 – Arrange these nicely on a plate to look like a bouquet of flowers.
FYI…
For additional information, the original recipe calls for a filling of whipped cream. I chose not to go in that direction because I needed them to last overnight and still look nice. When researching this post, we found this blog post of another food blogger (The Plenty Sweet Life) who tried a similar recipe of her grandmother’s and she used buttercream frosting, so I decided that’s what I would do as well. I took my lead from her on the recipe for buttercream frosting although you can use your favourite frosting recipe.
If you choose to follow my lead and fill with buttercream frosting, I used one cup of icing sugar, ¼ cup of butter and 2 tbsps of water and mixed well with my hand mixer, then used a piping bag to pipe the icing in the centre.
These cookies really are quite delicious. They are light and sweet and look really nice on a plate. They were very fussy and took me a batch or two to really get in the hang of how to form them into their shapes before they cooled down. This batch makes about 3 dozen cookies.
I would love to hear if anyone else has tried these cookies and how they worked out for you. Let us know in the comments if these are a tradition for you and your family!
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