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), have been exploring Victorian-era recipes and local food history to help us all appreciate the importance of food and its history in our daily lives.

Please enjoy the final installation of the series, Part 7: Peach Pie, baked by Abbey Stansfield.

Thank you to Abbey and Kathleen for an engaging and tasty blog series. And a big thank you to all of our readers for their support, participation, and sharing food memories with us!

Bon Appetit!

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Peach Pie Ontario
Hazel Hanna 
Cooking Collage of Rodman Hall 

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Peach Pie Ontario 

5 Cups peeled sliced peaches 
1Tbsp lemon juice 
3/4c. Sugar 
2 Tbsp. cornstarch 
Salt to taste 
¼ tsp cinnamon 
1 Tbsp. butter 
Pastry for one pie crust
 
Sprinkle the fruit with lemon juice. Combine dry ingredients and mix with the fruit. Turn into a 9-inch pie pan or a deep baking dish and dot with butter. Cover with the pastry, seal the edges firmly over the outer rim of the dish and cut vents for steam. Bake at 425°F til golden brown. 

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A straightforward peach pie recipe was not what one would expect when looking through the 200 pages of handwritten community contributed recipes that make up the Cooking Collage of Rodman Hall cookbook. The cookbook was released as a fundraiser in the early days of Rodman Hall’s journey as an art centre. It’s a self-published work that reflect its 1960s publishing with popular mid-century dishes like asparagus jellied salad, cheese fondue, and meatloaf. This recipe, however, stands out against all the other desserts because of the name providing a local connection with the star ingredient.  

The recipes that I selected over the course of this series contained ingredients that could be traced as arriving from outside of St. Catharines. Peach Pie Ontario, however, evokes summertime in Niagara when peaches are ready to be harvested locally. The inclusion of this recipe in Rodman Hall’s Cookbook suggests that this has been the case for the last 50 years, but exactly how long have we been harvesting and enjoying peaches locally?  

When researching the arrival of the fruits we still enjoy in Niagara today, there is evidence that they predated European settlement of the area. On July 2, 1793, while living at Navy Hall in Niagara-On-The-Lake, Elizabeth Graves Simcoe, wrote: 

“We have thirty large May Duke cherry trees behind the house, and three standard peach trees, which supplied us last autumn for tarts and desserts during six weeks, beside the numbers the young men eat. My share was trifling compared with theirs, and I eat thirty in a day. They were very small and high flavoured. When tired of eating them raw, Mr. Talbot roasted them, and they were very good.” 

By 1806, Catherine Clause a Niagara-On-The-Lake resident was recording the cultivation of specific verities of peach trees she was cultivating in her gardening journal. She noted that shoppers were travelling between 30-40 miles to the Niagara-On-The-Lake market to access the bounty of fruit and vegetables grown locally.  

The commercial appeal of Niagara fruit cultivation began early in St. Catharines, leading to the nick name of the Garden City. Dr. Chauncy Beadle moved to St. Catharines in 1821 when the population was less than 400 people and served as the only physician during his early days in the community. In 1830 he turned his attentions towards opening the St. Catharines Nursery, a 100-acre property on Geneva Street where he was cultivating apple, peach and apricot trees. By 1841 he had expanded his offerings to include apples, peaches, cherries, quince, plums, apricots, nectarines, raspberries and grapes. 

His 1841 nursery catalog boasts: 

“Some of my varieties have attained the height of ten feet or more. And I take a pleasure in stating, that among the many who have visited my Nursery, there have been none who have not borne very flattering testimony to their beauty and healthfulness.” 

In a time before refrigeration, it was the trees and plants that were exported to customers. The advantage of the canal’s suitability for shipping was advertised in the same catalogue. 

“It may be well to observe, for the information of those who live at a distance, that St. Catharines is situated on the Welland canal, which connects lakes Erie and Ontario, affording good schooner transportation to any of the ports on those lakes.” 

With the advance of manufacturing on the canal fruit production and processing became a priority. The 1913 Board of Trade reported that: “In Lincoln County, of which St. Catharines is virtually the centre, are upwards of 14,600 acres of the world’s best fruit lands.” With the development of fruit processing techniques and the availability of reliable transportation, the canning industry in St. Catharines grew from one factory in the 1890s to six by 1900. These factories employed hundreds from the community 80 percent of whom were women or girls.  

[Take a listen to our podcast episode about canning in St. Catharines: One Hour in the Past E703 – Canning.]

The development of cold storage shipping provided an opportunity for local growers to form the St. Catharines Cold Storage and Forwarding Company. The company kept a warehouse next to the Grand Trunk railway station to deal with wholesale shipments on behalf of the farmers. Another wholesaler company, Titterington, boasted “shipping by the car lot to all parts of Canada, there not being a point on the whole of the Canadian Pacific Railway system that they do not touch with their goods.”  

Work in the harvesting and canning sector was seasonal in nature and required mobilizing a legion of workers to ensure the fruit was harvested from the orchards and processed before it could spoil. Finding the necessary workforce was particularly difficult during both First and Second World Wars. During these conflicts the government campaigned for those who were not serving in the armed forces to contribute to the war effort by working on Canadian farms to help ensure agricultural demands were met. These campaigns were specifically targeting women and high school aged students. 

The importance of agriculture and canning in St. Catharines continued into the postwar era. An Aylmer’s label from 1947 showcases the place of pride St. Catharines peaches held as they were chosen as the City of St. Catharines official wedding present to Princess Elizabeth on her marriage to Prince Philip in 1947. The guidelines for wedding gifts for the royal couple stipulated that gifts should be something that would benefit the British people. St. Catharines sent 4800 cans of peaches, which at a time where rationing was still in effect would have been quite the treat!

From early settlement to royal celebrations peaches have impacted the lives of St. Catharines residents more significantly than one would have ever thought. Hazel Hanna’s simple recipe for Peach Pie is one heritage recipe that can be recreated at home as written, even fifty years later! 

The Recipe