"2 calf’s feet" … you’ve got to be kidding! This was just the beginning of my adventure with the Montreal cookbook entitled Clever Cooking for Careful Cooks put together by the ladies of the Church of St. John the Evangelist and printed and published by John Lovell and Son in 1888. It has been over five months, and I am still going in circles. I did not think it was going to be this hard. The title spoke to me immediately: I like to think of myself as relatively clever, and I certainly am careful. Measure twice and cut once, that’s me. Perhaps I even take careful a little too far in that I do not take too many risks with my culinary palette, clearly excluding forays into the realm of unplucked fowl, cow heels, stewed pigeons and forcemeat balls. (You really don’t want me to comment on this last, do you?). So I keep going back to the advertisements often included in community cookbooks, which intrigued me. I love history and these ads essentially tell the story of Montreal's commercial history in the late 19th century. The businesses are all located in what was then the commercial heart of Montreal: Notre Dame, St. Lawrence, St. James, St. Catherine, McGill, Victoria Square, Craig and Bleury streets. I get more than a little sentimental when I see addresses on Craig and Bleury as it was at this very corner where my own family set up shop in the early 1900s. In 1888, at the time of publication of this book, though, they were still peddling their wares in a small village in Romania. Back to the recipes. The preface states that some recipes were over 100 years old in 1888, or over 225 years old today! It also states that the raison d’etre for the book is “to give young housekeepers practical and economical hints, which, if faithfully followed, will make of them not only careful housekeepers, but clever cooks” (3). I try to find the two-century-old recipe. Maybe “mock turtle soup” (7), “soup for luncheon” with mushroom catsup (8-9), “mince collops” (26), “bread and suet pudding” (38) or could it be the plain old “doughnuts” (70) where the dough is just “thrown into boiling lard till brown” (70). I look for the “clever” and “careful” tips and find that “soups are an economical addition to a bill of fare, and material that is often considered useless, and consigned to the crematory of the kitchen stove or refuse heap, might, with a little carefulness and knowledge, be used in the preparation of a tasty and nourishing soup (5) “-”. What are such items? Beef remnants, gristle, drainings of gravy from dishes, and bones. Also, prepare your soups the day before so that the fat can be skimmed off the cold stock. Certainly this is still valid today. But wait, it gets better as there is a recipe for hare soup that instructs you to preserve all the blood after cutting the hare up for use later in the soup. The terminology and ingredients were certainly different back in 1888. There was a sharp fire and a slow fire and a hot oven was “brisk”. Some measurements have since gone by the wayside. When, for example, was the last time you measured a “dessertspoonful” or “saltspoonful” of anything? And have you ever measured butter based on “the size of a pigeon’s egg” or used a “peck” of tomatoes or a “gill” of milk? Have you ever used a blade of mace, Harvey’s sauce, or saltpetre? The longest and most complicated recipe …