Lunch With Lady Eaton

Their name is synonymous with royalty and their stores were landmarks in virtually every Canadian city, but as the Eaton empire rose and fell in the last century with the company's patriarchs, there was one woman equally deserving of credit. Flora McCrae Eaton was a visionary, a philanthropist, a socialite, a businesswoman, a world traveler, and a mother of six, but she also ushered in a shopping and dining aesthetic that revolutionized the retail and restaurant experience for generations of Canadians. Lady Eaton oversaw the architecture, staffing, and menus for more than a dozen grand dining rooms few have forgotten despite their eventual demise: the flagship Georgian Room (Toronto), the Round Room (Toronto -- now the Carlu), Le Neuf (Montreal), the Grill Room (Winnipeg), and the Marine Room (Vancouver). For more casual fare Eaton's offered soda and ice cream counters, snack bars, hostess shops, cafeterias, and bakery counters. Lady Eaton's direction of the restaurants "created" a Canadian cuisine -- chicken pot pie, cheese dreams, Waldorf salad, honey drop cookies, gingerbread, butterscotch pie, and Queen Elizabeth cake. Thirty recipes make this trip down memory lane as savory as it is nostalgic. Put on your gloves and hat and relive an era of elegance all but vanished. Lunch anyone?

In 1901 Lady Florence McCrae Eaton married into one of the most prosperous families in the Dominion of Canada. Along with her husband, Sir John Craig Eaton, they assembled a significant parcel of land in King City, Ontario on the advice of Sir Henry Pellatt of Toronto's Casa Loma. After the death of her husband, Lady Eaton retired from her home in Toronto to the seventy-two-room, Norman-style chateau, she had built on their King property – she named it Eaton Hall. This became the center of life and activity for the Eaton family. The estate provided jobs, impacted the local economy and community, and established a firm place in the hearts and minds of the residents of King Township. From its earliest days, Eaton Hall was of great service to the Canadian war effort (WWII). The life and history of Lady Eaton and Eaton Hall will enchant those that long for a gentler, more graceful, period in time. The Eaton family lived (and continue to live) a fabulous but charitable and well-earned life; an ode to the original patriarch of the Canadian retail industry and the Eaton family, Timothy Eaton. Eaton Hall hosted opulent parties; fundraising events; was home of the hunt; and, high-society drama; fascinating in any time. The history of this landmark will explore the property pre-Eaton occupation; the men who designed and built the Canadian castle; the many other buildings on the farm and estate; and, the local people who lived there, worked there, and have felt its influence over the past 75 years.

The experience of walking down a store aisle � replete with displays, salespeople, and infinite choice � is so common we often forget retail has a short history. Retail Nation traces Canada's transformation into a modern consumer society back to an era � 1890 to 1940 � when department stores such as Eaton's ruled the shopping scene and promised to strengthen the nation. Department stores emerge as agents of modern nationalism, but the nation they helped to define � white, consumerist, middle-class � was more limited, and contested, than nostalgic portraits of the early department store suggest.

Explore the broad, fascinating history of the Eaton's department store empire. Exhaustively researched and thoughtfully written by a prominent department store historian. Canada's largest and most well-known department store, Eaton's was an icon of Canadian culture. From its founding in 1869 to its famed catalogue and network of large stores spreading coast to coast, Eaton's offered something for everyone, in grand style. Relive the days when this remarkable store was a fixture in every Canadian province and served its customers with a distinctive personality that has all but vanished from the retail landscape.

In the fifth adventure of this popular young graphic-novel series perfect for fans of Captain Underpants and the Lunch Lady series, our bucktoothed heroes are up against a band of baboon bandits. It’s winter break, and Ace and Bub are hitting the slopes! But their ski session is interrupted by a sudden influx of . . . swimming pools? A band of enterprising baboons has graced Beaver Island with the Easy Breeze, a giant hair dryer designed to melt all the snow off the mountains and channel it into swimming pools. The residents of Beaver Island are over the moon about their new relaxation stations, but Ace and Bub don’t trust these monkeys any farther than they can ski down a hill with no snow. Can they uncover the baboons’ real plan before their neighbors become too attached to the summery island makeover? With environmental themes, laugh-out-loud humor, and fast-paced adventures, the Flying Beaver Brothers are sure to fly off bookshelves!

Exploring the roots of Canadian consumer culture between the 1890s and the Second World War, Purchasing Power uncovers the meanings that Canadians have attached to consumer goods. Offering a new perspective on the temperance, conservation, home economics, feminist, and co-operative movements of this period, this book brings women’s consumer interests to the fore. Due to their exclusion from formal politics and most paid employment, many Canadian women leveraged their consumer roles into personal and social opportunities. In the consumer sphere, they sought solutions for their isolation, their desire for upward mobility and personal expression, and their families’ survival. Through their purchasing power, Canadian women transformed consumer culture into an arena of political engagement.

Eaton's of Winnipeg was never just a store or just a building. It was an icon for generations of Winnipeggers. It was a place where many had their first job; a place where people met (by the statue or under the clock); a place where first toys, or first dresses, or first grown—up fedoras were bought; and of course, a place where people shopped. But it was the people, both the customers and employees, who made the store what it was.

Culinary Landmarks is a definitive history and bibliography of Canadian cookbooks from the beginning, when La cuisinière bourgeoise was published in Quebec City in 1825, to the mid-twentieth century. Over the course of more than ten years Elizabeth Driver researched every cookbook published within the borders of present-day Canada, whether a locally authored text or a Canadian edition of a foreign work. Every type of recipe collection is included, from trade publishers' bestsellers and advertising cookbooks, to home economics textbooks and fund-raisers from church women's groups. The entries for over 2,200 individual titles are arranged chronologically by their province or territory of publication, revealing cooking and dining customs in each part of the country over 125 years. Full bibliographical descriptions of first and subsequent editions are augmented by author biographies and corporate histories of the food producers and kitchen-equipment manufacturers, who often published the books. Driver's excellent general introduction sets out the evolution of the cookbook genre in Canada, while brief introductions for each province identify regional differences in developments and trends. Four indexes and a 'Chronology of Canadian Cookbook History' provide other points of access to the wealth of material in this impressive reference book.