Catharine Parr Traill's the Female Emigrant's Guide by Nathalie Cooke

Author:Nathalie Cooke
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780773549326
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2017-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

WHAT DID TRAILL PURCHASE FROM THE VILLAGE STORE?

As with all rural families, Traill and her family participated in the local economy as both sellers and purchasers, and were thereby part of the world-wide economy, since Upper Canada was linked by trade to both the British Empire and the continent. Her family’s meals and well-being were dependent on several imported ingredients and items such as salt that they could not produce themselves. She also had food and non-food products to sell, exchange, or barter. Household self-sufficiency, although neither possible nor expected, was an ongoing ideal. A housewife’s frugality was an important bulwark against economic disaster.

While living near Gore’s Landing from 1846 to 1857, the Traills shopped at William Brown’s general store in the village.44 She likely bought “groceries, salt, spices, and tea, and the finer sorts of wearing apparel” there.45 She was also a customer at Sherin’s general store in Lakefield after 1857 when she returned to live in the area.46 The term “groceries” was used for foodstuffs imported from elsewhere because they were not grown locally, such as spices, currants and raisins, wines, sugars, bottled sauces, sago and tapioca, rice, tea leaves and coffee beans, and some cheeses. “Provisions” were perishable local foodstuffs, such as maple sugar, flour and other grains, wild rice, beer and cider, fresh fruits and vegetables, eggs, butter, and milk.47 As was common, she sometimes had to delay payment.48

In exchange for bartering wild berries, she may have received pork or beef at times when they did not have their own hogs or cattle. Also, besides berries, the Guide is full of hints about other ways to gain a small income – selling caraway seeds [58], hops [60], goslings [202–4], tallow [178–9], and many other minor products in addition to such field crops as wheat and corn. Good quality cheeses could bring in a “remunerative price” [196], she notes. Also, home-crafted items such as dried flowers and ferns could be sold to collectors. The ever-resourceful Traill even took advantage of other people’s botanical interest.

Traill’s culinary and medical recipes required a minimum of imported goods (spices, lemons, essences, raisins, currants) and excluded other common items (wines, other spices such as for curries, sago, arrowroot, olive oil, macaroni, vermicelli, gelatine, oranges), which she and many of her readers might not have been able to buy with their limited funds. Lemons and lemon essence are suggested in several recipes, and almond and peppermint essences once each [109, 152], and all four appear in the account books of Peterborough area grocers.49 Whole spices arrived in Canada in vast quantities from the earliest years, as can be seen in official import records, grocers’ advertisements, and general store accounts. With the exception of caraway seeds, all spices came from tropical locations. Nutmeg and cinnamon were the most popular, along with allspice and ginger, but they were not yet sold in the powdered form we are so accustomed to. Wild ginger, a plant common to the area, was widely used as a medicine by the local First Nations.

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