"Out of Old Ontario Kitchens pays homage to the First Peoples of this land and the earliest settlers; those who trapped and fished and hunted; those who cleared the land and planted crops; and to all those women - our mothers and aunts, our grandmothers and great-grandmothers and great-great grandmothers - who got up and lit the fire; who toiled and stirred and cooked and baked and who kept families alive. Women who put down food for long, hard winters and who fed communities through plagues and depressions, famines and wars. Women who kept and passed down the recipes; who wrote and annotated cookbooks; and who passed the sacred knowledge on. Little did they know that they were quietly recording some of the most fundamental details of history - how we ate and lived and survived. From bannock to venison, Empire biscuits to Canada's War Cake, Veal and Ham Pie to Charlotte Russe d'Erable, these are the tales of what we ate - our food trails - because food stories, as it turns out, are the real stories of our lives."--