by Karen Anderson
TOUCHWOOD EDITIONS
2023/$40.00/384 pp.
What does it mean to eat like an Albertan? This is the question Karen Anderson sets out to answer in her new cookbook, Eat Alberta First. As the founder of Alberta Food Tours and the co-author of Food Artisans of Alberta, Anderson has long had a mission to promote Alberta food. So much so that the opening essay of her new book declares it as “both a cookbook and a manifesto.”
Bold words for a collection of recipes, to be sure. If Eat Alberta First is a manifesto, it is a mild one that aims to show how food shapes our province, rather than offering prescriptive calls to action or defining what it means to identify as a citizen of this province. Anderson gently illustrates how food practices, and home cooking in particular, are a reflection of Alberta’s culture, agriculture industry and, perhaps most importantly, weather. Because, if we’re being honest, not much defines one geographical place from another more than the weather.
With that in mind, Anderson breaks her chapters up by season, with a solid dash of humour. The first chapter, “The Long, Dark and Deep Winter,” doesn’t feature any recipes at all—it’s a lengthy guide to stocking a pantry for those months when local ingredients can be scarce. She playfully moves through the rest of the year, with chapters such as “Cabin Fever” (a sourdough bread primer for the tail end of winter) and “Harvest Hurry-Up” (late summer canning and preserving). The spring and summer chapters are all about using indigenous (and Indigenous) ingredients and creating simple dishes from freshly grown produce and local meat.
Anderson ends the cookbook portion of the book with a collection of “celebration” recipes, consciously expanding beyond holidays particular to her own background, with recipes for Ukrainian Christmas, Lunar New Year, Passover, Eid and Diwali, as well as Thanksgiving and Easter. As with many of the recipes in the book, she draws on friends and community members to share their versions of “Albertan” cooking, offering a necessary glimpse of the diversity that makes up the reality of those who call this province home.
Alberta has a long tradition of cookbooks full of homestyle recipes to get us through our various seasons, and parts of Eat Alberta First feel like they’ve been done before. But when reframed with her thoughtful writing and genuine admiration for regional growers, Anderson’s passion for prioritizing locally grown food does feel revolutionary. With over 40,000 farms in Alberta and an increasing hunger for local, sustainable food, Eat Alberta First paints a picture of not just who we are but where we might be going, through what and how we eat.
Elizabeth Chorney-Booth is a writer and editor in Calgary.
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