Honorary Lifetime Members

• Julian Armstrong: For over 50 years, Julian Armstrong has tirelessly explored the cuisine of her adopted province, Quebec. For the Montreal Gazette and the Montreal Star she traveled into every region to record its recipes and food stories. Her two cookbooks—A Taste of Quebec (1990, updated 2001) and Made in Quebec: A Culinary Journey (2014)—explain and celebrate her province’s cuisine to Canada and the rest of the world. An award-winning food journalist, she has mentored many other food writers.
• Elizabeth Baird: Elizabeth Baird’s distinguished career in food began with Classic Canadian Cooking (1974, reprinted in 1995). Her work as food editor of Canadian Living magazine for 20 years truly made her a household name. Along with magazines, there were other opportunities in radio and television, especially “Canadian Living Cooks” on The Food Network. She has produced more than 30 cookbooks, most notably The Complete Canadian Living Cookbook. She has received numerous awards and honours, including the Founder’s Award from Cuisine Canada, a National Magazine Award, a Silver Ladle from the Toronto Culinary Guild, and Woman of the Year from the Women’s Culinary Network. She is a Member of the Order of Canada.
• Nathalie Cooke: A professor of English at McGill University in Montreal and the Associate Dean of Rare and Special Collections of McGill’s Osler Library. Her scholarship has focused on the evolution of culinary and literary taste in Canada. She was an early advocate for introducing food history into the university classroom. A prolific writer and editor, she was co-editor in 2017 with our own Fiona Lucas of Catharine Parr Traill’s The Female Emigrant’s Guide, Cooking with a Canadian Classic. She is also the founding editor of the digital, peer-reviewed CuiZine: the Journal of Canadian Food Cultures.
• Pat Crocker: An award-winning author and culinary herbalist, Pat Crocker has written more than 22 cookbooks, including The Healing Herbs Cookbook, The Juicing Bible, The Herbalist’s Kitchen and Healing Cannabis Edibles (with Ellen Novack).
• Elizabeth Driver: Culinary Landmarks: A Bibliography of Canadian Cookbooks 1825–1949 by Elizabeth Driver was a monumental undertaking encompassing 20 years of thorough and exhausting scholarship. The bibliography is remarkable because of the intensive attention to each and every entry from all the regions of Canada, coast to coast to coast. This seminal work provides not only the background and the history of Canadian cookbooks, but also critical information about the many authors. Culinary Landmarks has become an invaluable tool for research into Canadian foodways, social history, women’s studies and book history, and as such is one of the most important books on Canadian foodways ever produced; it has been described as “a precious gift to Canada.” This first very special Hall of Fame award recognizes an outstanding achievement by remarkable individual.
• Dorothy Duncan (1927-2023): Dorothy Duncan worked with organizations across Canada and around the world to ensure that Canada’s culinary history is recognized, researched, and recorded. In 2007, her book Canadians at Table won the Cuisine Canada and University of Guelph Culinary Book Gold Award.
• Sarah Hood: A journalist who often writes about food and the restaurant industry, Sarah Hood has served as a member of the CHC board, and edited the CHC e-newsletter, Digestible Bits & Bites, for a decade. An award-winning jam-maker, she has published two books about food preserving, including Jam, Jelly and Marmalade: A Global History (Reaktion Books, UK). She contributed historical recipe research to the Canadian version of the television series Back in Time for Dinner. She gives occasional presentations about food history and volunteers as a historic cook at Montgomery’s Inn in Etobicoke, Ontario.
• Fiona Lucas: Fiona Lucas is an historian of cookbooks, foods, kitchens, and culinary material culture. She was a food historian with the City of Toronto Museums for over two decades. Before that she was a theatrical costumer on the Toronto-Hamilton-Stratford circuit; after that, for eight years she was the Coordinator of Volunteer Management for Doors Open Toronto and Nuit Blanche Toronto. As of mid-2019, she is a freelance culinary historian and consultant at “Fiona’s Food: Exploring and Eating History” and can be reached at fionasfood62@gmail.com. Lucas’s undergraduate degree was in the History of Fine Art. She earned a Diploma of Costume Design from Ryerson back in the early ’80s when it was still a polytechnical college and a Certificate of Museum Studies from the Ontario Museum Association in the early ’90s. She holds a Masters of Canadian History, with an emphasis on servants and food history (2006). In 1994, she co-founded the Culinary Historians of Ontario (now of Canada); up until 2017 she served in various capacities on the board of directors, including President, Chair of the Program Committee, and Editor of Culinary Chronicles. She also founded the Volunteer Historic Cooking Group of the City of Toronto Museums, in 1996. Her first book was Hearth and Home: Women and the Art of Open Hearth Cooking (2006), silver winner in the culinary narrative category of Taste Canada Food Writing Awards (then called Cuisine Canada). Her second book, co-edited with Nathalie Cooke, is Catharine Parr Traill’s Female Emigrant’s Guide: Cooking with a Canadian Classic (2017), which was shortlisted for the Taste Canada Awards in the culinary narrative category and also listed in The National Post’s 100 Best Books of 2017.
• Rose Murray (1941-2023): Rose Murray authored more than ten books, including two Taste Canada Gold Award winners: Canada’s Favourite Recipes (with Elizabeth Baird, in 2012) and Hungry for Comfort (in 2003). Her first work, The Christmas Cookbook, remains a treasured Canadian kitchen resource, and she contributed to many other publications, including Canadian Living. Her last book, Rose Murray’s A-Z Vegetable Cookbook, was originally published in 1983 and was revised to include an additional 100 recipes developed by home cooks across Canada. Rose was respected for her understanding of the agricultural traditions of our food. Beginning in her childhood on a mixed farm near Collingwood, Ontario, she learned the art of growing, cooking and preserving at a very young age. She blended her university degree in English from Trinity College, University of Toronto, with formal studies at cooking schools in Paris as well as classes in Costa Rica, Hong Kong and Thailand. She appeared in our 2020 video series Behind Every Great Cook Is a Great Mother.
• Mya Sangster: Mya Sangster is an award-winning baker and preserve-maker who has been active for many years as a Volunteer Historic Cook at Fort York National Historic Site. She makes regular presentations on food history for the Association for Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums (ALFHAM) and the Toronto branch of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA).
• Amy Scott has worked for over 25 years as a historical interpreter at Black Creek Pioneer Village, teaching, presenting and researching foodways of the mid-1800s. Amy holds a Chef’s Certificate from George Brown College. She is a prominent member of the Association of Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums (ALHFAM), for which she has given many presentations on food-history topics. As a volunteer for CHC, Amy was Vice President for three terms and Membership Chair for two, a total of ten years. As the first VP, Amy was instrumental in helping to write the Constitution and By-Laws. She arranged that a box at Toronto’s First Post Office in Toronto would be CHC’s official address and represented CHC at numerous fairs and events. She organized programs like Ruthven: Picnic on the Grand (2006) and contributed to our former newsletter, Culinary Chronicles. She has also interpreted many historical recipes with the Historic Volunteer Cooks at Fort York and Mackenzie House, both National Historic Sites, and was called upon to bake cakes for Toronto’s official 175th birthday celebrations in 2009.
• Anita Stewart (1947-2020): Anita Stewart spoke, wrote, lobbied and organized across Canada and internationally for over four decades on Canadian cuisine. She wrote 14 cookbooks, notably The Flavours of Canada: A Celebration of the Finest Regional Foods (2000) and Anita Stewart’s Canada: The Food, The Recipes, The Stories (2008). She was the first Canadian to graduate with an MA in Gastronomy, was awarded a Doctor of Laws (Honoris Causa) by the University of Guelph in 2011, where she served as food laureat, and held an honorary PAg designation. A life member of the Canadian Culinary Federation of Chefs and Cooks, she founded both Cuisine Canada (Taste Canada’s predecessor) and Food Day Canada. Anita was appointed as a member of the Order of Canada for her contributions as a journalist, author and culinary activist, and for her promotion of the food industry in Canada. She was a 2012 inductee to the Culinary Landmarks Hall of Fame.
• Bob Wildfong started as Treasurer, a position he held for three terms. He then became President for two terms and Past President for one. Altogether, he was a board member for over 12 years. It was Bob who shepherded our change of legal name into the Culinary Historians of Canada. Bob has led presentations on such topics as heritage apples, one of his specialties. He contributed to Culinary Chronicles. Also, as a member of ALHFAM, he has led many presentations on seeds and gardening. He became the first Executive Director of Seeds of Diversity in 2002, a position he still fills. Bob has also achieved the title of Head Gardener for Doon Heritage Crossroads, which is part of the Waterloo Region Museum in Ontario, where he still teaches about gardening and food history.
• Mary Williamson: Mary F. Williamson is a culinary historian whose research and publications focus primarily on food, cookery and cookbooks from the 19th to the mid-20th century. A collector of historical cookbooks, she is retired from York University as Fine Arts Bibliographer and Adjunct Faculty member in Graduate Art History.
• Bridget Wranich: A culinary historian and an expert in late 18th and 19th-century cooking in Upper Canada, Wranich has worked in museum education for more than 25 years and is a Program Officer at Fort York National Historic Site, where she develops and coordinates activities and events for students and visitors. She leads the Volunteer Historic Cooks in researching, testing and preparing recipes for the Historic Foodways Program. A cofounder of the Culinary Historians of Canada, she co-authored Recipes for Victory : Great War Food from the Front and Kitchens Back Home in Canada (2018) and co-edited Setting a Fine Table : Historic Desserts and Drinks from the Officers’ Kitchens at Fort York (2013).

CHC President Luisa Giacometti with Honorary Lifetime Member Elizabeth Driver, October 15, 2016. Photo by Sarah Hood.