Posts Tagged Toronto

I know many of you have sent comments and emails about the Historic Family Recipes series I started and how you have liked the recipes that have been posted so far. Don’t worry, I do plan to bring the series back and start posting some more recipes for your shortly. In the meantime, to get your fix of recipes and the history of food in Canada, please check out this lovely little site: The Culinary Historians of Canada.

 This group of Historians is based in Toronto and though the focus is mainly Ontario, they give a lot of great information about historic kitchens in Canadian museums, recipes, festivals and some resources for you to check out. If you have any links to culinary historians or groups in your province, do drop the CHC a line and I’m sure they will be happy post it on their website.

Anybody who points me in the direction of food gets a huge gold star beside their name in my book! So a special thanks to Deborah for sending me the information so I could pass it along to all of you.

Happy cooking!

Photo Credit: City of Toronto Archives Fonds 1244, Item 1

Although the date of April 19, 1904 would suggest it must have been a very pleasant and mild spring day in Toronto, it was actually quite the opposite. The temperature was -4 Celsius and there were flurries in the air that evening in the downtown core. But the winter-like conditions were the least of Toronto’s worries. People were furiously jumping off the streets and onto the sidewalks to avoid the charging horse teams that pulled 7,500 pound fire engines down Wellington Street West at about 8:30 that evening. When the night was over, Toronto had lived through the worst city fire in its history.  (more…)

Photo Credit: TOBuilt

This edition of The Great Canadian Architects series looks at two Toronto based architects who contributed greatly to the development of commercial and banking architecture in the early twentieth century in not just Toronto, but across western Canada. Frank Darling and John A. Pearson would create a solid association that lasted from the early 1890s until 1923. They are best known for their banks of which many were built in the Beaux-Arts and Classical Revival styles. Darling and Pearson observed what was happening in the architectural spaces of Chicago, New York and London and created their own architectural interpretations to reflect the unique Canadian experience of commercial development in the early twentieth century.  (more…)

Photo Credit: Toronto Public Library Archives

In our next instalment in The Great Canadian Architects series, we head back to Toronto where many great architects produced a number of beautiful buildings, many of which are municipal, provincial or national heritage sites. As promised from my story on Casa Loma, this feature will look at the works of Edward James Lennox who built over 70 buildings in the city of Toronto ranging in style from Richardson Romanesque, Neo-Classical, Gothic Revival and Beaux Arts. However, Lennox is most remembered for bringing the Richardson Romanesque style to life and helped develop the growth of Canada’s largest city.  (more…)

Photo Credit: Urban Toronto

We have come to the final chapter of our series on Canadian Castles and we end with the youngest of them all, Toronto’s Casa Loma. Since its construction, Casa Loma has been a tourist attraction and prominent landmark in the city of Toronto. It was built as a dream castle for wealthy financier and military man Sir Henry Pellatt and his wife, Lady Mary Pellatt. When construction began on the castle in 1911, Pellatt had amassed a vast fortune by investing in a number of Canadian businesses which included the Toronto Electric Light Company, the Home Bank of Canada and Cobalt Lake Mining. At the height of his financial success, Pellatt was the Chairman of 21 companies and through his own personal investments, he was in control of 25% of the Canadian economy. But before he even moved into his “dream home on the hill”, the seeds for his downfall were being sewn. Unlike his fellow Canadian Castle owners, Pellatt was forced to vacate his property less than a decade after he moved in.  (more…)

Photo Credit: Alan L. Brown

Last year, I was mentoring an undergraduate student at Leeds University who was writing her history dissertation on the London School of Medicine for Women. This school, established in 1874, was the first medical school in Britain to admit women. My student’s particular focus was the violence these pioneering women faced from threats of physical violence to being shunned by society, which included their own families. These young women showed extreme courage and determination to forge a path that today’s women find much less challenging.  However, this was Britain. What was it like in Canada for our own pioneering women in medicine? What was the first Canadian school to admit women into their medical programs? Who was the first licensed female doctor in Canada?  How did these events help the development of medical treatment for women in general? To answer some of these questions, we’ll examine two of those pioneering Canadian women as well as the Women’s Medical College of Toronto and the roles they played in bringing Canadian women into the medical professions.  (more…)