An excerpt from Out of Old Ontario Kitchens, coming September 2018.
“Never retreat, never explain, never apologize. Get the thing done and let them howl.”
— Nellie McClung
The list of things that Nellie McClung has been called is astonishingly long: a first-wave feminist, Canada’s most famous suffragist, a lifelong women’s rights activist, prolific author, social reformer, teacher, public lecturer, temperance movement advocate, member of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s first board of governors, a delegate to the League of Nations, Liberal party member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) for Edmonton, and legislator. She was a wife, mother of five, and a grandmother. She was also, rather notably, a devoted cook.
Nellie McClung got things done.
But the thing that Nellie McClung is perhaps most noted for is her role as one of the Famous Five — the group of five women who in 1927 petitioned the Supreme Court of Canada to have women officially declared as “persons.”
On March 14, 1928, the Supreme Court ruled that women were not persons, as it related to Section 24 of the British North America Act.
Undaunted, the Famous Five took the matter to Privy Council of Great Britain. On Oct. 18, 1929, the Lord Chancellor, Viscount Sankey, announced the conclusion of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council of Great Britain, overturning the decision made by the Supreme Court of Canada. Sankey announced that, yes, women were persons and further, that: “The exclusion of women from all public offices is a relic of days more barbarous than ours.”
Nellie Letitia (Mooney) McClung was born Oct. 20, 1873, in Chatsworth, Ont. She died Sept. 1, 1951, in Victoria, B.C. In between, she lived in Manitoba and Alberta. When she was seven, her family moved West, travelling in a covered wagon, arriving in the Prairies just in time for one of the hardest winters ever on record. Later she wrote in Clearing in the West about her childhood memories of her family’s journey from Ontario to Manitoba in 1880:
“The log house had a thatched roof, made from prairie hay and was not chinked, but it had a floor of rough lumber … and one window facing west. One window might be thought insufficient for a house that must lodge eight people, but light and air came in unbidden through many openings; indeed, how to keep out the cold became our great problem. We brought a real stove with us and pipes and the first day saw it set in place and mother could then begin her bread, real bread, made with a Royal yeast cake, to displace the soda bannock, cooked in bacon grease, which had been the backbone of our diet on the journey.”
Nellie McClung often wrote about food. When she lost her seat as the MLA for Edmonton, she consoled herself in the kitchen. “I was seized with a desire to cook,” she wrote in her autobiography, The Stream Runs Fast: My Own Story, published in 1945. “I set off at once on a perfect debauch of cooking. I grated cheese, stoned dates, whipped cream and made salad dressing and I let the phone ring …. I got more comfort that day out of my cooking spree than I did from either my philosophy or my religion.”
This recipe for dumplings is from a recipe Nellie herself submitted to a small booklet called, Cook To Win, put out by the Good Cheer Club of Wesley United Church in Calgary, in 1943.
[Nellie McClung’s] Dumplings
2 cups flour
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
4 tbsp shortening (lard or butter)
2/3 cup whole milk
Mix the flour, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl. Cut in the shortening until the mixture resembles coarse breadcrumbs. Add milk and mix to blend. Form into balls about two inches in diameter and drop into a pot of cooked, simmering chicken or beef stew. Cover pot and cook the stew and dumplings for another 15 minutes.
Lindy Mechefske is the award-winning author of Sir John’s Table and A Taste of Wintergreen. Watch for her new book, Out of Old Ontario Kitchens, coming this autumn. In the meantime, you can find her blogging about her adventures in the kitchen at lindymechefske.com.