What's on the Menu? Tastes, Traditions and Tantalizing Questions

Join us for an appetizing exploration of why menus matter and the stories they tell us today. We will come to menus belatedly, after the dishes have been washed up, so to speak. So in her exploration of ways that menus matter, in this talk and in her book Tastes and Traditions (2025), Nathalie keeps at least two audiences in mind: diners of the menus’ moment and we who look at menus from distances spanning years, even continents and linguistic divides. In this discussion for the Culinary Historians of Canada, Nathalie will offer some menus that befuddle and delight, and also ask us to scrutinize the menu from The Canadian Pavilion at Expo ’67, challenging us to consider what it told diners in 1967 about Canadian cuisine.

About Nathalie Cooke

Nathalie Cooke is an English professor at McGill University, a specialist in Canadian literature, literary food studies and material culture. She is member of the Royal Society of Canada and an honorary lifetime member of the Culinary Historians of Canada. Nathalie is editor of What’s to Eat? Entrées into Canadian Food History (MQUP), founding editor of CuiZine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures (Érudit), co-editor with Fiona Lucas of Catharine Parr Traill’s The Female Emigrant’s Guide, Cooking with a Canadian Classic (Carleton Library Series), and author of Tastes and Traditions: A Journey Through Menu History (Reaktion, 2025). Her recent research uncovers hidden stories told by menus, textiles, and other everyday artefacts, revealing how their forms, codes, and designs shape what we remember, and how we read.

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Host or Publisher Culinary Historians of Canada