Student Post: Patenaude, Jehane. 1941. Chocolate Around the Clock. Montreal: Fry-Cadbury Ltd. (Colin Rier )

Throughout her career, Jehane Patenaude would go on to publish more than 25 cookbooks (Driver 2008, 249). She would write on such topics as microwave cooking, whole lamb cookery and a definitive encyclopedia of Canadian cooking. These books would go on to establish her as a legend in the history of Canadian cooking, where her name would simply become ‘Madame Benoit’ (Marchand 2016, 270).

Before she was known as Madame Benoit, she had penned Chocolate Around the Clock for the Fry-Cadbury Company in 1941 under her maiden name Jehane Patenaude. Benoit’s lasting legacy in the Canadian culinary arena is well established, but there has been little research into the beginning of her career. Marion Nestle and other food scholars have argued that cookbooks are valuable resources to understand historical cultures, and groups (Ketchum 2019). What makes this particular cookbook so interesting to me is the additional help it provides in understanding a seminal author at the beginning of their career. 

During the mid 20th century, marketing executives were eager to dream up a false culinary persona that could be easily marketed to consumers without requiring these “spokespersons” to have deep culinary knowledge. Many famous cookbook authors from that time, such as Betty Crocker, were creations of a marketing meeting and not trained chefs (Betty Crocker Kitchens, 2017). Jehane Benoit was no Betty Crocker. According to a 1955 Maclean’s profile, Benoit studied food chemistry at the Sorbonne, dietetics at the University of Lyon, and fine cooking at Le Cordon Bleu (Young 1955). Julia Child has been lauded for her “ground-breaking” achievement of attending Le Cordon Bleu in Paris in the 1950s (Child & Prudhomme 2006, 2). Benoit attended Le Cordon Bleu twenty years prior, immediately after education in food science at two of France’s premier universities. Having achieved her education goals, Patenaude returned home to write her first professional recipes.

The Fry-Cadbury company is and has been one of the world’s largest cocoa manufacturers since its establishment in 1831 (Goldstein 2015). In an attempt to avoid import tariffs during the inter-war period, Fry-Cadbury began to develop factories in many of the Imperial countries. They also began to publish advertising cookbooks to encourage the use of their products (Bradley 2008, 133). Advertising cookbooks could either be given away for free or sold with products. They enabled a rapidly changing demographic to more conveniently use the products lining their grocery store shelves (Morley 2019). The McGill Rare Books & Special Collection alone is home to multiple domestically published Fry-Cadbury advertising cookbooks, but most importantly for our purposes it is home to Chocolate Around the Clock.

The cover design of Chocolate Around the Clock immediately catches the reader’s eye with the design combining elements of exoticism and mid-century modern. Jehane Patenaude’s name is featured on the cover, though in a plain font, and a smaller size than both the title and the publisher. This contrasts much of Benoit’s later work where her name and likeness are the feature on the cover of her books. The size of the title fonts is significant because it establishes the objectives of the book. It is intended for people to familiarize themselves with Fry-Cadbury products, and not with Patenaude herself. Again, this contradicts her later cookbooks. In her later work, growing closer to Benoit and her life at home is the primary selling point of the book (Benoit 1978). 

The first page features a letter of dedication from Jehane Benoit to her readers overlaid a racialized cartoon of black men in rags carrying bags of cacao to a boat under the watchful eye of a white man in all-white safari gear. The letter itself begins with “Dedicated to you. Yes, Madame, to you, who preside at your table and prepare daily delights for all those who look to you for this pleasant appeasement of hunger” (Patenaude 1941, 1). Within the first sentence of her writing, she has dedicated the text specifically to women. The dedication conveys that the matron of the household is not only responsible for preparing the food, but also must ensure it delivers “pleasant appeasement of hunger”. In conjunction with the racialized background image, this letter makes it clear who Patenaude is writing for: Canadian middle-class white women.

The book is organized, as the name Around the Clock would suggest, in chronological order of opportunities during the day to eat chocolate. The book includes chocolate suggestions for Breakfast, Lunch, After School Delight, Bridge Game, Five O’Clock de Madame, Dinner Time & Midnight Snack. By organizing the book in this manner Patenaude reinforces the expected daily life of her readership. The hypothetical reader should be concerned with producing food for her family from first thing in the morning (Breakfast) to the last thing at night (Midnight Snack). It even goes so far as to assume the social engagement of its readership via the allusion to a Bridge Game, and the so-called Five O’clock de Madame. Speaking of the Bridge Game, Patenaude states “whether your game is in real earnest, or a pleasant excuse for the airing of feminine views, Fry’s makes the occasion notable.” (Patenaude 1941, 18). Through these description’s Patenaude reaches through the page not only to gender the act of cooking, but aid in the gendering of time and space. She establishes that the Bridge Game and the Five O’clock de Madame are the time and space for women. Leaving the other 22 hours of the day are dominated by service of the family. 

The recipes in the book are written in a sparse manner that was typical of the period, due to the assumed knowledge which the authors had for their readers (Wilson 2015). The recipes are generally very simple: hot chocolate, layer cake, cookies. This is not a book to expand people’s culinary horizons but is simply showing their consumers 80 possible avenues to use Fry-Cadbury products. This corresponds with Barbara Ketchum Wheaton’s research that cookbooks written by women are much humbler and focus on comfort, while cookbooks written by men are more concerned with the pleasing of a jaded palate (Wilson 2015). 

Of the more than 80 recipes in the book, I attempted to recreate Patenaude’s recipe for the ‘Favourite Brownies’ (Patenaude 1941, 6). I chose this recipe for a very specific reason. To promote the release of the cookbook, Patenaude also contributed to a column in the Sherbrooke Daily Record titled "Your Fry’s Recipe for the Week" by Jehane Patenaude. In this column, Patenaude would feature recipes from Chocolate Around the Clock in an attempt to advertise the book itself (which was available for free upon letter request). In the November 6, 1941 edition of her column, Patenaude featured the recipe for her brownie (Patenaude 1941b, 6). Her confidence in the recipe as a selling point instilled confidence in me that it would turn out. 

Despite that, throughout the baking process, I had very little faith in the recipe. The recipe neatly displays the measurements, baking temperature/time & process. That said, it lacked the “it will be being to brown” or “it will be this texture” that we’ve been spoiled by in modern recipes. I was primarily concerned that the recipe did not have enough liquid (only 1 egg & ¼ cup butter) and way too much brown sugar (twice as much brown sugar as any other ingredient, including flour). In the end, the recipe turned out well though it had much more of a granular fudge texture than that of a decadent brownie. Considering the recipe was being made with a difference of 80 years in the tools and ingredients, it is a testament to the quality of Patenaude’s recipe writing that it turned out at all. What’s more, when placing my tin of cocoa powder back in the cabinet, I turned it around to realize that it was manufactured by none other than Fry’s. 80 years on, and Patenaude’s recipes are still bringing in the customers.

Benoit, Jehane. 1978. Madame Benoit Cooks at Home. Montreal: McGraw-Hill.

Betty Crocker Kitchens. 2017. “The Story of Betty Crocker” Betty Crocker. January 10, 2017.https://www.bettycrocker.com/menus-holidays-parties/mhplibrary/parties-and-get-togethers/vintage-betty/the-story-of-betty-crocker

Child, Julia, and Alex Prud'homme. 2006. My Life in France. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Driver, Elizabeth. 2008. Culinary Landmarks : A Bibliography of Canadian Cookbooks, 1825-1949. Studies in Book and Print Culture. Toronto Ont.: University of Toronto Press. 

Goldstein, Darra. 2015. The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ketchum, Alex. 2019. "Special Series on Cookbook Literature/Historiography: Cookbooks as scholarly resources” The Historical Cooking Project. April 30, 2019. http://www.historicalcookingproject.com/2019/04/special-series-on-cookbook.html

Marchand, Philip. 2016. Legacy: How French Canadians Shaped North America. Edited by Pratte André and Jonathan Kay. Toronto, Ontario: Signal, McClelland & Stewart.

Morley, Madeleine. 2019. “A Lesson in Advertising from Your Grandma’s Deceptively Savvy “Ad Cookbooks.” AIGA Eye on Design. February 18, 2019. https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/how-advertising-cookbooks-taught-us-to-love-everything-from-avocados-and-oranges-to-spam-and-jell-o/

Patenaude, Jehane. 1941. Chocolate Around the Clock. Montreal: Fry-Cadbury Ltd.

Patenaude, Jehane. 1941b. “Your Fry’s Recipe for the Week” Sherbrooke Daily Record. November 6, 1941. http://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/3002605?docsearchtext=chocolate%20around%20the%20clock

Young, Scott. 1955. “Food, Love, And Madame Benoit” Macleans, September 3, 1955.

Wilson, Bee. “The Archive of Eating” New York Times. October 29, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/magazine/the-archive-of-eating.html