In 1927, Canadian National issued a series of postcards that featured recipes that supposedly “made the CNR dining car service popular.” Since 1927 was also the year that CN put Canada’s first 4-8-4 locomotives in service, the cards have a small image of one of these locomotives on the back. Each card included two recipes, usually one for an entrée and one for a dessert.
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This card has recipes for sausage rissole and Alma pudding. Rissole is supposed to be “chopped meat, fish, or vegetables mixed with herbs or spices, then coated in breadcrumbs and fried.” In this case, mashed potatoes are used instead of breadcrumbs. No measurements are included with the rissole recipe, but the pudding recipe includes measurements by weight. This card was used and is postmarked August 5, 1927.
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This card has recipes for curried chicken and cabinet pudding, which is a layer cake with fruits. The recipes include some measurements but they remain annoyingly vague. If these items were actually served on board the trains and someone took the recipes home they would still have a difficult time replicating the dining car version — which might have been the point.
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This card has recipes for deviled beef with fried bread and Swiss pudding. In fact the deviled beef is not served with fried bread but is coated in bread crumbs and fried and served with croutons. The Swiss pudding recipe provides exact measurements, which was probably essential for this particular food.
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In 1930 or a little before, CN changed the format of its recipe postcards. In addition to using a different dining car photo and tilting the recipes at an angle, the image of the locomotive on the back of the card comes with the helpful words, “6100 class.” This particular card, which has recipes for pressed corn beef and celery and spinach salad — one of the few that wasn’t a dessert — is postmarked 1930.
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This card has recipes for cannelon of beef and fruit pudding. A cannelon is a tube and in this case the tube is pastry crust that contains chopped beef. The fruit pudding is made with flour, beef suet, molasses, sour milk, and raisins or currants.
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This card has recipes for potato cakes — one of the few that might not be considered an entrée — and maple custard. In addition to the six cards presented here, I’ve seen at least a dozen other cards in this series.