About Julia Baird:

I am fascinated by the everyday history of how people lived their day-to-day lives, because I believe that if we contemplate & understand the past, we can shape a better future.

I've worked as a Historical Interpreter in Canadian historic house museums with a culinary focus for almost two decades, from cooking over an open hearth and with a brick oven at a farm house at Gibson House Museum in Toronto, to cooking and baking below the stairs with a large wood-fired range at Dundurn National Historic Site, an Italianate villa in Hamilton, Ontario.

This is where my love for Food History was conceived, while cooking, baking & preserving with an open hearth, brick oven and wood-fired range. All the while, seeking out recipes from Victorian cookbooks that made use of seasonal and heirloom vegetables, herbs, fruits, and other garden produce. I always have enjoyed the challenge of interpreting the often hard to follow recipes that frequently hold assumed knowledge and obsolete measurements

After a while, this passion started to leak into my personal life and I began to read and do research about culinary history on my own time for fun! If I am in a thrift store or second hand book store, I always make a beeline to the cookbook section first to see what old treasures I can find. I need to buy a bigger bookshelf.

Right about when I was beginning this blog, Nelles Manor Museum in Grimbsy, Ontario was searching for a teacher to show the community how to cook and bake using the original open hearth from the 1780s or 1790s. And so I taught sold out classes, complete with a full meal prepared by the participants. Unfortunately, the day I did the recipe testing for the last baking class was the first day that toilet paper and other essentials were disappearing from the grocery store shelves in early April 2020, and the class was never rescheduled.

If you'd like to learn more about preparing food using an open hearth, a search for Open Hearth Cookery or a click on that tag will bring you to explanations for all my recipe testing and use of a reflector oven, dutch oven, frying pan & trivet and griddle & crane at Nelles Manor Museum.

And so I've begun this Cloud 9 Cookery blog, and I'll be following along wherever my curiosity leads me. Since a cookbook is history as soon as its published, I've arbitrarily decided to focus on cookbooks and recipes that are older than me, so you'll find recipes from the beginnings of written communication to 1975.
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On top of explaining who I am, I should probably also explain who I am not.

I'm not John Lennon's half sister Julia Baird – you'll find her online at http://juliabaird.eu/

I'm also not Julia Baird, Australian journalist and author – her website is http://juliabaird.me/