Hall of Fame
Elaine Collett Drury
by Helen Hatton
Elaine Collett dearly wanted to be a dietitian, and was influenced perhaps by her mother and grandmother, both perfectionists in the kitchen, who taught her to cook at a very early age. They were the type who could tell the temperature of the oven by sticking a hand inside, or by sprinkling flour on a baking sheet in the oven and watching how it browned. When her mother told her that if she, Elaine, would cook, Mom would clean up, she rebelled when told that a recipe could only be prepared in one set way.
At Davisville Public School, Elaine won an oratorical contest. It's no surprise that she became one of the top food communicators in Canada! Elaine graduated from North Toronto Collegiate where she excelled in athletics. She was a champion sprinter, played volleyball, golf, baseball and hockey, and was captain of the basketball team. “Captain? I jumped high”, she said. Also a serious swimmer, Elaine once swam three miles from Beaverton to Thor Island. The family to some extent engineered this interest in sports, so that she would be involved with her three younger brothers.
She was a serious reader and, at age 14, had read the dictionary. She was especially interested in Webster's definition of home economics—“the science and art of homemaking, nutrition, clothing, budgeting and childcare”. Furthermore, science—“the pursuit of systematic and formulated knowledge, the principles regulating such pursuit and the body of what is known on each subject.” From a very early age, Elaine knew what subjects were important to home economics, and she set about getting them.
After high school graduation, she began to study home economics at Central Technical School, but had to stop after one year because of financial restraints. However, she found a permanent job supervising the cafeteria at the National Life Assurance Company. She loved to work with the menus, and provide varied, balanced meals. Helen Gagen said that the food was so good at National Life that along with their own staff, half of Hydro and most of McLean-Hunter showed up for lunch as well!
By night, she completed a business course and then moved to Royal Bank headquarters dining rooms where she supervised daily meals for 400. One spring, she wanted to provide a treat, but couldn't rely on the often drunken chef. So she prevailed upon Dorothy Addison, her counterpart at a competing bank to help her make 400 hot cross buns overnight to be baked fresh in the morning.
It was a great disappointment to Elaine during the war that she couldn't get into the service without a diploma in dietetics, so she went back to night school to take a refresher course in dietetics at the University of Toronto. As well, she took an ambulance driver's course. From 1942 to 1944 she worked at Chatham General Hospital teaching diet therapy to nurses, lecturing on general nutrition, baby foods, salt-free, sugar-free, and fat-free diets and discussing special diets with the doctors.
After Chatham, she joined Massey-Harris, when electrification was just coming to northern Ontario. She produced a freezer book for farm women, and demonstrated electrical equipment at ploughing matches, freezing in her white uniform. Elaine said there was mud everywhere, and she would return to her hotel, rinse her uniform and try to clean her white shoes for tomorrows round.
Later, Canada Packers sought someone knowledgeable in food, who could demonstrate meat cuts. When Elaine was hired, they promised her the job of supervising a future cooking school. However, they had financial problems and the school never got started. Despite this, she was kept on staff and assigned the task of maintaining hygiene in the dining areas, and looking for roaches in the dishwasher. She had to pass through the slaughterhouse to reach one of her food stations-and her mother wondered why she wasn't eating very much dinner. This bizarre work situation including counting chocolate bars and the chewing tobacco supplies at the end of the day. Always the diplomat, Elaine said of this job, “Well I did learn how to make sausages”.
The cooking school never did materialize, so she joined Moffat's in 1947. At a meeting arranged by Don Moffat with Col. Baker, the director of the Institute for the Blind, she was presented the problem of assisting visually handicapped women in the kitchen. At her suggestion, the engineering department developed buttons on the temperature controls to indicate the level of heat. To prove the effectiveness of the system, a blindfolded Elaine gave a full cooking demonstration to the press, resulting in hundreds of requests for more information across North America.
Elaine did regular cooking schools as well. One memorable one was in Rosetown, Saskatchewan! This demo was held in a rough old barn, with the entire town showing up. There were wood shavings on the floor, backless benches and a roughed-in kitchen with a working sink - sort of. The dealer forgot to hook up the drain, and mid way through, Elaine had Niagara Falls of the Prairies. Rosetown talked about that evening for years.
Other experiences included auctioning a magnificent cake, only to later to find that the box had been filled instead with dirty towels….having a gas broiler blow up….watching an assistant drop an upside-down cake. All in all, she crossed Canada nine times with her cooking schools, with audiences in large auditoriums, and also in barns.
After the war, Raytheon Corporation, developers of a microwave for the armed services, planned to distribute them to fast food outlets. Elaine was hired for these promotions and, although the oven was the size of a Buick, she enchanted audiences by baking a potato in this monster in four minutes.
In 1950, Elaine married George Marvin Drury, Vice-President of National Assurance Company. Although she met him while she worked there, she did not think of him romantically until they met long after, and they had 20 lovely years together.
In 1956, she joined Chatelaine as food editor and director of the Chatelaine Institute. This was much like today's Good Housekeeping Institute, and Elaine and her staff tested all types of food, beverages, appliances, barbecues, household cleaners, children's toys and many other items. In her 19 years at Chatelaine, she developed 3000 recipes, answered hundreds of letters from readers and produced two editions of the Chatelaine cookbook. Many of these recipes were favourites adapted to quick and easy format.
One fascinating project involved fish meal, an excellent source of protein, which was being distributed to refugees and third world countries. The Chatelaine Institute tested it in everything from pancakes to muffins.
For Canada's centennial in 1967, Elaine gave Chatelaine the brilliant idea of a section called "Milestones in Our Country's Culinary Arts". It included a 200-year-old sponge cake recipe, the appearance of Junket in 1872, canned tomato soup in 1897, a no-knead bran bread recipe in 1918, and the arrival of cake flour, cake mixes, condensed milk and gelatin.
Other issues included “A Bride's Guide to Cooking” (also providing tips on equipment, storage, shopping and cleaning), entertaining and budgeting. She has won awards for her articles and even for her food styling for food photography. She is given much of the credit for raising the magazine's circulation to over one million.
Elaine's professional memberships have included the Women's Press Club, the executive committee of the Confrerie de la Chaine des Rotisseurs, the Women's Advertising Club, and the American Association of Cereal Chemists.
By 1975, Elaine said she had finally had enough, and she retired from Chatelaine. She then freelanced as Director of L'Ecole de Arts Culinaire, a title designated to attract companies and organizations in need of freelance food assistance. Some of her clients included Lipton, BC Fisheries, Chicken Chalet, the Department of Agriculture, Wiser's, Schneider's and Robin Hood.
Elaine and Sally Henry were in the same winemaking group, and had many hilarious experiences. En route to a competition, they realized they had the wrong sized bottles. They whipped off the highway to a wine store, made some quick purchases and frantically began decanting their homebrew into the new bottles. These trips with Sally were screamingly funny, and somehow they always won prizes.
Following Chatelaine she spent two years as internship supervisor for the Family and Consumer Studies program of Humber College, matching students to job opportunities according to their food knowledge, management abilities and person attributes, then checking their progress on site. During this time, she also found time to be food editor for Home Décor and Teen Generation Magazines. This was followed by gourmet cooking classes taught in her own home. After realizing the profit was minimal, she began teaching these classes through the Peel Board of Education.
Today, Elaine is heavily involved in volunteer work, especially for the Oakville Trafalgar Hospital. Last year (1991), she prepared 400 jars of jams, jellies and pickles, 12 pints of mincemeat and 45 pounds of fruitcake, which were sold at bazaars to benefit the hospital.
Her advice to our profession is to take on more training so that you can switch jobs with comfort and ease, rather than lose a job. Be willing and able to move, and enjoy what you are moving to. Plan and look ahead, think of the future, and always be aware.
She never worried about age or dates; she never looked at a calendar. She just kept going, but she put twice as much effort into jobs because she lacked the university degree.
She has lived a long and remarkable life by such a creed, and at this point, I think we all agree that Elaine Collett Drury has earned a lifetime Ph.D.