I grew up in Canada with a Mum who was born in west London in 1905, who came to Canada in 1928 as a 23 year old woman. She spent about ten years here in Toronto, working as a cook, and eventual chief house keeper for Lady Eaton of the Eaton department store family. Mum knew how to make just about anything, and she kept her collection of cookery books until she died at age 90 in 1995. Her most used cook books were by a Canadian called Kate Aitken who had a national 15 minute radio show, every day at noon local time ( Canada has 5 time zones, by the way ). You mentioned spotted Dick, and I am sure that many Americans have no idea what that really is. Mum's Christmas pudding was made in November, put into a crock pot, wrapped with cloth and tied up with butcher's twine, and put on the top of the kitchen cupboards to season.
After the war ended in 1945, Mum got a part time job with the Canadian Federal Government, teaching British War Brides how to cook ( and cope ) with Canadian appliances and household equipment. Part of her courses dealt with understanding the different names for things here. She taught hundreds of newly married young women how to keep house, do the laundry, the ironing, and the shopping. Imagine coming to live in a small town in Alberta, with no one to help you understand the new culture you have landed in. Mum's courses were held in Toronto, while the War Brides were waiting for their military husbands who were still in Europe .
It took almost a year, from the end of the war in May of 1945, to get the half a million Canadians in Europe sorted out, and onto transport ships, headed to Halifax port, on our Atlantic coast, then on to trains back to their home towns, collecting their Brides ( and in some cases their children who had been born in the UK ). Mum did that course for about ten years, into the middle 1950's when the flow slowed down a lot. In the decade between 1946 and 1956, Canada absorbed over a million new people, not just from the UK, but from all the destroyed countries of Europe. JImB.
