The Best of Bridge cookbooks started in 1975 with eight women who gathered regularly for games of bridge, for which they would prepare food to enjoy together. Forty years and four million copies later, Best of Bridge books have become well-known for their spiral-bound volumes containing simple family recipes and plenty of jokes and personality.
But a lot has changed in 40 years. Four of the original Best of Bridge ladies have died, and the remaining four—Mary Halpen, Val Robinson, Helen Miles, and Joan Wilson—are in their seventies and getting ready to retire. To keep the Best of Bridge tradition going, the ladies are passing their aprons to three women who are also friends that love to cook.
Up until 2008, the original group of women self-published and sold their books themselves. Then Canadian cookbook publisher Robert Rose bought the licensing rights and continued publishing new collections, with recipes for everything from cheesy scalloped potatoes to “Aunty Lil’s Simple Antipasto” and “Best-Ever Banana Bread.” In total, there have been 17 titles, 11 published since Robert Rose became the line's official publisher.
For the new guard, the first person the group thought of was Julie Van Rosendaal, food editor at Parents Canada magazine and author of six cookbooks. Van Rosendaal, who lives in Calgary, Alberta, will be joined by food writers Elizabeth Chorney-Booth and Sue Duncan, the latter of whom was Van Rosendaal’s co-author on the 2011 cookbook Spilling the Beans. Van Rosendaal and Duncan go way back: “We were best friends in Grade 7 and have been ever since,” she says.
Van Rosendaal has a longstanding connection with the Best of Bridge cookbooks. She went to school in Calgary with the daughters of several of the original creators, and remembers going to sleepovers where those girls’ moms, whom she refers to as “the Canadian Marthas,” would be testing their recipes for Best of Bridge. “It’s such an iconic brand, especially in Western Canada,” she says. “People feel like if the Bridge ladies can make these recipes, then they can do it too. At the end of the day, people want a really good banana bread recipe.”
It was important to Van Rosendaal that this new iteration of cookbooks still include a group of friends making food together — that camaraderie is the essence of the brand, she emphasizes. But the new group will transition toward fresher ingredients. “We’re going to keep the jokes, we’re going to keep the chattiness. But we’ll probably do less in terms of processed food,” she says. “Back then, that was how people cooked, with canned soup. It will be a little bit healthier than some of the recipes in the past, but still very focused on bringing people together around the table, with very approachable recipes.”
This fall, Robert Rose will publish Home Cooking, a transitional cookbook that will include recipes from the four original ladies, as well as from Van Rosendaal, Duncan, and Chorney-Booth. And in 2016, the younger group will publish their first cookbook as the new generation of Best of Bridge ladies — though the name will now be purely symbolic: Van Rosendaal hasn’t actually played the card game.
“I’ve never played bridge, but I hear it’s a good game,” she says. “I think we may have to learn.”
