Bannock, Baking Powder, and the Bread That Traveled
- michel1492
- 21 hours ago
- 18 min read
There are some foods you remember because they were extraordinary, and there are others that stay with you because of where you were standing when you ate them.
Years ago I traveled through Saskatchewan, a place where the horizon seems impossibly large and the sky feels close enough to touch. Somewhere in my memories of that trip is bannock. I don't remember wondering much about it then. It was simply something I ate there. Only much later did I begin to understand how much history could be hiding inside such a simple bread: grains and girdles in Scotland, fur-trade routes across Canada, Indigenous adaptation and survival, ranch kitchens, cast iron, lard, and eventually one of the most ordinary ingredients in my own pantry: baking powder.
I didn't know then that years later I would find myself pulling cookbooks off my shelves, chasing nineteenth-century baking powder manufacturers through old advertisements, corresponding with a museum in Alberta, and wondering about a ranch cook named Charlie Lehr. All of it because of a piece of bread.
Before the Little Tin
Bannock did not begin with baking powder, and "bannock" has never described a single bread.
In Scotland, the word belonged to a broad family of breads made from the grains available in particular places. Oats, barley, and bere, an ancient six-row barley still associated with Orkney and the far north of Scotland, all found their way onto the girdle, the Scots iron griddle heated over the fire.
Food historian Catherine Brown captures that diversity beautifully in Broths to Bannocks: Cooking in Scotland 1690 to the Present Day. Her collection includes Mealie Bannocks from Aberdeenshire, Beremeal Bannocks from Orkney, and Barley Bannocks. The names themselves tell us something important: the bread belonged to place.
Before commercial chemical leaveners became commonplace, cooks relied on fermentation, yeast, and other older methods of raising dough, or made breads that required little or no rising at all. A simple bannock cooked on a heated stone or iron girdle required neither a conventional bread oven nor a long rise.
Then, during the nineteenth century, something remarkable happened in the kitchen: bread learned a new way to rise.
A Spoonful That Changed the Kitchen
Chemical leavening seems terribly ordinary now. Baking soda, cream of tartar, and baking powder are inexpensive ingredients sitting in millions of cupboards. But it is worth imagining what it was like to encounter them when they were new.
Bicarbonate of soda supplies the alkaline half of a chemical reaction. Give it an acid, such as sour milk, molasses, or cream of tartar, add moisture, and carbon dioxide begins forming inside the dough. During the 1830s and 1840s, cooks increasingly experimented with bicarbonate of soda paired with acidic ingredients. Cream of tartar offered a more predictable acid than sour milk, and manufacturers soon began working to package chemical leavening into increasingly convenient preparations. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, commercial baking powders were becoming an established part of the North American kitchen.
What all that innovation and competition eventually delivered to the cook was startlingly simple.
There was no starter to maintain, no yeast to wait for, and no hours of fermentation. You mixed the dough and you cooked it. For a household cook, that was convenient. For someone cooking far from a conventional kitchen, it could be transformative.
The Bread Crosses an Ocean, but the Story Gets Complicated
Scottish immigrants and fur traders carried their own bannock traditions to North America, and Parks Canada notes that bannock came to Canada with the fur trade and has been in continual use ever since. But it would be a mistake to draw a neat line from Scotland to Canada and stop there.
Today bannock holds an important place in many First Nations, Métis, and Inuit food traditions across Canada, and that history is inseparable from colonialism. Indigenous peoples were making breads and grain- or seed-based foods long before European flour arrived. Depending on place and people, those foods could be made from corn, nuts, roots, seeds, and other ground plant materials. European trade and settlement introduced increasing quantities of wheat flour, while colonial displacement and ration systems later forced unfamiliar commodity foods into Indigenous diets.
The food traditions that resulted were neither simply "Scottish" nor evidence that Indigenous people had lacked bread before Europeans arrived. They were adaptations, and over generations those adaptations became traditions in their own right. At Rocky Mountain House National Historic Site, for example, Parks Canada interprets bannock within Métis food traditions.
That distinction matters. Food travels, but it rarely travels unchanged. People make it their own.
Then We Meet Charlie
Now the trail takes us to Alberta.
Charles "Charlie" Lehr was born around 1870 and was in the High River area by 1890. He became a cook for the Bar U and Mosquito Creek ranches and was remembered particularly for his work as a round-up cook. He married Annie Hagen in 1912, raised five children, and died at High River in July 1943 at the age of seventy-three. Lehr appears in more than one historical record of southern Alberta ranching. Simon M. Evans discusses him in The Bar U and Canadian Ranching History, while the local history Leaves from the Medicine Tree preserves additional information about the High River district and its early residents. Historical photographs of Lehr also survive in the Glenbow collections at the University of Calgary.
Think about his job for a moment. A round-up cook was not feeding a dinner party. He was feeding working people, often miles from the equipment and comforts of a permanent kitchen.
Food had to be substantial, economical, practical, and dependable. For that kind of cooking, bannock made practical sense. So did chemical leavening.
Parks Canada preserves a Campfire Bannock associated with the Bar U Ranch National Historic Site, and its ingredient list is as plain as it gets: flour, baking powder, salt, lard or butter, and water. The soft dough is cooked in hot fat in a cast-iron pan or Dutch oven. There is no yeast, no overnight rise, and no conventional bread oven required.
There is one more wonderful detail. Parks Canada notes that on the range bannock was usually served with something called Charlie Taylor, a mixture of bacon grease and molasses. Smoky, salty fat. Dark sweetness. Hot bread. That is working food.
But Charlie's story nearly disappeared.
The Cookbook That Burned
Charlie Lehr kept a notebook. We know that because another keeper of recipes found it.
Her name was Beulah "Bunny" Barss, a writer and collector of western Canadian ranch recipes and food traditions. Parks Canada credits its Campfire Bannock to her book Come'n Get It, explaining that Barss found the recipe in Charlie Lehr's notebook at the museum in High River.
So naturally, I wanted to see the notebook. I wrote to the Museum of the Highwood.
Anika Cripps replied with disappointing news. Charlie's notebook had been lost in the devastating 2010 fire at the museum. Beulah Barss had donated Come'n Get It to the museum in 1983, and the museum believed the publication included the original recipe. The museum's copies of the book were lost in the fire as well.
The original evidence had quite literally gone up in smoke.
But that wasn't quite the end of Charlie's trail.
My questions eventually made their way to Will Pratt, a Parks Canada historian in Calgary. He checked Parks Canada's archival collection for material relating to Lehr and pointed the search in several new directions. There were photographs. There were references to Lehr in Simon Evans's The Bar U and Canadian Ranching History and in Leaves from the Medicine Tree. And then there was one particularly tantalizing archival description: Mrs. V. Baskill re: Charlie Lehr, October 1995, telephone interview notes, Barbara Halliday.
The notes themselves have not yet been located. Pratt is continuing to ask about them, and I don't know what Mrs. Baskill said about Charlie. She may not have discussed his cooking at all. But the existence of the interview is a reminder of what historical research often looks like. One source points toward another. A notebook disappears in a fire, but a recipe copied from it survives in a cookbook. A photograph remains in another archive. Someone records an interview decades later. A historian finds the catalogue entry thirty years after that. More than a century after Charlie stood over a cookfire, someone else starts following the pieces.
The recipe survived because people kept it. Someone wrote it down. Someone else copied it. Someone published it. Someone remembered it. Eventually another cook made it again.
Recipes survive because people keep them. So do people.
Someone writes down a name. Someone takes a photograph. Someone asks a question while there is still someone around who remembers the answer. And sometimes, if we are very lucky, another person puts those things somewhere they can be found again.
What We Know, and What We Don't
We know Charlie Lehr cooked for the Bar U and Mosquito Creek ranches and was remembered as a round-up cook. We know Beulah Barss reported finding a bannock recipe in Lehr's notebook at the High River museum. We know Parks Canada's Bar U interpretation preserves a Campfire Bannock credited through Barss and Lehr's notebook. We know Charlie's notebook was lost in the 2010 Museum of the Highwood fire.
We don't know what brand of baking powder Charlie used. We don't know when he first began making this particular bannock. We don't know whether the recipe changed between Charlie's notebook, Barss's transcription, publication, and later interpretation.
And that distinction matters.
Somewhere Along the Way Was a Tin of Baking Powder
Charlie's surviving recipe tells us something about what he made. It cannot tell us everything that sat beside him in the kitchen.
We don't know which baking powder Charlie Lehr used. We don't know where he bought it. We don't know whether it came from High River, Calgary, or somewhere farther away. Unless another receipt, account book, advertisement, interview, or wonderfully specific piece of evidence turns up, we may never know.
That's all right.
Historical research isn't weakened by saying "we don't know." It is strengthened by knowing exactly where the evidence stops.
But we do know what kind of commercial world surrounded cooks like Charlie. By the late nineteenth century, baking powder had become manufactured merchandise. Companies competed for household customers through tins, trade cards, newspaper advertisements, cookbooks, and recipe pamphlets.
One of the companies I've been following is Newman's Pure Gold Manufacturing Company of Fairport, New York. Pure Gold made baking powder as part of a broader grocery line that included spices, extracts, tea, and coffee. Surviving trade cards, including examples held in the Toronto Public Library's digital archive, carry both the Fairport address and a Toronto one.
That Toronto connection fascinates me. It does not prove that a tin of Pure Gold ever sat beside Charlie Lehr's flour sack, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. What it does show is something more useful: baking powder had become merchandise. It could travel.
A manufactured chemical leavener could move through commercial networks until it became an ordinary tool in a cook's kitchen. Once that happened, old breads could change along with it.
Last Night I Needed Baking Powder
More than a century later, I was standing in my own kitchen making lemon cookies. I reached for the glass jar where I keep my baking powder and realized I was scraping the bottom. Then I stopped.
I always decant baking powder out of its box and into a glass jar, which meant I had thrown away the one thing that would have answered the question suddenly bothering me: the date. How old was this baking powder? I had no idea.
So I stopped baking, drove to the grocery store, and bought another box. While I was there, I bought fresh baking soda and cream of tartar too.
Driving home, I kept thinking about the absurd luxury of what I had just done. I needed something to make my cookies rise, so I drove a few minutes and bought it. There was another box waiting on the shelf and another behind that one.
I didn't have to maintain a starter. I didn't have to obtain brewer's yeast. I didn't have to calculate how much soda an acidic ingredient would neutralize. I didn't even have to combine baking soda and cream of tartar myself because someone had already done the chemistry for me.
All I had to do was measure out a spoonful.
Sometimes the best way to understand an old technology is to imagine your kitchen without it.
Is Your Baking Powder Still Alive?
Before you throw out an older container, test it. Stir about 1/2 teaspoon baking powder into 1/4 cup hot water. It should bubble and foam immediately. If very little happens, replace it.
Baking powder already contains both the alkaline and acidic components necessary for the reaction, so moisture is enough to get things moving. Baking soda is different because it needs an acid.
If you ever discover an empty baking powder container halfway through a recipe, there is another useful kitchen trick worth remembering. For approximately 1 teaspoon baking powder, combine 1/4 teaspoon baking soda with 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar. Use the mixture promptly. Unlike many modern commercial baking powders, this combination begins reacting as soon as it is moistened, so once your batter or dough is mixed, get it cooking. Cornstarch is commonly added if a larger quantity will be stored to help keep the components dry.
Suddenly that fresh jar of cream of tartar doesn't seem quite so obscure.
Now Make the Bannock
This is where I want to leave the archive and return to the kitchen.
Start with one plain bannock: flour, baking powder, salt, fat, and water. Make that one first. Learn what the dough feels like. Notice how little it needs to be worked on. Watch what happens when baking powder meets moisture and then heat. Listen to the bread settle into the hot cast iron, and tear it open while it is still warm.
Then, instead of changing the bread, change what you put beside it.
That seems particularly appropriate for bannock. A practical bread doesn't need to become three different breads to appear at three different meals. The same warm bannock can move from breakfast to an afternoon bowl of soup simply by changing the fat and flavor served with it.
And that gives us a wonderful opportunity to bloom flavor.
Basic Bannock
Makes: 6 to 8 pieces | Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 10 to 15 minutes
Bloom Classification
Gentle + Fat / Moisture
Why the Bloom Works
There are two small transformations happening in this very simple dough. First, working lard or butter into the flour coats some of the flour particles with fat. This limits how readily the proteins hydrate and connect into gluten, helping the bannock remain tender rather than becoming chewy like a kneaded yeast bread.
Then the water wakes up the baking powder. Once moistened, its acid and alkaline components begin producing carbon dioxide. Those tiny gas bubbles expand as the bannock heats, giving an otherwise sturdy flour-and-water dough a lighter interior. The important lesson is timing. Once the baking powder is wet, the reaction has begun. Mix gently, shape, and cook.
Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour (240 g)
1 tablespoon baking powder (12 g)
1/2 teaspoon fine salt (3 g)
2 tablespoons lard or unsalted butter, softened (28 g)
About 3/4 cup warm water (180 ml)
1 to 2 tablespoons lard, for the skillet (14 to 28 g)
Method
In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Add the lard or butter and use your fingertips to work the fat lightly into the flour until evenly distributed. Small pieces of fat are perfectly fine.
Add about 2/3 cup warm water and stir gently. Add the remaining water 1 tablespoon at a time until a soft, slightly tacky dough forms. Depending on your flour, you may not need all of it.
Turn the dough onto a lightly floured surface and bring it together with your hands. Knead only a few times, just until the dough holds together. Do not work it like yeast bread. Too much kneading will make the bannock tough.
Pat the dough into a round about 3/4 inch thick.
Heat a cast-iron skillet over medium to medium-low heat and add enough lard to lightly coat the bottom.
Place the bannock in the skillet and cook for 5 to 7 minutes, adjusting the heat as necessary so the bottom becomes golden without burning. Turn carefully and cook another 5 to 7 minutes, until browned and cooked through. If the bannock browns before the center is done, reduce the heat.
Transfer to a board and let rest for a few minutes before cutting or tearing into pieces.
Best With
That depends entirely on where you want to take it.
For Breakfast: Poudre Douce Maple Butter
Instead of turning the bannock itself into something sweet, leave the bread alone and let the butter change the experience.
Bloom Classification: Gentle + Fat
Why the Bloom Works: Butter is an excellent carrier for the aromatic compounds in warm spices. Allowing Poudre Douce to rest in softened butter gives its aromatics time to disperse through the fat, while maple syrup contributes just enough sweetness to move the bannock toward the breakfast table.
Ingredients
1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened (113 g)
1 teaspoon Oak City Spice Blends 14th c. Poudre Douce
1 tablespoon pure maple syrup (15 ml)
Pinch of fine sea salt, if needed
Method
Combine the softened butter, Poudre Douce, and maple syrup and mix until completely incorporated.
Cover and let stand at room temperature for about 30 minutes to allow the spices to bloom into the butter.
Serve immediately or refrigerate until needed. Bring back to a soft, spreadable temperature before serving.
Best With: Warm bannock, fresh berries, stewed fruit, apples, pears, or preserves.
Blooming Notes: This is a slow aromatic bloom rather than a heated bloom. Fat captures and carries the warm spice aromatics while allowing them to remain soft and rounded.
For the Savory Table: Wilde Garlek Butter
Now take exactly the same bannock in another direction.
Bloom Classification: Gentle + Fat
Why the Bloom Works: Garlic, onion, chive, celery seed, and black pepper behave differently once surrounded by fat. Butter rounds the sharper edges of the aromatics and carries their flavor across the palate, turning a simple piece of bannock into something that belongs beside a bowl of soup or stew.
Ingredients
1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened (113 g)
1 to 2 teaspoons of Oak City Spice Blends Wilde Garlek
Method
Stir the Wilde Garlek thoroughly into the softened butter.
Cover and allow the butter to rest at room temperature for about 30 minutes before serving.
Taste after the bloom. Add additional Wilde Garlek only if needed.
Best With: Warm bannock alongside beef stew, vegetable soup, beans, roasted chicken, or a simple afternoon meal.
Blooming Notes: Taste this butter twice, once immediately after mixing and again after it has rested. That difference is the bloom. The seasoning hasn't changed. The butter hasn't changed. What has changed is how completely the fat has captured and distributed the aromatics.
And Then There Is Charlie Taylor
If you want to take your bannock back toward the ranch story that brought us here, there is one more choice. Parks Canada's Bar U Ranch interpretation notes that bannock on the range was served with something called Charlie Taylor, a mixture of bacon grease and molasses.
It is difficult to imagine a more practical ranch accompaniment: smoky, salty fat meeting dark sweetness on hot bread. I would not call Charlie Taylor an Oak City recipe or try to improve it with seasoning.
Sometimes the most interesting thing we can do with a historical food is simply taste the idea that survived.
One Bread, Three Tables
So make one bannock. At breakfast, tear off a warm piece and spread it with Poudre Douce Maple Butter. Later, put the same bread beside soup with Wilde Garlek Butter. And if you're curious about the ranch table, try a little bacon grease and molasses.
The bread hasn't changed. The bloom has.
Perhaps that is the larger lesson bannock has been teaching all along. Foods don't have to remain frozen in one moment to retain their history. They move with people, ingredients, circumstances, technologies, and tastes.
Sometimes all it takes to send an old bread somewhere new is what you put beside it.
The Little Things We Stop Seeing
Food history tends to celebrate grand things: banquets, rare spices, famous chefs, and elaborate kitchens. But sometimes history is sitting quietly in a cardboard box in the baking aisle.
Baking powder changed what an ordinary cook could accomplish with flour and water. It made some breads faster and others lighter. It traveled remarkably well. Eventually it became so ordinary that most of us stopped thinking about it altogether.
I nearly did, until I reached the bottom of a glass jar while making lemon cookies.
Now there's a new box in my pantry, and beside it are fresh baking soda and cream of tartar. Three unremarkable little ingredients, except that they aren't unremarkable at all.
Sometimes abundance is simply having something on the shelf when you need it. And sometimes understanding the past makes you profoundly grateful for what is sitting in your pantry today.
Reading List
If this story has sent you down the same rabbit hole it sent me, these books are wonderful places to continue exploring.
Catherine Brown, Broths to Bannocks: Cooking in Scotland 1690 to the Present Day. Waverley Books, revised edition, 2010. ISBN-13: 978-1-84934-042-7. Brown's study is particularly useful for understanding Scottish food as something shaped by place, agriculture, economics, and changing kitchen technology. Her regional bannock recipes remind us that there has never been just one bannock.
Beulah M. "Bunny" Barss, Come 'n Get It: Favorite Ranch Recipes. Western Producer Prairie Books, 1983. ISBN-10: 0-88833-102-9; ISBN-13: 978-0-88833-102-1. Part cookbook and part record of western Canadian ranch foodways, Barss's collection is especially important to this story because Parks Canada credits her with preserving the bannock recipe she found in Charlie Lehr's notebook.
Simon M. Evans, The Bar U and Canadian Ranching History. University of Calgary Press, 2004. ISBN-13: 978-1-55238-134-2. For readers interested in the larger world surrounding Charlie Lehr, Evans provides a deeper history of the Bar U Ranch and the development of the cattle industry in southern Alberta and the Canadian West.
F. Marian McNeill, The Scots Kitchen: Classic Recipes and Traditions. Originally published 1929; Birlinn edition, 2025. ISBN-13: 978-1-78027-927-5. McNeill's classic brings together Scottish recipes, regional traditions, ingredients, terminology, and food lore and makes an excellent companion to Catherine Brown's later historical work.
High River Pioneers' and Old Timers' Association, Leaves from the Medicine Tree: A History of the Area Influenced by the Tree, and Biographies of Pioneers and Old Timers Who Came Under Its Spell Prior to 1900. Lethbridge, Alberta: Lethbridge Herald, 1960. 528 pages. The book documents the High River district and its early residents and contains material relevant to Charlie Lehr and the community in which his ranching career developed. The bibliographic record is confirmed by the University of Calgary Archives and Special Collections.
Explore Further
Parks Canada: Bar U Ranch National Historic Site is the institutional home for the ranch at the center of Charlie's story. Parks Canada describes the Bar U as a site interpreting ranching life from the late nineteenth century, and its historical documentation dates the ranch's beginnings to 1882.
Parks Canada: Campfire Bannock, Bar U Ranch National Historic Site. The Parks Canada recipe is credited through Come'n Get It by Beulah Barss and Charlie Lehr's notebook, and the source for the reference to "Charlie Taylor."
Parks Canada: Bannock, Rocky Mountain House National Historic Site. Useful context for understanding bannock within Métis and Indigenous food traditions.
University of Calgary Digital Collections / Glenbow Archives. Historical photographs and archival material relating to Charlie Lehr and southern Alberta ranching.
University of Calgary Archives: Leaves from the Medicine Tree provides the archival catalogue record and publication information for the 1960 High River history used in this research.
Toronto Public Library Digital Archive: Pure Gold Manufacturing Company Trade Cards. Surviving advertising cards provide a glimpse into the commercial world surrounding nineteenth-century baking powder and document Pure Gold's Fairport and Toronto presence.
Museum of the Highwood, High River, Alberta. My thanks to Anika Cripps for answering my questions about Charlie Lehr's lost notebook, Beulah Barss, Come'n Get It, and the devastating 2010 fire, and for helping clarify what survives and, equally importantly, what no longer does.
Bar U Ranch National Historic Site / Parks Canada. My thanks to Parks Canada historian Will Pratt for searching the Calgary archival collection, identifying additional Charlie Lehr material, directing me toward Leaves from the Medicine Tree and the Glenbow photographic collection, and generously sharing his research on bannock and ranching history.
From the Spice Keeper
I began researching this article because I remembered bannock. I ended up thinking about something much smaller: a spoonful of baking powder.
That's one of the things I love most about studying food history. The ordinary objects in our kitchens rarely feel historical while we're using them. Flour is flour. A skillet is a skillet. Baking powder is something we measure without much thought.
Until we ask what cooking looked like without it.
The next time you open that little container, stop for just a moment before measuring your teaspoon.
Someone had to understand the chemistry. Someone had to manufacture it. Someone had to package it. Someone had to carry it farther and farther from the places where it was made. And generations of cooks had to figure out what they could do with it.
Bannock was already an old food. Baking powder didn't invent it.
It gave cooks another way to make it.
And somewhere along this research trail, I found another nineteenth-century cook measuring baking powder into something completely different.
Doughnuts.
But that is another story.
We'll follow that little tin again soon.
The Spice Keeper
Oak City Spice Blends
Taste is how memory travels.
A Note on Sources
Parks Canada, "Campfire Bannock," Heritage Gourmet, Bar U Ranch National Historic Site; Parks Canada, "Bannock," Rocky Mountain House National Historic Site; Beulah M. Barss, Come'n Get It: Favorite Ranch Recipes (Western Producer Prairie Books, 1983); Catherine Brown, Broths to Bannocks: Cooking in Scotland 1690 to the Present Day (John Murray, 1990; revised Waverley Books edition, 2010); Simon M. Evans, The Bar U and Canadian Ranching History (University of Calgary Press, 2004); High River Pioneers' and Old Timers' Association, Leaves from the Medicine Tree (Lethbridge Herald, 1960); Southern Alberta Pioneers and Their Descendants, "Pioneer Profiles: Lehr, Charles"; High River Times, obituary for Charles Lehr, July 8, 1943; CBC News, "Fire ruins High River museum exhibits," July 28, 2010; Toronto Public Library Digital Archive, Pure Gold Manufacturing Company trade cards; University of Calgary Digital Collections / Glenbow Archives, Charlie Lehr and Bar U Ranch materials; correspondence with Anika Cripps, Museum of the Highwood, August 2026; correspondence with Will Pratt, Parks Canada, August 2026.
A Thank You
Food history is rarely researched alone. My sincere thanks to Anika Cripps of the Museum of the Highwood for answering my questions about Charlie Lehr, his lost notebook, Beulah Barss, and the museum's 2010 fire, and for pointing me toward additional places to continue the search.
My thanks as well to Will Pratt, historian with Parks Canada, who searched the Calgary archival collection, directed me toward Leaves from the Medicine Tree and surviving photographs of Charlie Lehr, shared additional bannock research, and is still looking for a tantalizing set of 1995 interview notes concerning Charlie.
Both responded generously to an unexpected email from a food historian in North Carolina who had fallen down a bannock rabbit hole. Their willingness to answer questions, distinguish what is documented from what is uncertain, and point toward the next source made this article considerably better.
Thank you for helping me follow the trail.
Ps
I used 100% artistic and AI creativity to add color to this black and white photo. I wanted to see our cook in color because I have a feeling he was a colorful character. Just look at that mustache and tie.
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