Jean Paré

Early Years

Jean Paré was born Jean Shirley Elford in Irma, Alberta on 7 December 1927. There, she met her first husband, Clarence Lovig. In 1959, the couple then relocated to Vermilion, AB where they ran the Vermilion Auction Mart. Later, they opened the Vegreville Auction Mart. Together, they had four children: Lyall, Brian, Grant and Gail.

Paré was a lifelong home cook and cookbook collector, finding inspiration for her family meals from community cookbooks. These ad hoc cookbooks, which had been around since the 1800s in North America, were made up of recipes collected from specific communities. They were often sold to raise money for a church or charity and became representations of a locale’s tastes. Paré’s obsession with these recipe books led her to be a prolific collector of them and informed her own cooking and eventual cookbook writing.

In 1963, Paré helped cater the 50th anniversary celebration of the Vermilion School of Agriculture (now Lakeland College). That night, she made over 1,000 meals. Her catering menu included dishes like potato salad, ham and ice cream served in Dixie cups That first job launched her successful catering business. She became known in Vermilion for her good food and reasonable prices.

Cookbook Writing

Later in the 1960s, Jean Paré and Clarence Lovig divorced, leaving her a single mother. According to Globe and Mail journalist Jan Wong, she relocated to Edmonton but moved back to Vermilion as her kids missed the small town. To make ends meet, Paré took out a loan at a local bank and bought the Rio Café in Vermilion. There, she met electrician and regular customer Larry Paré who she married in 1968.

Jean Paré sold the cafe shortly after buying it; instead, she grew her catering business. Over time, Paré became flooded with requests for her delicious recipes and was constantly asked for a cookbook. In response, Paré teamed up with her son Grant Lovig to start Company’s Coming Publishing in 1980.

A year later, in 1981, Paré published her first cookbook, 150 Delicious Squares. The book was bound with a plastic comb so that it could lay flat when open. It also had a large typeface and page numbers on outside corners — all to make it easily navigable for home cooks who are often juggling pages with kitchen tools. Later on, Grant Lovig described their books as “kitchen workbooks,” not just pretty display pieces.

Paré and Lovig first sold 150 Delicious Squares in untraditional places like gas stations and drug stores. Three months after publication, they’d sold out of their initial 15,000-copy printing. Their second edition, with 25,000 copies, also sold out quickly. According to Amanda Lovig Hagg, Paré’s granddaughter, Paré’s first book had sold 1.4 million copies as of 2010.

Paré began writing and publishing other books, all of which were hits. She also continued to sell her publications in gas stations and grocery stores around the country, cementing them as everyday pieces of knowledge.

Instantly recognizable thanks to their spiral binding, Company’s Coming books typically focused on a single subject. Books like Company’s Coming: Muffins and More as well as Company's Coming: Holiday Entertaining cemented Paré as a culinary figurehead in Canada. Inspired by specific community recipe collections, Paré’s recipes used simple, everyday ingredients and basic techniques to help make mealtimes manageable, regardless of the reader’s skill level. Rather than aim for polished culinary perfection, Paré had a goal of teaching her readers how to simply cook for their families. Many attribute her down-to-earth attitude around cooking and the confidence that her steady, friendly instructions gave new cooks as the secret to Paré and Company’s Coming’s success.

Later life

In 2005, wishing to be closer to her children and their publishing company, Jean Paré moved to Edmonton. In 2009, Paré donated her massive collection of cookbooks — 6,700 in total — to the University of Guelph. This donation doubled the university’s already sizable culinary collection.

She retired in 2011, after three decades of writing over 200 published cookbooks, with over 30 million copies sold worldwide. She was one of the top-selling cookbook authors in the world.

In 2004, Paré was inducted into the Order of Canada. She also received many other awards in her lifetime like the Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden and Diamond Jubilee Medals. Paré was inducted into the Alberta Business Hall of Fame and the Taste Canada Hall of Fame.

Legacy

Jean Paré died in Edmonton on 24 December 2022. She was 95 years old.

Company’s Coming and Paré are remembered for bringing easy-to-follow, affordable and accessible cooking to Canadian kitchens. Journalist Isabel Slone wrote in Chatelaine that “Paré helped pioneer a genre of recipes that lessened the burden of cooking.” She praised Paré’s cookbooks and their eventual ubiquity that served as both a compass and a life raft for Canadian home cooks.

Paré’s prolific publishing career, with hundreds of titles out, represented the immense trust that Canadian cooks had in Paré and their almost endless appetite for her recipes.

Aside from the bestseller status of her books, Paré captured the Canadian culinary landscape at the time. Her cookbooks can be seen as an archive of Canadian cooking traditions, a collection of the local recipes she learned and collected throughout her life. Paré’s recipes acted as a bridge between the informal community recipe collections and traditional chef-led cookbooks. Her works taught a whole generation of Canadians how to cook — whether they had company coming or not.