Canadian Cookbook Author Jean Paré 's began her career in the culinary arts by volunteering to cater the 50th anniversary celebration of the Vermilion School of Agriculture, now Lakeland College, in Alberta in 1963.
She worked in catering for more than 20 years before she began publishing cookbooks.
Her first cookbook, “150 Delicious Squares”, was published in 1981 when Paré was 53. Throughout her career she the wrote more than 200 cookbooks. According to Wikipedia, she sold 30 million copies of cookbooks, making her one of the top-selling cookbook authors in the world.
Not surprisingly she was a collector of cookbooks, she donated 6,700 cookbooks to the University of Guelph library’s culinary collections.