July 23, 2020
Cassandra Marsillo

It’s been quite a few years since I’ve seen these tents. They’re icons of my childhood summers. Every August, we celebrated my great-grandfather Nonno Bart’s birthday in my nonni’s backyard, where I breathed in the intermingling smells of grass and tomato plants and the bbq. It was an anticipated family affair. The tents meant a day with all my dad’s cousins and their kids. It meant running to get the soccer ball after we’d kicked it over the fence for the 10th time, swings (before the tree was cut down), and make-believe games.

I can’t remember exactly when we stopped having these bbqs. Various efforts have been made over the years to hold some new version of them, with “Marsillo cousin parties” at beaches, parks, and other backyards or in other homes. But as always happens when people grow older and families grow bigger, it becomes harder to gather everyone in the same place, at the same time without interfering with work, activities, or other commitments. The people themselves have become almost nostalgic to me. We don’t see each other often, but when we do, I always get this feeling of being both in the past and in the present.

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July 29, 2020
Stacey Zembrzycki

I can still see this golden carrot cake sitting on Baba’s table, wrapped in layers of cling wrap on a white Corelle plate with its gold butterfly edging. Taken from an article published in the Sudbury Star during the 1950s, it is lovely and light as well as warm and spicy, a near perfect pairing for a late afternoon cup of tea. Despite its delectable flavor, Baba never baked this cake for holidays or special occasions. It only made an appearance for funerals, delivered to dear friends as comfort when they had lost a loved one. It’s always been Baba’s way of offering her condolences in difficult times.

In fact, I remember this cake being there when my grandfather, my Gigi, died, a man who lived a life I knew little about but witnessed him drink away, one pint of Labatts at a time. Sadly, he never managed to come to terms with what he witnessed as a Polish soldier who fought valiantly in the Second World War.

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July 22, 2020
Carolin Collins

My Nana and Grandpa, Eileen and Tom Kennedy, lived in Needham, Massachusetts. She was the parish secretary for St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church, and by the time I was born, he was retired. They had met during World War II and married as soon as possible once it was over. Grandpa was very handy, and built their Needham house himself. During the 1950s and 60s, his work in the wool trade took him all over the world while back home in Needham their family grew. They eventually had eight children. My mother was both the oldest and the only girl.

When my mother was a teenager, Nana and Grandpa bought a summer cottage in Pocasset, a village of Bourne on Cape Cod. My most cherished memories are of spending time with them there. Nana was social and gregarious. It was only one block from the house to the beach but when I was a kid it felt like it took hours to get there as she stopped to chat with everyone we passed. Grandpa was taciturn, and he did not go to the beach.
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July 17, 2020
Andrea Massaro

Ironically (or maybe fittingly), minutes before spotting the email calling for food memories for this online blog, I had been flicking through one of my favourite books. For me, Patience Gray’s Honey from a Weed carries a sense of pride and affection,since I met her daughter a decade ago as I settled into a recently opened--what I was calling at the time--ethical deli and coffee shop. It was a failed attempt--catastrophically so from a near bankruptcy point-of-view--but I had hoped it would affect positive change by promoting more ethical eating and shopping. I haven’t dispensed with this idea, but it has taken many different twists and turns as I realize the matter is far more complex, ingrained in much deeper issues.

Honey from a Weed is not a straightforward recipe book: although it has many very good recipes. It aims to evoke a sense of being: a way of appreciating, communing, loving, and nurturing, often with very little effort other than the hard but beautiful graft of the farmer and the cook.

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July 15, 2020
Johnwilliam Kriebel and Margo Shea

This post brings you into the Kriebel kitchen with Margo Shea for a taste of Alsatian culture seen through the lens of a flour-coated computer.

Johnwilliam writes:

During this pandemic, much of our lives has been altered. However, as one of my classmates said --- one thing that hasn’t changed is the way we view the kitchen and the role it plays in our lives.

Ever since this began, my father has been making many more baked goods and passing them out to our friends in the neighborhood. This pandemic has given my dad a chance to go back to his roots and bake. This pandemic has allowed my dad to do the one thing he truly loves, to bake and to share his baking with the people around him.

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July 13, 2020
Kate Navarra Thibodeau

It has not been an easy transition from Motherhood to Mother/Teacherhood during the pandemic. My roles have been constantly shifting, redefined regularly since March 12, 2020. Scurrying from the dining room to the kitchen to my office and back in erratic circles, helping one kid log into one online platform and then double checking the other’s password, all while updating software on a third laptop to get to a meeting on time. I knew at once that I could handle the stress of the push and pull of my new job requirements if I could find something to relieve stress. Baking – creating a whole from parts – has always helped soften the noise of everyday stresses.
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July 10, 2020
Bethany Groff Dorau

The original title of this piece was “Aunt Emily’s Applesauce Raisin Cake.” Aunt Emily is my great-aunt, Emily Noyes Poore, my maternal grandmother’s sister, the last of the increasingly impoverished but proud Poores to live on Poore’s Lane since her great-grandfather Ebenezer Poore built the house that is perched atop the hill in 1817. “Poore by name, poor by nature” is the farm’s motto.

My parents and three siblings moved into the rambling, crumbling farmhouse in 1985, returning penniless from a decade-long sojourn into the wilds of Canada. Aunt Emily was still working, and my grandmother was wheelchair-bound and increasingly frail. We moved into three unheated rooms upstairs, and our stop-over in West Newbury stretched on into years, then decades. In the end, when Aunt Emily, who had outlived my grandmother by over a decade, died without complaint on the couch in the living room, my parents had lived with her for thirty years. She left the house to my mother.

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July 9, 2020
Brandi Adams

During the covid-19 crisis, I, like many others around the world, am learning to cook and bake.

Through my research as a Canadian history student on sugar rationing during the Second World War, I have had the opportunity to view a few victory cookbooks. Victory cookbooks were made specifically during wartime and have been written with the war effort in mind. These cookbooks contain recipes altered to fit the requirements of rationing and conservation. Many of these cookbooks included helpful hints creating an efficient kitchen and optimizing nutrition in rationed meals. Marked with grease spots, remnants of flour dust and personally adapted with handwritten notes, commentary and additional recipes, these cookbooks were well loved by their previous owners.

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July 8, 2020
Andrea Leddy and Lianne Leddy

Soft ginger cookies, originally made by Andrea’s grandmother (Lianne’s great-grandmother), have now touched five generations of their Anishinaabe family. What follows are mother and daughter memories of the importance of centering family traditions and honouring previous generations.

Andrea:

Our family has shared these cookies for as long as I can remember. My grandmother made these at Christmas and I loved them so much. After my Grandma had difficulty making them, my mother took over. She made them until she began to have difficulty. I then took over and continued after my mother passed away.

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July 7, 2020
Linda A McKenney

The first cake I learned to bake with my mother felt like playing; making holes in the flour mixture and adding wet ingredients. I had to practice patience as I slowly stirred it all together, ensuring all ingredients were incorporated. Making this cake might have seemed like child’s play, but the result was a sophisticated and memorable chocolate cake.

I passed along the shared baking experience and recipe to my children and grandchildren. Sometimes we joke that the name of it, Wacky Cake, couldn’t be more accurate for our family. Also known as Cockeyed Cake, the recipe flourished during World War II, when more traditional cake ingredients became scarce.

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July 6, 2020
Amelia Wignall

My high school years were spent at a project-based charter school, where my mom was given complete reign in designing my curriculum (she’s a scientist known for developing award-winning education programs). In the 11th grade, she thought I’d have fun learning the chemistry of jam making. I’d always made crazy food concoctions (peanut butter and pickles, anyone?) and she thought I would benefit from understanding the science behind cooking.

Experimentation led to the creation of “Berry, Berry”, a jam created from raspberries, blueberries, and black cherries. Family and friends raved about it, so for fun, I entered it in the County Fair. I was shocked when I learned I’d won a blue ribbon. I call it my “gateway ribbon” because I’ve been addicted to entering new recipes ever since. My jams, syrups, cookies, and breads have won an assortment of ribbons from “Best of Class” to “Best of Show”.

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July 3, 2020
Steven Thurston Oliver

Mrs. Jackson was an old woman who lived directly across the street from us in Hollis, Queens. Like many of our neighbors she had come to Hollis by way of Harlem by way of the South.

I can still hear her reply of “Hey baby” whenever someone greeted her while she was working on her garden.

Recently, I found myself craving the coleslaw she would make in the summer, sometimes giving a batch to my mother.

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July 2, 2020
Carmen Radu

I am not a good cook; I am just decent. I cook out of necessity, not passion.

I lived for the first 40 years of my life in communist Romania, enduring food shortages of every imaginable kind. I cooked family meals with unspeakable ingredients, sometimes with the kitchen door closed, sometimes crying over my frying pan. The seventies were bearable, the eighties were manageable, the nineties were heart wrenching. The vocabulary around food changed over time. You were not buying food, you were “finding it.” The food was not sold, it was “given.” Shopping for food was “hunting.” It was like food was some mysterious and rare animal, ever elusive, ever hiding somewhere, and you had to be in a permanent state of alert to spot the lines in front of the stores and wait for hours for two chicken thighs. This was just enough to feed a family of four a two-course meal. These food shortages were political, it was one of the instruments of oppression used by the communist party to ensure the obedience of the masses. The other forms of oppression were rooted in heat and hot water distribution in the winter, which were also terrible to endure.

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July 1, 2020
Jingshu Yao

After living in Canada for three years, I had planned to visit my family in China this summer. However, my plans were cancelled due to the pandemic and the travel restrictions required to control the spread of the virus. When homesickness and loneliness have struck during quarantine, glutinous rice cake is a reminder of home especially as it evokes sweet memories. Cheesecake and brownies could fulfill one's desire for desserts, but the condensed sweetness and the strong flavour often overwhelms me. I can’t help but feel guilty for the amount of sugar and fat that I’ve consumed. On the other hand, rice cake provides mild hints of sweetness from natural ingredients and adds another layer of joy to this dessert.

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June 30, 2020
Margo Shea

It took me a long time to understand that my mother's summer life as a successful and hard-working business manager was more than an opportunity to bring in much-needed cash. Friendships. A shared project. Being in charge. Temporary freedom from the roles of wife and mother that tended to define her. The money mattered, too, but not only because of its utility. I remember her fanning stacks of $20 bills and could almost see the mental math she was doing. It was her money to do with as she chose. Like her, I use my summer money to pay down debt, invest in needed house and car repairs. Like her, I make room for a few splurges, like a good facial moisturizer or a fancy shampoo. It is not so much that it is impossible to do these things during the "regular" year -- but my money is budgeted and spoken for. The earnings I bring in from extra work above and beyond my salary are mine to do with as I wish. I learned the pleasures of choice from watching my mom with her strawberry cash.

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June 29, 2020
Amy Smith

For many people, the name Mrs. Smith is synonymous with frozen apple pie. Apples might also come to mind when you think of Granny Smith. But for me it conjures memories of my grandmother Dorothy, also known to me as Granny. Born in 1918, the same year women were granted the right to vote as well as the year of the last major pandemic to affect the United States, Granny Dorothy lived through a fast-moving century filled with war, innovation, and struggle. She was impacted by her family’s experience during the Great Depression. She had immense pride in her two sons and served as our family matriarch following the untimely death of her husband. She never drove a car, relying on taxis, buses, and later the light rail for transportation. She held close relationships with her siblings and was devastated when each passed before her. Her grandchildren, and later her great-grandchildren, were the apples of her eye.

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June 26, 2020
Christina Gessler

A fire took my studio; my ex took a lot from me, including my dog; then my cousin took the end of life cocktail. People take things for reasons they can go on and on telling you about; but even though we can't hold the funeral until people are allowed to gather again, my cousin had the only reasons out of the whole bunch of them that I understand.

Now I have nothing, really, except my dreams. Most of them are old, or broken, and some of them are missing parts. I gather them in a basket. I think they were left to me because of all the bruises. But I know I can do something with them; when apples get like that, you toss them with some sugar and make a pie.

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June 25, 2020
Etta Madden

When the sun climbs to a certain height and the days lengthen accordingly, my cravings for koulourakia call me to the kitchen. Twisted within these Greek sweetbreads -- I call them cookies – are joyous memories of a spring semester abroad as an undergraduate student. My first tastes of the buttery sesame-covered confections came during a short trip to Greece, where the April sun sparkled off the Mediterranean in a magical way. In that moment, nothing of the future and certainly no thoughts of a pandemic nudged its way into my mind. Almost mysteriously such brief moments have now become vivid food memories.

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June 24, 2020
Sonia Cancian

My nonna Rosina had magic in her hands. You could see it. And, you could feel it, each time she held the flour dough in her large, confident hands. For my maternal grandmother, the flour dough would fold, bend, ply, and turn with conviction, at her hands’ request. With self-assurance and speed, she would turn flour, water, and yeast into a festival of airy, perfectly crunchy pizza smothered with her freshly-made tomato sauce and sprinkled with grated mozzarella cheese and basil leaves, picked from the plants on her balcony.

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June 23, 2020
Daniel Samson

Food has always been important in my family. My father was an only child. His father left L’Ardoise during the First World War. Like many poor Maritimers, most of his family left Nova Scotia and lived far away – Boston, Montreal, and a residue in L’Ardoise. Relatives, Samsons and the broader family of Martels, Mombourquettes and Landrys, would often visit our home outside Halifax. This fully anglicised, frozen-pizza-eating boy joined them at the table but was unable to speak their language, and unwilling to share their feasts of lobster, eels, and various bivalves. My mother’s family were closer. Descendants of Highland Scots from Glenfinnan, their Jacobitism long forgotten but still evident in certain habits of dissent, the MacInnises were more clannish, much more seeking of each other’s company. My mother’s family was my family. My childhood revolved around western Cape Breton in general and Inverness in particular: summer picnics at the beach, Easter and Thanksgiving dinners, odd weekends, all spent somehow connected to family, and food.

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June 22, 2020
Mary Hricko

A few years ago, a friend of mine went to a neighborhood garage sale in Pittsburgh where she found a Slovak cookbook. She decided to buy it for me as a gift since I collect vintage/ethnic cookbooks. When I received this book, I liked it immediately because it was put together just after World War II and it had a lot of ration recipes. As I skimmed through the pages, to my surprise I found three recipes submitted by my very own grandmother!

Intrigued by this discovery, I was curious how my grandmother came to be involved with this project, considering she was living in Ohio at the time this book was put together. I also tried to find out if anyone in my family knew why our grandmother submitted German food recipes to a Slovak cookbook. It made no sense, until I started digging deeper.

No one had any answers to my questions, so I began looking for German Slovak connections. My father's family came from Carpathian Germans and settled in Slovakia. Even though my grandparents migrated to America, many of their friends and family members remained in Slovakia until the 1940s.

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June 19, 2020
Ashley Adams

The pandemic has put me in a very nostalgic mood. With much more time on my hands, I have taken to going through old family photo albums. Many of these albums belonged to my grandfather and my great grandmother, who came from Quebec to the United States during the middle of the last century.

I have fond memories of childhood visits to Rosemont, the neighborhood in Montreal where my great grandmother grew up. I remember the whimsical looking staircases in front of the apartment buildings, the way the air smelled, and the soft patter of Canadian French being spoken. My relatives eventually moved out to Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu and Granby, where I have the most special memories of cooking on the raclette.

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June 18, 2020
Olesia Lew

A recurring topic of discussion in my childhood was who made the tastiest borsch. This is not an unusual subject for Ukrainians. It’s a bit like breathing. The distinctive, mildly-sweet tart flavor that gives borsch its personality, and finding just the right taste, was something of a point of pride among the families in our community.

March 12, 2020 will always stick out in my mind. It was my last day of work. I knew the food and hospitality industry was going to be severely affected, but I could not and still cannot imagine what it will look like when this pandemic is over.

To keep myself occupied, and through the encouragement of friends, I did what an unemployed chef should do: I wrote recipes. For years I had said I did not have time to sit down and write recipes. Now I did. I started to write down recipes and email them to a few friends who might want to try them at home. The list grew.

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June 17, 2020
Ioana Radu

Famous for being one of the few inhabited medieval strongholds in the world and (allegedly) the birthplace of Vlad the Impaler, Sighişoara is a little town in Transylvania where I spent all my childhood holidays in the company of my paternal grandparents. It has always been a magical place for me; a place where time seemed to slow and impossibly warp in ways that news of my naughty deeds reached my grandma way before I got home. It was a place where city kids like me could escape the scorching Bucharest summers, enjoy the bountiful countryside, and forget the scarcity of communist Roumania.

The late 1980s in Roumania marked the decline of the communist regime, if for no other reason than because the country starved given that all of its food production was earmarked for export to help pay the foreign debt. I still remember buying bread with ration cards – we had 1.5 breads for a family of four per day - and routinely lining up for hours at the grocery store in the hopes of getting essentials such as eggs, butter, or meat.

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June 16, 2020
Alex Touloumtzidis and Kleri Bakoura

The coronavirus crisis that we are going through is, perhaps, along with the economic recession of 2008, the greatest crisis that humanity has faced in the 21st century. The coronavirus pandemic, its rapid spread, the quarantine, the uncertainty and the fear for the future, make us reflect on all the dimensions that constitute human health (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social) and how they relate to food.

Considering the crisis we are experiencing and the questions that arise from it, we turned our attention back to the past to seek information regarding food in periods of crises, bearing in mind that the past is not repeated and that every crisis has its own unique characteristics. We turned to the project that we started in 2018, The Heritage of Taste , for information. It explored cultural practices related to food and health by collecting oral history testimonies from elderly people in our area (Thessaly). By reexamining our archival material, we observed the ways that specific foods can become the objects or symbols of a crisis.

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June 15, 2020
Danielle Poitras

At any time a smell can take me to another place. Especially now, during the stay-at-home order in Colorado, the smell of almost burnt butter in a cast iron pan brings me back to my childhood home in Connecticut, to Sunday evenings when my father was making crêpes.

I’d find him in our patchwork kitchen with a sunny yellow apron tied tightly over his belly. By this point the smoke alarm might already be going off. After whisking a few eggs and some milk in a stainless steel mixing bowl, he’d slowly add this mixture to a bowl with flour and salt. I never once saw him measure any ingredients. He could tell if the proportions were off by the consistency of the batter. He would add more flour with the sweep of his hand.

This is what I remember: Melt butter in a medium hot pan. Pour the batter with a ladle into the pan and swirl it around to cover the surface. Gently work a spatula over the crêpe to fill in the holes.

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June 12, 2020
Sabine Frid-Bernards

Growing up as a vegetarian in a Swedish-American household, my favorite part of Swedish cooking was always the pastries and the snacks (as an adult, I've learned to love beets and dill, too). My Mormor (Mother's Mother) came to Sweden from Finland at 16 and was a great cook, but very traditional. When we would go over for lunch, she would throw up her hands and say, "I don't know what to cook you vegetarians!" So when I or my other vegetarian cousin were there, she would always make the same thing for lunch: onion soup with toasted bread and cheese, and pancakes with ice cream and lingonberry jam. We had no complaints. We would eat the food in her kitchen, with the light hanging low above the table, amongst all her eclectic art, and always finish with strong coffee and picking at the bowl of candy on the table.

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June 11, 2020
Stacey Zembrzycki

To say that food is on everyone’s mind would be an understatement. Trying to figure out how to get food, without coming into contact with COVID-19, is a real challenge. If we choose to refrain from entering a physical store, we must now wait in long, virtual lines to enter the websites of our favourite providers and hope, fingers crossed, that we can obtain a delivery time slot once our orders are placed. Some sites are no longer letting customers create new accounts while others can’t offer delivery for at least a week. Often, when long-awaited deliveries arrive, items are missing, unavailable given the lag between ordering and delivery. Everyone is overwhelmed, especially those on the frontlines doing the important work of ensuring we are fed. Some large retailers have increased wages, and here in Quebec these essential workers are now receiving a weekly hazard bonus of up to $100. The risks they face are real, made clear by their rates of infection.

Eating food is also a means through which we are trying to cope. Meal planning, which many of us rigorously adhere to in normal circumstances, is now lost to the anxiety of the moment. Meals that seemed like a good idea at breakfast are unappealing by the time dinner rolls around because we have stress-eaten our way through the day.

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June 10, 2020
Matthias Trischler

My grandmother died a few weeks ago. A week after her 99th birthday. It didn't come as a surprise. Over the last year she has been quite sick. But when it happened it hit me and my family harder than I thought it would. You simply cannot prepare for something like this: death, loss, grief. I am very bad with death. I mean, is anyone good with it? I don't think I can comprehend yet what has happened. My dad called me the morning it happened. Already then, in that moment, I knew something was up. He doesn’t usually call that early and it was something I had imagined many times. At least for the past year. To receive this call.

All I wanted in that moment was to be with my family. To help prepare for the funeral and to be there for my mum to help her go through her mother’s things. But I couldn’t. I live in Copenhagen with my wonderful wife and my one-year-old daughter.

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June 9, 2020
Cynthia Hammond

My mother used to make this treat for us, my three sisters and I, on the nights when my father was off doing "something marvelous" as she used to put it. When we were little, on these nights, she would allow us to dress up in her clothes and jewelry, put on her lipstick or eyeshadow, and listen to the one pop record my father allowed in the house: the Beatles' Help!

My mother would put this on for us on my father's otherwise forbidden stereo, in the otherwise forbidden living room. Those nights were moments of great joy, liberation, and fun – we would dance and laugh in our borrowed clothes and shoes until we couldn't breathe. It was all the more wonderful a time because we had our mother to ourselves.

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June 8, 2020
Matthew Barlow

Like everyone else, COVID-19 means I am spending more time in the kitchen, experimenting, trying to make new things and relying on my arsenal of practiced ways to create new dishes. My style in the kitchen owes a lot to my Uncle Russ.

I inherited my love of food and cooking from my Uncle Russell, who was a chef. Cooked for the Queen herself once, he did. My cousin Lindsay is a chef. Until I was 30, I spent a lot of time working in restaurants and bars, in the kitchen, at the bar, waiting tables, bouncing. You learn a few things along the way, it turns out. I worked a bit with my Uncle Russ. He was a hard man to be in a kitchen with, but we talked a lot about how to make food, what went into food. From him, I learned how to make food in a manner that was less technical than it was a feeling, a sense of what would go together, how it would cook or bake, which spices worked with what and most importantly, what flavours would work with other flavours.

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June 5, 2020
Neenah Estrella-Luna

At the beginning of COVID-19 crisis, several East Boston based community building and social movement organizations began collaborating under the umbrella of Mutual Aid Eastie. The idea was that neighbors with abundance could share with or support neighbors in need. It was our commitment from the beginning that not a single child and not a single adult in Eastie should go hungry. We honestly had no idea what we were getting ourselves into but we were going to figure it out because that’s what organizers and activists do.

Early on, I learned from one of our Muslim neighbors that they were unable to take advantage of the Boston Public Schools’ (BPS) meals because they are not halal. In Boston, as in other places around the country, the school meal programs alleviate the food insecurity suffered by a significant number of young people, particularly in communities of color and immigrant communities.

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June 4, 2020

As any home cook will tell you, ingredients react with other ingredients. And learning a few new techniques can up your game in ways you never imagined. I was 35 when I was introduced to a pastry cutter. Before that I used my fingers. I wondered why my pie crusts were tough -- I was warming up the butter as I broke it into the dough. I learned, I do better and now my crusts are kind of great. Now is a moment for both new ingredients and new techniques.

Today we highlight a list of 40+ books for anti-racist educators compiled by educator and culturally responsive leadership coach Joe Truss. We examine three of his book recommendations in depth and explore how they offer new information and new techniques for oral and public historians.

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June 1, 2020
Deidre Cuffee-Gray

At the start of COVID-19 - the “silver lining” conversation continually annoyed me. I too had leisure time, and worked on my Spanish, and thought about what I was grateful for every morning, and had some Zoom moments with my family (and then didn’t).

Couldn’t put my finger on it.

However, it remains - the inequity of it all. There were people wiping down COVID ERs, delivering, not having a job before and during, not homeschooling because they were too tired or didn’t have a school community that plugged them in.

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May 29, 2020
Karly Hurlock

I was lucky enough to grow up surrounded by my Nona’s delicious cooking and baking. While I grew up on Italian favourites like spaghetti & meatballs and risotto passed down to my Nona from her mother, the vast majority of the recipes that would come to be considered household and holiday staples in our family were taught to my Nona by her Scottish mother-in-law. At 18 years old, my Italian-Canadian Nona Anita married my Scottish-Canadian Nono Archie (I believe, "Nono" was simply chosen for consistency, because Nona and Grandpa just doesn't have the same ring to it). My Nona married into the Fraser clan and came to learn how to make all the Fraser family favourites from her mother-in-law Marie, known to me as "Granny". This included everything from pie dough and date squares, to pickles and relishes, and a full turkey dinner (to be enjoyed three times a year, at Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas).

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May 28, 2020
Shin Yu Pai

Growing up, I watched my parents prepare congee in a variety of ways. My mother used leftover rice combined with water to create a soupy porridge in the morning. My father's method was to measure a cup of white rice and to add 4-6 cups of water to a small pot that he'd heat on the stove. My father touted congee as a healthful and easily digestible food which seemed to be a part of his daily diet. Being a picky kid, if the temperature or consistency was off on a batch of congee, I'd turn up my nose at it, in the way that I can be a snob about overly dry oatmeal. Neither of my parents' cooking methods worked out well for me and I often struggled to find the right combination of water to rice to get the creaminess of a classic congee.

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May 27, 2020
Pietro Clemente

Bianca Pennella, my mother, arrived in Cagliari (Sardinia) in 1938 after marrying my father, Salvatore Clemente. They had met in Portici, near Naples, where she lived, and where my father was studying for his degree in Agrarian Science. Culturally, she maintained a deep connection to Naples and its traditions throughout her life. She kept speaking with a Campanian accent and followed a number of traditional recipes, both sweet and savoury, which my brothers and I loved.

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May 26, 2020
Mary Anne Poutanen

At Grandma’s house, I played in the backyard sauna and accompanied her as she shopped for groceries on Bay Street in Thunder Bay, each time stopping for refreshments at the Hoito in the Finnish Labour Temple – of which she was a member - before returning home. She gave me my first watch having purchased it from a Finnish-Canadian jeweller on Bay Street. I went to Grandma’s sauna with her, my mother, Auntie Norma, and my sister Lynda on Saturday evenings. She would sit on the top bench and splash water on the hot rocks; my sister and I would crouch by the door to escape the dense steam. At the end of sauna, we rested in the change room to consume soft drinks carefully selected from a wooden box kept in Grandma’s closet. I have come to realize that sauna reinforced gender solidarity and provided moments to listen to adult female conversations related to the family, to the local community, and even to the world. They were resilient women. But, I also recognize that it must have been difficult for my mom who did not speak Finnish although she understood the language.

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May 25, 2020
Arwa Hussain

Bateta champ, or potato cutlets, is a seemingly simple fried little nugget of deliciousness that has as many variations as it has names in the Dawoodi Bohra community, a sect of Shi’te Islam that lives in diasporas around the world, and particularly in India, Pakistan, and Africa. The community has its own distinct culture, customs, dress, language, and food traditions, which have become markers of its identity. In the areas where they live, the community is known for its love of good food. Every Bohra celebration or gathering is a testament to this fact.

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May 24, 2020
Julia Afflito and Jennifer Cook

Two posts about cooking in an Italian American tradition from Salem State students Julia Afflito and Jennifer Cook. Both reflect on the importance of being together with their families and the ways that has changed due to COVID-19. While Julia finds herself under the same roof with her six siblings for the first time in years, Jennifer is missing the gathering of the clan that happened often.

Julia shares her dad's sauce with meatballs and Jennifer remembers her great-grandmother's pizzelles.

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May 23, 2020
Isabella Halko

As a child, I would look forward to our trips down to the Koreatown of Ellicott City. I loved the trips to the H-Mart, Lotte Mart, and the BBQ place. It’s where I first ate my favorite dish, Jajangmyeon, and where I learned to love spicy foods like this tteokbokki. I would look forward to the Korean-American wives clubs events that my grandmother would force me to go to where I would fill up on a purple rice dish and various noodle dishes. I still go to the H-Marts here in Massachusetts and I always force my roommates to come because it really is a magical place. The last couple of trips have been jarring, though. H-Marts almost always have a food court and a bakery. Seeing everything closed down and blocked off made the store feel lonely. I long for the day where I can sit with my roommates and force them to try new foods.

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May 22, 2020
Danny Gillis

My yaya would tell me about her uncle, a suspected communist, hiding in his closet while the national guardsman held a gun to his four-year-old son’s head demanding to know his father’s whereabouts. How only a few days after that incident, the local police picked him up and he was never heard from again. My grand-uncle was one of the disappeared.

She would tell me about how she would sneak her father’s newspaper into bed at night to try and teach herself how to read. Or how both of her parents died when she was only 24 years old, making her the head of household for her five younger siblings, just as she was beginning her own family with the recent birth of my aunt.

She would talk, and I would listen.

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May 21, 2020
Connor Campbell

I’ve heard a lot about “simpler times”, and how so many of us wish to return there. For me, it isn’t simpler times; it is the heat of the stove and the crowded house, the smell of the Christmas tree and the baking cookies, and the feeling that I was quite content to know that surely I would do this for the rest of my life. I never considered a Christmas without my aunt to guide me, “Don’t cut it too thick!”, “Don’t burn yourself, use oven mitts!” My aunt is stubborn and kind. And she is old. Covid-19 terrifies me because I don’t know how, one day, I can bake these cookies alone in the kitchen.

But, maybe, now I won’t be alone - as I leave this recipe in good hands with all of you.

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May 20, 2020
Alex Sacco

For the past year, I have been working on the kitchen staff for a nursing home in my community. I got the job so I could put myself through college. However, over time, I have begun to care about the people who come into the kitchen to eat. I always want my folks to eat well and be happy. My job, no matter how menial it is, instills great pride. Since the coronavirus has entered the United States, my nursing home, like others worldwide, has been severely impacted by this disease outbreak. Since March of 2020, I have seen a lot of people die. These people, at one time, were valued members of someone’s family, school, company. What bothers me the most is that these people could not have their families with them as they died. I spend every day worrying for the residents and for the safety of my friends, family, colleagues and those I do not know.

My love for history has always kept me grounded in personal times of anxiety and struggle, like now.

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May 19, 2020
Jessica Harris

In the late 19 th century Luther Burbank, a horticulturist in California, set out to breed a thornless blackberry plant. He acquired different blackberry seeds from around the world, including one small envelope he believed to be from India. These plants were fast growers—a single cane will grow up to 25 feet in one season, and the fruit is plentiful. He dubbed them Himalayan Giants, and knowing the plant would do well in the temperate climate of the Pacific Northwest, he began selling seeds up in Seattle.

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May 18, 2020

This week, we highlight voices of university students from Baylor University and Salem State University whose lives were suddenly upended by COVID-19. Along with their teachers, students made the move to emergency online/remote teaching, pivoting over the course of a few days to ensure that they could complete their courses. Many were also forced to pack up their belongings and move out of residences with little notice, either returning home to quarantine with family members or finding alternative living arrangements on short notice. Others have continued to work, often full time, as essential workers in nursing homes, restaraunts, and grocery stores. Today’s posts are from Baylor students, one appears here this morning and another will be posted this afternoon. These stories and recipes speak to two themes: family food memories that connect the authors to home; and food strategies for enduring quarantine/shelter in place directives. Throughout the rest of the week, students from Margo Shea’s Intro to Public History course, herself a co-editor of Historians Cooking the Past, will share their reflections on similar issues: family memories and connecting to cuisine from the corners of the world they and their families call home.

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May 18, 2020

This week, we highlight voices of university students from Baylor University and Salem State University whose lives were suddenly upended by COVID-19. Along with their teachers, students made the move to emergency online/remote teaching, pivoting over the course of a few days to ensure that they could complete their courses. Many were also forced to pack up their belongings and move out of residences with little notice, either returning home to quarantine with family members or finding alternative living arrangements on short notice. Others have continued to work, often full time, as essential workers in nursing homes, restaraunts, and grocery stores. Today’s posts are from Baylor students, one appears here this morning and another will be posted this afternoon. These stories and recipes speak to two themes: family food memories that connect the authors to home; and food strategies for enduring quarantine/shelter in place directives. Throughout the rest of the week, students from Margo Shea’s Intro to Public History course, herself a co-editor of Historians Cooking the Past, will share their reflections on similar issues: family memories and connecting to cuisine from the corners of the world they and their families call home.

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May 15, 2020
Samantha Stevens

Garlic has been touted throughout the ages for its healing properties, for its ability to stave off heart disease, lower cholesterol, treat infections, boost the immune system, and more. It’s one of those kitchen staples that I've always enjoyed working with. There is just something about the bulb’s easy spice, something that fills even the most mundane dish with a burst of flavour. Pair it with a dry earthy herb like elegant saffron and you create food that poets and chefs have coveted and called gourmet.

Though, despite my love for the pungent vegetable, yes, garlic is a vegetable, I’ve rarely used it in large quantities at one time. This is mostly out of fear of the after-smell, and out of respect for my neighbours who would have to live with the smell wafting out of my kitchen long after I’m done cooking. So when I came across a recipe for a garlic soup at a small rural festival, I expected the garlic to be kept in moderation, thinking that others shared my concerns. But I was about to learn that not only was I completely wrong in that assumption, my fear that excessive garlic would drive people away was actually far removed from the truth.

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May 14, 2020
Sara Goek

I know few Turkish words, but most of the words I do know relate to food. I can ask for tea (çay) or coffee (kahve), and name some of my favorite dishes (like baklava, obviously). In the realm of embarrassing stories from childhood, my family never tires of reminding me of when, visiting Turkey as a toddler, I repeatedly asked for “more zeytin, more zeytin” (olives – still a favorite).

My father is Turkish and my mother American. Most of my father’s family still lives in Turkey and I grew up here in the US...Without the language, my primary connection to a Turkish identity is through food. My Babaanne (father’s mother) and I can’t speak much to each other, but we can cook, and eat, together. With the help of my dad, acting as translator, she has taught me how to make some of my favorite dishes. The recipes themselves reflect her own life history….

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May 13, 2020
Nick Tosaj

A few years ago I had the pleasure of travelling to Berlin to visit my paternal grandmother’s relatives in Germany for the first time. I stayed with my great aunt Jutta, a warm-hearted and generous woman with a deep love of food. The most striking feature of Jutta’s lot was an immense walnut tree with boughs that spanned the width of the yard. The tree had grown to be an important part of the home’s ecosystem, dominating a space where three generations of family met regularly to dine and celebrate. The tree’s arching branches delivered welcome shade in the Berlin summer; they also hung heavy with walnuts. I fondly remember a cloth sack containing the previous year’s harvest that hung on the porch alongside a well-used nutcracker — an open invitation to pair freshly cracked walnuts with a crisp glass of Riesling, some herb-rolled cheese, and good conversation.

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May 12, 2020
Anne Noonan

Let me make three confessions, right off the bat.

First, I'm not a historian, just a storytelling psychologist. Second, I'm not Italian, though I did grow up in an inner-city Italian neighborhood in Massachusetts.

And third, I'm not exactly cooking my past here. To be sure, my French-Canadian mother knew how to feed our family of 10, and her spaghetti with meat sauce was nourishing and tasty enough. But it never would have won a neighborhood cook-off, if only for the fact that she didn't use garlic.

Ever. I know: it's unthinkable. Garlic was simply not a part of her past, nor a part of my Irish-American father's past.

But unless we're true culinary innovators, any time we prepare a meal we're cooking the past – a past – even if it's not our own. The brain might go to the very word repast: to feed oneself; to feed others. But maybe the heart spins its own definition: to re-past, that is, to re-engage with the past.

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May 11, 2020
Anonymous

Sometimes, the recipe is the story…

1. Preheat your oven to 350/180 degrees.

2. Combine the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon in a large bowl. As you stir them together, take a moment to think about all the amazing colleagues you’ve worked with over the years, who have since left academia due to lack of regular employment. Feel how much you miss them. Then, focus on the realization that they have moved on to work in other areas and are likely in a much better place than you. Some of them are living close to their families, in places they love. Some even have social lives outside of their work. And yet you are considered the “success story” for having managed to keep your head above water—just barely—in academia these past few years. Take a deep breath into your diaphragm and then exhale, laughing out loud at the irony. They say laughter is the best medicine after all.

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May 8, 2020
Nancy Janovicek

This recipe is from the Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church Cookbook. My paternal grandparents were among the Slovak and German immigrants who founded this church in Chatham, Ontario in 1946.

This cookbook connects me to the culinary heritage that my mom couldn’t teach me because she died in 1982, when I was twelve. It was a church fundraiser. I remember Mom typing these recipes from handwritten notes entrusted to her from this community of women bonded in family, friendship, and faith.

Mom contributed a lot of recipes, but my favourites are the desserts. I make Slovak Walnut Crescents every Christmas. Slovak Walnut Torte is Dad’s favourite cake. He turns 80 next year and I hope to bake this cake for him when I go home for the celebration.

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May 7, 2020
Donna Gabaccia

Some time in early 1975, forty University of Michigan teaching and research assistants picketed outside a physical plant building. They were on strike to demand the University negotiate a first contract with their union. That morning the students planned to provoke police into arresting them as they slowed traffic and distributed leaflets to unionized building trades workers. Hustled into police wagons, the students sang the “Internationale” and “Solidarity Forever” as they rode to the Washtenaw County Courthouse.

I was one of those picketers. I was arrested. And that is all I remembered of that day until 2020 -- when an old box of recipes opened a door to the past: Marcel Proust had his madeline; I had eggplant parm.

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May 6, 2020
Sady Sullivan

Last summer, my mom told me stories I hadn’t heard before about my great-great-grandmother, my Nana’s Nana: how she was a real firecracker, mischievous and funny; how she would hide and throw snowballs at her grandchildren and they would think it was the neighbors and chaos would ensue until she popped out of hiding. I can picture my own grandmother as a child laughing. My Nana was a wonderfully playful grandmother and it made sense to hear that my Nana’s grandmother was a joyous rascal.

Then my mom said, "Maybe she was so full of life because she lost all four of her sisters to a flu one winter."

“1918?” I asked knowingly.

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May 5, 2020
Cassandra Marsillo

Week two of social isolation, the week I learned to make pasta e rapini over the phone, was the week I started preparing for emergency remote teaching.

In May 2019, I was sitting at my desk at my old job in Ottawa when I got called for an interview for my dream job. The day before, I had just sobbed into the phone about giving up. I had applied for at least 30 jobs in Montreal that month - and many more before - and hadn’t gotten a single positive response. But then I got that call. Within two weeks, I had an interview, got the job, and started teaching. I spent the next month between Montreal and Ottawa, between the two jobs as I tied up loose ends before moving my last boxes back to the city I call home. I spent the next two months furiously trying to keep up, catch up, and not feel like a complete impostor. Having just finished my master’s, I knew how lucky I was to be teaching in a college classroom. Despite the initial precarity, it’s a position many are dying to be in.

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May 4, 2020
Cathy Stanton

Ever since I became deeply involved with the leadership of our local co-op, we’ve shifted our shopping patterns almost completely. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, a bunch of things seemed to fall suddenly into place for us and for the co-op. First, it was very easy for us to stop going to supermarkets altogether. Who needs them? We co-own our own grocery store, and we’ve learned how to shop there for most of what we eat. The resurgence of local agriculture and the rebuilding of local food economies in this part of the country means we can draw on these resources to put together a pretty complete shopping list of foods produced and processed within not much more than a hundred-mile radius. COVID-19 has accelerated that process of rebuilding, literally and conceptually. It’s one of those moments when a lot of people are thinking harder about the sources and safety of their food. Our sales at the co-op have more than doubled since the stay-at-home order went into effect in Massachusetts. In turn, we’ve more than doubled the amount we’re buying from our largely-local suppliers.

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May 1, 2020
Megan Breault

The current situation with COVID-19 has me reminiscing a lot about the past and particularly about my family’s history. Because of the pandemic, I recently moved back to Forget, Saskatchewan, to the home where my dad grew up. The move and my boredom have led me to do a fair amount of baking since I arrived. Some of which are my grandma's recipes.

My paternal grandma, Mary Breault, played an active role in my childhood. Growing up, she was often over at our house or we were at hers and she always had a constant supply of baking on hand. My grandma could make everything from buns to pies to cookies. As I grew older, I discovered that I had inherited her love of baking even though I often didn't get the opportunity to make baked goods with her directly. After she passed in 2015, my mom and aunts discovered that she had written some of her recipes down (she mostly baked from memory).

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April 30, 2020
Joyce Pillarella

I grew up in a duplex furnished in mid-century modern, from the Scandinavian furniture to the square plates on our teak table. These pieces announced that my parents were stylish, cosmopolitan people.

The basement was another story. It’s where old furniture went to die and yes, we had the mandatory second kitchen and food production area that graced all Italian duplexes in Montreal. Tucked in the back of the basement was the cantina (cold storage room). The steel shelves were always bursting with jars of tomato sauce and vegetable preserves, olive oil, flour, damigiane (16 gallon containers) of wine, and oregano from the garden, hung to dry like chandeliers.

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April 29, 2020
Elizabeth DeWolfe

I can still hear the sound of the support for the table leaf being pulled into place; the wooden bar squeaked, the drop leaf creaked as it was raised into position. Years before, the clamp from a meat grinder had left its bite marks on the edge of the table. My grandmother sat at the center, my Mom to her right, and I sat to her left, squished into a nook between the refrigerator, the table, and the wall. It was luncheon in the 1970s and at the end was Sara Lee Torte, or what I knew as Grandma’s Mocha Cake. When she took it out of the freezer, a cloud of cool air drifted down to the table.

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April 28, 2020
Margo Shea

The fact of “USA #1 for COVID-19” has scared and angered me, as it has many people. So quickly we overcame other nations for this dubious and terrifying notoriety. Frustration at the way we’ve handled it as a nation, at inequalities the virus has revealed and our equanimity with those inequalities, at disaster capitalism generally and at coronavirus marketing campaigns grows exponentially in my belly by the day. Naomi Klein came up with the term disaster capitalism to name the ways “private industries spring up to directly profit from large-scale crises.” I lie awake worrying about it just as much as I worry about COVID-19 coming for me or my loved ones.

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April 27, 2020
Erin Jessee

In these strange times, I find myself thinking about absence. While I’m a contented introvert most of the time, COVID-19 has me thinking about all the people with whom I usually interact in the spring and summer months—peak periods of work-related travel for me. Like many academics, the people I love are spread all around the world. My work at the University of Glasgow keeps me in Scotland during the teaching semesters, but as soon as teaching ends I’m usually travelling back and forth to Rwanda for fieldwork, attending international conferences to connect with some of my favourite scholars, and, when time and funds permit, sneaking home for a visit with family back in Canada. I will miss these visits and the people who take time out of their busy schedules this year to connect with me, usually over food. And so, I dedicate this pankoka recipe to them. It’s a favourite of mine: simple to make, adaptable to the contents of most kitchens at any time of the year, and so delicious.

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April 24, 2020
Rowen Germain

As long as I can remember, my family has been a big believer in pancakes on weekend mornings. When we were young, my Dad would spoon pancakes into letters (typically the first letter of our names), stick figures, or animals. A family video shows my Dad allowing my oldest sister, Elyse, to eat a small spoonful of pancake batter: at three years old, she takes a ladleful in haste as my parents exclaim, “Elyse, just a small spoonful!”

As we got older, pancakes remained a part of our family routine, albeit appearing in more typical, circular shapes. Pancakes were a staple, staying with our family despite moves from Toronto to England, from England to Wales, and from Wales to Ottawa, where my three sisters and I spent our teenage years. We grew increasingly busy as we moved through middle school and high school, and academics, sports, and social circles drew us apart.

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April 23, 2020
Sali Lafrenie

“It tastes like more.” That’s what my Great Grandma and my Grandma Cindy used to say when they liked something. And then they’d wait to see my reaction and just laugh like they had heard the funniest joke. At this point they had probably said this to me at least once earlier in the day if not earlier in the week. And if it wasn't this statement then it would be expressed in another, usually in the follow-up questions they had after meals (except breakfast because we didn’t eat dessert in the morning, an arbitrary rule to me, but anyway).

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April 22, 2020
Kate Preissler

There was nothing special about the burger. What is special is my memory of it. Without any hazy anxiety overlay, I can picture all the details. I see the dirt road we sat on. The little coffee cans scattered across the path as they warmed up like burners, suddenly obvious in their rightness for this function. And I see the simple burger on a white grocery store bun in my hand, as I sat cross-legged on the path that beautiful day in the woods. It would be a long time - honestly maybe not until this very week - before I recognized that the choice I’d made to stay at home from Survival was not a failure of courage, but an early triumph of caring for myself in my own way.

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April 21, 2020
Stacey Zembrzycki

I still remember the call. The phone ringing in the long, dark hallway in Baba’s apartment, and my dad muttering ‘mmm hmmm,’ ‘ok,’ ‘great,’ ‘goodbye,’ as Baba and I stood in silence watching, listening. That call changed our lives. Dad had finally gotten a full-time job and soon he’d be off to Aylmer, Ontario, which was then an eight hour drive from home, to attend police college for four months. It was 1984, the start of my father’s honourable thirty-four-year-career with Sudbury’s police force.

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April 20, 2020
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett with introduction by Cheryl Harned

When I was asked to write an introduction to Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s version of her mother’s split pea and barley soup that had traveled from the once Polish city of Brest-Litovsk, to Canada, and back to Poland (all in the last century), I didn’t quite know what to say. I wanted to safeguard the original and also find my own place at the table, even if I wasn’t Jewish and my own family’s ties to Poland were nearly two centuries removed and thus not tangible in any meaningful way. I sat with it a few days and nothing came to mind, so I decided to start cooking anyway.

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April 17, 2020
Mary Rizzo

Braised broccoli rabe is Italian soul food. It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized not everybody ate it. What I love is its bitterness. So does my mother -- one of the few things we agree on. My mother made it all the time growing up. No recipe. Just knowing how to do it through her DNA. She cooked all the meals when I was a child, never sitting down to eat. Instead, she'd nibble from the pot, grabbing a forkful of tender oily greens while we ate on plates.

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April 16, 2020
Jesse

"I don't care about your Aunt Debbie's frozen lemon meringue cake."

I remember it through a haze of years. It was ten days to my Bar Mitzvah. I was on my Synagogue's bimah reading a polished draft of the speech I would give to the congregation. The Rabbi who had dutifully prepared me for what it meant to become an adult in the Jewish faith, as he had with many other children, stopped me mid-sentence.

But my aunt is coming all the way from Toronto, I thought to myself. And, her frozen lemon meringue cake really is that good! But the decision was made, my speech was going on too long and the line was cut.

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April 15, 2020
Anna Sheftel

One of my family’s idiosyncratic Passover traditions is that we eat our matzah balls in clear borscht, traditional Polish beet soup. Most Ashkenazi Jews eat them in chicken soup. I love watching the vibrant broth dye the fluffy dumplings pink. The combination is delicious, both sweet and sour, and it has always seemed like an apt representation of my family’s own culture: Ashkenazi Jewish, but also still deeply Polish, as both my parents’ families stayed in Poland longer after the war than most Jews. My dad left in the 50s, while my mom was the first of her family to move over in the mid-70s.

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April 14, 2020
Kelly Britt

Growing up, Easter was always my favorite holiday due to the season: spring, and the food, chocolate being my favorite food group. Easter was usually spent with family at my gram's, including an aunt and uncle and cousins, complete with tons of food. Some traditional Slovak dishes like a cold buttermilk soup were always on the table (I have no idea what it's called because the thought of it made me gag.) One staple that everyone loved was my mother's bunny cake. Usually a white cake with sugar icing, it was always the desert for the day and always a fun one to decorate, complete with dye-greened coconut for grass and black jelly beans for eyes, a nose, and whiskers.

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April 13, 2020
Leyla Neyzi

When I began to read the “call to cook” sent by my friend and fellow oral historian Stacey Zembrzycki for the Historians Cooking the Past blog, I had a Proustian moment. Quarantined at home like many around the globe, I found myself smelling and desiring the lentil soup my beloved maternal grandmother lovingly cooked for her grandchildren so many years ago in a city that is lost—the Istanbul of my childhood. So I would like to share this memory and this recipe.

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April 10, 2020
Tyson Røsberg

Food is so much at the heart of how I like to do Church: hosting Evening Prayer dinner parties, soup-lunches, mission meals for the poor, or tea-and-talk discussion circles. I like to imagine my dining room as an extension of the Church. Food is the universal language: when we eat together with other people, we experience a great sense of unity. Communal bonds are born over passing bread and butter. Food (dare I say, good food) is an essential Church ministry tool!

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April 9, 2020
Marlene Epp

As many people took to baking and cooking when told to stay home to flatten the COVID-19 curve, I too decided to make some comfort food—though no one in my household would say I am a baker. My choice of recipe from The Mennonite Treasury of Recipes was for a simple, two-layered, white flour yeast bun called Zwieback (there are many spellings, this is my choice). It is a foodstuff familiar to Mennonites with ancestral history in the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine.

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April 8, 2020
Rachel Berger

I love Passover. I love it more than Channukah and Rosh Hashanah and Christmas and Diwali and my birthday and the various anniversaries of lovely things that have happened to me. I hate Zoom, though I am getting used to it. Which is to say that no one is less excited than I am to do my favourite thing on my most hated platform. Tonight and tomorrow evening, Jews all over the world will prepare small iterations of our large meals and pour out glasses of wine for those with whom we are confined, and then we will log on to connect with our families.

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April 7, 2020
Zeina Ismail-Allouche

In this time of confinement and physical distancing, I find myself delving into feelings, sensations, smells, and tastes as a way to reflect on what has been lost. Remembering has become a part of my daily routine to cope with the void of time. It seems as though I am trying to hold close all of the images and colors of the country that I left behind some five years ago when I immigrated to Canada. The streets, the sea, and the smell of Jasmine are all packed within me. I also invite back my memories of Tripoli, my home city in Lebanon, and the images of my mother, Meherdicar, who passed away some thirty years ago.

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April 6, 2020
Bryonie Reid

Food is a pressing issue right now in a way it hasn’t been before, and some of my food habits are standing me in good stead. I am used to planning a week’s worth of meals and shopping once a week on that basis. I am confident in improvising with leftovers. Knowledge about buying, growing, preparing, cooking and sharing food has been handed down to me by my mother and one grandmother, and added to in various ways during my 41 years living on the island of Ireland, but I don’t think I am drawing on anything that could be termed a collective heritage. I hesitate to claim connection to a national food culture because ‘national’ cultures on this island tend to exclude at least some of the people all of the time, and because I wonder whether Ireland has a national food culture at all.

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April 3, 2020
Sharon Gubbay Helfer

Tonight, as the sun sets, Jews all over the world will gather around their tables and break bread, challah, for Shabbat. Those at the table will likely be limited exclusively to immediate members of their family, rather than extended members who routinely celebrate together each Friday. Watching from afar, I see that my home city of Montreal has become the epicentre for Canada’s COVID-19 outbreak. Côte Saint-Luc, a densely populated Jewish neighbourhood with a large proportion of Holocaust survivors, has been particularly hard hit, with rates of infection rising steadily each day.

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April 2, 2020
Ayda Loewen-Clarke

“Butter is the ultimate luxury!” my Granny Shirley exclaimed, as we baked Christmas cookies together a few years ago. I will admit, during my anxiety-fueled pandemic panic shopping, it was butter and not toilet paper that was my priority. When it became clear that this global catastrophe was just beginning and was not likely to pass quickly, I made a quick decision to head back home to Winnipeg to be near (but appropriately socially distanced from) my family. Before the trip, I squeezed a couple of pounds of frozen butter into my suitcase.

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April 1, 2020
Cassandra Marsillo

I’m not one for long phone calls. As a kid and a teen, though, I remember easily spending two to three hours on the phone after school and on weekends with friends, cousins, and crushes. My poor parents. I cherished my first phone: a transparent purple corded phone, just for me, in my room (sadly, no personal line). Once I started high school and had to take the metro there and back every day, I was gifted a Samsung E300. Phone conversations were easier when the alternative was T9.

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March 31, 2020
Stacey Zembrzycki

In hindsight, my preparation for COVID-19 began in the basements of my youth, the cold, damp, musty, dimly-lit ones where my Grandma Alice and Baba Olga stored their preserves on shelves, their pickles in second fridges, and anything that could be frozen in their “deep freezes.” Both were working-class, their husbands employed by the International Nickel Company, and so having anything extra was a luxury, especially during the tough times that plagued my community in northern Ontario. Strikes, lay-offs, and recessions all took their toll, leading both of my grandmothers to be resourceful when it came to food.

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March 29, 2020
Margo Shea

Life in the time of the coronavirus is eerily quiet. I have never become fully used to the quietude of my adulthood home and now the lack of people-generated noise feels especially imposing. The youngest of six children, I was raised in a city with my parents’ parents living a mile or so away. A bevy of aunts, uncles and cousins were part of my quotidian world. Houses were small and gatherings were large, noisy, chaotic and mostly loving. Life in general was that way.

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March 25, 2020
Stacey Zembrzycki

I started preparing for COVID-19 about a month before the Premier of Québec declared a public health emergency on March 14, 2020, effectively closing the schools in which my husband and I work, banning visits to hospitals, retirement homes, and long-term care facilities, and asking those who are either immune-compromised or over seventy-years-old to isolate themselves from the larger public. Teaching about the Black Death in my Western Civilization class and reading about what was happening in Wuhan gave me perspective, [...]

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July 23, 2020
Cassandra Marsillo

It’s been quite a few years since I’ve seen these tents. They’re icons of my childhood summers. Every August, we celebrated my great-grandfather Nonno Bart’s birthday in my nonni’s backyard, where I breathed in the intermingling smells of grass and tomato plants and the bbq. It was an anticipated family affair. The tents meant a day with all my dad’s cousins and their kids. It meant running to get the soccer ball after we’d kicked it over the fence for the 10th time, swings (before the tree was cut down), and make-believe games.

I can’t remember exactly when we stopped having these bbqs. Various efforts have been made over the years to hold some new version of them, with “Marsillo cousin parties” at beaches, parks, and other backyards or in other homes. But as always happens when people grow older and families grow bigger, it becomes harder to gather everyone in the same place, at the same time without interfering with work, activities, or other commitments. The people themselves have become almost nostalgic to me. We don’t see each other often, but when we do, I always get this feeling of being both in the past and in the present.

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