For immigrant communities, preserving traditions often involves cooking. Eating like at home is comforting! And this is also very important. But over the past two years, groceries have become more and more expensive. Here’s how Meherunnessa, originally from Bangladesh, manages to keep her traditions alive… and tasty!
Do you know about food banks? These are organizations that offer food to people who don’t have a lot of money. They are very popular at the moment, due to the rise in food prices. In Quebec, one in four food bank users is an immigrant or refugee.
From Bangladesh to Montreal
Meherunnessa Chowdhury comes from Bangladesh, an Asian country that is glued to India. When she lived there, she employed a cook at home. Her life changed when her husband died of COVID-19. She and her daughter immigrated to Quebec in February 2023 and, since then, her budget has been very tight. What helps: the food bank of the Ressource Action-Alimentation organization in Parc-Extension, in Montreal.
“The hardest thing is to eat well,” she explains. She took her recipes from her memories. She remembered the dishes her cook prepared for her family. In Bangladesh, we eat a lot of rice, a lot of lentils and a lot of vegetables. All topped off with spices and herbs, like cumin, cinnamon and fennel! Thanks to Ressource Action-Alimentation, she has access to fresh food, which helps her a lot.
Delicious and shared traditions
New country also means new foods. Newcomers must therefore learn to cook with ingredients they did not know before. And they integrate them into their traditional dishes!
At home, Meherunnessa Chowdhury prepares vegetable soups and Thai dishes. His roommates of Indian origin also showed him how to cook dishes from their country, like roast (a flatbread) and the biryani (a rice-based dish). His roommates love his food!
And you, if you were going to live far away, what recipe would you want to preserve?
Camille Lopez, based on a text by Sarah Boumedda
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