Category Archives: Food and Drink

Culinary History, Food and Drink, Summer 2026

The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book: Community Building in Beirut

Leave a comment

By Jennifer Brannock

On September 21, 1950, E. Gertrude Joly gave a talk about the women of Lebanon at the Royal Central Asian Society, a British society founded in 1901 focusing on the history and culture of Asia. In her speech, she described the diverse roles of women in the country, from educated Lebanese women advocating for equal rights (Lebanese women did get the right to vote in 1951) to village women who cared for their households while working in the homes of British families in Beirut. Even though Joly differentiates between the women of Lebanon, partially because of the audience at her talk, she celebrates the foodways of the women and culture, but with a caveat. “Arab cookery is very good, but you have to get used to it gradually – it is hard on Anglo-Saxon digestions until they have got used to it.”

Cover of the cookbook The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book (1940s). Image courtesy of Special Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi.

In the 1940s, Joly and a group associated with the Young Women’s Christian Association (Y.W.C.A.) in Beirut, Lebanon, compiled the cookbook The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book to highlight local and Western recipes. In the book, Joly refers to the dishes as Syrian, which may be a holdover from the time before Lebanese independence. It may also acknowledge the culinary overlap between Syrian and Lebanese cuisines. The cookbook was created to serve three purposes:

  1. “To supply the newcomer (generally a bride coming out to live in a country whose vegetables and dishes are unknown to her but popular with her husband) a book to guide her steps in the first anxious days of striving to “feed the brute.” 
  2. “To supply to those who live in the Near East something definite in ideas for the arranging of new and varied menus suitable to the country.” 
  3. “To supply to the Y.W.C.A a book, the sale of which may bring in an income to help in the furnishing of their annual summer camp in Lebanon.” 

The book had a broad potential audience, and to further the goal of making this book accessible to locals and expats, each recipe is printed in English and Arabic. In the preface, following the goals and purposes of the cookbook, Joly writes how disappointed she is in the book. “I regret that my original intention of committing to paper a representative set of Syrian dishes has been far from realized. The response to my appeal for such dishes was not as hearty nor as spontaneous as I could have wished…” 

With the combination of Lebanese, English, and some American recipes, Joly wanted to create a community of people, food, and culture through The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book, and in her own words, she believes she failed. 

Recipe for Tamale Pie from The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book (1940s). Image courtesy of Special Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Why weren’t there more local dishes submitted? There could be numerous guesses as to why. Maybe the call for submissions was not as broad as needed. Most of the women who submitted recipes were probably expats married to professors or businessmen in Beirut. These women were not from Lebanon and probably employed local women to prepare meals in their homes. Another reason may be that the local women did not want to submit their recipes to a cookbook that could potentially put them out of a job. The Lebanese cooks in expat households relied on their recipes and cooking skills to maintain employment and publicizing their recipes makes their main commodities available to anyone who had the book. 

One wonders if the community that Joly hoped to bring together couldn’t be formed because the community didn’t exist in day-to-day lives. Joly infers in her talk to the Royal Central Asian Society that there were the wealthy expats like her, the educated Lebanese women who were pushing for equal rights, and the village women who helped in the expat homes. Maybe the emphasis wasn’t on creating a human community, but more of a diversity in recipes?

Recipe for Majadarah from The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book (1940s). Image courtesy of Special Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi.

The Lebanese recipes included in the cookbook are few, but include dishes that are well known today. Simple dishes like Houmous Tahini, Mjadarah (a rice, lentil, and onion dish), and Kibbeh highlight the food of the local culture. More unique recipes like The Dervish’s Rosary (great name!) and Mouloukeya found their way into the book as well. 

Recipe for The Dervish’s Rosary from The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book (1940s). Image courtesy of Special Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi.

From a Veal à la Marengo (a French classic) to the American Southwest’s tamale pie to a section on scones, the bulk of The Y.W.C.A Cookery Book focuses on European classics and wartime versions of English recipes. The European and American recipes incorporate some local ingredients, but most require tapioca pudding, Robinson’s Patent Barley, and other ingredients that were only found at specialty stores in Beirut. If anything, many of the recipes submitted don’t encourage community and seemingly emphasize the differences between the cultures. 

An advertisement from Anis Nasif, the proprietor of a grocery at the American University in Beirut, stating that he carries American groceries that can be used to prepare recipes in The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book (1940s). Image courtesy of Special Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi.

It’s unknown how many copies of the cookbook were sold. What we know is that in 1950, E. Gertrude Joly published The English-Arabic Cookery Book. It’s evident from the preface that this cookbook is a copy of The Y.W.C.A. Cookery Book without attribution to the people who submitted recipes or contribution to the money donated to support the Y.W.C.A. Perhaps Joly believed that having edited the first edition, and likely contributed many of its recipes, she was entitled to revise the formatting and modify some of the recipes for a new edition under her name. She continued with her initial mission of providing a book of recipes for the young bride new to Lebanon, but her initial goal of creating a community cookbook had been left behind.

References 

Joly, Mrs. Gertrude. “The Women of Lebanon.” Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society. 38 (1951): 177-184.

Jennifer Brannock is Professor and Curator of Rare Books and Mississippiana at the University of Southern Mississippi. She has a BA in Art History and an MSLS from the University of Kentucky. In 2011, Jennifer started collecting Mississippi community cookbooks for Special Collections. Over 150 of these cookbooks are digitized and available in USM’s Digital Collections. Since starting the collection, she has hosted events highlighting the collection and given talks to local women’s groups, as well as conference presentations in Mississippi, the United States, and in Kazakhstan about the importance of cookbooks in local history and genealogy research. 

In 2020, Jennifer received the American Library Association/Reference and User Services’ Genealogy/History Achievement Award, recognizing her work with the cookbook collection among other achievements. She is active in the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (Vice-chair/Secretary for the Local History and Genealogy Section) and the Society of Mississippi Archivists (President).

 

Culinary History, Food and Drink, Posts, Summer 2026

What were we eating? Salmon, seafood, and the diet of fishing and canning communities in British Columbia’s Salmonopolis

Leave a comment

By Tatyana Beck, with content adapted from Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present, a Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society publication

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the fishing and salmon canning industries on the West Coast of British Columbia (BC) were powered by a diverse workforce of Indigenous communities, European settlers, and international labourers primarily hailing from Japan and China. This multicultural working community was in turn powered by salmon.

The communities that fished the Fraser River and laboured for the expanding number of canneries along the BC coast were operating in the province at a time when Pacific salmon was particularly abundant, fresh, and accessible. The canneries along the Coast, which opened as early as the 1870s, were built at the mouth of the Fraser River, where they had access  to a seemingly endless supply of fat, fully-grown salmon as the fish made their way from the ocean towards their freshwater spawning grounds each summer and autumn.

Chum salmon awaiting processing, Leonard Frank Photography. Credit: Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society Collection, G1996.006.002/8

Known colloquially as “Salmonopolis”, the village of Steveston, BC was a major player within the history of these industries. By 1890, Steveston was home to a total of 15 operating canneries,the largest of which was the Gulf of Georgia Cannery. For the communities living and working in Steveston, fish and seafood weren’t just a job – they were inseparable from the sights, smells, and taste of everyday life.

In Steveston, like the rest of the Coast, the first cannery workers came from the local Indigenous communities. Indigenous groups were the first fishers of the Fraser River, as well as the original knowledge-keepers who taught European settlers how to find and fish Pacific salmon. Traditional Indigenous fishing focused on collecting enough fish to feed community members during the spring and summer, and to be smoked, dried, or candied for winter preservation or seasonal trade. 

Fishers taking a lunch break on the dock. Credit: Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society Collection, G2003.033.004.

The arrival of European businessmen to Steveston, alongside the newly-invented process of commercial canning, brought rapid change. The industry grew, and cannery work attracted labourers from around the world. Along the West Coast, the Japanese community had a significant presence and brought tremendous fishing expertise with them. Chinese labourers, some already in BC to build the Canadian Pacific Railway, supplied seasonal labour in a variety of manual positions. Together with a range of European immigrant communities and early Indigenous workers, these communities formed the workforce that helped the business of salmon canning and exporting flourish. The Fraser River’s abundant marine populations became an economic tool, exported by sea to buyers primarily in England.

But wait: if the hundreds of thousands of cans of salmon that the canneries produced were being sent across the world to England, then how was salmon the food that powered the Cannery’s workforce? What, exactly, were they eating?

Cannery can loft stacked with thousands of cans waiting to be filled with salmon. Credit: Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society Collection, G2002.003.001.

In 20th century Steveston the reality was this: when the river has a seemingly never-ending supply, even the canneries might turn away your catch. Even after selling what the canneries rejected, leaving gifts for your friends and neighbours, and stocking your pantry with self-canned product for the winters, there would still be more fish waiting for you to use. If you were a fisher, docked for the night and in need of dinner, what would’ve been simpler than taking a fish right out of your boat to whip something up for you and your crew? With such abundance, Steveston residents would make use of whatever leftover fish they had on hand, adapting traditional recipes to fit with the resources the River had given them.

There was one notable exception: Indigenous communities, who had been the earliest workers at many West Coast canneries, were soon heavily policed and restricted from partaking in traditional fishing practices or accessing salmon for their communities in favour of those very same canneries.

At the canneries, seasonal workers typically lived in bunkhouses segregated by race and gender, or in communal housing with a contracted cook supplying meals. Supplies often included the national foods of the workers, such as salted eggs, bean cakes, and bamboo shoots for Chinese bunkhouses. This community would certainly have made use of fresh or canned local fish in addition to the pork and chicken they were supplied. 

Commercial fisherman Butch Sakiyama remembers bringing the fish he’d caught that the canneries had rejected to the bunkhouses to be turned into meals for himself and the other fishers : “[…] the ladies would cut it up, salt it or cook it, and the next day, next thing you know they got teriyaki salmon. And the ladies would go up there and grow their own veggies, […] and have meals ready for us”.

With diverse communities working and living in such close proximity, there were opportunities not only to adapt one’s own cultural recipes, but to learn and share recipes with one another. Commercial fisher and Coast Salish/Sahtu-Dené cultural worker Rosemary Georgeson recounts how she and her father shared jibu, a seafood hot pot, with Japanese-Canadian fishers they encountered one night after she gave them some of the fillets from her family’s boat. “[…] they bring me and dad over and they start making this sauce on the grill, adding in slivered onions and carrots, and then the slivered fish. We ate together and they spent about two hours talking with my dad.”

Cover, Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present

The Gorgeson’s story is just one of the many tales included in the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site’s Fish Tales feature exhibit (2023-2025), which explored coastal BC residents’ deep ties to fish and seafood as a dietary staple, source of community connection, and a way of life. The legacy project created from this exhibit, the newly-published Cannery community recipe book Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present collects the “fish tales” shared by Steveston’s present community members, fishing communities, and museum audiences and connects them to the past experiences, interviews, recipes, and eating traditions of Steveston’s past.

Credit: pp. 44-45; Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present, Copyright 2025, Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society.

This article is only a taste of what can be found in the Society’s new publication. Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present is now available at the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site in Steveston, BC, or through our online gift shop at https://thecannerystore.square.site/s/shop. 

References: 

Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present. Vancouver, BC: Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society, 2026.

The Monster Cannery: The History of the Gulf of Georgia Cannery. Vancouver, BC: Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society, 2011.

Tatyana Beck is a heritage and cultural resource management professional and current Curatorial Program Manager at the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site. With over five years of experience in museum programming and interpretive writing and many more in cultural and event work, Tatyana finds joy in using storytelling to create connection and bring new and hidden perspectives to audiences of all ages. Fish Tales: Cannery Community Cooking, Past and Present is her first official publication.

The Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society honours the importance of Canada’s West Coast fishing history by sharing stories of the fishing industry and fishing communities through exhibitions, collections, programs, and events. In addition to operating the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site, the Society works to achieve its mission through other activities such as creating annual feature exhibitions related to fishing history and producing community events. www.gulfofgeorgiacannery.org 

 

Culinary History, Food and Drink, Summer 2026

From Tuscany to the Classroom: How Biroldo Continues to Evolve

Leave a comment

By Daniel Bazzinotti

Severino in his salumeria. Image credit: Daniel Bazzinotti.

The first piece of biroldo (Tuscan blood sausage) that I tasted was handed to me by an 89-year-old butcher named Severino. Standing in a small family salumeria (a traditional Italian shop found in every neighborhood in Tuscany, specializing in cured meats) overlooking the ancient walls of Lucca, Tuscany, I watched as Severino chopped braised pork from the head and jowls of a local pig before sliding a small piece across the table. Smiling, he said in Italian, “This is my favorite part of the head. It makes our biroldo unique.” It was the tongue—rich, tender, and deeply flavorful from hours of slow braising.

Moments later, his son Gino carried in a white bucket filled with fresh pig’s blood. Together, they mixed it with the meat, tasting the uncooked mixture several times while adjusting the salt and their family’s closely guarded spice blend, droga—a name that literally translates to “drugs” in English—until Severino nodded with approval. The mixture was then hand-stuffed into beef casings and gently lowered into a century-old copper kettle filled with the broth used to braise the pig’s heads. Severino mentioned that the century-old pot was the key to successfully cooking the biroldo. Then, the sausage was poached until Gino felt it was firm. After their biroldo was cooled, it was ready to be sold in their shop.

As I watched this father-and-son team work together, I realized that I was witnessing much more than the preparation of sausage. I was watching knowledge pass from one generation to the next, not through written recipes, but through observation, repetition, taste, and trust. As Gino explained, he does it the way he does because his dad did it that way, and his dad has done it that way because that’s how his dad did. Thankfully, his great grandpa knew what he was doing! That experience forever changed the way I teach charcuterie and salumi and respect the tradition.

The author with Gino. Image credit: Daniel Bazzinotti.

When my Banquets and Catering students at Johnson & Wales University learn to prepare blood sausage in my class, they are often surprised to discover that there is no single recipe. Blood sausage exists in countless forms throughout Europe: black pudding in the British Isles, boudin noir in France, morcilla in Spain, blutwurst in Germany, and biroldo and sanguinaccio throughout Italy. Although each begins with the same basic ingredients, blood, fat, meat, and seasoning—every region, village, and family has adapted the recipe to reflect hyper-local ingredients and family traditions.

As such recipes crossed the Atlantic, they continued to evolve. Familiar ingredients were not always available, American tastes differed, and regulations including the prohibition on collecting swine blood during commercial production for much of the twentieth century – forced producers to modify traditional practices. Some families carefully preserved recipes handed down for generations, while others adapted them to new ingredients and new audiences. Like those who carried them, these recipes changed while maintaining a connection to their origins.

The author holding the prepared biroldo outside the salumeria in Tuscany where it was made. Image credit: Daniel Bazzinotti.

Today, another transformation is taking place. Traditional blood sausages are becoming less common as eating habits change and fewer people continue the craft. What was once an essential part of whole-animal butchery has become unfamiliar to many younger cooks and diners.

In my classroom, I try to bridge that gap. Rather than simply teaching students how to make blood sausage, I teach them why it exists. We discuss cucina povera (the poor kitchen), the Italian tradition of resourceful cooking, emphasizing whole-animal utilization, its relationship to sustainability, and the cultural traditions that gave rise to these foods. What begins as a lesson in ingredients quickly becomes a discussion about migration, adaptation, and cultural identity.  Once students understand the story behind the recipe, they begin to see it as an expression of ingenuity and respect for ingredients.

From there, I encourage them to adapt these techniques using their own culinary backgrounds. For example, one student from the American South created blood sausage using cornbread and Creole spices. It was unmistakably inspired by Tuscan technique, yet distinctly Southern in flavor and identity. The recipe had traveled once again—not by abandoning tradition, but by building upon it.

That lesson is perhaps the most important one I can teach. Recipes are not preserved by remaining unchanged. They survive because each generation learns the techniques, understands the history, and thoughtfully adapts them to new places, cultures, and ingredients.

The biroldo I helped make in a small Tuscan salumeria is different from the blood sausage my students prepare in New England. However, they remain connected by something deeper than ingredients: they share a commitment to craftsmanship, whole-animal utilization, and the belief that food carries history with it. Every time a student creates a new interpretation of an old recipe, another chapter is added to that story.

 

Culinary History, Food and Drink, Summer 2026

Lost in Knowledge and Translation: The ‘nutty Case of Nigerian Suya and “Suya Spice”

Leave a comment

By Ozoz Sokoh

Being away from home often leads to adaptations of methods and ingredients when translating, and recreating recipes. In this transnational game of “telephone,” a fair amount may be lost, especially where regional recipes have gone national. In Culinary heritage in Asia: National and regional identities, Reflections from the field, Stephanie Assmann suggests that safeguarding regional food products may consist of maintaining a “collective memory” of food as a positive self-identification and reaffirming diasporic group identity.

In geographies where cultural documentation is nascent, preservation of recipes and food products may be barely-constructed. Take the case of Nigerian suya, a popular street food composed of seasoned, grilled skewers of meat. While suya’s heritage is in the north of Nigeria where it is made by Hausa men, mallams, it has spread across the country via pastoral nomads. Today, suya is considered a national treasure, and every locale boasts a suya spot. 

For a long time, associated regional practices were not well-known and documented outside the north, creating a significant gap between regional and national food knowledge. Today, food blogs and other social sharing have changed that, facilitating knowledge exchange.

To make suya, meat skewers are seasoned with basic yaji, and served with yajin kuli, also called suya spice. Both spice blends, from the “yaji family” often contain indigenous spices — grains of Selim, calabash nutmeg; and globally available ones — ginger, garlic, salt, and cloves. Basic yaji is nutless, and yajin kuli is made with kulikuli, a defatted groundnut (peanut) biscuit, made with leftover dough from groundnut oil processing. Often salted, the dough is sometimes seasoned with warming spices, and sweetened with sugar before being fashioned into shapes including rings and crackers, then deep-fried to create products that are shelf-stable. Kulikuli gets ground down and added to basic yaji for the nutty yajin kuli served alongside suya.

Image Credit: Ozoz Sokoh

For decades, many Nigerians bought suya with nary an attempt to make it at home. Public know-how was largely limited to observations at the suya spot during purchase, usually in the evening. What we saw: sticks of already-grilled meat would be pulled from a pile based on your selection, reheated on the grill, placed on paper where they would be cut from the sticks into bitesized pieces. 

Toppings followed on that foundation: one or more of cut tomatoes, onions, hot peppers, cucumber, cabbage. Each wrap was finished with a sprinkling of yajin kuli and parcelled to-go, with extra packets — paper or foil — of yajin kuli. At home, the packets were employed in a host of things, including making suya and instant noodles, erroneously leading to assumptions that suya was only seasoned with yajin kuli because we didn’t see the first step when seasoning where prepared raw-meat-on-sticks were dredged in nutless, basic yaji. 

So, my translation of suya recipes and substitutions began incorrectly long before I moved away from home. 

In 2007, I was married and parenting two, soon-to-be three young children, when we moved to The Netherlands. We longed for suya so I began to make my own, first with yajin kuli that we requested from visiting family members and then in 2010, with a peanut butter sauce I reverse-engineered based on taste memories and yajin kuli “knowledge”. 

I shared a recipe on my Kitchen Butterfly blog, one of the earliest Nigerian food blogs, and on Food52 where it won a Suya Swordfish recipe contest. Both features cemented the use of groundnuts (peanuts) when making suya spice, and erroneously presented my partial knowledge as whole.

When I moved back to Nigeria in 2011, homemade suya was common. My older sister, Upe, introduced me to Mamanga, a mallam who made delicious suya for her and so I ordered some yaji from him. I was confused when I received two blends (for cooking, and serving) since I only knew one. My mamangafied suya was tastier than I’d ever had but I still didn’t understand the difference.

It wasn’t until 2024, while recipe-testing for my award-winning debut cookbook, Chop Chop: Cooking the Food of Nigeria, that I learned more from my friend Hauwa who is from the north. Hauwa shared that yajin kuli burned easily on the grill, sticking to the grates. She shared that it was best as an accompaniment to suya, and prepared fresh otherwise it turned “cold”, a reference to the kulikuli softening, and turning rancid.

Image Credit: Ozoz Sokoh

Today, there is an abundance of suya recipes online and in print, and you no longer have to depend on your mallam for suya spice – you can find it online and in physical stores. The majority of recipes, digital and in books, continue to feature variations on the groundnut/ peanut butter theme. 

When a recipe becomes national, and media channels make information accessible, due diligence is required to capture the origin story and translate that to knowledge. I’ve learned the difference — thank you, Hauwa — and corrected my words.  Now when I encounter recipes, I apply the 5Ws and 1H journalism framework, asking “What are the ingredients?”, “How is it made?”, and other questions around Who, Where, When, and Why, questions that fully illuminate the nuance of construction. We miss a lot when we adopt recipes, but are only versed in their consumption — care in translating the heritage processes is how we safeguard and preserve legacy.

Ozoz Sokoh is an ex-exploration geologist, food and tourism studies educator, 2026 James Beard Emerging Voice in Book, and Nautilus Gold Awardee for her book, Chop Chop: Cooking the Food of Nigeria (2025), the definitive guide to Nigerian cuisine drawn from over a decade of unearthing and preserving Nigerian culinary tradition. She researches, and interrogates connected foodways across the world, highlighting similarities between popular, little known cultures and cuisines.

Her ongoing project, “Coast to Coast: From West Africa to the World” traces the histories and edible trails of West Africa and its diaspora through ingredients and “commodities” and is documented on  Feast Afrique. It includes an open-access digital library of 250+ Black culinary resources, from the 1800s to date, a hall of fame, data-driven work on the role of food media in marginalizing West African voices, and a series of short films available for screening.

She makes her home on Land of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation in Ontario, Canada. Ozoz has spoken at TEDx and at conferences hosted by the Culinary Institute of America. Her work has been featured in Brittle Paper, The Republic, Smithsonian Magazine, Gastro Obscura, CNN African Voices, Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, and more.