Stories from our Tables: A Black Community Recipe Book

Food holds meaning. 

It carries migration, celebration, survival, and love. It’s the Sunday pot that fed everybody, the dish that only tastes “right” when Auntie makes it, the seasoning you measure with your spirit, the recipe that travelled across oceans in a suitcase and landed in a Pickering kitchen. It’s how we keep our people close even when we’re far from where we started. 

Pickering Public Library is curating Stories from our Tables: A Black Community Recipe Book highlighting recipes and stories rooted in Black culinary traditions across the diaspora (Caribbean, African, Black Canadian, Afro-Indigenous, Afro-Latinx, and beyond) as a celebration of food, memory, and community. 

Our recipe book will feature selected recipes from Black community members across the Durham Region, along with brief profiles of the contributors and memories associated with their dishes. This project is about representation and preservation, so selected submissions will be compiled into a digital and physical cookbook that will be added to the Library’s collection so future readers can learn, remember, and taste our stories. 

Please note: Those who choose to submit to this opportunity must self-identify as Black. Recipes will be chosen by Library staff based on length, accessibility, and their harmony with the entire project. All those who submit will retain the rights to their recipe and written content, regardless of selection for the recipe book.