'SHE NEVER DID COOK THE CANADIAN WAY' : immigrant women's changing relationship with food and cooking in postwar North Bay, Ontario

Abstract

This paper uses the memories of ten immigrant women who lived in North Bay, Ontario between 1945 and 1975. It looks at the interrelationship between women's pre- and post-migration contexts as reflected in their food and cooking experiences. Women's homelands were connected with memories of food: what foods they cooked, who they cooked it with and times when it was not always possible to cook or even eat. When these women made their way to North Bay, their relationships with their self and others changed as did those with their sense of place and their earlier experiences with deprivations. How they cooked food, and what they thought of food in this small northern Ontario city, allows us to understand how they negotiated these changed relationships as well as the new relationships they were creating in their new context. For instance, German-born Elisabeth Meier decided to cook Canadian foods and in doing so, she also constructed a Canadian identity for herself and overcame the shame she connected with her German heritage. This paper brings categories of gender, class, ethnicity and race into conversation with women's pre- and post-migration contexts. It argues that immigrant women used food and cooking to express their changing relationships with their self and other people, with their sense of place in the physical spaces they occupied as well as with their experiences in their homeland and in their new home.