Introduction

We are excited to announce this innovative story-based cookbook that includes recipes and stories from the students you serve at Refugee Transitions!  Click below to submit your story and enter the competition, or read on for more details.  

 
Refugee Transitions is committed to empowering the most isolated members of our community. Within refugee communities women are often tasked with caring for the home and family, making language acquisition and cultural integration more challenging.  RT started as the Refugee Women's Program to counter some of these trends.  In line with our own mission and history, we hope this cookbook project will shed light on refugee women's histories, struggles, and accomplishments by affirming their importance, relevance and expertise as caregivers and cooks.* 

This story-based cookbook will document the traditional recipes of refugee women and will feature corresponding biographies and cultural foodways (practices relating to the production and consumption of food).  The project will also explore the challenges refugees face in adapting their food cultures to their new communities while simultaneously helping preserve endangered cultural knowledge from our students' home countries.

The people behind the project

Volunteer with RT? Get involved!

We see this book not only as a means to celebrate refugee and immigrant women's contributions to their families and communities, but also as an opportunity for volunteers and students to have a meaningful cultural exchange. As volunteers, we kindly ask that you...

• Let your students know about this project if you think they might be interested.*

• Work with your student to choose an important and favorite cultural/family dish, cook it together, and develop a replicable recipe. You can submit up to two recipes: one savory and one sweet!

• Work with your student to tell the story of the food using the Language Experience Approach.

• Send the completed recipe and story to Refugee Transitions (see submit button below, or email us your submission directly at info@reftrans.org) before April 15, 2013.

All entrants in this cookbook competition will receive a $25 gift certificate and a copy of the book; those chosen for publication will also receive a $125 prize!  More significantly, we hope your student will have an opportunity to share her story and expertise as a cook with the wider Bay Area community. 

Guidelines for developing a recipe and story

You will need to sumit both your student's recipe and related story.

The recipe needs to include an ingredients list with quantities and must be replicable, using ingredients that can be found in the US. The story will help contextualize the recipe by explaining how it fits into the student's experience, culture, and/or life in the Bay Area (Language Experience Approach).  It doesn’t need to be long: a paragraph is ideal.

Here are some guidelines:

Higher-level students: 

• Where is this food from?
• Where did you learn to cook this food?
• Why is this food special to you, or to your culture? Do you make this food for specific ceremonies or rituals? Does the food symbolize something special?
• What are the most important ingredients in this meal?
• Where did you get these ingredients in your country? In your country of asylum?
• Where do you get them here? Is it hard to find them? Does the meal taste the same here, or different?
• Where did you do food shopping before you came to the US? Where do you go grocery shopping now? How is it different/similar?
• What are your favorite things you have tasted since you arrived in The Bay Area?
• Has your cooking changed in California?  How?
• When you eat this meal, what do you think about? What do you remember?

Lower-level students:

(use a family member or neighbor to translate, if available and/or needed)

This food is called ___________________________. It is from my country, ___________________.  We make it when ________________________. The most important ingredients are ___________________________ _______________________________________________________. In my country, I got these ingredients __________________________________. In America, I find these ingredients ______________________________________________________________________. The meal is special because ___________________________________. The secret to making it delicious is ___________________________________________________________________________. When I eat it it makes me think of ______________________________________________________________. 

Submit before April 15th, 2013

Acknowledgments: 

This project was made possible with support from Cal Humanities, an indepedent non-profit state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.  For more information, visit www.calhum.org.  Any views, findings, concliusion, or reccomendations expressed on this webpage do not necessarily represent those of Cal Humanities or the National Endowment for the Humanities.