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 as a celebration of food, memory, and community.
This project is about representation and preservation. It’s about ensuring Black community knowledge is treated as valuable, documented with care, and held in a place that says: “we were here, we are here, and our stories deserve shelves”.
Our recipe book will feature selected recipes from Black community members across the Durham Region, along with brief profiles on the contributors and memories associated with their dishes. Selected submissions will be compiled into a cookbook that will be added to the Library’s collection and featured in related, upcoming programs so future readers can learn, remember, and taste the stories we carry.
Please note: Those who choose to submit to this opportunity must self-identify as Black (Caribbean, African, Black Canadian, African American, Afro-Indigenous peoples, and beyond).
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.
Deadline to submit is September 20, 2026.
Please note: the online form opens February 1, 2026.
