Arab Cooking on a Saskatchewan Homestead

Book excerpt: In Arab Cooking on a Saskatchewan Homestead, over 200 recipes and the author's recollections from childhood combine to tell the story of a little-known group of early immigrants to the Saskatchewan prairies--the Syrians (most of them later known as Lebanese). There was a significant Syrian community in Saskatchewan during the Depression, and as Mr. Salloum points out, their traditional foods and crops were well-suited to the dryland farming that the drought of the 1930s demanded. Thus they thrived during this difficult period on the prairies. Their traditional foods--such as yogurt, chickpeas, and burghul--were, at the time, virtually unknown to their fellow homesteaders; today, however, these same foods are an important part of an increasingly varied and globally influenced North American cuisine.