Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on August 9, 2021

Tracy Michael figures she's made around 5,000 batches of hummus with her grandmother, who she called "Sitti."

Growing up in Prince Edward Island's vibrant Lebanese community, the dish was a staple, and the ritual of making it is one of her earliest memories, said Michael, a registered dietitian who also teaches cooking classes.

"I would help when I was just a little toddler. We'd come into the kitchen and help her. And I remember putting the chickpeas in the blender and pressing it on," she told Unforked host Samira Mohyeddin.

It's a tradition thatstretches back 120 yearsto a time when Michael's great-grandfather, Thomas Michael Adado, one of the earliest and best known Lebanese settlers on P.E.I., worked as a peddler selling things like soap, dry goods and other household items.

Tracy said herfamily believes when Thomas showed up at the immigration office, his last name was dropped because officials just couldn't figure it out. His middle name, Michael, after his father, became the family name going forward.

Thomas supported his wife, Annie, and their nine children, walking the whole island to sell his wares. It was a way that he and other Lebanese people could get a foothold in a new world.

"He was really well known for what he did, to the point that actually one of his peddling routes was to Lucy [Maud] Montgomery's house," said Michael, who lives in Charlottetown. "And it's been said that he is the inspiration for the peddler that sold Anne the green hair dye in Anne of Green Gables. So that's, like, our family claim to fame. I don't know if it's true or not, but we like to think it is."

From there, the Michael family opened up a grocery store, which meant they could import ingredients like tahini, chickpeas and lentils that weren't stocked in most maritime shops at the time, as well as za'atar and other spices they needed to make traditional Lebanese foods.

Their family, as well as other Lebanese settlers, later opened restaurants.

That path to prosperity and integration within the broader P.E.I. community was a common one, said David Weale, an island folk historian and author of the book A Stream Out of Lebanon.

"For the most part, the Lebanese on Prince Edward Island were identified either as peddlers [or] they were corner store operators," said Weale, a former history professor at the University of Prince Edward Island.

These were the most viable opportunities for those newly arrived from what was then part of Syria, before Lebanon became a separate state around 1920.

The first Lebanese people came to Atlantic Canada around 1880 because of persecution in their homeland, said Weale, and to Prince Edward Island about three or four years later. As local lore has it, a Lebanese peddler in Nova Scotia saw P.E.I. across the water and asked whether people lived there.

After learning that they did, he said, "'I must go over there.' And he did. And that was the beginning of the Lebanese emigration into P.E.I.,"Wealeexplained.

Providing goods to relatively isolated country residents made the Lebanese peddlers valuable to their clientele even though they didn't really understand where these mysterious salesmen came from, he said.

In addition to the island's original inhabitants, the Mi'kmaq, who had been there for 10,000 years, said Weale, the other residents were almost exclusively descendants of early British and French colonizers.

"When you live in a society where almost everybody is, you know, English speaking from the British Isles, these people were quite a novelty."

Many rural people assumed the peddlers were Jewish,Weale said, because all they knew of people who appeared Middle Eastern was that Jewish people lived in that part of the world.

Although they were Christian, just like their customers, Weale's interviews with former peddlers found that some didn't bother to correct that mistake, opting tojust getthe job done. "One man said when he would come down the lane towards the house and the kids would meet him he'd say, 'Go tell your mother that the Jew is here.'"

When these Lebanese Canadians and their children and grandchildren had earned enough to buy property for corner stores and around the middle of the 20th century to open restaurants, Lebanese food was "one of the first kinds of exotic foreign cuisines that islanders would have encountered," said Weale.

"Everybody on P.E.I. now eats hummus, but 60 years ago, they would not have known what a chickpea was. They have certainly transformed the eating, the menu on P.E.I. to a large extent larger than any other group."

That shift has been significant even in Tracy Michael's lifetime.

"Growing up in P.EI. in the '80s and '90s, there wasn't a lot of diversity in my school. My sister and I were definitely the odd ones out," she said. "Most of my peers came to school with Dunkaroos and Lunchables and you know, sandwiches, and all those really like 'normal' things at the time what I thought was normal."

"Then I would come to school with this garlicky hummus that I would open up. And it was the thing that I got teased for the most, the food that I brought to school."

Since then, Lebanese cuisine has gone "pretty mainstream," saidFadi Rashed, president of the Canadian Lebanese Association of Prince Edward Island.

"In opening those businesses and starting to introduce that food over time, yeah, everybody knows what hummus is; everybody knows what a shawarma is," he said.

Although Prince Edward Islanders of Lebanese descent have since had success in all manner of professions including two premiers in their numbers entrepreneurial ways with food were long the cornerstone of that success.

When civil war broke out in Lebanon in 1975, Rashed's parents fled to Cyprus and then to Canada with infant Rashed in tow.

"He didn't speak English, my dad, he just started cooking at the Seatreat restaurant, which was a popular restaurant at the time," said Rashed. Eventually his parents bought a building, started a corner store, and then "a little grill" the foundation of two successful locations of Sam's Family Restaurant that Rashed runs today.

As a dietitian, food remains at the core of the work Tracy Michael does, and her long-lasting connection to her culture, she said,having lost touch with parts of her heritage, including the language and music.

"When I think about it, what really stands now, generations later, is the food. That's the only tie that I really have to my Lebanese culture, and that has been so strongly passed down. And I'm so grateful to be able to pass that along now to my two sons."

Written by Brandie Weikle. Tracy Michaelinterview produced by Erin Noel.

More:

Today there's hummus in every grocery store. But it was once considered P.E.I.'s 1st 'exotic' cuisine - CBC.ca

Category: Jewish Cuisine
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