Feasting and Fasting: Canada's Heritage Celebrations

Feasting and Fasting is an introduction to the foods and beverages that were a central part of how our ancestors celebrated important events.

Long before the arrival of newcomers, the First Nations were celebrating the passages of life, the changing seasons, and the gifts of the Great Spirit with feasting. When settlers from around the world arrived on Canada's shores, they brought with them the memories and traditions of their homelands. Diverse and unique culinary histories began to develop as the newcomers were unable to find some of their traditional ingredients and were forced to compromise. Wild game, fruit, plants, grains, vegetables, and maple sugar were often transformed from survival foods to the foods of celebration.

Food brought families and communities together to pay tribute, to honour, to celebrate, to mourn, and to be comforted. This is a sampling of their events and what was on their tables at births, weddings, funerals, religious holidays, garden parties, and more!

Dorothy Duncan has lectured internationally on Canada's heritage foods and customs, including at several universities and colleges in North America and at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery in England. She was the Toronto Women's Culinary Network's Woman of the Year in'2004, and in 2006 she was chosen by the Ontario Hostelry Institute to receive the Gold Award for Media and Publishing. In 2007 her book Canadians at Table won the Cuisine Canada and University of Guelph Culinary Book Gold Award. Nothing More Comforting, Dorothy's first book for Dundurn, was published in 2003 to wide acclaim.