Flavourful Bonds Part 3: Resilience in the Ruptures

How do food and culinary traditions reflect resilience, forgiveness, and hope? 

In this episode I look at the character strengths of forgiveness, hope and perspective through the lens of food in Pakistan and also Vietnam and Portugal.  Three countries that have experienced upheaval and rupture.  Through personal stories and culinary traditions I illustrate how these strengths manifest in the kitchen and during travels, emphasizing the importance of food in preserving memory, fostering connection, and enabling healing. 

You will hear reflections on:
🌏Partition of India in 1947: Devastation and the birth of Pakistani cuisine
🐟The Portuguese Saudade and bacalhau
🍲The story of Pho
🙏🏼A special dinner with Sadie

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Transcript

Paula Mohammed: Hi, I'm Paula Mohammed and welcome to In My Kitchen with Paula. This podcast is a gathering place for culinary adventurers who love to travel. Every week, we'll come together with chefs, cookbook authors, talented home cooks, and everyone in between to talk about their story and their unique dish using food as the vehicle, we'll take a ride into the ins and outs of their culture and country.

Come on, let's get this party started.

Hi, I am Paula Mohammed and this is In My Kitchen with Paula. Welcome back to our Flavourful Bonds four-part series where we explore how character strengths show up in our travels, in our kitchens, and our connections with others. This episode is actually really close to my heart. Uh, well, they all are, but this one in particularly, it's called Resilience in the Ruptures.

And we're looking at three powerful VIA Character Strengths: forgiveness, hope, and perspective. And if you remember, the VIA Character Strengths are from the VIA Institute of Character Strengths, and I talk about that in the previous episodes.

So forgiveness, hope, and perspective. These strengths live in our kitchens and our travel bags. They show up in stories, recipes, and rituals passed down through generations and across cultures. Today you're going to hear food stories from Pakistan, Vietnam, and Portugal. Each of these cultures, like many, has endured upheaval and each has used food to keep moving forward. Understanding this relationship, in my opinion, uh, and the history helps us have a deeper connection to the people and places we visit.

You are going to notice that I focus mainly on forgiveness as that to me is where food is so powerful. And also my connection to Pakistan had me reflecting on life after partition. My father was, um, just eight years old when he lived through the partition of India and Pakistan. At 18, he left Pakistan and never returned. There's definitely silence in that story for sure, but I also discovered growing up that there's flavour, memory, and strength in his story.

Let's begin with forgiveness. Forgiveness isn't about forgetting. It's the strength that lets us carry on without letting the pain define us. It shows up in the kitchen, in community feasts and in the way cultures choose to keep feeding each other even after disruption.

The partition of Pakistan in 1947 was a massive rupture. About 15 million people moved or were forced to move, and between half a million to 2 million died in the ensuing violence. The partition was the largest mass migration in human history, according to historian Priya Satia as recorded in the Stanford report.

My dad was one of the children caught in that storm at the age of eight. He was forced to leave his home with his mother and grandmother. He eventually left Pakistan and immigrated to Canada at the age of 18 and never returned to Pakistan. That departure left a silence in our family, but in his cooking, of our family chicken curry recipe was memory.

I think that was one of the ways he kept his story of his childhood alive, or I'm reading way too much into this and he just really loved his mother or Bibi's chicken curry. Either way, that dish brought him comfort and connection because anyone who became friends with my parents would eventually sit at our table for a plate of dad's chicken curry.

In the wake of partition, migrants in Pakistan recreated their kitchens literally in new locations. This created a melting pot of culinary reinvention. Karachi is a great example of this. Refugees brought Mughal and Punjabi dishes and made them accessible. Nihari which was a dish mentioned in the previous episode, was once a dish for the elite, became street food. Biryani took on regional adaptations. These weren't just recipes. They were comfort, food and repair.

Now, I'm thrilled to see a movement of bringing awareness to Pakistani cuisine, which of course has developed and evolved since 1947. My friend and past podcast guest Nosheen Babar does this through her blog, Untold Recieps by Nosheen, where she shares authentic Pakistani recipes.

And I too have fond memories of my grandma or Bibi, as we called her, making delicious curries. And I remember making roti for the first time at about the age of four or five with my dad's cousin's family. My mom actually was the one in our family that took it upon herself to learn all the family curry recipes from Bibi.

These included what are still today family favorites. Actually, I made all three of these last night, saag, dahl and the chicken curry. My dad stayed pretty true to Bibi's recipes and made them right up until the last year of his life, but he stuck to just her chicken curry. Mom on the other hand, who was a fabulous cook, not saying dad wasn't, he was an amazing cook, but mom adjusted the recipes and was going to publish a cookbook in the seventies based on healthy Indian cooking or healthy Pakistani cooking. We always said that she should have done that cookbook. Way ahead of her time. Maybe we'll do it together. Who knows?

Now that I'm reflecting more on my dad's life in Pakistan and wondering about the lasting effects of partition on him, I like to think that these family curry recipes allowed him to not forget the hardships, but as I said in the beginning, provided the strength that lets him carry pain without letting it define him.

We have created so many wonderful memories around these family dishes that I hope eventually, the painful memories my dad and his family experience did recede to the corners and were subdued.

Let's now travel on to Vietnam and take a look at forgiveness through the lens of food. Vietnam is one of the top destinations now for solo woman travelers over 50, and for good reason. It's vibrant, safe, and profoundly welcoming with delicious dishes. But beneath its beauty lies a tumultuous history of war, colonialism, and renewal. Vietnam's history is steeped in colonization and war from the French occupation to the American conflict, but food remained a point of unity and resistance.

Pho is one of the most well-known Vietnamese dishes. Born from colonization, it evolved into a meal of remembrance and resistance. Pho emerged in Northern Vietnam around 1900 to 1907 under French colonial rule. The introduction of beef, uncommon in Vietnamese diets before, was driven by French demand. Uh, leftover bones and lesser cut meats were simmered with spices to create a nourishing broth.

Vietnamese street vendors, especially Chinese-Vietnamese laborers, adapted a dish called, now forgive my pronunciation here: xáo trâu, a buffalo stew. They adapted it by adding flat rice noodles creating the early pho. Now, this is pho spelled p-h-o. We often pronounce it fo, but it's pronounced pho. Originally sold by vendors carrying mobile kitchens in Hanoi streets, pho evolved into the country's national dish, but with distinct variations, depending if you're in the north or the south of Vietnam.

Walk the streets of Hanoi in the north and you'll find pho with a clear fragrant broth, light restrained, and very herbal. Head south to Ho Chi Minh City and the same dish is richer, sweeter, more layered with spices and sauces. The divide that once split a nation is still present in the bowls served at sidewalk stalls and family kitchens.

Today, pho is served freely to foreign visitors and former enemies. Cooking becomes an act of reclamation. Saying we're still here, and we choose connection. In episode four of this podcast show, I speak within In My Kitchen host Raymond Liens, whose family were refugees from Vietnam and eventually lived in Winnipeg, Canada.

When speaking with Raymond, it became apparent how his parents sheltered him from the stress and fear of what was happening in Vietnam during the war through food. Here's a quote from Raymond that I, that I love. "I never really felt like I was living in danger." Sorry, and just to put this in context, I asked Raymond what it was like growing up during the American War in Vietnam.

"I never really felt like I was living in danger, and I think that's partly because we always shared a meal as a family. We always go and get our food daily at the market and we just carry on life as it was offered to us at the time. So I don't remember being afraid or sadness. Our life continues. If you ask my elder members of the family, including my siblings, they might have a different version of the story, but for a kid it was just like, okay, life goes on. Let's just eat."

In this case, preparing and sharing the family meals created comfort in a routine that could be upheld even during war. It provided a shelter of sorts.

Now we go to one of my favorite places, Portugal. Portugal lived through nearly half a century of dictatorship. It was a time when many voices went silent, but the kitchens never did. Before we look at forgiveness through the lens of food in Portugal, I want to share one of my favorite words from, uh, Portugal. In Portugal, there's a word I love: saudade. Saudade is one of those words that doesn't translate neatly into English. It's often described as a deep emotional state of longing or nostalgia, but it's more layered than that. Saudade is the ache for something or someone that is gone or far away. There is the sadness for missing the loss, but also the sweetness for having a love so deep, a love for land home, a person, it doesn't matter. It's the love that remains after loss. The beauty in missing. It's not just missing something, it's the soulful reminder that you once had something worth missing. And I can only imagine that this is what Raymond's family and my dad and his family, and many other people have felt when forced to leave their home during partition as immigrants and as refugees.

Oftentimes that longing is connected to disruption or disagreements and food, with its power to evoke memory, becomes one of the most impactful vehicles to express this longing and often forgiveness.

When you travel through Portugal, it doesn't take long to feel how deeply connected food is to memory. Portugal has lived through some difficult chapters. Uh, as I said, nearly 50 years under a dictatorship, centuries of colonial rule and waves of migration that have pulled families apart. But here's the thing, you won't always hear people talk openly about pain or politics. Instead, you'll find that healing happens at the table.

Take bacalhau, for example, the salted cod that's the heart of Portuguese cuisine. It's often said that there are 365 ways to cook bacalhau: one for every day of the year. The fish isn't native to Portugal. It actually comes from the cold waters of the North Atlantic, brought south through trade, colonization and necessity. It fed sailors during the age of exploration and became a staple for peasants, especially on Catholic feast days and over time. It found its way into nearly every Portuguese celebration from Christmas Eve to Sunday lunch. But behind the comfort of bacalhau lies a more complex history, one shaped by colonial extraction, forced labor, religious control, and state propaganda.

It's a dish born not only of resourcefullness but also of empire suffering and survival. And yet today bacalhau is cooked with love. It's shared between generations. When I had just given birth to my first child back in 2006, my mom's very close friend Maria, who is Portuguese, arrived at the hospital with a warm casserole of bacalhau, and I think, I think it was done with a cream, a creamy casserole. I just remember it being comforting and so delicious.

In addition to being an expression of love, this is also where forgiveness shows up. Not as forgetting, but as transformation. Basically, the salted cod or bacalhau gets soaked in water and then becomes this beautiful ingredient to make so many different variations of.

In the VIA Character Strengths framework, forgiveness is defined as letting go of hurt and offering second chances to others, to yourself, to history. It doesn't mean we ignore harm. It means we choose not to be defined by it. Like salt in the cod, forgiveness preserves what matters, not by hiding the pain, but by transforming it into something nourishing and shared.

Okay, we're gonna move now from forgiveness to hope. Hope is what carries us forward. Not blind optimism. It's a grounded belief that despite pain or loss, something good can still grow. So in Pakistan, this looks like the culinary renaissance. Today, Pakistani cuisine is experiencing a global revival. Even through many older generations carrying trauma from partition, a new generation is rekindling joy through food. Young Pakistani chefs are reviving regional recipes, exploring sustainability and opening restaurants that celebrate identity. And social media has helped amplify this renaissance. Home cooks once confined to their kitchens are now cultural keepers with a global audience.

Hope shows up in every recipe posted, every meal recreated from memory, every granddaughter or son or grandson, learning how to roll perfectly round roti. Even though my father never returned, I've been drawn to learn more about his childhood. What was his village like? What type of dishes did they eat? Was he allowed in the kitchen? What did he have for lunch? This curiosity is my own form of hope as I try to connect across time.

In Vietnam and Portugal, uh, both are finding themselves anew with food. Culinary tourism is booming. Cooking classes are in abundance where recipes and their history and stories are being taught by grandmothers who are getting creative with traditional recipes.

Innovation around food is in abundance. Lisbon was just awarded Europe's best culinary city destination in, uh, 2024. Hope is seen in Pakistan, Vietnam, and Portugal through the innovation of traditional dishes. Sharing the past through food, but also not putting a lid on creativity, uh, or the fingerprints of this and future generations. Like my mom evolved Bibi's recipes. Each generation puts their own fingerprint on a recipe tweaking it, adding another layer. To me this is hope in action. Something good is growing from generation to generation.

You may feel hope rise in, uh, your travels when you try something completely unfamiliar and you like it. Or when a dish made by a stranger reminds you of your grandmother's cooking. It's in learning a new skill, hearing a resilient story, or discovering that even after rupture, something beautiful can be passed on through food, flavor and connection.

Finally, let's take a look at perspective. Perspective is what allows us to hold multiple truths, to recognize complexity, to zoom out and see history, culture, and conflict in wider context. The food of Pakistan today is an archive of migrations. Refugees brought with them their spice blends, their cooking techniques, their sacred family dishes, and fused them into new communities. Perspective helps us to see that Pakistani cuisine is not one story, but many. I remember something else that Raymond said in our interview. Uh, one refugee's story is one refugee's story. I thought that that was really, uh, important. Pakistani cuisine is shaped by South Asian roots, Persian undertones, central Asian techniques, and British colonial layers. Understanding this complexity helps us to appreciate food, not just for the taste, but for what it holds: the movement of migration, memory and meaning.

Vietnamese food teaches us about dualities, sour and sweet. Hot and cool. Soft and crisp. North and south. Regional distinctions reflect historical tensions. Perspective in Vietnam is visible in how food bridges divides in the north, restraint and subtlety dominate. In the south, bold and sugary flavors reign, yet both are proudly Vietnamese.

Portugal- the cultural concept of saudade helps explain how a people can look back with tenderness even through hardship. Perspective here means recognizing the pain of dictatorship, colonialism, and poverty, but also celebrating the traditions that endured. Bread making, olive oil harvesting and fish stews are culinary acts of remembrance and survival.

For travelers this perspective is often gained through participation. Learning how to roll dough or salt fish the old fashioned way. It's humbling, it deepens appreciation. My own personal experience around this was a culinary experience I had in the home of a First Nations woman here in Vancouver. We made bannock together and a traditional salmon dish and a few other dishes too. I was so used to these type of experiences being exuberant and connecting over laughter in the kitchen. This was a bit different. Sadie was so gracious and generous in what she shared. When we sat down to share the meal together, Sadie talked to me about her firsthand experience when her and her siblings were taken away from their mother. Two were put in a residential school and Sadie and another sibling were put in an older couple's home in East Vancouver and they were homeschooled in their basement. I remember Sadie saying how she was lucky as this couple was good to them compared to what her siblings endured in the residential school.

I will never forget how Sadie, who must have been in her seventies when we met, spoke with such longing about how once a year her and her siblings in the house that she shared with them would be able to see their mother, who they were very close to. So that's once a year.

I often talk about connecting over food, and I often think of connection as meaning a lot of positive emotions. But this experience was probably a time where I felt more connected to someone I have never met before over food. And it wasn't joyful necessarily, uh, in the traditional sense anyway. But Sadie being vulnerable and sharing her story with me gave me perspective that I never had before. And I think that's important to remember. Sometimes it's good to get uncomfortable and not to shy away from that.

Forgiveness, hope, perspective: these strengths aren't abstract. They're in every dish that nourishes after loss. My father's story began in rupture, but I've learned that food has the ability to bring back memory, meaning, and sometimes even healing.

So wherever you are and wherever you're traveling next, taste with intention. Ask questions. Get uncomfortable. Be curious about the stories behind your meal.

Thank you for listening to Flavourful Bonds on In My Kitchen with Paula. You can discover your own via character strengths at VIAcharacter.org and join our growing community of food loving travelers at exploreinmykitchen.com.

Until next time, happy cooking. Happy travels.