ChowTown.ca

Food, family, and the story of Alberta

The Alberta table isn’t just a place to eat; it’s a timeline written in smoke, soil, and survival.

My own ancestors didn’t just come to this land; they dug right into it. When the first members of my family arrived, back when this vast expanse was still the Northwest Territories, they didn’t have a cozy farmhouse waiting. They lived in a “soddie,” or prairie sod house—literally building a life out of the very earth beneath their boots. My American branch crossed the border from Montana in the early 1900s without any grand blueprints. Like so many others, they simply came to scratch out a brand-new start on the Alberta prairie.

When I look at my family tree today—including all the lines added by adoption, marriage, and love—I see the history of Alberta itself. Our family spans Ukrainian, Polish, German, English, Vietnamese, Chinese, and American roots.

It begins with my first Ukrainian ancestors building that humble soddie on the Alberta prairie. The story continues with an English immigrant abandoned as a baby by an impoverished mother, surviving a hard, real-life Oliver Twist childhood before crossing the Atlantic as a young child to be adopted by a rugged farming family. It carries on with a fiercely determined young mother fleeing the wreckage of the Vietnam War on a barely seaworthy boat with her baby in her arms. Today, it includes my incredible wife Nancy’s parents, who came from Hong Kong to build a new life here in Alberta.

We are the very definition of an Alberta family, and that remarkable tapestry is exactly what makes our provincial food culture so damn special.

Long before the boundary lines of 1905 created the Province of Alberta, the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Tsuut’ina, the Stoney Nakoda, the Cree, and the Métis people had already mastered the art of living on this prairie. Lean, nutrient-rich bison, harvested saskatoon berries, wild sage, and native root vegetables provided sustenance for millennia.

French-Canadian voyageurs and European traders with the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company brought flour, salt, and lard. Combined with generations of Indigenous and Métis knowledge of the land, its ingredients, and its cooking traditions, those newly introduced staples gradually transformed traditional breads into the form of bannock that would eventually become one of the defining foods of the Canadian West.

When the Canadian Pacific Railway cut through the territories in the late nineteenth century, waves of British and European immigrants arrived to break the soil and establish farms. But it was the massive wave of Ukrainian and Polish settlers moving into the “Ukrainian Bloc” northeast of Edmonton—stretching through communities like Vegreville, Mundare, and Glendon—who forever changed Alberta’s early food landscape. They looked at our rugged prairie and realized their traditional foods were perfectly suited for Alberta. Pyrohy, holubtsi, and smoky, garlic-heavy kovbasa quickly became some of Alberta’s defining comfort foods.

For me, that history lived in my maternal grandmother’s kitchen. I still carry deeply loved memories of standing beside her, pinching the edges of pierogies together while learning how a simple pocket of dough filled with potato and cottage cheese could hold a family’s history.

The recipes my grandmother taught me eventually escaped family kitchens and became part of Alberta’s identity. Modern icons like Stawnichy’s Mundare Sausage and Edmonton’s Cheemo Perogies helped transform immigrant traditions into prairie staples. It’s a cultural footprint so deeply rooted that the town of Glendon famously built a giant perogy to honour it. Alongside them, German and Scandinavian settlers established deep agricultural roots, using our world-class hard spring wheat to anchor Alberta’s baking traditions while sowing the seeds for our massive barley and canola industries.

Of course, you can’t tell Alberta’s food story without talking about cattle. As the great bison herds disappeared from the southern prairie, sprawling ranches spread across the foothills and grasslands. Before long, Alberta wasn’t simply raising beef—it was building a reputation for producing some of the finest beef anywhere in the world. Around here, steak or prime rib isn’t just dinner. It’s practically a birthright.

And let’s be entirely honest here—thank God for Alberta grain. And while a tasty sourdough loaf is a wonderful thing, it’s premium malting barley that quietly helped build Alberta’s breweries and distilleries. Long before Calgary and Edmonton earned reputations for craft beer and artisanal spirits, pioneer farmers were growing world-class grain that still define Alberta’s brewing and distilling industries today.

History has a funny way of ending up in the family kitchen.

My own paternal grandmother was living proof of that. She was a master of her own imported baking tradition, and I can still taste her sweet poppy seed cake and the spread of German treats that routinely filled the room during my far-too-infrequent visits to her and my grandfather’s home.

As the decades rolled on, new waves of global immigration arrived, each looking at Alberta’s remarkable agricultural bounty through their own cultural lens.

Many of the Chinese labourers who helped build the railway chose to stay. With few opportunities available to them, many built new lives by opening cafés, restaurants, market gardens, and businesses across Western Canada. In time, they helped create what we now know as Western Canadian Chinese cuisine.

One of the defining moments came in 1975 when Calgary’s now sadly departed Silver Inn introduced Ginger Beef, helping shape Calgary’s distinctive contribution to that same version of Chinese cuisine. Decades later, landmarks like the Silver Dragon Restaurant in Calgary’s Chinatown continue to anchor that culinary heritage. For me, this tradition hits especially close to home whenever my father-in-law arrives at my hospital bedside carrying something delicious to share from his own culinary heritage.

Arriving in the late twentieth century, courageous Vietnamese families, many escaping the aftermath of war, found that Alberta’s outstanding beef was the perfect foundation for a steaming bowl of pho. They transformed noodle soup into a permanent fixture of our cities and a beloved cure for the common cold. Somewhere along the way Calgary’s Vietnamese diaspora even developed its own unmistakable variation—Pho Sate—a spicy, peanut-rich bowl that has become one of Cowtown’s signature foods.

Even more recently, South Asian immigrants have helped transform Alberta’s bounty into aromatic curries, while a rapidly growing Filipino community introduced silog breakfasts, crispy pata, and countless other dishes that have become part of Alberta’s everyday culinary landscape.

What truly built Alberta’s table was the ingenuity of the people who had thrived on this land for generations, alongside those who arrived from every corner of the world carrying little more than hope and family recipes. Together, they looked across this remarkable land and transformed what it had to offer into food that reflected their own cultures while becoming unmistakably Albertan. My own family is simply one small thread woven into that much larger story.

On any given evening you can wander Calgary’s International Avenue or Edmonton’s Alberta Avenue and experience more than a century of culinary evolution. The story of our table isn’t frozen in time. It’s still being written every single day by people who do something as humble as share a traditional family recipe and unknowingly become part of Alberta’s next culinary chapter.

From prairie sod houses to world-class dining rooms, from bannock to pho, from pyrohy to Ginger Beef, our table tells the story of who we were, who we are, and who we’re still becoming.

It’s the same story that began in a prairie soddie with my own family, and today continues every time another family arrives in Alberta and adds another place at the table.

If you ask me, that’s something worth pulling up a chair for.