Habeeb Salloum was born on March 9, 1924, in the village of Qaraoun, then part of Greater syria/" class="auto-internal-link">syria under French Mandate, later incorporated into modern Lebanon. His father, like many Levantine migrants in the early 20th century, sought better opportunities in North America. A few months after Habeeb’s birth, his mother, his brother, and the infant Habeeb emigrated to the wide prairies of Saskatchewan, Canada, joining the father who had already settled there.
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This early uprooting shaped his destiny: he grew up straddling two worlds—the intimate memory of Arab homelands and the stark reality of Canadian prairie life. The immigrant family endured isolation, harsh winters, and back-breaking farming, yet preserved cultural threads through language, food, and storytelling.
Habeeb Salloum: War, Work, and a Turn to Writing
During World War II, Salloum served in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), a formative experience that introduced him to global horizons. After the war, he entered Canada’s civil service, working for over three decades at the Department of national Revenue in customs and excise.
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Upon retirement in the mid-1980s, instead of withdrawing into quiet life, he embraced writing with full force. What began as modest travel and food pieces evolved into a rich literary career, making him one of the most prominent Arab-Canadian voices of his generation.
A Life in Books and Articles
Salloum published around 14 books, co-authored several others, and contributed hundreds of articles to newspapers and magazines across North America, the Middle East, and beyond.
His major works include:
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- From the Lands of Figs and Olives (1995): A monumental collection of over 300 recipes from the Middle East and North Africa.
- Arab Cooking on a Prairie Homestead (2005): A personal and cultural memoir, linking syrian recipes to his family’s Canadian prairie life.
- Scheherazade’s Feasts: Foods of the Medieval Arab World (2013, with his daughters Muna and Leila Salloum): A revival of medieval Arab culinary heritage.
- Sweet Delights from a Thousand and One Nights (2014): Exploring the world of Arab sweets and their cultural symbolism.
Beyond cookbooks, he wrote travel essays that spanned from Andalusia to damascus, and linguistic studies tracing the Arabic roots of English and Spanish vocabulary. His writing often combined meticulous research with personal anecdote, bridging scholarly inquiry with the intimacy of lived experience.
Themes: Food, Identity, and Memory
For Salloum, food was never just nourishment. It was memory, identity, and diplomacy. Recipes became archives of migration, mapping how Arab immigrants carried flavors across oceans and adapted them with local Canadian ingredients.
He treated the kitchen as a historical archive, showing how dishes embody centuries of cultural exchange: Arab trade routes, Islamic Spain, Ottoman influence, and colonial disruptions. His culinary histories were thus also cultural histories, undermining Western stereotypes that often reduced Arab culture to politics or conflict.
Another hallmark of his work was linguistic curiosity. He documented how Arabic shaped the vocabularies of European languages—terms like “sugar,” “cotton,” “orange,” and “coffee”—reminding readers of the Arab world’s scientific and cultural contributions.
Recognition and Legacy
In 2018, Salloum received the Governor General’s Meritorious Service Medal, a prestigious Canadian honor, for his role in documenting Arab heritage and promoting multicultural understanding.
He passed away on December 4, 2019, at the age of 95. Yet his influence endures: his cookbooks are still in circulation, his travel essays remain cited in diaspora studies, and his daughters continue his cultural mission.
Critical Reflection
While Salloum’s legacy is celebrated, it also raises important questions:
- Can culinary heritage alone capture the complexity of Arab identity in diaspora, or does it risk romanticizing tradition?
- How representative is the experience of a Syrian-Canadian farmer’s son compared to the diverse trajectories of Arab immigrants elsewhere?
- To what extent can food writing serve as a tool of resistance against erasure and misrepresentation in Western societies?
Nevertheless, by turning the seemingly simple act of cooking into an intellectual and cultural bridge, Salloum carved out a unique space in Canadian and Arab cultural history.
Conclusion
Habeeb Salloum’s life embodies the hyphenated identity of Arab-Canadians: loyal to Canada yet deeply rooted in Arab heritage. Through his words, he built bridges between prairie wheat fields and Syrian olive groves, between Canadian multiculturalism and Arab memory. His story reminds us that identity is not a burden of divided loyalties, but a creative possibility: to live in translation, to make exile fruitful, and to transform recipes into acts of cultural resistance.
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