‘Bridging divides through the uniting power of food’

On a recent evening, a dozen or so people with rolled-up sleeves huddle around Negla Abdul Hadi who is stirring ruby-coloured liquid in a giant bowl into a whirlpool.

A chorus of appreciative ‘oohs’ and ‘mmms’ can be heard as ice cubes clatter satisfyingly with her ladle. “This is a hibiscus drink,” she tells the eager crowd. “It’s very sweet but refreshing.”

This is a Migrateful cooking class, a social enterprise established in 2017. The idea is to give migrants, including asylum seekers and refugees, a space in which to share their cooking and culture and to gain new meaningful skills.

The three-hour evening class at Coexist Community Kitchen is led by Negla, 51, a Sudanese migrant who now lives in Avonmouth with her family and leads two classes a month with Migrateful.

She is teaching a small group of paying customers how to make Sudanese graa (squash curry) and dama (chicken curry), served with chilli sauce, molah nemya (okra dip), guars (pancake), and baklava for dessert, all washed down with the sugary hibiscus drink.

Negla teaches people how to the delicacies of Sudan including squash curry, okra dip and baklava

The first task is to make the curries. Armed with aprons and our recipe sheets, we pair off and proceed to carefully chop onions, grate garlic and measure out liquids. “I also ask my husband to do this,” Negla tells me with a wink and a nudge as she notices I’ve given the job of peeling and slicing a mammoth-sized squash to my partner.

A tantalising aromatic concoction of cumin, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves dusts our noses as ingredients are fried together in stainless steel plans and soon left to bubble away. Negla’s smiling face watches over us and our cooking and she flits between groups to taste little spoonfuls of stew and add pinches of salt and sugar or dollops of tomato paste.

We go on to be taught how to blend a chilli and peanut sauce, fry off fluffy pancakes and roll baklava – food staples of the war-torn country at the crossroads of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.

To Negla, cooking allows her to reconnect and remember her life back home. She came to the UK from Sudan with her three daughters at the time so they could have a better education.

“I was taught to cook alongside my sister, so cooking reminds me of her when we were younger,” Negla explains. “It means a lot to me as I love my family.” Migrateful classes have allowed her to spread some of the teachings she learnt with new people, she adds.

All classes end in a shared meal

Jess Thompson, who grew up in Redland, founded Migrateful after being inspired by conversations with a group of refugee women at an east London skill exchange project.

“The women in the group were all very qualified, yet were unemployed because of language barriers and their qualifications not being recognised in the UK,” the 31-year-old explained. “But when asked about the skills they could share with the group, many of them said they could cook.”

Many of the refugee chefs have escaped war-torn countries or sex trafficking. Though Migrateful works with all genders, most of the chefs are women because they often come from countries where the culture is that the woman stays in the home, meaning they are generally more confident with cooking.

Thompson’s mission is “to bridge divides through the uniting power of food” by bringing people together from different backgrounds in a kitchen.

She explained: “In doing so, stereotypes are challenged: the migrant is leading the class, everyone is cooperating (sharing tasks in preparing the meal, which is then eaten together) and the intimate setting enables personal stories to emerge.”

Migrateful hosts classes in London, Brighton and Bristol, each costing around £50. In our city, there are regular classes at Coexist Community Kitchen and St Werburgh’s Community Centre – with cuisines spanning from Sri Lankan to Syrian and Nigerian. Each evening culminates in a shared meal.

Back in Easton, stews are simmered to tender perfection and baklava is cooling from a hot blast in the oven. The group, along with facilitators, lay the table with plates and cutlery and carefully carry the delicacies to the back room. Impatient fingers tear portions of pancake, which are used to scoop up the stews and sauces and we sip glasses of our hibiscus.

It’s the picture of togetherness, as the once-strangers share stories over their steaming homemade meals, each with a new-found appreciation of Sudanese food.

This feature originally appeared in the latest Bristol24/7 quarterly magazine, available free across our city

All photos: Betty Woolerton

Read next:

• An evening of cooking at the newly expanded Pony
• ‘Migrant stories are filled with individual heroism’
• Bristol charity advent calendar 2023, day 12: Migrateful

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