Sillery, Valcartier groups receive heritage funding
Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter
editor@qctonline.com
Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter
editor@qctonline.com
Heritage preservation groups in Sillery and Valcartier are among the 15 organizations across the province that have received funding from the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network (QAHN) through the SHARE grant program, a Canadian Heritage-funded initiative to support projects “sharing the diverse history of English speakers in the province,” Sherbrooke-based QAHN announced last week.
SHARE program co-ordinator Julie Miller said she was “very pleased” about the diversity of the selected projects, which span the province from the Outaouais to the Gaspé, via the Laurentians, the Eastern Townships, the historically bilingual Pontiac region in Western Quebec, and Quebec City.
The Société d’histoire de Sillery (SHS) has received funding to contribute to the creation of a vast, bilingual archive of Quebec culinary history, from a multicultural, local perspective. “It’s an immense project to do an inventory of what exists in terms of culinary history, particularly anglophone and Indigenous culinary history – the Fédération Histoire Québec is doing a project on the scale of Quebec. We’re going to focus on the anglophone history of Sillery,” said SHS president Jean-Louis Vallée. The project will centre around inventorying, digitizing and translating recipes and stories about ingredients, traditions, communities and companies that have left their mark on local cuisine, writing articles which make those stories accessible to the general public, and indexing the content to make it easier to search. Vallée also said the SHS planned to conduct oral history interviews with older members of the anglophone community, to discuss culinary traditions and memories around food and cooking.
“Sillery has an interesting anglophone history that we haven’t made a lot of room for in the past 20 years,” Vallée said. “The population was 50-50 [francophone-anglophone] in the 19th century, and I don’t think we had a francophone mayor until the 1930s. There was a strong proportion of people of Irish ancestry, but every cultural community came here with its cooking methods and its recipes.”
Author Rose-Hélène Coulombe, a retired civil servant and self-described “memorialist” who has written three books on the culinary history of Quebec, is one of the project’s co-ordinators. She said the Sillery project will be the first step in expanding the wider project, dubbed Patrimoine ~ Identités, to the anglophone community. “We will have articles, recipes, updated recipes, talking about products and food that are key to identity,” she said. “We are working with students as well; I have a student who has done an article on the history of pouding chômeur, on how we used to use buttermilk, that sort of thing.” The ultimate goal, Coulombe and Vallée said, is to create a provincewide archive, using Sillery as a pilot project.
The Saint-Gabriel-de-Valcartier Historical Committee has received funding to finish a documentary about Valcartier Elementary School, to mark the school’s 75th anniversary. The project began shortly before the pandemic and was paused due to public health measures. “We finally finished the interviews last spring,” said historical committee president Debbie Chakour. “We have multigenerational families and seniors sharing their experiences. It was easy to find families where three generations went to the school. One of the seniors we spoke to was the daughter of a teacher; she was actually born in the school building and lived there as a baby!”
Chakour said the small school was deeply linked with the local English-speaking community and the growing bilingual community on the nearby military base. “Twenty- five years ago, there were about 50 kids; now there are closer to 120, and they almost sit on top of each other. They may need to build a new school in the next few years, which is another reason why we want to document it. Let’s celebrate the memories while we have them!”
Chakour hopes the film will be completed by the end of February, 2026. “The deadline is the end of March, but you can’t really do anything in March in Valcartier because there are too many Irish things going on,” she said.
Miller said there will be a third round of SHARE grant funding distributed to heritage projects in February 2026. Organizations must be members of QAHN to apply for funding. To learn more, contact her directly at julie@qahn.org.