Event highlights how throughout Cambridge’s history, sharing food has been sharing culture
by Beth Folsom, 2025
Stephen Chen was a child attending Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge when a call went out for contributions to the school’s annual bake sale. Chen’s mother, Joyce Chen, baked a batch of cookies to donate and some egg rolls to bring along. To her surprise, the egg rolls were a sensation, and the other school parents asked her to make more. The interest of parents and the school community in learning how to prepare egg rolls and other Chinese dishes led Chen to hold cooking classes, first in her home and later at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. In 1958 she opened her first restaurant on Concord Avenue, and went on to have an illustrious career as a chef, educator, restaurateur and cookbook author.
In the Cambridge of the 1950s, eating out was a much rarer occurrence than it is today, and sharing food – whether at a restaurant or a school bake sale – was also a way of learning about another culture. In the decades that followed, as home cooking began to give way, at least in part, to restaurant dining, sharing a meal was a means of understanding the histories and cultures of the increasingly diverse Cambridge population. As immigrants began arriving in the city from new and different areas of the world, they brought their cuisines with them, often opening restaurants that served the food they had enjoyed in their home communities. The post-World War II boom in disposable income dovetailed with an increased interest in all things “exotic,” particularly Asian and Polynesian food and culture that American GIs had experienced in their time serving in the Pacific.
For many Cantabrigians, dining out was an escape from the daily work of preparing, serving and cleaning up after meals at home. For others, choosing to eat at a restaurant run by immigrants was a deliberate act of solidarity with those cultures, particularly during the social and political upheaval of the 1960s and ’70s. Dining in immigrant restaurants was a way for residents to learn about the conditions that led the owners and workers to leave their home countries and to put very real human faces to the conflicts they had read about in the newspaper or seen on television. Through sharing foodways, Cantabrigians were able to connect with immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Haiti and other regions of the world. More recently, Cambridge restaurants run by members of persecuted communities such as the Uyghur Chinese have broadened diners’ understanding of world cultures and the global dynamics that have led to migration and displacement.
History Cambridge hosts a fundraiser Oct. 23 called Culinary Crossroads that explores the city’s rich food traditions and the role of food as a means of community connections. Held at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, this event features a discussion of the school’s history and its place in the Porter Square neighborhood and the city as a whole. Owner and director Sean Leonard shares reflections on his 25 years of experience at CSCA, and assistant director of education chef Simone Montali provides a cooking demonstration. Attendees will also have the opportunity to tour the school’s new cafe space directly across Massachusetts Avenue, where students gain experience preparing and selling coffee, tea, pastries and other treats made in their professional training program. History Cambridge will share some of the many food traditions that have come out of the city over the past two centuries.
Tickets are available here; all are invited to this celebration of food, history and community connections.
This article first appeared in Camabridge Day.
