SYDNI Cookbook

Aim

Produce a cookbook of fantastic recipes collected from the wonderfully diverse community on the Sydenham Estate

Vision

The Sydenham Estate in Leamington Spa is a wonderfully diverse community in which 39 different languages are spoken by families from many different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. We want to celebrate this diversity and bring the community together by producing a cookbook where the recipes are collected from the local community. More than a traditional cookbook, we want to tell the stories behind all these recipes and for it to be full of family stories and good memories. It is all about sharing food, friendship and love! So far we have collected over 75 recipes with more to come.

We want funds to be able to print enough copies of the cookbook so it can be distributed free to every household on the Sydenham Estate.

This is the introduction to the cookbook:

The SYDNI Community Cookbook

It’s Pure Gold!

The SYDNI Centre is proud to present its Community Cookbook as part of the celebrations for the golden anniversary of the Sydenham Estate. We think our recipes are Pure Gold: full of simple, healthy ingredients transformed by the Midas touch of our cooks into something precious!

All sorts of different people have contributed recipes – all ages, all backgrounds. So naturally our recipe book reflects the glorious diversity of our area and our town. The common denominator, though, seems to be a love and passion for cooking. It’s clearly not true that all we do nowadays is watch the celebrity chefs on TV and then warm up microwave meals!

It’s really been an inspiration talking to people about the food they love to cook and its meaning to them. You’ll see that most of these recipes are not just presented as a cold set of instructions. We’ve tried to locate them in the context of people’s life stories: where did I learn to cook this meal? What does it mean to me and my family and friends? Why do I love it so much?

Collecting these recipes has brought home to all of us at SYDNI the obvious but overlooked message that food is about so much more than nutrition! It’s about friendship and love. It’s about tradition and ritual but also about experimenting and broadening our horizons. It’s about warmth and comfort, about pleasure and fun. It’s one of the ways we express our view of the world but also just a way of cheering ourselves up.

Cooking gladdens the heart – it’s pure gold. We hope that you’ll be warmed and inspired by these recipes just as we were.

This project successfully funded on 14th July 2021