It started with a dumpling and became so much more. For the last seven years, the humble parcel-shaped delicacy has been at the core of Heart & Parcel - a social enterprise based out of south Manchester, which uses food as a medium to bring women from ethnic minority communities around Manchester together to practice and develop their English language skills.
The dumpling is, after all, universal. Every culture has their own version, whether it's momos typically found in northern Indian, Tibetan and Nepali cuisine; pierogi, Polish dumplings made using unleavened dough; or kubbeh, an Iraqi-Jewish variation filled with bulgar, minced onions and ground meat, they’re a staple of many cuisines across the world.
As Heart & Parcel co-founder Clare Courtney explains, they’re also a metaphor. “It symbolises the hidden skills and knowledge of those people who are coming into the country, but not being recognised for those attributes.
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“The way you fold dumplings and cook them, it’s very much a shared learning process, where we come together to chat, cook, and build confidence.”
Founded in 2015 by Clare and Karolina Koścień, Heart & Parcel’s English and cooking classes were originally intended to fill the gap in ESOL classes provided in the UK, which cannot always be accessed by those who need them most due to restrictive eligibility requirements. Since then they’ve evolved significantly, with pupils now taking the reins and passing on their own recipes and experiences.
Unlike typical English learning classes, there is no pressure to pass tests and perform, and rather than learn by rote, the language is woven into the dumpling making process.
“Over the years we’ve seen people who have been really shy and feel unable to express themselves in English, but by the end of the course, they’re standing there in front of people and teaching them how to cook. It’s been a bit of a journey from 2015 to now because we’ve been through the pandemic, and we’ve learned many different ways of teaching English to different people around our communities.”
Ingredients and instructions are written on the board at the start of the class, while Clare and Karolina make casual conversation with learners before passing round a sheet with key vocabulary to learn and take home. The numbers speak for themselves, both in terms of the success of the initiative, but also how clearly this type of community project is still needed.
“Now, more than ever, it’s so important to keep this going, especially given the hostile environment and policies coming into place. We have to show people who are supposedly not deemed as British or not speaking similar languages to us that they are very much welcome, and that we acknowledge, celebrate and respect the experiences they bring with them to this country rather than just their level of English, which they haven’t yet acquired.”
In the space of seven years, 1143 ‘learners’ have come through their doors at centres across south Manchester including locations in Levenshulme and Cheetham Hill. Alongside this, 88 food and outreach events such as food markets, supper clubs and fundraisers have been held to keep this vital enterprise alive.
“Food insecurity is such a huge problem at the moment and a lot of our learners are affected directly by it - it’s accessing food banks, having to be more savvy with your cooking and making things last for longer that’s the issue. It’s also about equipping yourself with a community and a network so that you’re able to support each other.
“It’s much more than just the English language. That’s the starting point, as is the food, but then it grows from there.”
Moving the classes online during the pandemic gave Courtney and Karolina the opportunity to pass the baton over to their pupils, and also move them one step closer to their goal of making Heart & Parcel completely learner-led by 2025. The free-to-attend classes broadcast on YouTube in the winter of 2020, enabled learners to virtually open up their kitchens and showcase how they make some of their favourite dishes - for many it marked the first time they presented to an audience outside of the Heart & Parcel group.
For Paramita Raha, who is originally from Bangladesh and has been living in the UK for just over three years, the project has been a “delightful” way to improve her English skills and meet friends. “During lockdown I joined Heart & Parcel because food means everything to me, it means everything to everyone right?"
Despite being fairly new to the initiative, Paramita fully embraced the chance to present one of the online sessions, sharing her recipe for crispy spiced potato pastries and traditional masala tea. “I believe food can bring people together from all aspects of society, whether you’re rich or poor, or just from different cultures.
“It’s been delightful to join Heart & Parcel because the whole team has been so helpful, from offering guidelines and technical help on the lighting and cameras when filming, to the assistance with my English. I’ve also learned about different cultures as well.
“It’s given me endless opportunities and the cooking and the food has helped me to integrate into the new culture. I’ve also been able to meet new people and learn about their cultures, while sharing mine and expressing my opinions.”
The online sessions also saw learners like Liza Rasool prepare her steamed dumplings with spicy tomato sauce, while others showed guests how to make cheese-filled pastries and pistachio cheese rolls with sweet milk pudding.
Back in 2019, Courtney and Karolina released their first cookbook, ‘Cook Eat Write Share’, which documented, celebrated and promoted the knowledge, experiences and stories of the women involved in the Heart & Parcel. Not only did the collection of recipes reach homes all around the world, the sales of the cookbook went directly towards keeping their classes free and running for people who really needed a space to learn English.
Now, they're in the process of Crowdfunding their second edition, which if successful, will allow them to sustain their general running costs until 2025 and run weekly or monthly classes again. “It’s lots of different recipes from around the world but most importantly it’s from the women’s homes and memories.
“We have a lot of women who have passed through several countries like Italy via Morocco or Egypt via Spain and it’s really important that these women's own recipes, that they've developed as they’ve gone through these places, are shared.”
Recipes include a variety of dishes made by Heart & Parcel attendees including Rahel’s three-day injera (fermented pancake); Asmahan’s pistachio and orange blossom sweet cheese roll, and variety of Libyan dishes created by Najlaa.
“The concept we’re going for is who taught you to cook and it doesn’t have to be this romanticised narrative of ‘my mother taught me’. We realised romanticised stories miss so much of the richness of the ways that we learn about cooking and play into our preconceptions around the traditional values and skills of migrant communities in the UK.
“Food knowledge might be handed down through the generations sometimes, but, as some of the learners in this cookbook will show, they have much more realistic, practical, convenient and interesting ways they build their culinary repertoires - they are informed by more than memories, than matriarchal figures or their home countries. One of the learners from the last book, for example, her recipe was inspired by something she saw on YouTube, and there are also magazines, books, hastily torn-out pages of newspapers, a snatched five minutes between tasks searching online, exchanges between friends, sheer determination and a lot of mistakes, or even cooking classes to credit too.
“It’s subverting this traditional idea that constantly restricts the women that we work with in terms of who they really are.”
One of the most interesting aspects of Heart & Parcel, as Clare also shared, is its ability to empower those involved. While the dumpling has always been at its heart, often, as the course progresses, learners' ability to communicate and express their opinions in English becomes stronger and more pronounced, giving them greater agency and power.
“When the learners start doing it for themselves and we ask their opinions and help them make the decisions they're like ‘can we just do something else like pastry’.” With the continued evolution of the project, Clare’s hope is that they can also continue to equip their pupils with photoshop, camera and presentations skills, which became a focus of the online sessions, and will put present and future participants at the centre of the decision-making process.
While the initiative will continue to evolve, educate and empower, one thing is for sure - the dumpling will always hold a special place in the hearts of those involved in the project. “We’ve had such a great range of dishes in the cookbooks, but it always comes back to a parcel - we’ll always keep a dumpling of some form in the cookbook.
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