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Sharing a biscuit or a plate of dumplings can offer a taste of home, and a pathway to belonging in Australia.
Sharing a biscuit or a plate of dumplings can offer a taste of home, and a pathway to belonging in Australia. For Michelle Raguz, the biggest compliment she can receive is being told her food tastes just like baka's .
Raguz, who lives in Austral in Sydney's south-west, is one of a growing number of people running small businesses from their home kitchens, often supplying niche cultural foods to families who may not have the time or skills to devote to make them, but still crave the taste of home. While Croatian-style biscuits are available to buy in certain shops, the 41-year-old says "anything that comes out of a machine is not going to taste the way a homemade biscuit does".
Your trusted source for staying up-to-date with the world around you. Get free daily news updates and analysis, straight to your inbox. During her busiest periods ahead of Easter and Christmas, Raguz easily makes 1,000 biscuits for sale through her Instagram account. Michelle Raguz sells freshly made biscuits and cakes on her Instagram account.
Source: Supplied / @thewogbox The NSW Food Authority tells SBS News that "anecdotal feedback from local councils indicates home-based food businesses have grown in number", although it does not specifically collect data on these businesses. Driven by a mix of nostalgia, convenience and a desire for supportive communities, these micro businesses have also become a way for people to stayAmong the Balkan community in Australia, including those of Macedonian and Serbian heritage, it's traditional to enjoy treats like madarice and oblatne with coffee at social gatherings.
"Even my mother-in-law, she's got arthritis in her hands they can't stand there and bake anymore," she says. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she was spurred to start her business by a desire to help her community, which didn't have the option of having traditional foods delivered. if you wanted to reach out to somebody, the only option people had were … donuts or flowers.
This was not appealing to Croatians, Raguz says, who love having small portions of a variety of homemade cakes and biscuits. Raguz spent nearly a year perfecting her almond moons to taste just like the ones her aunt made. Source: Supplied About 90 per cent of her customers are of Balkan heritage, but she also has other customers who have found her sweet treats after friends or neighbours shared her biscuits with them, for example.
Michelle Raguz says she loves cooking for her family and enjoys keeping Croatian food traditions alive. Source: Supplied Raguz says she loves recreating the warm memories she had growing up and is lucky to have inherited a love of cooking from her mum.
"All of our friends still talk about my mother's hospitality," she says, adding that she always wanted to carry that on with her own children. Home cooking can create a sense of care that sets it apart from restaurant meals, says Carol Perdigao, a former chef who moved to Melbourne from Brazil six years ago. She regularly orders food such as feijão tropeiro and empadão de palmito from a home cook via WhatsApp.
"It's something I miss from home," she says of the dishes, which she adds can be difficult to find in Brazilian restaurants in Australia that often focus on meat. She says that when she began ordering the food she was mainly motivated by the desire to support the Brazilian community in Australia but says it is also "one of the best foods flavour-wise because it's cooked by people that care".
"A lot of people work in hospitality because they end up there and it's a very busy-paced life," Perdigao notes of restaurant cuisine. The meals have also helped Carol to continue the Brazilian tradition of having a large warm meal for lunch.
"It's an important part of the day for me," she says. "It's a habit that I really wasn't able to get rid of. "Cultural sociologist Sian Supski, a research fellow at Monash University, says food can be used to make people feel at home. She says women migrating to Australia in the 1950s used it as a way to become part of the Australian suburbs.
"They would give food to their neighbours and then their neighbours would ask for the recipes," she says. Migrants must also find local substitutes for some ingredients and Supski says this creates a lot of "cultural traffic" between the place they now live and where they came from.
'I feel like people appreciate me' Sarah says the thing she values the most about selling her homemade dumplings is that it gives her a chance to meet her neighbours, and a topic to talk about. " I love chatting. " Sarah sees her dumpling business as just a hobby, which is why she doesn’t want her name to be published.
She sells one or two bags of dumplings in Sydney each week, mostly through posts on a local community Facebook page. Doing this just give me confidence. I feel like people appreciate me. I feel good for myself.
Sarah's jiaozi are a blend of how her grandma cooks and the preferences of her non-Chinese husband and two children. The pork and prawn filling is minced by hand chopping, just like Sarah's grandma's, but she wraps them using store-bought dumpling pastry, which is thinner than handmade dough, and steams them rather than boiling them. This also suits Sarah's customers as the majority of them are not Asian.
Regular buyers include a woman who orders dumplings every Valentine's Day, and a man who buys them monthly to serve to his mates during a regular catch-up. Once her children finish their education, Sarah says she may start a small dumpling bar because she loves having a drink and chatting with friends while eating dumplings.
"The way we show love neighbours or that, we just keep feeding them. That's the Chinese.
" Asma Khalaf sells Middle Eastern pastries such as maamoul and kaak on her Instagram page. Source: Supplied / @yafasweet__ While most of her goods are sold to those of Middle Eastern background, about 30 per cent are bought by people from other cultures. Demand can be quite unpredictable but Khalaf hopes to eventually open her own shop, to help support her family in Australia and Gaza.
Supski says food can hold an important role for migrants from countries that have experienced societal upheaval and seen their cultural and literary heritage destroyed.
"They have lost their loved ones, or their connection because records have been lost, as well as people. "The re-creation of food and the feeding of community is this very direct connection straight back to family or to the place that people grew up. "But the Food Safety Information Council has warned Australians not to buy or sell food through social media sites that is prepared in unregulated home kitchens.
Chief executive officer Lydia Buchtmann says food prepared in a home kitchen or backyard barbecue is unlikely to meet the food safety regulations that apply to businesses selling food. A NSW Food Authority spokesperson tells SBS News home-based food businesses must meet the same requirements as all food businesses in NSW.
"Home-based businesses must notify the appropriate authority, their local council or the NSW Food Authority, with their business details so their food safety compliance requirements can be assessed," the spokesperson says. Sukhmani Khorana of the University of NSW, whose research looks at how migrants use food cultures to foster belonging, says food safety verification is important, although she questions whether it's always accessible to the people starting these businesses.
"Sometimes it also doesn't matter a great deal to customers from the same community if they know the family," she tells SBS News. She says she's also noticed an increase in supper clubs, where people host guests in their homes, which can allow for specific foods from certain regions to be experienced in place of cuisines often served in restaurants catering to broader tastes.
Australia has a long history of multicultural foods starting off as operated and owned by independent families or from ethnic backgrounds, and then becoming cool … too homogenised and commercialised. She is concerned social media algorithms may also limit access to foods and businesses to those who are already searching for them.
"Opportunities we had before extended that knowledge and awareness to other communities as well. " Selling food and posting recipes on social media may help provide access to food that is not commonly available — especially to younger generations — but Khorana points out that platforms like Instagram rely heavily on visual aesthetics.
Supski acknowledges concerns around the reliance on social media but says it appears to have played a positive role for some people amid concerns about what some say is a loneliness epidemic. Sign up now for daily news from Australia and around the world. You can also subscribe to Insight's weekly newsletter for in-depth features and first-person stories.
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