Pastry chef Saïd M'Dahoma gives us something to chew on this Canada Reads
CBC Books | Posted: January 23, 2025 2:32 PM | Last Updated: 8 hours ago
The Alberta chef will champion Dandelion by Jamie Chai Yun Liew. Canada Reads will air March 17-20.
Pastry chef Saïd M'Dahoma is championing the novel Dandelion by Jamie Chai Yun Liew on Canada Reads 2025!
The Calgary-based M'Dahoma is a neuroscientist turned pastry chef who shares his skills on social media as The Pastry Nerd.
The great Canadian book debate will take place on March 17-20. This year, we are looking for one book to change the narrative.
The debates will be hosted by Ali Hassan and will be broadcast on CBC Radio One, CBC TV, CBC Gem, CBC Listen, YouTube and CBC Books. Canada Reads airs at 10 a.m. ET (11 a.m. AT, 1:30 p.m. NT) on CBC Radio One and 1 p.m. ET (2 p.m. AT, 2:30 p.m. NT) on CBC TV. You can tune in live or catch a replay on the platform of your choice.
A sweet career change
M'Dahoma is a French Comorian Canadian pastry chef based in Calgary. M'Dahoma was born in Paris, where he completed his PhD in neuroscience, and moved to Canada to work at the University of Alberta.
Living so far from home, he began to miss French pastries, so he started making his own. Through trial and error and by sharing his journey online, he decided to give up his career as a neuroscientist and become a pastry chef full-time.
He shares his skills on television, including shows like The Good Stuff with Mary Berg, and with his online following of more than 200,000, M'Dahoma was named as one of the Top 20 Compelling Calgarians of 2025.
Canada Reads is his next challenge — and M'Dahoma is proud to bring Dandelion to the conversation, as one book to change the narrative.
"I could never have imagined that, especially as an immigrant, one day I'd have the opportunity to be on such a big stage to tell Canadians, this is the book that you should read," he told CBC Books. "For me, this is surreal."
WATCH | Saïd M'Dahoma makes a custard-based chocolate mousse:
Bringing immigrant experiences to the forefront
From a young age, M'Dahoma was a reader, devouring every book he could get his hands on, from The Odyssey to the Goosebumps series. Now, he's a fan of fantasy novels and stories about the struggles of everyday life and hurdles people face.
His Canada Reads 2025 selection, Dandelion, is the latter, and touches on themes of migration, motherhood and belonging through one family's experience. As an immigrant himself, he was especially drawn to its multifaceted approach to describing the process of moving somewhere new.
"What Dandelion brilliantly does is that it shows that there's not just one immigrant story. There are so many different stories, so many different dreams and aspirations that immigrants can have when they come," said M'Dahoma on CBC Radio's Commotion.
"Immigrants can be from different socioeconomic statuses. Some of them struggle ... I think Dandelion just changes the perspective that some people might have about immigrants and how diverse immigrants can be."
Dandelion just changes the perspective that some people might have about immigrants and how diverse immigrants can be. - Saïd M'Dahoma
While M'Dahoma can see his and his parents' immigrant experiences reflected in the novel, he told CBC Books that migration is something that most Canadians can relate to.
"Even if you did not move yourself to Canada, I'm sure that at some point in your ancestry, someone moved somewhere new," said M'Dahoma. He's hoping that when reading Dandelion, Canadians will be inspired to ask their family members what that was like and open up family discussion and bring untold stories to light.
LISTEN |Said M'Dahoma on All in a Day:
The importance of food
Food has always been a critical part of M'Dahoma's life, even before he started working in the industry.
"I love eating. I love food as a way to gather people," he said.
That's why he picked a novel where mouth-watering descriptions of family recipes are prevalent as something that connects the characters to their family and shared history.
"Food is super important for the author because food brings you back, especially when you're an immigrant," he said. "Food brings you back to who you were, to your roots, to what you liked. It just has that ability to connect you to your identity."
Food just has that ability to connect you to your identity. - Saïd M'Dahoma
"One thing that I realized with immigrants stories, immigrants families, is that sometimes a few generations will pass and the language has disappeared. The religion is not really practiced, but food is still there. People still eat the food that they grew up with, that their grandmother used to make."
A book about belonging
Dandelion is a novel about family secrets, migration, isolation, motherhood and mental illness. When Lily was a child, her mother, Swee Hua, walked away from the family and was never heard from again. After becoming a new mother herself, Lily is obsessed with discovering what happened to Swee Hua.
She recalls growing up in a British Columbia mining town where there were only a handful of Asian families and how Swee Hua longed to return to Brunei. Eventually, a clue leads Lily to southeast Asia to find out the truth about her mother.
Jamie Chai Yun Liew is a lawyer, law professor and podcaster based in Ottawa. Dandelion is her first novel, which won her the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop. She also wrote the nonfiction book Ghost Citizens. Liew was named one of CBC Books writers to watch in 2022.
"I wanted to explore themes of belonging and place from an emotional place. I wrote about it academically in terms of how the law creates foreigners, but I wanted to explore how that feels — what that does to the psyche, how that affects someone's mental health," Liew told CBC Books.
I wanted to explore themes of belonging and place from an emotional place. - Jamie Chai Yun Liew
"There are a lot of assumptions about why people are stateless and the first one is that they are foreigners or migrants."
"And some stateless people are, but a lot of stateless people — millions around the world — are living within their home countries and overwhelmingly people told me, 'I'm being treated like a foreigner in my own country.'"
Corrections:- This post has been updated to reflect that Dandelion by Jamie Chai Yun Liew is a novel. February 4, 2025 4:31 PM