Booyah Feasts

“Booyah,” also commonly spelled “booya,” is an abundant one-pot boiled meal distinctive to the upper Midwest and eastern Canada that anchors a family reunion or community event by the same name. Evidence associates the term and meal concept with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French and French-Canadians who pushed west beyond the Great Lakes from the Canadian maritimes. Later immigrants, including Czechs, Poles, and Walloon French speakers from Belgium, invigorated the tradition with similar terminologies and recipes from nineteenth-century Europe. Key divergent pockets of this syncretic dish include Canada’s Ottawa River Valley, Michigan’s southwestern Upper Peninsula commercial fishing communities, Belgian-American strongholds in northeastern Wisconsin’s Green Bay area, and firemen, community, neighborhood, and church associations in Minnesota’s Twin Cities.