In April 1982, the director of the ITHQ asked him to replace at short notice one of his cooking teachers who was to take part in the popular TV show Radio-Canada Hello Boubou, presented live from Complexe Desjardins in Montreal. Sister Angèle shows up on set a few minutes early and challenges a man she doesn’t know. It is the animator Jacques Boulanger. He explains to her that he is waiting for a nun who has to make a recipe, adding that it will be boring! He is wrong. The success is immediate. The audience laughs out loud when Sister Angèle explains with great humor and enthusiasm how to prepare cannelloni. As a result, she signed an agreement to participate in 40 shows.
“She is the complete opposite of the austere nun and has a lot of charisma,” explains, admiringly, the vice-president of the Society of Chefs, Denis Paquin, who worked alongside her at the ITHQ. She stood out among the serious and haughty leaders that we saw at the time on television. For more than 20 years, she became the star of many appointments on TV and radio. Her cookbooks are selling like hotcakes.
“The public knows Sister Angèle’s extroverted side,” says chef Ricardo Larrivee, one of her friends and former students at the ITHQ. But few people know that it also helps thousands of people. From the end of the 1990s, for example, it supported the Plein Air à Plein Cœur holiday camps in the Laurentians, which welcome young people from underprivileged neighborhoods and show them how to eat well. “I wondered why the children nicknamed a nine-year-old boy ‘chicken in a hurry’,” says Father Jean Boyer, who takes care of these camps, with amazement. I learned that at home, that’s all he ate. He regularly sees young people arriving with green garbage bags as their only suitcase.
Sister Angèle also prepares, with many chefs, Christmas dinners for hundreds of children and teenagers who receive nothing else during the holidays. “I will never forget this 13-year-old who asked me for soup five times in addition to stuffing himself with meat pies,” says chef Mario Julien, who has participated in several of these events.
In 2001, Brunilda Reyes, a social worker who had immigrated from Chile six years earlier, founded Les Fourchettes de l’espoir in Montreal North. “I did not understand how children arrived in class in the morning without having had breakfast, she confides. For me, Canada was synonymous with wealth!” She shouts from the heart to Sister Angèle who, thanks to generous donors, will donate more than $100,000 in 18 years to the organization whose mission is to educate. On weekends, young people aged 4 to 12 attend a culinary school and learn to taste food, while 13 to 17 year olds cook with the help of cooks from the Society of Chefs who volunteer with Sister Angela. “It is fascinating to see how attentive the children are to his actions and gestures, explains chef Denis Paquin. She has a young heart. The one who could be their great-grandmother takes the little ones in her arms to help them climb on benches so that they can taste soups, salads and muffins, which she then teaches them to prepare.
“The most beautiful moment is when Sister Angèle gives a diploma to those who have completed their six-month training,” explains Atika Saoudi, mother of three boys aged 7 to 13 who have taken several of her courses.