Why This Cookbook – Born From Turmoil, Resilience & Crossed Borders – Belongs In Your Kitchen

Silky aubergines, tender chickpeas and a warmly spiced tomato sauce laced with onions and garlic come together in maghmour, a Lebanese stew featured in Hawa Hassan’s new cookbook Setting a Place for Us: Recipes and Stories of Displacement, Resilience, and Community. It’s the kind of dish that makes you want to reach for the spice rack and start cooking. But there’s more to it than the promise of a delicious meal – it’s a recipe rich with meaning.

“Maghmour is not just a dish,” Hawa writes. “It’s a representation of cultural identity, regional diversity, and the values of Middle Eastern cuisine. It reflects a deep connection to the land, traditions, and the importance of gathering around a table to share flavourful and satisfying food with loved ones.” It’s exactly the kind of moment that fills the pages of Setting a Place for Us, where food becomes a bridge between past and present, displacement and belonging.

When Hawa writes about food, it’s never just about what’s on the plate. In her debut cookbook, In Bibi’s Kitchen, which came out in 2020, she used recipes and ingredients as a lens into the culinary traditions of East Africa, told through the voices of the grandmothers who keep them alive. Across its pages, 15 bibis – Swahili for grandmother – shared life stories and ingredients, kitchen lore and memories to create a compelling portrait of heritage.

Her latest widens the scope, taking readers into kitchens across eight countries – Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, El Salvador, Iraq, Lebanon, Liberia and Yemen – that are often reduced to headlines about war and conflict. In each place, the Somali-born chef, entrepreneur, and James Beard Award winner traces the thread that connects food, memory and migration through dishes, essays and conversations with the people she met during her reporting. The result is more than a collection of recipes – it’s a map of resilience, shaped by those who’ve carried their culture across borders, one dish at a time.

“It was important to me to make room for stories that are often left behind or left out of the narrative,” Hawa tells me. “When you think of setting a place at the table, it’s a deeply personal gesture – setting a place for you, your family, your children, your friends. I was keen to speak to the power of gathering, no matter where we are.”

“This is more than a collection of recipes – it’s a map of resilience, shaped by those who’ve carried their culture across borders, one dish at a time.”

Hawa drew from her own experience as a refugee in developing the idea for Setting a Place for Us. Born in Mogadishu, she fled civil war in Somalia at the age of four, settling with her family in a refugee camp in Kenya, where her mother ran a small goods store. By seven, she had resettled in Seattle to live with a family friend, eventually reuniting with her mum and siblings 15 years later. Today, she lives in New York City.

“The way that I wanted to report on this book was very personal, because of my own story of displacement, separation and longing to find home again,” she says. “For such a long time, I felt a sense of abandonment, as if I’d been forgotten. Then I realised there had to be other people that went through what I went through, and I started thinking about telling their stories. So that’s how I approached it. It was people first, food second, places third.”

Over three years, Hawa travelled around the world and interviewed chefs and social entrepreneurs both locally and across the diaspora, documenting their lived experiences of adversity or displacement and collecting recipes for the book. She dove into the food traditions of their homelands, purposely focusing on their work and achievements rather than centring the turmoil or politics of the nations they came from – a concerted effort to reframe familiar ‘sad’ narratives and highlight agency, connection and identity over conflict.

In Beirut, she sat down with Mikey Muhanna, founder of educational platform Afikra, to discuss community, the essence of home, and his mission to encourage individuals to reconsider the histories and cultures of the Arab world. For the Liberia chapter, she spoke with academic, musician and restaurateur Tanya Ansahta Garnett about her efforts to showcase the richness and diversity of Liberian cuisine, and challenge misconceptions about the country. In El Salvador, she met with Francisco Martínez, a coffee farmer in the highest part of the Cordillera del Bálsamo, who has dedicated his entire life to growing and selecting coffee beans.

Hawa was able to visit four of the eight countries in the book – Democratic Republic of the Congo, El Salvador, Lebanon and Liberia – alongside photographer Riley Dengler. In the remaining regions, where safety concerns or visa issues made travel impossible, she worked with local visual artists to capture each place from within in a nuanced, truthful manner. “My deepest desire, really, was not only to tell stories that were layered, but also to move away from this one brush we paint these countries with,” says Hawa.

That intention also informed her selection of which countries to include. “All of them come from ancient societies and have incredibly rich cultures,” she says. “They are the cradle of civilisation – and they have delicious recipes. So when I was choosing each place, a lot of it was about asking myself: ‘OK, what does it look like to come from there?’ And, ‘How could we speak about somewhere like Iraq or Yemen, for instance, in a way that doesn’t feel reductive or othered? The collective of people and community that helped bring this [book] together was key in answering those questions.”

“Cooking familiar dishes is an act of preservation, a way to recreate home, even when you’re in a landscape that is completely different from your own”

One of them is Mokhtar Alkhanshali, a Yemeni American coffee entrepreneur featured in the Yemen chapter. “This book dives deep into countries that are often misunderstood, and it does so with curiosity and respect,” he says. “I’ve always believed food and drink can act as a catalyst to bridge people, and Hawa’s work is proof of that.”

Mokhtar, whose coffee company Port of Mokha imports specialty Yemeni coffee, spoke at length with Hawa about his country’s most beloved recipes and comfort dishes, exchanging voice notes on pronunciation, origins and why certain familiar items such as qishr, a Yemeni drink made with dried coffee husks that’s deeply rooted in Yemen’s coffee-growing tradition, endure. Seeing them now in print, he says, “feels like stepping into a Yemeni kitchen”. The act of preserving and sharing these recipes, for Mokhtar, is a way of honouring the cultural richness of his homeland – something that, even in exile, continues to nourish the soul. “When someone is forced to leave their country, they don’t have much they can take with them,” he says. “One of the things that doesn’t actually weigh a lot but has a lot of emotional weight, is food recipes. That’s what makes this book so important. For people in the diaspora, flipping through its pages feels like being back home, before conflict or unrest. That’s how I felt reading it.”

Hawa echoes the same sentiment. “Food is a getaway into culture and people” she says. “It’s memory, and one of the most tangible ways to hold on to your own identity – all the more for those who have been displaced. Cooking familiar dishes is an act of preservation, a way to recreate home, even when you’re in a landscape that is completely different from your own.” In Setting a Place for Us, food becomes yet another vessel – not just for nourishment, but for celebration. “We are more than one single story,” the author says. “There’s so much more than just sadness.”    

Scanning the dishes featured in Setting a Place for Us, that spirit of celebration comes through in every chapter. There’s macarona béchamel from Egypt, a popular comfort food made from tubular pasta-like penne baked in a rich béchamel sauce; kleicha tamar, the “national cookie of Iraq”, baked for special feasts and holidays and filled with dates (or pistachio or walnut paste); El Salvador’s pupusas, vibrant masa flatbreads accompanied with cabbage slaw that are fixtures of family gatherings.

Alongside 75 beautifully photographed recipes, the book offers a brief introduction to each country, blending cultural context with snapshots of their current geopolitical realities (as of 2024). Each recipe is paired with a QR code linking to audio pronunciations, a thoughtful tool to help readers pronounce each dish’s name with care and accuracy. “So many people often ask me to pronounce things as if some of those languages are also my own, but the truth is, I am actually quite clumsy with foreign words,” says Hawa. “And I know I am not the only one. So the QR codes are a way to say, ‘Let’s learn together.’ It’s an invitation.”

That, ultimately, is the book’s central message. “I hope that people come to this book and realise that food is powerful. It’s resistance,” Hawa says. “But I also hope that they’ll pick it up and want to know more about the stories that I’ve shared and the people I have talked to. If it makes the world feel a little smaller, then I’ve done what I set out to do.” In giving space to voices so often pushed to the margins, Hawa invites us to see food not just as a source of comfort, but as a powerful form of memory, connection and survival. The result is a book that doesn’t just teach you how to cook something different – it teaches you how to listen.

Setting a Place for Us: Recipes and Stories of Displacement, Resilience, and Community by Hawa Hassan, released by Ten Speed Press, is out now.