“Food is both a record of the upheaval of wartime and a comforting talisman of where you’ve come from and who you are. It’s the tie that binds you to your people wherever they are in the world.”
I can’t take credit for such an eloquent passage; it’s from Hawa Hassan’s new book, Setting a Place for Us: Recipes and Stories of Displacement, Resilience, and Community.
Hawa Hassan—today’s guest on Food—was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, the second eldest of ten siblings; when she was four, her family fled the country during the Somali Civil War, going first to a United Nations refugee camp in Mombasa, Kenya; then to Nairobi; ending up, three years later, in Seattle, where her mother sent her to live with family friends. The goal was for the rest of her family to join her eventually, but by the time she was in middle school she realized no one was coming.
In Setting a Place for Us, Hawa combines her intimate understanding of displacement with interviews, recipes, and stories that span global borders. Each chapter is a window into a different country—El Salvador, Yemen, Iraq, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to name a few—offering historical insights on how war and displacement have shaped each region’s foodways and cultural identity, and shedding light on the importance of preserving recipes and food traditions in places of conflict and migration.
How great to focus so much on telling the stories of others.
We’re sharing three recipes from Setting a Place for Us: Fresco de Melon (Cantaloupe Juice, with or without rum); Madesu (Stewed Red Beans); and Rice Bread.
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