‘We have no sad stories to tell’: Hawa Hassan’s new cookbook explores the meaning of home in the midst of displacement

Hawa Hassan was only 4-years-old when fighting forced her and her family from their home in Somalia. Hassan spent the next three years in Kenya, where some of her earliest memories were of running around tents in a refugee camp with her siblings and helping her mother stock the goods store she’d opened there.

When she was seven, Hassan’s mother sent her to live with family friends in Seattle. It would be another 15 years before she saw her family again.

“A lot of my childhood was spent wondering about my own background and my own identity,” said Hawa, a chef and entrepreneur who now lives in New York. “For many years, I had this deep desire to find people like myself and tell that story.”

Hassan’s new cookbook, Setting a Place for Us: Recipes and Stories of Displacement, Resilience, and Communities from Eight Countries Impacted by War is the fruit of that longing. 

To write it, Hassan spent three years travelling and interviewing dozens of chefs and entrepreneurs from Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, El Salvador, Iraq, Lebanon, Liberia, and Yemen—countries perhaps better known to outsiders for civil strife than rich ingredients and complex flavors.

The chapters are divided by country, each one offering a brief history; lush photos of daily life; several recipes; and at least one interview with a local grower, restaurateur, or community organizer. 

“My number-one goal is to tell a different story about what it means to be from these places,” Hassan said. “I hope that when people pick up this book, they come for the recipes, but they stay for the stories.” 

In the DRC she spoke with a baker who found success delivering mikate—or doughnuts—to customers during the pandemic. A brewer from Baghdad reflects on building a new life in New York and highlights masgouf—a grilled fish with tamarind sauce—as a must-try Iraqi dish. 

Though many of the people she spoke with have been displaced, Hassan said she intentionally focussed on food traditions and everyday life rather than conflict. “This was much more about the idea of home rather than what the temperature of a country is, or what your politics are,” she said. 

Mikey Muhanna, a social entrepreneur featured in Hassan’s Lebanon chapter, said that perspective came as a relief. “I was apprehensive at the beginning,” he said. “There’s a million orientalizing books, like, let’s go to war-torn countries and talk about real people on the ground, but the more I got to speak to her, and her collaborator [photographer Riley Dengler], I realized that they were coming from a place of real curiosity.”

He said Hassan’s work offers a “blueprint” for how to report on communities other than one’s own. “It’s really powerful to see somebody who has the life perspective that Hawa has tell these stories with integrity, patience, and curiosity,” he said. 

Hassan traces the roots of Setting a Place for Us more a decade back to a six-month stay in Norway, where her mother and siblings eventually settled. After so many years apart, Hassan said she had to learn to find her place again in her family. “That’s when I started thinking about how I know it’s not only my family that has these big stories to tell about being othered or impacted by war or by family separation,” she said.

Hassan was working as a model in New York at the time, but in Norway she spent hours in the kitchen with her mother making Somali food. When she returned to the U.S. in 2015 she started to lay the groundwork for her company, Basbaas, a condiment company with offerings like tamarind date sauce and coconut cilantro chutney. 

In 2020, she published her debut cookbook, In Bibi’s Kitchen, which she cowrote with Julia Turshen. A collection of recipes from grandmothers in eight eastern African countries, it won the James Beard Foundation award for Best International Cookbook. 

“The sauce [company] has helped me to inch my way onto the American dining table, and tell a story of not just being a Somalian girl, but being an African girl,” she said. She saw In Bibi’s Kitchen as an expansion of that story—offering a glimpse of women’s daily lives in East Africa. 

Following the success of In Bibi’s Kitchen, she was approached by Food Network TV to host her own show. She starred in Hawa at Home, where she cooked dishes like Doro Wat and made piri piri sauce, bringing East African food to new audiences. 

Her new book is a more intimate exploration of her life story—one that relates to millions of displaced people around the world. “Setting a Place for Us is the next layer of who I am that I’m willing to share, which is a person who’s been impacted by civil unrest, displacement, and family separation,” Hassan said. 

But despite the heavy subject matter, the book is largely optimistic—a celebration of the places people have returned to after years away or that that they continue to long for from afar. 

“My philosophy is we have no sad stories to tell,” Hassan said.

Setting a Place for Us: Recipes and Stories of Displacement, Resilience, and Communities from Eight Countries Impacted by War will be published on Tuesday, May 13, by Ten Speed Press.