Somali chef Hawa Hassan tells stories of East African cuisine through the experts: grandmothers

Original Story Published by: Sharyn Jackson, Star Tribune (Minneapolis), www.greensboro.com
Photo Source: Penguin Random House

(Above) "In Bibi's Kitchen".

MINNEAPOLIS — Hawa Hassan clears something up right away in her first cookbook, "In Bibi's Kitchen."

The book is "not about what is new and next," she writes in the introduction, a daring departure for a food entrepreneur and recipe developer whose YouTube videos garner hundreds of thousands of views.

Instead, Hassan decided to go back, way back, to the kitchen wisdom of grandmothers.

"In Bibi's Kitchen," which Hassan co-authored with Julia Turshen, is a primer on the dishes that originate in the African countries bordering the Indian Ocean, from Eritrea to South Africa, as seen through the lens of the matriarchs who pass those recipes down from generation to generation.

"I want to preserve the stories that have always preserved me," Hassan said in an interview. "I want to pay homage to the people who've taken care of me, and I want to share our food with people."

But sharing the food of eight countries that hug thousands of miles of coastline was a daunting task for the founder and CEO of Basbaas Sauce, a line of Somali condiments.

So, she turned to the experts: 16 bibis (that's Swahili for grandmother) with a combined "gazillion" years of experience, who share their stories and cooking techniques in interviews at the start of every chapter.

"I kept wondering why grandmothers were being left out of the narrative," Hassan said about the framework for her book. "Why was no one speaking to grandmothers anywhere? Why was it that when men traveled far away to countries where women were the people who sustained cultures and kept recipes, why were they not being spoken to on TV?"