Women Who Travel Podcast: Hawa Hassan's Recipes from Somalia, Egypt, Lebanon, and More

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19-05-2025

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In Hawa Hassan's second cookbook, the chef and author explores the recipes and stories born out of displacement, and the sense of community and resilience that can be found through food. Lale chats with her about the travels and research behind the book, which took her to The Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, and Lebanon, among others, as well as how her own path from Somalia to the US informed her personal food journey.
Lale Arikoglu: Hi there, I'm Lale Arikoglu, and today I'm talking to chef and author Hawa Hassan about her groundbreaking book Setting a Place for Us.
Its subtitle explains its radical scope, recipes and stories of displacement, resilience, and community from eight countries impacted by war. Hawa and her family fled the Somalian Civil War. A few years later, she was sent to friends in America and was separated from her mother and siblings who moved to Oslo. The stories of the people she meets in her book often mirror that of her own life.
Hawa Hassan: I migrated to the U.S. in 1993, November of 1993. My mother and family never made it to America. Till today, my family has never been to America. I only have one little brother who's born in Norway that's come to New York, and he came in 2018 just as he was getting out of high school. But my family has lived in Somalia, Kenya, and then Oslo.
LA: Moving in 1993 means that you were very young when you moved.
HH: Yeah. The first two years of living in America, because I assumed my family was still coming and that was the game plan. I went as a part of a team of six people. At the time, it was my five siblings and my mom. So I was like, "Okay, the rest of my teammates are coming. They're just waiting for sponsorship to the U.S.," which never came because Black Hawk Down happened and the Clinton administration had shut it down at the time.
And in hindsight, I don't think there's a better place than Oslo that my family could have ended up in for so many different reasons. So for the first two years, I was still very much a Somali child. I was still trying to cook. I was still trying to clean with the people that I was living with because I wanted to be an active participant of the group that I was living with.
LA: What were you cooking?
HH: Well, there was an older person in the house, a woman. She did all the cooking, but I did all the cleaning and the chopping those first two years.
LA: You were sous chef?
HH: I was sous chef. I didn't know I was a little chef in the making, okay? But I had already been a sous chef with my mom and my brother, and so this was just a different version of it. But after those first two years passed and I realized no one was coming, honey, I was eating hot dogs, Doritos, pizza, gas station food was my survival tool.
LA: When you say survival tool, what do you mean?
HH: It was what fueled me. I would have me a little something in the morning before school and then after school I would walk right over to Mr. Henry's gas station. I would go right over there and he knew Hawa wants a hot link. Don't make Hawa's bread too thick, cut the crust off for her.
LA: Remind me where in the US you were.
HH: I grew up in Seattle, Washington.
LA: Was there a Somalian community there? Where you were aware of one?
HH: So when I arrived in Seattle, it wasn't only my arrival, it was the Cambodians, it was the Russians, it was the Vietnamese, the Eritreans, the Ethiopians, the Sudanese, and Somalis. My elementary school was so diverse. I've always had, whether it be the Somalis or others, there's always been a diversity around me just because of the time that I came to the U.S.
LA: Did your family that was in Oslo and your mother, did they have the same or...
HH: Yeah, well, kind of and not. When they migrated to Norway, they were some of the very first immigrants, and so there wasn't a huge Somali population. And I don't know why this happens. When migration happens, oftentimes governments place you in the middle of the center, in the city center, and so my family grew up in an area called Gronland, which is downtown Oslo. But downtown Oslo, if you just walk, it's full of Somalis now. Yeah, so they now have a very healthy community.
LA: It sounds like for your family, Oslo is a haven of sorts, or at least feels like home.
HH: Totally. Yeah, totally. I mean, my siblings, they're Norwegian kids. They fight in Norwegian. They have grown up there. Some of them were born there. They've been schooled there. Some of them are married to Norwegians.
The last time I was in Somalia was 1991. My father still lives there, and my older brother goes every year. My little sister goes. She's taking her kids to go see him. But there were a few of us that hadn't seen him since I left Kenya, and so I took everybody to Turkey, to Istanbul because it was the only place that my father can get, we can get him to get a visa.
LA: Which is interesting because there are other people I know who have family. I'm thinking of a friend whose family in Iran and Istanbul is the meetings point.
HH: Oh.
LA: And I think that happens for a lot of diaspora communities-
HH: Totally.
LA: ... which are all trying to come together in a place, and Istanbul seems to be that city.
HH: Absolutely. I mean, we knew it would be easy to apply at the embassy in Somalia. It would be familiar for my dad because people speak Arabic, he's Muslim. So all of us went and we had a family reunion for 18 days. It was really nice.
LA: Back in 2020, I sat down with Hawa to chat about her first book, In Bibi's Kitchen, which won the James Beard International Cookbook Award. Then, she shared food traditions of African countries bordering the Indian Ocean. But this book also covers Asia and Central America. The eight countries Hawa talks about are usually featured in the media as being in a state of disarray or in crisis. But here she focuses on community spirit and the power of food to bring people together.
HH: I visited the Democratic Republic of Congo, El Salvador, Lebanon, and Liberia. And then the other four countries that I did intense research and hired other people to help research were Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Egypt.
LA: You list off those countries, and at first listen, you might think that's quite like a sort of disparate list of places. But there's a through line and a thread that stitches them all together and is why you chose them. What is that thread?
HH: Yeah, so I wanted to examine countries that there was conflict and instability. There was refugee and migration, humanitarian crisis, and then historical and cultural significance. Some of these countries are the oldest civilization on earth. I wanted to talk about that because oftentimes when we hear about these places, even though the through line of this book is a part of my story, which is civil unrest, and I wanted to examine that for my own reasons and also for the purpose of saying, "Hey, here's another way to look at these people." And so this book, there's no sad stories in it, and I say that about my own life. I have no sad stories to tell.
LA: And that there isn't this sort of two-dimensional view of what a person from X country is like or if they choose to leave, what their life as a displaced person could be.
HH: Correct. Because the desires are the same no matter where we are. We're a lot more alike than different.
LA: Could you tell me a little bit more about how you were weaving your own personal story into the book, or at least how it was driving the book?
HH: Yeah, so originally when I started thinking about food in 2014, I was so curious about my own personal story and I wanted to confront so much the otherness of my own life. When you've been separated from your family or from your homeland, there's a desire to return always in hopes of finding yourself or finding out new information, like, "I want to discover more of who I am," and that's what this book was for me. That's what all my work is. In Bibi's Kitchen was a selfish project. I wanted to preserve those stories. I wanted to make Africa accessible. I wanted to talk about the Indian Ocean from an African's perspective. This book is the same. I want to talk about displacement from a displaced person's perspective. It's not all sad and gloom. It's not doom and gloom.
LA: When you were choosing these countries, did you have some sort of criteria that you were looking for, or was it literally just kind of looking at a big old map and thinking, "These are the places that fascinate me."? Or were there kind of certain political or cultural moments or touchstones that you were keeping an eye out for?
HH: The main things that I wanted to examine were historical and cultural significance, migration, conflict, and I also wanted to examine it from the perspective of... Somalia has been in constant conflict almost for as long as I've been born. And some of the countries in this book also have been in prolonged conflict. And some of them have been in conflict and are kind of out of it now, but they're still residue of some of those old feelings. And so I just wanted to see the similarities of the places and I wanted to tell a different story about what it meant to be from those places.
Displacement can also come at the cost of climate change. And so even though in this book I talk about 177 million people across the world, the people that you speak to on the ground do often talk about the lack of rain or too much rain. I'm no climate expert, but the shifting of crop season and things like that, because ultimately you fill it across the board. And when there's conflict within a country's borders, movement of food isn't the same as it is in our world. I think things change and people are much more mindful and they're not as wasteful as we are here. And I hope that also comes across in the book.
LA: There are four countries that you visit physically in the book. Tell me a little bit kind of about what you were searching for in each one.
HH: Yeah. So El Salvador, I went to in February 2020, right before the world shut down. I went with my photographer and I'd already had my friends in El Salvador, so it was simple. And El Salvadorians are such kind people, loving people, welcoming people, and so it's a easy place to feel at home. And I was on the beach the whole time, and so it was lovely.
LA: A challenging but empowering visit to Kinshasa coming up.
I'm here with Hawa Hassan on Women Who Travel.
HH: The next place I went to was the Democratic Republic of Congo. I went to Kinshasa. And I say that in the intro to Kinshasa, or going there, the travel for it was chaotic, and it feels like an ongoing shell game where at every turn you're meeting a cast of new hustlers and you are the target. So Congo taught me so much, and to my Congolese brothers and sisters, I take my hat off to you because I just cannot. They are such resilient people, and they dance and they dress so incredibly and they're so joyful, but they don't suffer any fools.
LA: Often when I am reporting for Condé Nast Traveler and I sort of arrive in a place, sometimes I'll connect with it right away and be like, "I gel with this place. I get it." I know how to find my way around it, or it's like something just clicks. And then there are others that are a little harder to understand at first and you have to work a little harder to make sense of it.
HH: I didn't get Kinshasa. I didn't understand the movement of the American dollar before I got there, at the speed in which it moves, I should say.
LA: Wait, explain that a little bit more.
HH: So they basically, well, at least with me and my experience, everything was done in U.S. dollars. So something that could cost you a cab ride that should be $30 would be $200.
LA: Wow.
HH: And it was like, "There's no question about it, pay the 200 or get out." So there was a lot of things I didn't understand in Kinsasha, but I spoke to somebody else who'd gone there and she was like, "Oh, it's probably because you look different." But she's right. You're talking about a country that right now is on the brink of breaking because of their next door neighbors in Rwanda. And so I am East African. I do look Rwandese. And so there was some of that flare up when I was there. And some of those stories I won't go into because they don't serve me or the people that I met, but there was that unspoken tension and you had to be aware and move accordingly.
LA: I want to hear a bit more about this trip because so far we've talked about how it was... It does sound like it was challenging and probably quite exhausting, but clearly it was a success because you have recipes and stories in the book.
HH: Yeah.
LA: What were some of the outstanding moments of being...
HH: Oh, man. I met a young woman named Natalia that owned a restaurant called Bantu. She had been a student in Cape Town and had been craving home and returned home to build from the ground up. She was a successful entrepreneur. Her restaurant was so stunning. I met a woman named Lina and her husband.
LA: Wait, can you describe the restaurant to me a little bit?
HH: Yeah. It actually just looks like a cafe out of Soho, but it had African baskets that she had weaved across the walls and it had all these plants. And Natalia was beautiful and young and just bright and she wanted to be a part of the rebuilding of the Democratic Republic of Congo. And she and a lot of young people like herself had become entrepreneurs during COVID, which was so interesting to learn.
I also met another woman named Emily, who was the beignet lady. She had been living in Belgium and returned home also. And she started online and it caught wildfire and everybody goes to her home to get their beignets. And she was contemplating about opening up a brick and mortar. And so there was so much hope.
LA: Can you describe to me just kind of what it's like to walk around there a little bit? Sights, sounds, just kind of like the vibe just to kind of bring a picture into people's heads.
HH: Lots of moving cars, bustling markets, lots of motorcycles, bunch of people talking over one another. I mean, imagine a busy market and that being the streets. Lots of fresh fruits and vegetables.
LA: What kind of fruit?
HH: Lots of mangoes and oranges and papayas and watermelons and things like that. When I went, it was in June, so there were a lot of fruits more than there was anything. A lot of fruit stands.
LA: Is there a dish from there that you now cook regularly or that you think of regularly?
HH: Yeah, there's a skewered goat dish that you can actually buy on the street and is very popular in the DRC. But that's like a quick snack, a quick delicious meal. It's incredibly well-seasoned. And that was something that I really enjoyed while we were there.
LA: And you just grab and go down the street with some goat on your skewer.
HH: With a newspaper. Yeah.
LA: Delicious.
HH: And then the next place we went to was Morovia, the capital of Liberia. And I'd known some friends there. So Liberia felt like a reprieve. It felt like joy. It felt like a vacation. Morovia can almost feel like a beach town because it's on the ocean. I had sushi every night. I was staying in an incredible hotel where everybody was just so welcoming.
And then we went to Lebanon after that. We went to Beirut and then went all over Lebanon for 10 days. And again, same thing in Beirut, just kindness and open doors and so much food and conversation and joy. I feel very grateful because every place offered a new way of seeing things.
LA: After the break, what these very different food traditions have in common.
You're back with women Who Travel.
Okay, moving on, we've got to talk about the recipes.
HH: Okay.
LA: I think of there's so many commonalities between different recipes or foods around the world. What were some of the kind of recurring things that you found in these recipes that are from all these different places with different stories?
HH: One thing that I saw everywhere is that people's usage of dates.
LA: Oh.
HH: I thought that was really nice. Some people were drinking date tea, some people were making date soup, some people were making date cookies. There's a date cookie recipe in the book. I also loved people's capacity to eat sweet and savory together, which for me, I do because we're Somalis.
LA: Did you walk away from that thinking, "I want to bring some of this back into my own cooking in my own life." Or did it feel like when you come back from vacation and you're like, "I'm going to change everything," and then you get back and it's just immediately everything's the same?
HH: Yeah, I did. I mean, as soon as I was done with the book, I made a lot of stews, which was, I mean, my husband once said to me, he's like, "What is it with you and these stews?"
LA: And you're like, "I'm slowing down."
HH: Yeah. He didn't understand that. God bless his heart. But I did come back and I was cooking a lot slower.
LA: Were there any foods that you tried that you were surprised that they reminded you of Somali food? I think sometimes it's like you can have a cuisine that seems so different to your own, and then you suddenly are like, "That flavor or that method of preparation reminds me of this dish and I would've never have expected it."
HH: Oh, totally. A lot of the food. There's a seven spice in both the Iraq and the Lebanon chapter. That spice is very similar to Hawaij, which is a Somali spice, which is the bedrock of most of our cooking. And so that centered me home often. And then the other thing was is that in a lot of these countries, people have fruit on the side with all their food. And in Somalia, that's something that we do. Fruit is a part of your meal. And so that always made me feel like I was at my mom's table.
LA: You started this book five years ago, but does it feel even more timely than when you started it?
HH: Yeah. I mean, I think just like In Bibi's Kitchen. In Bibi's Kitchen, I started it because I was looking for community and I was looking for those stories. And then it came out in COVID when everybody was at home and thinking about community and how to sustain it and how to make it and how to be better at it. And we're in a different phase now, but we're still trying to answer questions. How do I be a human in the world today? How do I be kinder to more people? How do I talk about USAID if I don't know enough about who USAID serves? And I hope these are questions people are asking themselves. Don't be distracted by the splashy headlines. Pay attention to the details. Who is USAID serving? What diet are people in Somalia eating during drought season, effectively climate refugees very soon?
LA: Well, and I was going to say, what can we learn from that level of resourcefulness?
HH: Yep. Because guess what? We're not immune to it. I hope that this book is a gateway into answering some questions, but I hope it's a pamphlet that allows people to go on a deeper search for themselves.
LA: I'm going to ask you the impossible question, which is if there's one meal that you could take from this book and make over and over again?
HH: Yeah. There's actually, and we both love it at home, and it's so simple. There's this beef and rice and pepper, stuffed pepper recipe in the book that is so delicious and so simple. It's just onions, beef, parsley, and uncooked rice all together. And then you make everything on top of the stove, and then you bake it for a while. You bake it for I think 25 minutes or 28 minutes. And it's so delicious. And I make it all the time and it's so healthy. So that's boring to say, but that's what I would make all the time because it's not time-consuming and I love it.
LA: And my mouth is watering just hearing about it.
HH: Oh, good.
LA: If there's kind of a takeaway you want people to have when they close this book and they put it back on their kitchen shelves or they pull it down and they're in search of something, what is it?
HH: That single-origin stories are not true and that people in the world at large are all living differently, but we're innately very similar.
LA: Why don't we talk about... The one thing we haven't talked about that much is you mentioned your photographer, so I'm going to just get you to say something about that.
HH: Yeah.
LA: I'm flipping through the book right now, and there's so many beautiful stories and recipes, but also the imagery is gorgeous, from the food and the people and the kind of scenery from these places. What was the kind of vision between you and your photographer as to how to capture these places?
HH: I wanted to work with actually a dear friend, Riley Dingler, who is a college mate of my husband. They met at Boulder in Colorado. And Riley is a photographer and a videographer, but for commercial businesses. And I think one of the things about my vision was, "Let's shoot this in the most beautiful light to showcase the people, the food, and the place." He's blonde hair, blue-eyed and like 6'2". So he was not blending in most places. But his spirit did, and people loved him everywhere we went and people were excited to meet him. But he got the most incredible shots because you didn't even know he was there. Just same as me, I was enthralled in the interviews and in the conversations, and there weren't phones and there weren't a lot of distractions, and Riley was similar to that. His energy was of that. And that comes across in the book. Yeah, that photo actually with me and Emily.
LA: Tell me which photo we're looking at and describe it a little bit.
HH: You're looking at a photo of Emily. I think she's telling me about the herbs that she's growing in her garden. This is the beignet lady that I was telling you about. We're sitting in her courtyard and I'm facing her, and she is speaking with her hands and telling me about what she's growing in this season.
LA: You're deep in conversation in this photo.
HH: Totally.
LA: And then there is a beautiful picture-
HH: Of her beignets.
LA: ... of her beignets.
HH: Those are beignets that she made for us. So Riley just took a photo of them.
LA: And also, because they're on some sort of blue table, where were you eating them?
HH: In her courtyard. We were just picking them up and eating them in her courtyard.
LA: Freshly baked. Amazing.
HH: Yeah.
LA: And I think that is a lovely note to end on.
HH: Thank you so much.
LA: Thank you for listening to Women Who Travel. I'm Lale Arikoglu and you can find me on Instagram @lalehannah. Our engineer is Pran Bandi. And special thanks to Jake Lummus for engineering support. Our show is mixed by Amar Lal at Macro Sound. Jude Kampfner is our producer, Stephanie Kariuki, our executive producer, and Chris Bannon is head of Condé Nast Global Audio.
Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler
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