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

Condé Nast Traveler

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?