Yemeni shakshuka is a warm, aromatic, scrambled delight

Some of Hawa Hassan s earliest sense memories are the smell of burning tires and the sound of crackling gunfire. At age 4, she and her family are l...

Some of Hawa Hassan’s earliest sense memories are the smell of burning tires and the sound of crackling gunfire.

At age 4, she and her family are living in Mogadishu, Somalia, "and the city of my childhood is no longer a bustling and burgeoning metropolis but a vacant and violent war zone,” she writes in her new cookbook.

Hassan’s family escapes - first to a refugee camp just across the Kenyan border, then to an apartment in Nairobi, and finally to Oslo. But before that last move, Hassan separates from them, moving at age 7 to Seattle to live with a family friend for "more opportunities,” as her mother tells her. And she finds them, ultimately landing a modeling gig and traveling the world before turning her attention to founding a sauce company (Basbaas) and writing cookbooks ("In Bibi’s Kitchen” and the new "Setting a Place for Us”).

While Hassan hasn’t lived in Africa since her childhood, "Setting a Place for Us” isn’t about cooking in the diaspora. Instead, it’s about the foodways of people who still live in eight countries that, like the Somalia of her childhood, have been subject to war. "It’s about people who’ve never left home, because they have placed it on themselves to be the caretakers of their land,” Hassan said when I interviewed her for an event at Politics and Prose Bookstore in DC.

The book includes profiles, essays and recipes from Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, El Salvador, Iraq, Lebanon, Liberia and Yemen. And despite the difficult context - and the timeliness of the book’s arrival amid massive US protests of the Trump administration’s immigration policies and actions - "Setting a Place for Us” carries a message of resilience. Or, as Hassan put it in our interview, "This book is joy, it’s celebration, it’s community, it’s love.”