In Bibi’s Kitchen

Karen Lee

‘When we sit together like this, I’ll tell you everything.’
Ma Sahra, from Somalia, now Kenya, talks about sharing stories and recipes.

This is permitted travel in 2021; diving into a new cookbook, In Bibi’s Kitchen, scouring maps for the regions and cities it mentions, tracing the routes of East African grandmothers across the world, the spice merchants across oceans of time, travelling to unfamiliar parts of my own city to seek out new ingredients, combining them in my kitchen, sharing the food with friends and family, marvelling together at the way the flavour combinations merge familiarity and difference. It is as expansive an experience as a trip abroad could offer. This is perhaps ‘a more creative way to be a tourist’, to use someone else’s phrase. There is much more than culinary exploration to be found in this book. There are the stories of women and their families, and of universal experiences of home, belonging, place, and in some cases, dislocation and new lands. And there are the links between cultures revealed by the drift of ingredients and dishes across the Indian Ocean and into the kitchens of East Africa, arriving in mouths, bellies, and hearts over generations.

‘Even when I eat imifino alone, there is always the reminder of community, of women coming together, of sharing not just the food but also sharing themselves.’
Ma Khanyisa, from South Africa.

Published by Ten Speed Press, In Bibi’s Kitchen is a recipe book compiled by Somali chef Hawa Hassan and American food writer Julia Turshen, two women united by their belief that ‘…home cooking is where culture is created and sustained.’ The recipes and first-person insights come from 16 grandmothers, or bibis, from eight East African countries bordering the Indian Ocean, from Eritrea to South Africa and east to Madagascar and the volcanic islands of Comoros. The dishes and stories featured raise up and link across regional and generational differences the necessary act of preparing food as care and sustenance, the passing of traditions and techniques, hand to hand, mother to child. The cuisines and the helpful brief histories of the countries reveal tumultuous tales of trade by sea, interactions between global capital and labour, both injustices and kindnesses. Reading the book is a journey through the shaping of community and the endurance of culture from the perspective of women, whose experiences are held at the centre with care. 

‘You’re judged only by how much you give.’
Ma Penny, from Kenya.

Women’s care-work, their making of a home, is a theme that unites the bibis with any reader who has ever cooked or cared for others. It is a way to build a bridge between women, between people. The feminist credentials of the book are overt, the authors noting that: ‘Seeing the bibis through Khadija’s (M. Farah, the East African photographer) lens reminds us how important it is not only to highlight women’s stories but also to consider who captures and narrates them.’ An illuminating diversity of perspectives on gender issues is drawn out from the bibis as the book progresses. To read them feels like listening to elders in person, promotes deference and reflection. Sometimes we think of being in the kitchen as being trapped, both historically and as a lived experience across countries and cultures in the present day. This first-world-feminist dissatisfaction is challenged by the straightforward, assertive pride of the bibis in being mothers, grandmothers, homemakers, and generous caterers for their communities. There are also tales of small businesses, with women as both the entrepreneurs and the workers, doing it all. There is a familiarity in this creative competence and common sense which the book celebrates as strengths of women who uphold the structure of their families and communities. Part of the beauty and much of the resilience honoured here comes from an acknowledgement that the effort in preparation and provision of food is a daily one, rhythmic and endless. Who better than grandmothers to proffer the wisdom of just carrying on? 

‘…we want a society that works together.’
Ma Josefina, from Mozambique.

A friend flicks through In Bibi’s Kitchen and remarks upon the similarities between some of the dishes and her own Middle Eastern food traditions. A few days later she brings ‘foul’ (pronounced ‘full’) to my house, not realising there is a recipe for mashed fava beans, ‘Shahan Ful,’ from Eritrea, in the book. Between African languages and ethnic groups, as well as cultures from elsewhere, there is the sharing and melding of ingredients which has produced the recipes typical of each place. The word bolo is used for cake in Mozambique because of its history as a Portuguese trading post and, in exchange, piri piri, from the Swahili word for chile, is well known as a spicy condiment. Tamarind is found in a South African lamb dish because of the Indonesian origins of the people who now live in a place called Cape Malay. In Somalia, they make samosas, since India is not so far across the ocean. The use of wild greens in many recipes connects to the African American dish collard greens. Many more interrelationships are revealed as the reader takes the journey from Eritrea in the north, to South Africa, then east by sea to the islands. 

‘Culture is not static. It moves - just not very quickly’
Ma Shara, from Zanzibar, Tanzania

Ma Sahra’s story of a Somali birth, in a place that became Kenya without her moving after an alteration of borders, demonstrates that ideas of nationhood and the delineations of (momentarily) accurate maps are shifting conceptions. This story and others in In Bibi’s Kitchen evoke a flow of traditions, ingredients, techniques, and names for things, from village to village, landscape to landscape, varying in sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious ways from one side of a mountain range to another, from the coast to the interior, and so on, continually altering the maps of home.  We imagine, too, this pungent transference and vibrant exchange between groups and families, the social curiosity beyond necessity from which trade is born, in an array of circumstances: expansion, contraction, hardship, abundance, war, commerce and colonisation. This transmission continues apace, it is going on all the time, right now, in hyper-charged ways as we watch food clips on social media, as we video-call our own bibis or parents or others for step-by-step instructions on how to make that special dish we want to taste to ground ourselves in something greater than our immediate and sometimes bewilderingly uprooted lives, sustained at times only by a thin soup of global homogeneity. We crave more meaningful satiation, a taste of home.

‘Even if you’re not home, like back in Eritrea, we over here are able to form a community and feel like we’re there.’
Ma Abeba, from Eritrea.

These women know about the transmutation of home, many of them now living in the United States away from their birthplaces, others still close to home, a concept viscerally constructed in South African culture as told by Ma Khanyisa, as the place where one’s umbilical cord is buried. Identity and home are complex, but food is a linker and a leveller. Among the bibis, there is an appreciation of the comparison between old and new offered by an immigrant life. And wherever they are, they continue to cook the foods of their homelands. They are participants in mobile, living cultures, not wary guardians of static traditions. There is a robustness to their perspectives on issues of home, community, gender, family, society; they don’t seem weary, they are still engaged, still thinking it all through.

‘It makes me feel special because it’s not something everyone does, or can, make. It feels like it holds value.’
Ma Zakia, from Comoros.

In Bibi’s Kitchen is not only information-rich, gastronomically instructive, and enlivening of appetite, it is joyful and grateful, just as we can be every day, for what is right in front of us, in the kitchen, in the garden, growing wild nearby, in our capacity to keep company and share food with the people close by, our family, friends, and neighbours, whether we are materially rich or poor. The bibis remind us of choices we can make to deeply celebrate what we have. Their wisdom and love are gifts offered through these pages, and they can be accepted without leaving home.