By compiling 75 typical recipes from East Africa and southern Africa with portraits, the somali chief Hawa Hassan and the culinary author Julia Turshen pay a sensitive tribute to a kitchen so far little documented.
by Léo Bourdin
Cooking books sometimes tell much more than recipes. In Bibi’s Kitchen, recently haloed by a James Beard Award (the gastronomic equivalent of the Oscars, in the United States), the somali chief Hawa Hassan and the successful Food Writer Julia Turshen shed light on a kitchen until Here little documented and transmitted orally: that of the Grandmothers of East Africa – affectionately nicknamed “Bibis” in Swahili.
By meeting more than fifteen women from the continent, the two authors gleaned and compiled 75 typical recipes from Eritrea, Somalia, Kenya, Madagascar, Comoros, Tanzania, from the Mozambique or South Africa. The 282 pages, richly illustrated, are punctuated by portraits, interviews and hand towers which all evoke, in a very sensitive way, something of intergenerational transmission.
In the preamble, Hawa Hassan, born in Mogadishu in the middle of the Somali Civil War, delivers the story of his personal history. She is only 7 years old when, thanks to a humanitarian convoy, her mother agrees to let her go to live in the United States. Growing up, the one who is today at the head of basbaas, basbaas, basbaas, A brand of craft sauces inspired by African flavors, gradually loses the use of its mother tongue and is going through a deep identity crisis. It is first thanks to the cuisine of her mother, her recipes and her little daily gestures, that Hawa Hassan will manage to reconnect with his identity and his origins, by finding his relatives, at 22.
The SUKUMA WIKI recipe, a Kenyan dish based on fire vegetables (green cabbage, kale cabbage).
The key ingredient The Maggi cube broth, present in the cupboard of all African grandmothers.
