“The world should be more proactive in protecting our culinary heritage during war,” writes Michael Shaikh in The Last Sweet Bite, which is among the forthcoming books that share an explicit mission to highlight endangered cuisines. These narratives and recipe collections simultaneously amplify threatened cultures and bear witness to the trials of what Shaikh calls “people whom the world seems to have forgotten.”
The Last Sweet Bite
Journalist and human rights investigator Shaikh introduces readers to home cooks and human rights activists working to preserve cuisines being lost due to genocide, occupation, or civil war. They include Maryam, a Rohingya Muslim who fled Myanmar for Bangladesh in the aftermath of a genocidal coup, and Marhaba Izgil, a Uyghur woman formerly under the thumb of China’s ongoing human rights abuses in Xinjiang, who made a daring escape to Virginia. Their recipes—Maryam’s goru ghuso (beef curry), Izgil’s Uyghur polo (lamb pilaf)—serve as a conduit to their stories.
Setting a Place for Us
The follow-up to Hassan’s James Beard–winning debut, In Bibi’s Kitchen, traces the ways geopolitical conflicts in eight hot zones— Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, El Salvador, Iraq, Lebanon, Liberia, and Yemen—have impacted food systems and cuisines. Hassan, a Somalian refugee, writes that sharing recipes from these regions, such as pupusas con curtido (filled masa flatbreads with cabbage slaw) from El Salvador and saltah (lamb stew with fenugreek froth) from Yemen, is a way to “show you how we who experience violent or invasive conflict in our communities and daily lives are more than our travails.”
Strong Roots
Hercules, known for Mamushka and other cookbooks, recounts her family history in Ukraine, from her grandmother’s internal deportation under Stalin to her parents’ flight from the country after Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion. The food-infused memoir is “a complicated grief response,” Hercules writes; each chapter uses a particular dish as a central motif, such as “Borscht in Italy” or “Vera’s Toast.”
