The history of cuisine is a history of migration: people travel with their culinary traditions and incorporate local customs as they adapt to new lives. This intermingling is universal and long-standing, and reflects a need to connect and share through food.
It’s also not without its growing pains. First-generation Filipino chef Woldy Reyes, raised in the Los Angeles suburbs, relates a sentiment familiar to many children of immigrants in the introduction to his cookbook In the Kusina (Chronicle, Apr.). “I always wanted my parents to send me to school with lunch money instead of food from home,” he writes. “I didn’t want the kids at school to see what my mom made for me, dishes like steamed rice with a pungent-smelling adobo. I wanted to just eat, like, a hamburger.” But eventually, Reyes embraced both a career in food, launching his Woldy Kusina catering company and popup in 2016, and the flavors of his family’s kitchen.
Authors like Reyes are championing tastes of home, however they define them, in new cookbooks that trace the world’s evolving foodways.
Flavor profiles
Beejhy Barhany, founding owner and executive chef of Tsion Cafe in Harlem, tracks her journey from Ethiopia to Sudan to Israel to the U.S. in Gursha (Knopf, Apr.), which, like her eatery, “shines a light upon the traditions and stories of the Beta Israel [Ethiopian Jewish] community,” she says. “I want to showcase their resilience, but also my story—my immigration, the struggles, and the successes.” Her book, written with journalist and food critic Elisa Ung, emphasizes the resourcefulness of Barhany’s community. “In immigrating to a new place where access to ingredients is not there, you have to improvise in order to make something that kind of takes you back home,” Barhany adds. Recipes include corn and wheat injera, which her family made after migrating to Israel where the fermented flatbread’s traditional grain, teff, was inaccessible; and gomen, which substitutes sautéed collard greens for the wild greens that her grandmother grew in Ethiopia.
“The term gursha basically means feeding one another, an act of love and friendship,” Barhany says. “Ethiopian food as a whole is all about sitting together, communal eating, interacting, engaging, and touching it with your hands and feeding your friend across the table. There is this bond and love and friendship that you cannot take away.”
With Kin (Norton, Mar.), British chef Marie Mitchell, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, excavates “who I am, where I come from, and what makes up my identity,” she says. “In the U.K., there’s a homogenized thinking in terms of ‘Caribbean’—often English-speaking and usually Jamaican. But Caribbean food is a global cuisine. You had Indigenous communities. You had people ripped from their homes. You had colonial powers. This convergence of cultures—you see it in the food.” The curries, soups, and stews chapter of the book best illustrates this, she says, through recipes such as Colombo curry, seasoned with a Sri Lankan spice blend, and Ital chickpea curry, which draws on the tenets of Rastafarianism.
Mitchell hopes that her book encourages readers to rethink their preconceptions about Caribbean cuisine. “If you want to understand a particular culture and its cuisines, don’t only look through the framework of a white lens,” she says. “Allow yourself to be guided from the place and its peoples, especially if you really genuinely think of yourself as an ally. I want readers to understand that Caribbean food is expansive and incredible, and that has a lot to do with ingredients, processes, and histories that tied all its peoples together.”
Kitchens of Hope (Univ. of Minnesota, June) began as a volunteer effort by lawyers Linda S. Svitak and Christin Jaye Eaton to collect recipes from immigrants who had connections with the Advocates for Human Rights, a Minneapolis nonprofit whose work includes legal help with complex immigration proceedings. As the project grew, they invited Lee Svitak Dean, Svitak’s sister and a former longtime food editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, to join them. “When we asked how and why participants made their long journeys, we found their stories to be so compelling and the people so eager to share them that we realized this perspective was a key element of the book,” Dean says.
Biographical narratives and photos introduce the recipes, which include coconut cakes from Sierra Leonean political asylee Emilia Olabisi Fatmata Smith, Hmong chicken soup from refugee Maiyia Vang, and chicken samosas from South African economic migrant Shereen Fakier. Their stories, Dean says, “speak of resilience, fear, loss, family, hope, traditions, opportunity, and, of course, the dinner table.” (For more books that highlight how political forces intersect with culinary traditions, see “Preservation Techniques.”)
Pick ’n’ Mix
Cultural traditions meet contemporary experience in books like Sama Sama by Julie Lin, a May release from Interlink. The Malaysian Scottish chef and restaurateur speaks to the idea of “authentically in-between,” says Interlink editor Leyla Moushabeck; Lin’s mother is Nonya (Malay Chinese) and her father is Scottish, born and raised in Glasgow. “Julie explores notions of authenticity in mixed cultural spaces, and how you can respectfully represent your cultural cuisines, but also be true to your own experience of them.”
The book’s 90 recipes, such as “Goodbye Buttermilk Chicken, Hello Tea-brined Crispy Fried Chicken” and kaya croissant-and-butter pudding, highlight this duality. Lin also uses the concept of agak-agak, a colloquial term rooted in the Malay word for “somewhat,” to encourage diasporic readers, especially, to season until “it feels right—to one’s own taste,” Moushabeck says. “Sometimes if we’re cooking in diaspora, we don’t necessarily have that same instinct of how much spice or how much salt a dish needs at that moment.”
In Ferment (The Experiment, Aug.), Kenji Morimoto, a Japanese American living in the U.K., infuses traditional fermentation techniques with atypical flavors. “He’s drawing from global food traditions, some of them centuries old,” says Sara Zatopek, Morimoto’s editor at the Experiment. “He honors these traditions but he’s also putting a modern spin on them. Tradition isn’t static—it’s always evolving and being informed by the migration of people and the cultures.”
Morimoto’s recipes for fennel and turmeric kimchi, and miso fisherman’s pie, illustrate this ethos best, Zatopek says. “He developed the kimchi recipe while in India, inspired by a restaurant in Mumbai that served an Indian take. He couldn’t easily find the traditional ingredients for Korean kimchi, so used what he could find. The miso fisherman’s pie is inspired by his time living in London where he fell in love with British fish pies. Miso gives it this extra umami, savory, salty oomph.”
Shifting Boundaries
Pitmaster Arnie Segovia, who has more than one million YouTube subscribers, celebrates South Texas border cuisine in ArnieTex, which DK is releasing in July. Recipes for Segovia’s comfort foods—hamburguesa Mexicana, pork belly chicharrón, and parrillada tejana—include tips gleaned from his 20 years on the Texas competition barbecue circuit. “There’s that pure Texas thing going on, but his roots are in Mexico,” says DK senior editor Brook Farling. “Much of his family is in Mexico, and he’s right on the border in McAllen. He doesn’t even like to call his cooking ‘Tex-Mex’—he likes to call it Mexican American.”
Farling highlights the book’s discada norteña, a mixed meat dish from northern Mexico, in which beef and pork are stir-fried over an open flame on a disco (a concave metal disk repurposed from a plow). Segovia adapts the recipe for the backyard grill. “He adds ingredients one at a time and creates this visual display,” Farling says. “Everything’s brought together to create a mix of flavors you’d never find at your run-of-the-mill Tex-Mex restaurant.”
Bon Appétit contributor Zaynab Issa, who calls diaspora foods “fusion in the best way,” draws on her East African and South Asian roots, as well as her suburban American upbringing, in Third Culture Cooking (Abrams, Apr.). By way of example, Issa points to her recipe for jugu scones. “The scone is familiar,” she says. “Jugu pak is a popular peanut rusk cake in South Asia. Peanuts are East African. This mash-up feels typical of fusion food, but when you realize where all of these things are coming from, there’s something really beautiful there. Fusion cooking gets a bad rap, but there’s nothing wrong with it so long as the context and the sense of place is maintained.”
Like others who spoke with PW for this piece, Issa sees a timely resonance in cross-cultural recipes. “People are forgetting that they came from somewhere else too, and migration is the way of the world—always,” she says. “These books serve as a reminder of our shared global heritage and how there was always someone in your family who has come from somewhere else.”
Pooja Makhijani is a writer and editor in New Jersey.
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