When I’m asked about my journey to the culinary world, the first thing that usually flashes through my mind is a scene from Gurinder Chadha’s cult classic film Bend It Like Beckham. Mrs. Bhamra, the frustrated mother of protagonist Jesminda asks in exasperation: “What family would want a daughter in law…[who] can’t make round chapatis?”
If I hesitate to share how I came to the culinary world, it's because I know people expect a warm story about how food always spoke to me, or how I have fond memories of cooking cherished family recipes with my mother. I certainly do have those experiences, but they didn’t come until much later. The truth is that for a large part of my childhood and early teen years, I hated cooking.
So, how is it that I’m now a chef, recipe developer and food writer?
In the winter of 1996, my family was resettled in the United States. I grew up in Seattle, Washington, as the eldest daughter of a Somali refugee family. As my family acclimated to our new lives in America, my mother made sure we understood we were Somali first. We surrounded ourselves with other Somali people, spoke the Somali language, and of course, ate and cooked Somali food.
Like many parts of the world, in my community, cooking was largely the domain of women and girls. Culturally, I was expected to learn how to cook so that when I got married one day, I would know how to feed my future husband and children. Learning to cook was a cultural responsibility that was reserved for girls, while women were the culinary guides that taught them how to cook and carry out their responsibilities. These expectations were not extended to my brothers, which struck me as deeply unfair.
Despite my frustration with this gendered inequality from a young age, I dutifully soldiered on and began learning how to cook from my mother. Regardless of any negative feelings I harbored, respecting your mother is one of the most important rules in a Muslim household.
As I learned to slap anjeero batter and toast spices for rice, my resentment towards cooking simmered. Had these cooking lessons not been tied to the expectation that I would be caring for some hypothetical man in the future, and had they also been a duty required of my brothers, I might have been less angsty about it. I tried to veil my frustration with jokes, but my mother and aunties were deeply unamused by my suggestions of hiring someone to cook once I got married, or marrying a man who knew how to feed himself.
My culinary “wife training” or Hooyo’s Cooking School, as I called it, carried on for years, in between my mother’s endless double work shifts, my homework, and the never ending responsibilities of an eldest daughter in a refugee household. In Somalia, cooking was a daily ritual where one could find comfort and pride in the routine of feeding family or connecting communally over food. To me, a first-generation diaspora kid, it felt like just another chore on a very long to-do list.
Despite the old school values attached to my domestic training, my mother also highly valued my education. Once the star student in her class, the Somali Civil War had derailed her own university studies and higher education. Unlike the parents of many girls I knew, my mother didn’t want me to get married until I had at least a Master’s degree or a PhD.
So naturally, I became the kind of daughter who had a 4.0 GPA, academic scholarships, was the valedictorian, and could also make “koob shaah oo edeb daran” (a disrespectfully good cup of tea) that visiting aunties would endlessly compliment. I was a dutiful daughter who had gotten used to the bitter taste of biting my tongue. But, in my heart, I was a feminist, a baby punk, a girl who hated cooking for others despite my growing interest and curiosity in the intricacies of how food worked.
As I discovered Black feminist theorists like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis, and bell hooks in high school, my resentment towards wife training began to thaw. I learned about feminist theories like Hill Collins’ Black feminist standpoint—which argues that because of gender, class, and race, Black women possess a unique view of society—and I learned about Crenshaw’s intersectionality, and I began to understand the world around me and my own community a bit more. I realized my mother was doing her best to prepare me for the world in the ways that she knew how, and in a context she understood. She was an older person who essentially had her whole life uprooted due to forced migration and war, and a mother raising her children in a foreign society by herself.
Once this shift happened in my brain, I started to think about food and cooking in more positive ways. I began to cherish spending time with my mother in the kitchen and began to view cooking through a narrative lens. I had a small assist from cable television in developing my interest in food, especially the Food Network, where I learned about culinary history, and watched iconic storytellers and chefs like the late Anthony Bourdain. I came to realize that it wasn’t cooking that I hated, but rather, the gendered expectations that brought so many of the women I knew into the kitchen.
Many years later, I finally met the imaginary, future husband I had spent so much of my youth learning to cook for. He was the first person to ever thank me for making a meal. I didn’t realize that no one had ever thanked me for my food before, until he did. His excitement over whatever dishes I made shocked me. For him, my cooking was something to be delighted in, not something that he expected of me.
Despite it still being fairly early in our relationship, he saw this connection that I had with cooking and he encouraged it. With him, cooking was not just a curiosity or a burden, but it transformed into a creative practice, and even became an act of love.
From there, I spent several years experimenting, eating, and learning as much as I could. Cooking was my passion, but I was studying to become a lawyer, so at no point did I think of it as a serious career path. I was the eldest daughter of a Somali family, after all. Creativity did not pay the bills, as I was always told.
Furthermore, despite knowing women who knew how to cook, I also didn’t grow up seeing many female chefs. “Men become ‘chefs’ who are paid for their work; women become ‘cooks’ whose labor has no market value” Julia Black writes in her essay “I Thought Cooking Would Make Me a Bad Feminist.” As I delved deeper into the annals of gastronomy, I discovered chefs like Leah Chase, Julia Child, and Edna Lewis. From there my world only expanded.
Once my relationship to food and cooking shifted and my creativity was at the center of it instead of resentment or gendered expectations, I switched careers and continued to feel a deep sense of gratitude for Hooyo’s cooking school.
Due to culinary knowledge being passed down orally in Somali culture, I began to see my mother’s years-long dedication to teaching me to cook as her way of making sure our culinary knowledge was not lost. After all, she had experienced the risk of that knowledge being disrupted generationally. She, like many other Somali refugees, connected our cultural food traditions to our sense of identity and our sense of self.
In a Journal of Occupational Sciences article on Somali women’s experiences of cooking after immigration to Sweden, one interviewee shared what the loss of recipes meant to her in her new life: ‘‘Part of our origin has disappeared because of the lack of time spent [on] food. [T]he Somali culture disappears... [Our] lives disappear.’’
The reasons I learned to cook might have been irritating to me, but thanks to my mother, I am classically trained in Somali cuisine. As Mrs. Bhamra says towards the end of Bend It Like Beckham: “At least I taught her full Indian dinner, the rest is up to God.”
Because of my mother, I have a skill set and knowledge that some of my peers don’t share, despite also coming up in a similar cultural background. This is not an uncommon thing for children of immigrants, who sometimes are uninterested in learning the culinary traditions of their parents while coveting the food of their new homelands.
This is an experience also echoed by the Somali women in Torp, Berggren, and Erlandsson’s article in the Journal of Occupational Science: “Their daughters did not want to learn how to cook Somali food and the women felt sad that their children had abandoned the Somali food traditions and feared that their culture would disappear with their children.”
It is thanks to my mother that I have continued to build on the training she provided me with through my traveling Somali culinary pop-up MILK & MYRRH, and my recipe development work for major publications like The New York Times.
I see myself and each Somali person with this culinary knowledge as walking archives, carrying on a tradition passed down by our loved ones. Through my writing and recipe development, I am preserving Somali cultural knowledge for future generations, including my own.
In “Teaching My Daughter How To Cook Does Not Make Me a Bad Feminist,” Jessica Valenti writes “I’m glad that I’m teaching her that sometimes joy trumps the perception of politics and that there is a pleasure in preparing good food, when it is a choice and not a chore.”
As a chef, a feminist and a mother, my daughter will have her own version of Hooyo’s Cooking School, if that is something she expresses an interest in. I will teach her how to enjoy the process of making good food.
I will instruct her in our ways as a way to make sure our culinary knowledge lives on, regardless of her gender and not solely because of it.
