Diaspora Cookbooks Hit Their Heyday

Courtesy of Ten Speed Press

Three quarters of the way through cooking Sami Tamimi's red pepper paste called dips al filflil, I had a taste and realized it was something profound. For it, I charred and peeled red peppers, then blitzed them with olive oil, chiles, paprika, cumin, cider vinegar, and salt before painting the mixture onto parchment and thickening it in a hot oven. All this just to put a tablespoon into his tomato kubbeh, but the effort was worth it for that taste alone. The kubbeh uses a baharat spice blend, featuring peppercorns, coriander, cardamom, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice, the flavors absorbed by bulgur wheat. It's consumed “like a taco,” in lettuce leaves with onion, radish, and mint. If this is your first foray into the Palestinian food of Tamimi's homeland, it's easy to realize that you are in excellent hands.

Tamimi is well known for partnering with Yotam Ottolenghi, and the two of them opened restaurants around London, along with writing two landmark cookbooks together: Ottolenghi and Jerusalem, followed by Falastin, which Tamimi wrote with Tara Wigley.

I had all I needed at this point to recommend the book, but then I found his braise-y cabbage tray bake—malfoof bil siniyeh—with garlic, onion, cider vinegar, and za'atar with a tahini sauce, and I was powerless to resist.

Courtesy of Sasquatch Books

Technically this book arrived late last year, but it was the one that got me thinking about how far along these books have come and how approachable they are. Seattle food author Hsiao-Ching Chou and her daughter Meilee Chou Riddle team up in a book that explores their Chinese heritage, based around Chinese-American holidays and events, resulting in a mix of Chinese, Taiwanese, and Pacific Northwest. The book is interspersed with sections called “Meilee's Perspective,” often followed by “Mom Says,” which create a back-and-forth between a teenager and her parent about their identities and celebrations, making the whole thing unexpectedly touching.

Crucially, these two can cook up a storm and do an excellent job writing the recipes. I blazed through the book on my first read, dog-earing a goofy number of pages just like my mom does.

I made their Super Garlicky Baby Bok Choy in a ripping-hot wok, a dish which honors its allium promises and is made better with soy sauce and sesame oil, but it was the addition of white pepper powder that gave it great restaurant food vibes. Next to it, I served popcorn chicken, which also got the white-pepper treatment and was zhuzhed up with a handful of fried basil leaves. The duo calls for cubing boneless thighs and coating them in corn starch, and the result is crunchy, pillowy cubes easy enough to make that I found myself immediately plotting their return.

Courtesy of Penguin Random House

Instilling a sense of place in a cookbook along with writing delicious, coherent recipes, and giving a sense of the chef behind it all is a combination of high art and hard work. Chef Nina Compton and writer Osayi Endolyn do this again and again as they trace Compton's culinary history, starting her career in her St. Lucia birthplace and working in Jamaica then Miami. Finally, she found a new home in New Orleans, where she opened Compère Lapin, followed by BABs Nola and Nina's Creole Cottage. While in Jamaica, she gets local intel and goes down to a dance hall with a coworker named Rita, meets the Pudding Man and samples his tamale-like specialty (IYKYK), and gets sweetening advice for the porridge shack goods from a taxi driver.

“When you're growing up in the Caribbean, the islands, they kind of bicker with each other,” she says, pulling on her history. “Big islands are like, Ah, you small island people.”

I will not bicker with her suggestions. Her Jamaica-inflected grilled lobster gets cilantro-lime butter, but Compton's addition of fish sauce, a potent ingredient that can make another ingredient taste more like itself and sends my heart aflutter. Having worked with chayote for some Oaxacan recipes recently, I was excited to cook the christophine gratin (the gourd vegetable's name in St. Lucia), which gets a turmeric tinged béchamel, thyme, cayenne, and cheddar, all under a crisp blanket of panko. She also offers firm recipe advice about the importance of sautéing the vegetable that mirrors my counsel on the book itself: Don't skip it.

Courtesy of Ten Speed Press

Books with a cause can be hard to pull off, as can those encompassing diverse geographies. Throw in a pandemic while you're writing it, and Hawa Hassan's feat feels that much more impressive. The book shines a light on the food cultures of eight countries dealing with conflict: Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, El Salvador, Iraq, Lebanon, Liberia, and Yemen. Hassan fled Mogadishu as a child in the early 1990s with her pregnant mom and three siblings for a Nairobi refugee camp before being sent to live with family in Seattle. She went 15 years without seeing her mother and siblings, and her book grabs us and pulls us in with warmth, compassion, and delicious food, creating a bridge between home cooks and those eight countries. For each country, she introduces you to one of their citizens or their progeny, some of whom like Ayad Asha, an Iraqi-born brewer in the United States, are now flung far from their homelands and enriching other countries.

I try to be methodical when testing for these reviews, giving a sense of the breath of the whole book. Sometimes, the process is gloriously hijacked, as was the case here, where a bright green Yemeni cilantro sauce called sahwaiq is enlivened with toasted coriander, cumin, and cardamom seeds. Jalapeño, which you might choose to amp up or throttle back, provides kick. Set that on the table while making Yemeni shakshouka, where the eggs are scrambled into a tomato sauce. It was tomato season in Seattle, and I grabbed some from my garden—then made the dish sophisticated with hawaij, a spice blend with toasted peppercorns, cumin, coriander, cardamom, and cloves. I added a liberal heap of turmeric and inhaled. Finally, I spooned on the green sauce, warmed up some flatbread, and made a connection.

Courtesy of Weldon Owen

I love Vancouver’s Persian restaurants. There's a vibrant community there and WIRED friend Hamid Salimian and I regularly dip in for casual kebabs or go nuts and get a table full of food that leaves us with glorious leftovers for days. Most importantly, I learn more about the cuisine.

Seattle chef, culinary instructor, and psychotherapist (!) Amid Roustaei knows Persian may be new territory for this book's readers and uses his teaching skill to guide us gently while sharing stories of both his mom and, later, his first attempt to escape Iran that included having a boy soldier point a rifle at his chest.

His recipes and photos by Richard J. Wardell pull you in, and my mind was made up for which dish to make first—khoresh gojeh bādemjān, an eggplant and tomato stew with sour grapes—as I was at my mother-in-law's house where the garage trellis was covered with unripe grapes. The dish is a hop, skip, and jump from Italian food, clearly set apart by the grapes’ acidity, contrasted with the soft centers and charred exterior of the eggplant. We had this with baghāli ghātogh: braised fava beans, poached eggs, and crispy fried shallots. There were some recipe testing snafus in the book, but nothing insurmountable considering the quality of the finished dish. Do not call your shopping list done without adding ingredients for dugh, here a yogurt and mint soda rounded out with rose petals and salt. Roustaei recommends these with kebabs on a hot day, but I'd welcome that fizzy, savory goodness all year long.

Courtesy of Americas Test Kitchen

Regular readers will recognize my affinity for America’s Test Kitchen and their recipe-refining process. Their “testing recipes 100 different ways to give you the best one” approach sets you up for kitchen success like nobody's business. Yet some of their previous books that forayed into other cultures have felt stilted and distant. They took a whole new tack with Umma. Authors Sarah Ahn, a former ATK employee, and her mother, Nam Soon Ahn, a former restaurant owner, share 100 Korean family recipes and the stories and know-how that go with them. With that foundation, the ATK crew can do their test-o-rama, making this book more approachable for a US audience.

Boy did that two-pronged approach pay off; the book ended up on the New York Times Bestseller List. It did well in my test kitchen, too. Korean radish and carrot cubes pickled with white vinegar, sugar, and a bit of salt—aka chicken radishes, as it's a common fried-chicken accompaniment in restaurants—were fun to compare with Eric Kim's version from Korean American, where whole red radishes quickly dye the pickling liquid a fun hot pink. Both versions are chicken-dinner winners. I had mine with soy braised chicken—dakgogi ganjang jorim—where wings sear in a skillet, then get a quick braise in a continually thickening sauce that includes mirin, garlic, ginger, vinegar, and sesame oil. It was quite a squeeze searing three pounds of wings in a single layer in the called-for 12-inch skillet, but the whole thing was enlivened by chiles, green onions, and sesame seeds, and it came out great.

I also made one banchan—the small plates or side dishes that accompany a meal—of seasoned spinach with gochujang, garlic, and sesame oil, along with a surprising hit of maesil cheong, the plum extract syrup gave the dish a puckery sweet-tart depth that gently jiggles your taste buds. Gentle went out the window with their salad dressing, which features fish sauce, the plum syrup, sesame oil, white vinegar, and garlic over greens. Alongside the wings, pickles, and banchan, dinner was a hit. If you are an adventurous cook looking to take a deep dive on Korean food, start here.