Books

Cooking my way through Africa’s east coast

Hawa Hassan and Julia Turshen offer a rare thing: an English-language cookbook of African food that isn’t from Ethiopia.

The US dining scene boasts hundreds of culturally specific restaurants, but when it comes to African food, we seem to have little beyond Ethiopian. Why don’t we have a better selection of that continent’s cuisines?

In Bibi’s Kitchen doesn’t answer that question, but it does help address the dearth of English-language cookbooks featuring African food.

Hawa Hassan and Julia Turshen offer a fresh and accessible set of recipes, more than half of which are vegetarian or vegan. The book sold out shortly after its publication last fall, prompting a reprinting and a spate of publicity.