Growing up, Ifrah F. Ahmed never planned on becoming a chef.
Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, Ahmed came to the US as a child after the start of the Somali Civil War. In 1996, her family was resettled in Tukwila, Washington, as part of an early wave of Somali refugees who went on to form a community there. In their new home, Ahmed’s mother made it her mission—even as she worked multiple jobs and took care of her children—to ensure Ahmed and her siblings stayed connected to their Somali identity. Food played a vital role in that mission, and planted the seed that, years later, led to Ahmed becoming a chef and writer—and eventually authoring her debut cookbook, Soomaliya: Food, Memory, and Migration, which is out now.
First, she had to learn the oral traditions of Somali cuisine. When Ahmed was in elementary school, her mother began teaching her how to cook classic Somali dishes. At times, Ahmed had mixed feelings about these lessons, feeling that they were part of a set of gendered expectations. But she came to appreciate the fact that through her mother’s cooking lessons, she was learning much more than the ingredients and techniques needed to make the perfect canjeero (sour fermented pancake) or sambuus (dumplings).
“It’s helpful to know the recipes,” Ahmed tells Vogue. “But it’s almost like her teaching me not just what we eat but how we eat was really teaching me about who we were.”
Ahmed soon discovered her passion and curiosity for food, which her mother nurtured. “I became an avid Food Network stan from a very young age,” she says. She would develop “hyper-fixations” on “classic American foods” like pancakes and chicken burgers, and enjoyed figuring out how to make them. She loved Anthony Bourdain, who merged her interests in food and geopolitics. She prized academic excellence (her work paid off; she was valedictorian), and originally pursued a career in law.
After college, Ahmed worked with Somali refugee students at Seattle public schools. She got married and started law school, but found that she was always taking her law work home with her. Cooking continued to be her passion, but she didn’t think of it as her life’s work. It was hard to shake the expectations inherent in being the eldest daughter in an immigrant family.
“I never thought of food as a serious career because usually, when you are coming from those backgrounds, you feel like you have to have a career that translates to something in terms of maybe redeeming some of your parents’ sacrifices,” Ahmed says. “I think a lot of immigrant and refugee kids can probably relate, and it’s not always easy to transition to a food career. I also had never really seen anyone that looked like me that had the kind of career that I was fantasizing about.”
Then, in 2018, she went on a homecoming trip to Somalia with her mother. “I had an urge to kiss the ground when I got off the plane. It was the first time that I was fully immersed in my own community in that way,” Ahmed says. “When I was there, it was really simple moments where I was like, okay, I really want to turn to food: the first meal that I had in our house in Mogadishu after meeting all of my family, and just really small moments like that.”
It was a constellation of moments that convinced her to reorient her life towards Somali culinary and cultural work. “Everything was incredible. It was that with the combination of being in your homeland, with seeing the beauty and the movement and the energy, and also tasting the freshness of the food, the ingredients, and the slowness and the intentionality around not just eating, but how you eat and who you eat with,” Ahmed says.
That experience eventually led to her launching Milk & Myrrh, her Somali culinary pop-up, which has routinely sold out since its launch in 2019. Around that time, she also had the idea for a cookbook focused on Somali cultural and culinary preservation. She set out to build the writing, cooking, and recipe development skills that she needed for the book, contributing to The New York Times’s cooking section, and writing for publications including Vogue, Eater, The Los Angeles Times, and more. Now, nearly a decade later, all her work has come to fruition.
The book explores the cultural, political, and geographic forces that have shaped Somali cuisine. Ahmed translates an oral cooking tradition into writing, building a vital new addition to the archive of Somali culinary history.
Researching, writing, and developing the recipes in the book wasn’t an easy feat. “If you’re coming from an oral cooking culture, you’re never just a recipe developer, you’re never just a chef, you’re never just a writer,” Ahmed says. “For a lot of this, I felt like a detective, a historian.”
In addition to recipes, Soomaaliya features profiles of people throughout the Somali food world, including chefs, business people, restaurateurs, herders, and agricultural workers.
“I think for me, it’s really important that my pioneers get celebrated because I think not only was there that lack of knowledge of Somali culinary traditions, but I just feel like they did such important work that really does not get the recognition that it deserves. Because what they did is they really worked on the preservation of our cuisine and really moving that through the digital age, especially to serve a growing diaspora,” she says.
For Ahmed, Soomaaliya has always been more than a cookbook. It is a work of cultural preservation, an invitation, and a way of addressing the disruption of the oral tradition of Somali culture caused by decades of forced migration due to the war.
It’s also, crucially, a way of taking long-held tenets of Somali cooking and culture, and putting them into writing. “The historical section is the past; the recipes are kind of like the present; and to me, the interviews are sort of like the future,” Ahmed says.
Below, Ahmed shares a favorite recipe from the book.
Mallaay Qumbe (Coconut Fish Curry)
Serves 4
Despite Somalia’s long coastline, seafood has not traditionally been a big part of the Somali diet outside of coastal towns. In most of the country, red meat has been king, and both seafood and poultry have been seen as lower-class food, or not “real” food, in comparison to red meat. In the 1970s and 1980s, in a time of severe famine, the government tried to combat the negative view of seafood and boost the fishing sector. They relocated nomads to fishing cooperatives and even made certain days of the week officially “meatfree” days, dedicated to seafood consumption. Despite these efforts, the industry did not take off. A decade later, the Somali Civil War saw the full collapse of this sector. More recently, interest in seafood consumption is growing.
Mallaay qumbe can be found up and down the East African coast, including in the coastal towns of southern Somalia. This version is distinctly Somali, due to the addition of xawaash and creamy coconut milk. Serve mallaay qumbe with rice or soor.
- 1¼ teaspoons fine sea salt
- 1 pound (450 g) barramundi or other firm white fish, cut into serving-size pieces
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 1 medium red onion, diced
- 2 large Roma tomatoes, finely diced
- 8 garlic cloves, minced
- 1 (13½-ounce / 400 ml) can unsweetened coconut milk
- 1 cup (16 g) cilantro leaves, finely chopped, plus more to serve
- 4 teaspoons Xawaash
- Steamed white rice, for serving
- Sprinkle ¼ teaspoon of the salt over the fish; put it aside.
- In a pot just large enough to accommodate the fish in one layer, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Once the oil is hot but not smoking, add the onion and cook, stirring, for 8 to 10 minutes, until almost translucent. Add the tomatoes, cover, and cook for 7 minutes, occasionally stirring and smashing the tomatoes down as they cook.
- Add the garlic and cook for a minute or two, then add the coconut milk, cilantro, xawaash, and the remaining 1 teaspoon salt; stir and cover. Cook for 4 minutes to allow the flavors to come together, then add the fish, making sure the coconut milk covers the fish (if necessary, add a splash of water to cover). Cover and cook for 8 to 10 minutes, until the fish can be easily flaked with a fork. Serve the curry with rice, topped with additional chopped cilantro.
Xawaash (Somali Spice Mix)
Makes about 2 ½ cups (260 g)
It’s no exaggeration to say that xawaash is at the heart of Somali cuisine. It is Somali history on a plate—a culinary reminder of Somalia’s centuries of global trade, particularly along the Indian Ocean. Xawaash is what makes many Somali dishes taste distinctly Somali. While every household’s xawaash recipe is its own, typically seven core spices—cumin, coriander, black pepper, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, and turmeric—are toasted until their fragrance blooms, then blended into an earthy golden-brown powder. Xawaash stores very well and for a long time in an airtight container, though it’s at its peak shortly after it’s made. If you use it often (and many recipes in this book call for it), you can double or triple the recipe for a big batch.
- 1 cup (100 g) whole cumin seeds
- 1 cup (70 g) whole coriander seeds
- ¼ cup (35 g) black peppercorns
- 1 small-to-medium piece of cinnamon bark
- 2 tablespoons green cardamom pods
- 1½ teaspoons whole cloves
- ¼ cup (30 g) ground turmeric
- Toast the cumin, coriander, peppercorns, cinnamon bark, cardamom pods, and cloves in a medium skillet over medium heat, stirring constantly so the spices don’t burn. The spices are toasted when they have a slightly darker color and become fragrant, 1 to 2 minutes.
- Transfer the toasted spices to a blender or spice grinder and blend until they become a fine powder. Transfer to a bowl and mix in the ground turmeric until it’s fully incorporated and the spice mix is golden brown. Allow to cool completely, then store in an airtight container.
Excerpted with permission from Soomaaliya by Ifrah F. Ahmed, published by Hardie Grant North America, March 2026, RRP $40.00. Hardcover.
