While conducting research for her new cookbook, Yasmin Khan visited a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesvos in the Aegean Sea. The island, about 6 miles off the Turkish coast, has become ground zero for people arriving in Greece by sea and continues to host thousands of migrants. She interviews people about their choices of leaving their homes and the recipes they carry across borders, while carrying anything else could mean death. She spoke with local organizers like Lena Altinoglou, whose restaurant serves dishes from Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan, provided by the refugees she employs.
"I found it like an incredibly traumatic experience," Khan said of the 2018 trip. “The fact that this is happening on European soil, which is a very wealthy part of the world, is really shocking.” I ask her if she’s ever had any resistance to this method of cooking. "No," she said. "Food is political. I use food to help us understand ourselves and the world around us. That's the whole premise of my work."
In her new cookbook , Ripe Figs: Recipes and Stories from Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus , Khan shares more than 80 recipes from the region, such as eliopita (an olive-infused Cypriot bread) and kaymak (an olive-infused Cypriot bread). Turkish breakfast spread made from buffalo milk). In between dishes, she writes about her travels, global migration and the people she meets. “Being uprooted is an unsettling experience,” she writes in the book’s introduction. "People often become attached to things that help them maintain a sense of identity. ...[And] perhaps nothing provides a greater sense of identity than food."
Since 2015, refugees have poured into Europe in large numbers, mostly from war-torn Middle Eastern countries such as Syria and Iraq. By 2016, the UN Refugee Agency estimated that more than 5 million people had landed on European shores fleeing violence and persecution. Refugee camps are becoming overcrowded and under-resourced, and coastal countries like Greece are struggling to cope with their growing populations. Khan later booked a trip to Athens.
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Her humanitarian character is clearly reflected in her works. Rather than portraying her travels like a jet-setter on Instagram, she's honest. During our phone call, she told me that she had spent an exhausting morning doing the interview at her home in northeast London. She was unrehearsed and took a long pause before answering.
“When you’re chopping tomatoes or chopping onions in the kitchen, there’s a sense of intimacy,” Khan, 40, said. “You can hear them sizzling in the pan and the smell and aroma is a conversation starter”.
She began her career as a human rights activist in London, focusing on the Middle East. But around age 30, after 10 years of advocacy, she hit a wall and was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. Soon after, she packed her bags and embarked on a new adventure, and with it a new career in cookbooks.
Between recipes for ripe figs , Khan's prose is imbued with the same candidness—for example, when describing a beautiful Greek island port, she also mentions European border and coast guard patrols of the waters looking for migrant boats. In one chapter, Khan describes her worst travel days after her miscarriage. She comforted herself by eating figs, which reminded her of home and family.
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A few months later, Khan was in Istanbul cooking lamb meatballs with Turkish publisher Barak Gossel, a Kurd. (Turkey’s Kurdish community is a distinct indigenous people in the Middle East but doesn’t have a country of its own.) Over a steaming bowl of mint yogurt soup, They talk about being "other" and growing up in a multicultural household [Khan's mother is Iranian and her father is Pakistani]. She asked Gossel if he wanted the Kurds to be independent.
"She said, 'Really, this is just about equal rights for people within Turkey,'" Khan said. “It was a simple premise, but one that was so powerful for me and made me question my views on nationalism.” The author pauses, perhaps recalling life before the pandemic. The full kitchen, now a memory, is one of her favorite places to talk about identity. “And the food is delicious .”
