How Doritos, Resilience, and a Mother’s Memory Shaped Hawa Hassan’s Life in Food

Tinfoil Swans Podcast

On this episode

When Hawa Hassan was 5 years old, she was living in a refugee camp in Kenya. By seven, she was resettled in Seattle with a few other refugees from Somalia, waiting for her family to join her. Then the political climate changed, and she came to realize that they were never coming; she was on her own. The thing to know about Hassan is that she will always find the light in any situation and use it to guide the way forward for others. The author, host, entrepreneur, and chef joined Tinfoil Swans to talk about her stunning new cookbook, Setting a Place for Us, celebrating the lives of refugees; surviving as a kid far away from the world and family she’d known; how Doritos shaped her life; and the scent that transports her to her mother’s kitchen.

Meet our guest

Hawa Hassan is a James Beard Award-winning chef, TV host, entrepreneur, and author. She was born in Somalia and by the age of five, had relocated to a refugee camp in Kenya before being resettled in Seattle at the age of seven, without her immediate family. Her mission of cultural reconnection led her to create Basbaas, the first Somali line of condiments widely available in the United States, and to write the cookbook In Bibi’s Kitchen, celebrating the recipes and stories of grandmothers from eight African nations. Her newest cookbook, Setting a Place for Us, continues this work, weaving her own personal narrative with the stories of displaced people from around the world, and sharing their recipes. She is the host of the shows Hawa at Home, Hawa in the Kitchen, and Spice of Life.

Meet our host

Kat Kinsman is the executive features editor at Food & Wine, author of Hi, Anxiety: Life With a Bad Case of Nerves, host of Food & Wine’s Gold Signal Award-winning podcast Tinfoil Swans, and founder of Chefs With Issues. Previously, she was the senior food & drinks editor at Extra Crispy, editor-in-chief and editor at large at Tasting Table, and the founding editor of CNN Eatocracy. She won a 2024 IACP Award for Narrative Food Writing With Recipes and a 2020 IACP Award for Personal Essay/Memoir, and has had work included in the 2020 and 2016 editions of The Best American Food Writing. She was nominated for a James Beard Broadcast Award in 2013, won a 2011 EPPY Award for Best Food Website with 1 million unique monthly visitors, and was a finalist in 2012 and 2013. She is a sought-after international keynote speaker and moderator on food culture and mental health in the hospitality industry, and is the former vice chair of the James Beard Journalism Committee.

Highlights from the episode

On being displaced

“By five, my family was in one of the biggest and oldest refugee camps in the world. It’s called Dadaab, and it’s in a beach town in Mombasa. My parents were on the brink of a divorce and the night that we were leaving, the country was on the brink of a collapse. My mother had been with my father since she was 16, and she was ready to start life over so she took us to the camp and signed us up for resettlement. We had just a few suitcases of our clothes and things that my mother had deemed important.

We had our own shelter and my mother immediately started to set up a goods store. She had some money from my father and used that money to buy dry goods. She really had an understanding of business and people and feelings, and she was adamant that people were not broke — they were just displaced.”

On life in the refugee camp

“Just as I have all of my life, I thought that the camp was another adventure. My mother did the same thing that she had in Mogadishu, where people would come to our house and drink tea and eat together. People were trying to figure out where to go next, how to get their kids back in school, how long we’d be there, should they move into the city of Nairobi or go abroad where their siblings were? There were ambassadors who were split from their families. The wife and the children might have been at the camp and the ambassador was in Egypt. There were a lot of conversations and a lot of tea and food being consumed at night. It was like one long sleepover.”

On coming to America — alone

“My mother sent me to Seattle in 1993 because in the ‘family’ that was being sponsored, there was a space for a little girl. Originally, it was supposed to be someone else’s daughter, but about a month before the interviewing process started with the United Nations Refugee Agency, the other girl’s mother decided that she wasn’t going to be coming. My mom said, ‘My eldest daughter will go.’ Her thought process at the time was, ‘I’ll be down one kid, I’ll have four, and I’ll get sponsorship for five of us.’ 

When I got to Seattle, I was like, “Oh, any day now my family’s coming, my family’s coming, my family’s coming, my family’s coming.’ Black Hawk Down happened. Sponsorship was stopped for the Somalis under the Clinton administration. My mother remarried a few years later. She sent her husband to Norway as a student, and he did family reunification for her. 

I was on the plane with nine other Somali people who were also being resettled with me. We were a ‘family’ and the father in the family dynamic was my grandfather’s cousin. He came to be my father in America.”

On feeding herself

“There was a lady who was living with us — like the mom of the family — who made all the same foods that we made at home. My job was really to clean up or cut vegetables or be her sidekick. After two years passed, she got married and moved away. It was me, the man who I’d come here with, and one other person in the house. That’s when I was like, ‘Oh, no one is coming. I’m going to eat pizza. I’m going to eat hot dogs. I’m going to get into Doritos.’ That’s what I did for a very long time. When I got to middle school, I rebelled a ton, and I started to assimilate. I started to play basketball. I took off my hijab. I had all sorts of after-school programming and before-school programming so that I wouldn’t be at home. I was like, ‘I have to make a life.’ 

The man would give me an allowance every week, and then it was up to me how to use that allowance to buy myself food. Mr. Henry and his wife had a gas station on the corner of our block. I would walk there before school and after school, and I would get the same food every day — a hot dog link, a bag of Doritos for 25 cents, and a can of soda. I would eat that maybe twice a day, and then I would have lunch at school. I did that all through middle school.”

On the smell that brings her home

“The smell of xawaash — a Somali spice that consists of cardamom, cumin, turmeric, cinnamon, and coriander toasted all together automatically makes a home smell a particular way. That was transformative, because it is exactly the same smell from all these years ago. Even in our home now, there are times where I’ll wake up in the morning and I’ll ask my husband, ‘Do you smell that? It smells like my mom’s house.’

The smell of xawaash can literally center me right into my mom’s home. Also, the smell of pasta sauce. There’s a Somali suugo that we make with warm spices that can instantly make me feel like I’m in my mom’s kitchen.”

On amplifying other people’s voices

“For a long time, people wanted me to do a memoir. I was like, ‘No, I have to do this book about displacement first, because it’s the next part of my story.’ I am an African kid, but then in the world, I’m a displaced person. I’m an ex-refugee, and I want to tell that story from our perspective. I don’t have any sad stories to tell. I wanted the book to be a celebration, a joy, a coming together to ask the tough questions. But also I wanted it to say, ‘You decide how that conflict came to be. Use this as a gateway into doing more research — but here’s some beautiful recipes. Here’s some kind, smiley faces. Here are the people that you’re hearing these stories about, in their own words.'”

About the podcast

Food & Wine has led the conversation around food, drinks, and hospitality in America and around the world since 1978. Tinfoil Swans continues that legacy with a new series of intimate, informative, surprising, and uplifting interviews with the biggest names in the culinary industry and beyond, sharing never-before-heard stories about the successes, struggles, and fork-in-the-road moments that made these personalities who they are today.

This season, you’ll hear from icons and innovators like Roy Choi, Byron Gomez, Vikas Khanna, Romy Gill, Matthew Lillard, Ana and Lydia Castro, Laurie Woolever, Karen Akunowitz, Hawa Hassan, Dr. Arielle Johnson, Dr. Jessica B. Harris, Samin Nosrat, Curtis Stone, Kristen Kish, Padma Lakshmi, Ayesha Curry, Antoni Porowski, Run the Jewels, and other special guests going deep with host Kat Kinsman on their formative experiences; the dishes and meals that made them; their joys, doubts and dreams; and what’s on the menu in the future. Tune in for a feast that’ll feed your brain and soul — and plenty of wisdom and quotable morsels to savor.

New episodes drop every Tuesday. Listen and follow on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

These interview excerpts have been edited for clarity.

Editor’s Note: The transcript for download does not go through our standard editorial process and may contain inaccuracies and grammatical errors.