The spices came from India. The family came from India by way of Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and New Zealand. The recipes came from everywhere the family stopped long enough to cook.
Ashia Ismail-Singer’s Food for Sharing is an immigrant cookbook in the truest sense — not a book about one cuisine adapted for a new audience, but a book about what happens when a cook has lived in enough places that the boundaries between traditions stop being boundaries and start being flavours.
The book sits near Yasmin Khan’s Zaitoun on the shelf of cookbooks where diaspora is not a problem to be solved but a condition that produces excellent food.
A book for the table where the guests have come from everywhere and the host has decided that this, precisely, is the point.
