How to Cook a Book

Yasmin Khan and being part of the conversation

This time next week, I’ll be getting the house ready for the next food writers retreat at my house in East Sussex. They’ll bring their patchwork of ideas, some more stitched together than others, and we’ll weave them over the next couple of days and evenings into something that looks much more like what they’ve always wanted to say.

I ask them three main questions: what do you want to say, to whom and why? But then I ask them to dig a little deeper through the four sub questions which, I think, are even more important:

• What do you stand for?

• Who do you represent?

• What conversations do you want to be part of?

• What conversations do you want to start?

Later this week on Cooking the Books, Yasmin Khan, the award-winning food and travel writer is back on to talk about her latest book, Sabzi. The word means herbs in Persian, her mother’s mother tongue, and vegetables in Urdu, the language of her Pakistani father.

But this beautiful vegetarian cookbook continues a conversation we know from Yasmin’s long held beliefs in justice. The former human rights campaigner whose Saffron Tales in 2016, crossing her mother’s homeland of Iran in search of its cuisine, launched her career as a food writer, claimed the space of food justice with Zaitoun in 2018, a dazzling celebration of Palestinian cuisine. Listen to her on Cooking the Books talking about Ripe Figs. As she takes us across the East Mediterranean tasting the best food in Greece, Turkey and Cyprus in the company of refugees and activists, she chops and chats with them about borders, memory and identity.

Yasmin has consistently shown us how food can give dignity and humanise people in the harshest of circumstances, and Sabzi, ostensibly a pantry cookbook which gives us more ideas to add to our vegetarian repertoire, was always going to do more than introduce us to a few new ways with a chilli.

Eating less but better meat isn’t just what Henry Dimbleby tells us to do in the National Food Strategy (which was dumped by the last government, but looks like it’ll see the light of day with this one), but for her, a political act to challenge the industrialisation of food and farming. Introducing her 14-month-old daughter to Persian food is, on the face of it, what any mother would do to connect her to the ancestral table, but Yasmin tells us how she did it last month as a response to the recent attack on Iran by Trump and his cronies. Food is for many of my CTB guests about belonging and identity, but for Yasmin, it’s a powerful political act. It’s the conversation she leads, the narrative she pushes, her place in the food space.

We’ll be eating many of the delicious dishes in her book next week and discussing how and why to cook a book, and this bunch looks like they’ll get it. Watch this space for their new Substacks in a month or so. As my favourite late activist, Vivienne Westwood said, “There’s too much to do to do nothing at all.” And how better to do it than through food writing?