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.”