Ilhan Mohamed Abdi: ‘I want to preserve memories that I had growing up’

When you speak to most cookery authors as their debut cookbook is about to hit shelves, they’ve been busy celebrating, sharing tonnes of recipes with their followers and gearing up to sign hundreds of books in their publisher’s office. The run-up to Ilhan Mohamed Abdi’s first cookery collection, The Ramadan Kitchen, however, has also involved surgery. Brain surgery in fact. “So if I am a bit slow on some of the questions, please bear with me,” she says gently. Major surgery has not blunted her elation at having written a cookbook though. “I’m very excited, nervous at the same time, but very excited,” she buzzes.

You may have come across the London-based 36-year-old on Instagram, where she has 265k followers. It’s there, particularly during lockdown, that The Ramadan Cookbook was first conceived. “I started a Ramadan series online, just live on Instagram, and I’d post to tell everyone, ‘This is what we’re going to cook. These are the ingredients and kitchen utensils you’re going to need. Join me at six o’clock.’ And I’d get hundreds of people come on these lives. It was fantastic,” she remembers.

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What particularly resonated was the fact that, “I would actually show people I was being serious when I said something takes 15 minutes.” “Like my Somali rice is 15 minutes, one of my most popular recipes, and once they’d seen me actually cook it in front of them online, they’d realise, it really does take 15 minutes, and it really is beginner friendly,” she says.

For a while, she toyed with writing a speedy recipe cookbook instead of a Ramadan one, and she is still besieged by fans telling her to write a bread book – Paul Hollywood, look out – Mohamed Abdi’s dinner rolls and kimis (flaky flatbreads) should become household staples.

Formerly ensconced in the fraught corporate world, working for Goldman Sachs and then Amazon, how would the mum-of-one describe her food? “A lot of it comes from my own culture, my own heritage. It’s influenced heavily by that. So the foods I grew up with,” she explains. “It’s Somali flavours. It’s Arab flavours. My heritage is Somalian Egyptian, so a lot of the flavours come from there. But at the same time, my mother was in the kitchen quite a lot, so cooking her meals would take hours, and I don’t think that’s a fit for the modern cook, so I just adapted those [recipes] to fit the modern cook essentially.”

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She spent a lot of time watching her mum create incredible dishes (“I absolutely loved it. I didn’t bore of it at all,”) and a similar pattern is emerging in her own kitchen, decades later. Mohamed Abdi has dedicated the book to her own daughter, Amaana – who has changed her cooking in the sense that she’s developed even better shortcuts, alongside ways to involve a toddler in the process. “I want to preserve memories that I had growing up, the same recipes,” she says. “Ramadan comes every single year. It’ll come every single year until the end of time, and so it’s a book that will grow with her and her children, potentially.”

This year, Ramadan, a month of fasting observed by Muslims across the world, runs from the evening of Tuesday, February 17 until Wednesday, March 18 this year. “For me, it’s a month that brings me back to my faith, routine and family. We spend a lot more time, not just with my own immediate family, but my extended family,” she says reverently. “When I was in Somalia a lot [when I was younger] I would feel it around me everywhere, but in England or London, you don’t, so Ramadan for me was that one thing that was always constant every single year, no matter where I was. Now, as a mother, I’m trying to create that same sense for my child – comfort and memory.”

Split into two main sections, the book covers suhoor, the pre-fasting meal, eaten pre-dawn, including Mohamed Abdi’s decadent-sounding croissant bread pudding and date shake (“I’ll often just have a cup of water and a few dates, or I’ll have a really small sandwich or bagel, or even egg bites”) and iftar, the evening meal. For breaking fast, Mohamed Abdi shares dishes like chicken shawarma, oxtail stew, lamb chops, macaroni and even sheet pan pizza dotted with pepperoni.

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“The book is absolutely for everyone,” she says, noting it’s not just for those that observe Ramadan. If you don’t observe, but do want to get an initial taste of the holy month, Mohamed Abdi says to try her samosas and syrup-soaked fried doughballs. “I have such strong memories of these, they’d be the first thing on the table along with samosas throughout the entire of Ramadan.”

“I want people to feel confident when they try these dishes, and I want [them to experience] a sense of comfort,” she continues. “I also want people to walk away with a better understanding of the Somalian Egyptian cuisine I’ve grown up with.” She remembers saying to her editor, right at the beginning of the book’s life, that “there are so many more Muslims in the world than, let’s say, vegetarians and vegans, but there are so many vegetarian and vegan books, which are fantastic,” she says, but “why aren’t there more books like [The Ramadan Cookbook]? I think it’s really important. I think it’s changing, but very slowly.” Hopefully Mohamed Abdi has kickstarted the charge.

The Ramadan Kitchen: Nourishing Recipes from Fast to Feast by Ilhan Mohamed Abdi is published in hardback by Pavilion Books. Photography by Haarala Hamilton. Available January 29.