STOCKHOLM, Sweden – For as long as she remembers, Razaw Diako has loved food.
Now that love, cultivated in Erbil where she was born, is being brought to her adopted home in Sweden, where she is working on a cookbook on Kurdish cuisine -- albeit a different one.
“I want to create something Kurdish, but in a different way. What I do is not traditionally Kurdish; it’s Kurdish in my own way,” she explains.
The kitchen is her happy place, where she puts her passion to work, bringing to tables in Sweden a bold, refreshing spin on traditional time-tested Kurdish dishes through her use of local ingredients and a few dashes of creativity.
Diako recalls how she would experiment in the kitchen, adding unconventional ingredients to Kurdish dishes to give things a twist.
“As a teenager I would add apple to salads, things we don’t normally do in Kurdish cooking, or ask my mom ‘why can’t we add a little bit of garlic to this or present this in a different way?’ When I was 20, that’s when I really started to get into cooking.”
Diako says the lack of attention to presentation, and the Kurdish preference of quantity over quality, has influenced her work.
“I love using colors; presentation is very important – it has to look good. It’s not just food for me, it’s art.”
Diako’s family has its roots in Kirkuk and Erbil. Born in the Kurdish capital, Diako spent the younger years of her life in Kurdistan before moving to Sweden in the early 1990s with her immediate family.
Though her parents and brothers are all in Sweden, Diako says she returns to Kurdistan often to visit her extended family.
“When I go back, I spend most of my time in the village. I love it there, where you’re far removed from the cities and they’ve retained their cultural folklore better, and less has changed. And the food from the villages tastes amazing, straight out of the garden.”
Diako’s visits also allow her to build on her existing knowledge of Kurdish cooking and food culture from her relatives, which she cherishes.
Diako is not a chef by profession. She studied medical technology and biotechnology in university and now works in a lab in Stockholm.
In April of this year, she joined Instagram and started posting photos of her food. Her tasteful photos showcased Kurdish food with a bold, colorful spin and quickly earned her a growing group of followers, largely composed of Kurds and fellow food enthusiasts around the world.
Her bold culinary experiments have paid off and Diako is now working on a cookbook, which she hopes will be released sometime this fall.
Diako says the book will only feature Kurdish food, but prepared and presented her way.
“The book is ‘Razaw’s Kurdish cookbook.’ It’s my take on Kurdish food. It has to be personal and this is my way of presenting Kurdish food. It will have recipes for salads, soups, main dishes, meats, breads and desserts.”
Learning how to write precise recipes has been a challenge for Diako, who prefers to experiment and be creative when cooking by throwing ingredients together.
“I’m not good at recipes, I never follow them and I’ve never written them before now. So when people ask me for recipes, I actually don’t know!”
She says she never thought she would write a cookbook, but is having fun in the process and is excited to see what happens next.
The cookbook, which will initially be published in Swedish, will be the first of its kind.
Diako also hopes to connect with the diaspora through her book: Kurds not living with family or who do not know how to cook Kurdish food but want to learn. With the book, she says, those interested in learning will have exact recipes to follow.
Diako’s work shines a light on Kurdish food culture, which is not as well known as other regional culinary heavyweights like Turkey, Iran and Lebanon.
“My friends and I were at a Lebanese restaurant once and we ordered stuffed grape leaves. I told my friends, we make something similar in Kurdistan, too, but we call it dolma. They had no idea, they had always thought of the dish as Lebanese or Turkish mezza. I explained that in Kurdistan we not only have a different way or preparing it, but we also use all kinds of vegetables – grape leaves, eggplant, zucchini, potatoes, tomatoes, onions,” she notes.
Like many Kurds in the diaspora, Diako dreams of one day returning to Kurdistan for good and putting down roots in her family’s village.
“When I was young, growing up in Sweden, far away from my homeland, I didn’t think about what it meant to be Kurdish or have Kurdish culture. But once I grew up, my culture became closer to my heart.”
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