She Who Tastes, Knows

A beautiful, expansive memoir on food as a vital bridge between cultures, from the internationally award-winning author of Parwana.

To truly understand things, we need to know them. We need to taste them.

This is a story of how food connects us all - not only at the table but to each other's cultures and histories. Durkhanai Ayubi was born in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and she and her family became refugees when she was a small child. She's grown to see her ancestral lands be misunderstood as a desolate war zone of helpless people, with no history or culture worthy of mention, when the reality is in fact steeped in rich, complex histories of incredible cultural significance.

Living in Australia, Durkhanai's only tangible connection to the histories of her homeland was through food, first through cooking with her family, and then as an owner of her much-loved award-winning Adelaide family restaurant, Parwana. Years on, and following Afghanistan's systemic collapse in 2021, Durkhanai realised that it was time to revisit those histories and tell the previously untold stories that can help shape a more optimistic future.

She Who Tastes, Knows is an expansive history of Durkhanai's homeland and a vivid, moving story about what it truly means to understand another's culture. Through stories of food, family, belonging and migration, the book traverses cultural boundaries, weaving a tapestry of dignity, empathy and understanding.

Each chapter draws on a particular ingredient important to Durkhanai's cultural identity, and explores their life cycles to uncover unseen histories of Afghan culture, the complexities of migrant and refugee experience, and how we as a society might work towards unifying our disparate cultures and ways of seeing the world.

In our modern world, which can feel so disjointed, this book shows us - with timeless prescience - how new possibilities for connection are just under the surface, waiting to bloom.