Zaynab Issa thinks storytelling is a great way to learn about food

Part one of conversation about her globally-influenced recipes and writing a cookbook.

photo: Carlos Ruiz

Zaynab Issa

is a freelance recipe developer and writer, and in April 2025, she will publish her first cookbook, Third Culture Cooking. She’s worked at BuzzFeed and Bon Appétit and creates recipes that blend her Indian and East African heritage with her childhood in New Jersey. As part of her cookbook writing process, she put out a call on Instagram for recipe testers, and I was selected to test a recipe for Wali Ya Mboga, her take on a classic East African dish.

This conversation is the first part in a three part series and will focus on her background and foray into food media. In part two, we chatted more about developing her cookbook and working with recipe testers like me. Then as her book pub date gets closer, I’ll share a recipe for Wali Ya Mboga.

Brianna Plaza: Can you tell me about your background and how you got into the food world?

Zaynab Issa: I would say I've always been into cooking and my family is a big food family. It's what excites us. I have three siblings, so there was six of us in the house, and at one point, my mom’s family was also living with us. Someone is always hungry with nine people in the house.

I didn’t see any example of what a career in food looked like other than being a chef, and my parents were like, “The hours, the pay. No.” At the same time, I started internalizing the idea of cooking as this domesticated misogynistic act, which is not good because it’s really what you make it. But I liked to cook, and I wanted to do it for myself.

My parents wanted me to study finance and I got a scholarship to Baruch College. I wanted to got to NYU and do something creative, but they strongly encouraged me to go to school for free and into a profession that was lucrative. Halfway through, I was exclusively taking editorial internships and I realized I was taking classes in Excel when one of these jobs needed excel at all. I made the decision to switch to a custom major that combined journalism, marketing, and art.

For my thesis in 2020, the project was to create a commentary on the political climate in the United States, which was very loaded. My mind immediately went to food as being the thing that can bridge gaps. It was really indicative of the way I actually feel about food. It’s the best way to meet somebody and immediately puts you on common ground. I made a zine that contained hyper-traditional recipes. It was COVID so I had the opportunity to really work on it in a way that I wouldn’t have if I was commuting to the city. I would get my grandma and mom on FaceTime and I would learn all these recipe that I grew up eating but never bothered to make myself. I think what made the zine successful is I was able to take these recipes and make them more technical. And when people made them they had a lot of success.

I also started posting what I was doing on TikTok. I had published the zine and had a product to sell, so it was proof that I could write and develop recipes, and talk about something substantial. It was the perfect combination and it feels like a lot of luck in many ways.

Peppery Potato Pakoras from Third Culture Cooking

Brianna Plaza: How did publishing your zine prepare you for working in a more established food media landscape?

Zaynab Issa: Aside from the edit test for my role, I think they used the zine as a marker for what I am capable of, and they used socials to see that there was a demand for my recipes.

A lot of the formality of recipe development and writing, I learned at Bon Appétit. It was a crash course in the first month. I learned everything I needed to know, and then it was just like, "Go forth." There’s 10 people touching your recipe before anyone sees it, which is amazing. It teaches you a lot about how perfect a recipe can get (if it can even be perfect). Whereas on social, I’m testing a recipe twice, maybe three times, and I decide it’s good. And that’s what most of the social landscape is. You enter the editorial landscape and you make your recipe three, four times, then someone else is making it a few more times.

Then the recipe goes to an editor who’s checking everything for consistency and asking you a million questions. You need to know your food like the back of your hand to be able to respond to these questions. It teaches you all the questions someone could have. And then on social you actually get those questions. You learn to write a recipe that has all the bases covered because you can anticipate what someone is going to have questions about. I think that really honed my recipe writing.

Brianna Plaza: If traditional food media helped you refine your process, how did you translate that to recipes you grew up with?

Zaynab Issa: In the cookbook, there's some recipes that are a little bit more traditional that I learned from my family, and I, for accuracy's sake, measured everything in grams. So instead of interpreting my grandmother’s vague teaspoon, I actually took her teaspoon and measured it.

In that way, they're almost hyper-accurate, but that's just knowledge that comes from conversions and math. The magazine was often translating recipes for home-cooks who have different skill levels. They might follow the recipes and only have a few tools and that’s all we know about them.

Riffat’s Kuku Paka from Third Culture Cooking

Brianna Plaza: How do your Indian, Tanzanian, and New Jersey heritages show up in your cooking?

Zaynab Issa: I feel like it's everywhere. My spice palette is definitely Indian and Tanzanian, and then my style of cooking is more New Jersey: easy casual. I feel like there's definitely thought in my recipes, but there's also this effortlessness to them where nothing feels over complicated.

I would say it's either familiar and a bit more difficult, or unfamiliar and easy. I try to strike that balance of something's that’s going to make you feel like your hand's being held with the feeling like you've done this kind of thing before or you've seen these ingredients before. I think when you get a recipe home run is when it's easy and it's familiar.

I chose the traditional recipes in the book very carefully because I'm trying to make sure that they get made. I think if I can pique your interest and curiosity, that's what I want to do. My mission is to get you interested. And I think in the beginning, something has to feel familiar.

Brianna Plaza: East African cuisine is not prominent in food media. How do you think about writing recipes that are less known to the average American consumer?

Zaynab Issa: I think that storytelling is a really great way to get people to learn something that they don't know. Those are the more traditional East African, Indian, Pakistani recipes that made it into the cookbook, and I put them through the lens of amazing women. So hopefully you're interested in the story and that will pique your interest in the food. You might never make it, but at the very least, you'll learn about where it came from, the origins, what kind of ingredients get used in it.

I think there's more of a storytelling educational aspect to those recipes as opposed to them going viral. Those are more for someone who likes to project cook or someone who's deeply curious and wants to learn. And I feel like even if you just read that recipe, you would learn a lot even if you never made it. I think that the other shiny recipes in the book are the ones that are like, “I'm going to make this on a Tuesday night."