In collaboration with Rooftop Institute
Hong Kong, 2026
I am not from Libya, nor did I grow up with the yeasty, warm scent of Aseeda bubbling on a stove. The first time I encountered this comforting ancient dish was through my artist friend Marwa Benhalim in Cairo last year. She hosted a workshop of Aseeda with her mother, turning the kitchen into a space of performance and preservation. Watching their hands move together over the pot and witnessing the unspoken, inherited rhythm of their shared labor, I saw a lineage of care taking physical shape. They did not exchange measurements or precise instructions; their communication existed in the muscle memory of their forearms, the tilt of the bowl and a shared understanding of the dough’s resistance. It was messy yet full of love.
Aseeda is a traditional semi-solid dough pudding originating from North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. The preparation is very simple, usually consisting of only two core ingredients: flour and boiling water, sometimes also with salt and oil. Once combined, the mixture is vigorously stirred with a wooden spatula until it thickens into a dense and smooth dough. It is served warm, with a hollow carved into the middle to catch the date syrup, honey or olive oil. More than just a dish, Aseeda is a culinary weight that grounds the family. It is a dish born for survival and movement, designed to be carried across borders and shared from one pot, turning a simple meal into a shared site of belonging.
Recently, while hosting an artist-parent workshop for the Rooftop Institute, a group of parents and their children, I found myself standing over the same struggle. The premise was simple: flour, water and effort. Yet, as the afternoon unfolded, the simple act of combining these elemental ingredients transformed into a profound mirror. Through the making of Aseeda, the chaotic, beautiful and physically demanding realities of raising a child — and of carrying a culture across oceans — finally made sense.
Making Aseeda requires a grounded kind of endurance. It is not a passive recipe; you cannot put a lid on it and walk away. As the water and flour bind, the dough becomes annoyingly heavy and sticky. It demands constant forceful stirring to bring it together. You must press the dough firmly against the sides of the pot to smooth out the lumps, using your whole upper body to work the mixture. It helps to hold the pot steady between your feet on the floor, just as Marwa showed me in Cairo.
It clings to the spoon and resists easy movement, very much like the all-encompassing, messy and unrelenting demands of parenthood. It is a physical labor that pulls from the shoulders and the heart alike. Every repetitive rotation reflects the daily acts of care we pour into our children. It mirrors the endless meals, the piles of laundry, the physical weight of a growing child and the long repetitive nights of trying to get them to sleep. Parenting, similar to making Aseeda, is exhausting. It tests your threshold for fatigue. But that very friction—the constant, sticky resistance and the effort required to smooth it out—is what ultimately holds the family together.
As my arm ached from the stirring, I began to think about the origins of this dish. Aseeda is, at its core, a food of endurance. Its roots date back to nomadic landscapes. To make it, one needed minimal tools: fire, water and flour that could be carried in sacks across vast distances.
Because of its elemental nature, Aseeda traveled along ancient trade routes. It survived the diaspora of nomadic people because it relied on the one thing that cannot be confiscated at a border: embodied knowledge. The recipe wasn’t found in heavy books left behind; it lived in the hands of women, passed from mother to daughter through the steady rhythm of stirring. It is a physical archive of survival.
In Marwa’s work, food often serves as a tool to explore power and the subversion of domesticity. Standing in this workshop, I realized that for a displaced person, the kitchen is never just a room; it is a site of resistance. When the outside world changes, the pot remains a place where you have agency over.
Watching Hong Kong parents wrestle with this dough, the historical weight of Aseeda felt very relevant to our own current geography. We are living through a time of displacement. Families are uprooting their lives, packing everything into suitcases and trying to find new homes in new cities across the globe.
When you are displaced, what do you actually take with you? You cannot pack the humid air of the Victoria harbor, the fishy smell of a wet market, or the rhythmic ding-ding of a tram. But you can pack flour. You can pack the memory of how your mother moved in the kitchen.
Cultural continuity relies on what we can manifest with our own hands. Whether it is making dumplings in a small London kitchen or speaking Cantonese to a child who is surrounded by English, we are always stirring our own heavy dough. Through the daily relentless work of feeding and teaching, we are proving that we still exist. The physical strength needed to keep the dough from burning is the same effort required to keep a culture from fading away in a new place.
There is no rigid universal recipe for Aseeda, just as there is no definitive manual for raising a child. The knowledge is learned not by strict adherence to a clock, but by watching, feeling and being present. Every family holds its own subtle rhythm. You have to learn to read the dough, relying entirely on intuition to adjust the heat and the effort.
Parenting requires this exact presence: abandoning the illusion of a correct way in favor of reading the unspoken cues of your child, adapting your approach as they grow and change. There is a freedom in the no recipe approach, but it comes with a responsibility. You cannot blame the book if it goes wrong; you must trust your own hands.
Perhaps the most difficult lesson in the pot is knowing exactly when to stop. If you overwork the dough, it loses its intended comforting texture; if you stop too soon, it remains raw and unformed. It requires a profound level of trust to know when the effort has been enough.
Motherhood requires this same delicate balance. We pour all of our energy and ancestral anxiety into the stirring. We want to smooth out every lump in our children’s lives. But we must also cultivate the wisdom to recognize the moment to pull the spoon away. To step back, let go of the control and simply let our children be who they are, trusting that the foundation we have mixed for them will hold.
By the end of the workshop, our arms were tired, the tables were dusted white and the air was smelling like toasted grain. We sat down to share the Aseeda we had fought so hard to bring together.
The dish itself is eventually eaten. Even though it is so simple, all children love it. What stays behind is the warmth of being together at the table. This deep labor of love — the tired shoulders, the sticky pots, and the quiet talks over an imperfect batch — is never really lost. It becomes the core memories of a family.
Through the simple rhythm of cooking, we are doing much more than sustaining our bodies. We are linking our children to an invisible network of endurance. Through the sticky, heavy and beautiful work of the everyday, we are shaping an enduring archive of our love, ensuring that no matter where they go, they will always know how to feed themselves and how to remember who they are.