Taste Makers

Description

A Editors’ Choice pick Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, , , , Food Network, KCRW, WBUR , Emma Straub, and One of the ‘s Most Anticipated Books of 2021 America’s modern culinary history told through the lives of seven pathbreaking chefs and food writers.  introduced me to the life stories of extraordinary women and offered me an invigorating history of cooking—as life’s purpose, as pleasure, as political act—in America. Mayukh Sen writes with great heart and a spirit of vibrant inquiry to give us a magnificent book. Reading   is a lot like enjoying an amazing meal: It surprises you, fills you, and you’re sorry when it’s over. Mayukh Sen has crafted something truly special, a book where women’s stories take center stage. Mayukh Sen isn’t the first to write about women who made significant cultural contributions while being undervalued during their lifetimes, and even more so in death. But he does it in such a way as to make you think he might be the first. He is acutely aware of the cliches that have come to inhibit the genre, and he both challenges and upends them. A gathering of voices that’s altogether necessary, radical, heartfelt, and intimate. A fascinating and impeccably researched book.  is a joyous celebration of the cooks whose lives have enriched so much of our cooking and eating. A beautiful, engaging, and long-overdue book, one which highlights some of the best-known and most influential cooks of the recent past as well as some whose names are not as familiar but should be. An invaluable book that’s also a pleasure to read. is beautiful. Mayukh makes the American kitchen feel vast, interconnected and full of wonder – never insular, small-minded or cold – and weaves together these undertold stories with unmatched care and respect. He’s a masterful chronicler of American cooks and cooking, and we’re lucky to have this book. Through meticulous research and broad insight, Mayukh Sen follows seven immigrant women who crashed the gates of the U.S. food establishment in the twentieth century.   is essential history for understanding American food’s current reckoning with inclusion and diversity. In this dazzling debut, James Beard Award–winning food writer Sen looks at the lives of seven remarkable immigrant women whose passion for their homeland’s food transformed how Americans cook and eat… A vibrant, empathetic, and dynamic exploration of culture, identity, race, and gender… Thoughtfully written, Sen’s portrayals of his subjects reveal how rich and nuanced being ‘American’ can truly be. Food lovers with a big appetite for knowledge will gobble this up. A must-read for those interested in culinary or women’s history and the evolution of American cookbooks. Making a lively book debut, James Beard Award–winning journalist Sen, who teaches food journalism at NYU, celebrates the accomplishments of seven immigrant women who defiantly introduced new tastes, ingredients, and recipes to their adopted country…Well-crafted, engaging portraits of culinary and cultural pioneers. Through his seven portraits, Sen restores a missing part of American culinary history, drawing on interviews, reviews and menus to create a compelling story about the love of food, the pull of the tastes of one’s homeland, the delicious pleasure of sharing the richness and complexity of your most cherished recipes with strangers at your table. Mayukh Sen is an award-winning darling of the food journalism world, and  , his first book, is both a necessary addition to the food-writing canon and a lovingly crafted work of women’s history.  is a great springboard for discovering cookbooks written by immigrant women who have made significant cultural contributions to American cuisine. A prizewinning journalist serves up profiles in culinary courage of seven immigrant women who transformed American cuisine, among them Jamaica’s Norma Shirley, China’s Chao Yang Buwei, and India’s Julie Sahni. Sen’s book is its own delectable feast and homage to the kitchen queens who reigned supreme. A queer person of Bengali descent, Sen has been drawn to the stories of those in the food world whom the food and food-media establishment in the U.S. often forgets or erases…[ ] is more nuanced than any blurb could explain; one of Sen’s gifts is a storytelling ethos and skill that values context and belies simple summary. The stories of the women in this book — China’s Chao Yang Buwei, Mexico’s Elena Zelayeta, France’s Madeleine Kamman, Italy’s Marcella Hazan, India’s Julie Sahni, Iran’s Najmieh Batmanglij, Jamaica’s Norma Shirley, and an interlude about the most famous American woman chef of all time, Julia Child — embody a kind of caring attention rarely found in typical food writing. Sen is a sensitive and perceptive journalist and a deft historian; his willingness to let his subjects speak for themselves whenever possible gives his book a compelling power. ‘Earth mother’ doesn’t exactly describe the strong-willed pioneers of Mayukh Sen’s  For them, he writes, cooking was a source of power and establishment of cultural identity. Mr. Sen has picked an esoteric group and writes about them with empathy in short, well-researched biographies. Mayukh Sen’s   is a work that sets the record straight: With seven biographies of immigrant women who influenced how Americans eat today, it’s a cultural deep dive for the history buff in your life — or just someone who loves to read and think about food origins. The James Beard award-winning writer’s book debut is a stellar group biography that reconstructs the lives and influence of seven immigrant women – such as Indian cook Julie Sahni and Jamaican chef Norma Shirley, who shaped food (and appetite) in America. After World War II, the U.S. went through a food revolution driven by immigrants from other countries. Mayukh Sen examines the lives and works of seven such immigrant women through archival research, original reporting and well-crafted prose. But this book is more than history or biography. It is also an interrogation of cultural politics and historiography, of who and what gets recorded, remembered, forgotten and celebrated. As a queer, brown writer born to Bengali immigrants, Sen offers insightful critiques into how American media’s biases against immigrants, women and people of color have caused these lapses in our collective consciousness. He invites us to appreciate the important culinary contributions made by these women fully, with joy and pleasure. What Sen does is bring these seven women to life in cinematic fashion, rendering their life stories with a propulsiveness that evolves as the text goes on to reveal not just their experiences but the whole of American culinary history. …  is a work of biography and cultural criticism that should have the food media establishment on edge in its turn away from the paternalistic perspective on the meaning of immigrant labor What these teachers, chefs and writers have in common is an unapologetic impulse to cook food that truly represents who they are and where they come from, without having to temper it to appeal to the American palate. made me wish for a time machine so I could rewind to when I was a young cook and find in any of them, all of them, my role models and mentors. Indeed the variety and pervasiveness of food from different countries is often used as a metonym for America’s multiculturalism. But Sen’s approach is different. He avoids quoting family members and acolytes, and therefore hagiography. Instead, he paints a vivid, complex picture of his subjects. … Sen is an excellent storyteller, and his portraits are immersive. Resurrectional… The magic of   is in the lightness of the prose and the dense research it reveals. In less than twenty pages, Sen shows you crucial moments of history in food culture, and leaves you with an understanding of how quickly and thoroughly the past can be forgotten. Throughout his profiles of seven women who arrived in the United States and helped shape the country’s still-forming modern food culture, Mayukh Sen develops themes like motifs and variations in a symphony. … is a propulsive read thanks to Sen’s meticulously researched storytelling … Also, he begins the book with a sharp, concise, unsparing introduction, in which he addresses, among many pressing topics, one obvious question: “Why is a man writing this?” His persuasive, transparent answer is worth reading for yourself. As someone who has been reading cookbooks for 60 years, I’m acutely aware that there is a vast collection of valuable voices that didn’t just spring up in the last decade. I’m lucky to have that historical context, but many do not. Talented award-winning writer and professor Mayukh Sen’s book remedies this by shining a light on seven immigrant women who were trailblazers of their times. Mayukh Sen’s enthralling debut book…blazes with rage at this injustice as it commemorates these creators’ merit and mettle…. Sen has written an urgent and timely book. Passionate, well written, and accessible, its story of the vigor, struggle, and fleeting success of seven immigrant women offers a counternarrative to conventional understandings of success and failure in the food world. Sen traces the intimate details of these women’s lives and the broader social conditions that shaped – and in many ways stifled – their work. An important book that, like the work of the women it describes, deserves the widest audience. …[S]ensitive and insightful profiles of those who didn’t make the history books. [A] love letter to the immigrant women who defined food as we know it. [Sen’s] insider-outsider perspective is what makes his voice distinctive … It is possible – almost – to read as a kind of hagiography, a collection of portrayals of women who, despite the odds, accomplished great things, made valiant strides and blazed trails for others to follow. Yet this is no cosy armchair, feel-good read. ‘The book should make you squirm,’ he writes. And it does. [A] perceptive group biography. While Americans have taken to these cuisines, the contributions of these women have been largely forgotten. Mayukh Sen rediscovers their legacy in intimate, sensitive portraits. Each of these women fought against a system that often tried to pigeonhole, minimize, demean, or exoticize them. … Sen’s book is both a series of compelling portraits and a deeply researched challenge to entrenched American historical narratives. US