Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America
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2.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
An NPR Best Book of the Year
A New York Times Editors’ Choice pick
Wall Street Journal’s Who Read What: Favorite Books of 2021
Longlisted for the 2022 Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize
Observer Food Monthly’s 50 Things We Love in the World of Food Right Now
Named a best book for the holidays by Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Oprah’s O Quarterly, Globe & Mail, and the Food Network
Named a best food book of 2021 by the Los Angeles Times, KCRW, WBUR’s Here & Now
One of The Millions’ Most Anticipated Books of 2021
America’s modern culinary history told through the lives of seven pathbreaking chefs and food writers.
Who’s really behind America’s appetite for foods from around the globe? This group biography from an electric new voice in food writing honors seven extraordinary women, all immigrants, who left an indelible mark on the way Americans eat today. Taste Makers stretches from World War II to the present, with absorbing and deeply researched portraits of figures including Mexican-born Elena Zelayeta, a blind chef; Marcella Hazan, the deity of Italian cuisine; and Norma Shirley, a champion of Jamaican dishes.
In imaginative, lively prose, Mayukh Sen—a queer, brown child of immigrants—reconstructs the lives of these women in vivid and empathetic detail, daring to ask why some were famous in their own time, but not in ours, and why others shine brightly even today. Weaving together histories of food, immigration, and gender, Taste Makers will challenge the way readers look at what’s on their plate—and the women whose labor, overlooked for so long, makes those meals possible.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. While he originally set out to write about immigration using food as his lens, Sen ended up "interrogating the very notion of what success looks like for immigrants under American capitalism." What results is a vibrant, empathetic, and dynamic exploration of culture, identity, race, and gender. The story of Iranian-born cookbook author Najmieh Batmanglij examines how America became, for her, "a wonderful place for the stateless," even as the prejudice she faced in the 1980s stifled the potential reach of her work. The late Chao Yang Buwei's revolutionary How to Cook and Eat in Chinese (1945)—"a manual of gastronomic diplomacy"—and Elena Zelayeta's Mexican cookbooks in the 1960s made their home cuisines palatable for an American audience, while the late acclaimed chef Norma Shirley resisted assimilation and eventually returned to Jamaica, because "making food for white Americans was never her chief aim." 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.
