Inspirational stories from amazing immigrant women chefs & the challenges they’ve faced and overcome along their journeys.

✨ Review ✨ Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America by Mayukh Sen

This book gives us "America’s modern culinary history told through the lives of seven pathbreaking chefs and food writers." The book includes "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."

Pros: I loved that this book took us beyond Julia Child in thinking about how women have influenced the culinary history of the U.S., in particular thinking about the role of ethnic food and its perceptions by different U.S. communities as well as immigration, culinary writers, and so much more. It introduced me to amazing chefs and cookbook authors who I hadn't heard of before.

Cons: this book is pretty dense. Anything that includes biographies of so many people gives you sort of a whirlwind tour of a life, and then begins again with the next person. I think it can be hard to transition from person to person in that way. At times it also felt a bit name-droppy -- not in power move as much as a contextualization move -- but all of the names, book names and dates, etc. felt a little overwhelming.

I really liked what this book was trying to do, and overall I enjoyed it, but it also left me feeling a little overwhelmed. I'm glad I finally picked this one up and gave it a listen!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: non-fiction, food history, gender history

Thanks to W. W. Norton & Company and #netgalley for an advanced e-copy of this book!

I think this is such a beautiful tribute. It is drier than most may assume by its brightly inviting cover. As an avid reader of nonfiction and amateurish food writer with ten years in the restaurant industry - this book made me emotional and grateful. Without a doubt this has made me a fan of Mayukh Sen. I am very much looking forward to whatever he tackles next.

I love books about food and I love books about women. This book featured some incredible women. I had such high hopes. I was so let down. This was written like a dry textbook with bias forced down your throat and a lens of modern opinion tainting these women’s lives.

A revolutionary new book telling the stories of some of America's most overlooked culinary influencers. Read if you love history and food.

After World War II, the US went through a food revolution driven by immigrants from other countries. 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: 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 fully appreciate the important culinary contributions made by these women with joy and pleasure.

I interviewed Sen for the Desi Books podcast. Please see the link below.

I was intrigued by this book from the title alone, but when the opening pages not only drove home the focus on marginalized voices but also set out to interrogate the role of capitalism in erasing them, I was sold. It offers a deeply personal introduction that not only sets out the author's intentions with the book but also explains his role, decisions, and lens in approaching the topic. It's a book about collective food knowledge and the amazing accomplishments of seven immigrant women, in particular.

In the book's collected essays, readers are invited to see the women's journeys as chefs alongside their experiences as immigrants in the United States. It touches on the way each fought against white American views of their home countries' cuisines, the struggles to find success in a food culture that doesn't welcome them or only does with a patronizing tone, and the way identity, artistry, and commercial pressures influenced their careers. It's a fascinating read centering impressive women.

The author decided to only rarely use direct quotes or sources in the narrative itself to leave the reader's focus on the chefs themselves. While I respect that purpose, the anthropologist in me would have enjoyed more context to the information to allow interrogation of the different viewpoints that filter the information provided. Also, he chose to focus on food-related events in the subjects' lives to keep the narrative focused on their careers. I think more personal details (where available) would have added color and context to each accomplishment and given a clearer view of each woman's personality and lived-in experiences. Finally, I appreciated the analysis offered in the introduction but didn't always see it carried through the essays themselves. For example, I couldn't help but notice how many of the women discovered a love for cooking first in the necessity of cooking for a husband early in marriage. The tension there is intriguing and meaningful, and I think with the book's stated anti-capitalist stance, there was an opportunity there to examine how this unpaid women's labor translated into financial success later on and a powerful form of self-expression and joy.

This is a carefully researched but concise read about some amazing women and larger trends in food in America that span their different stories. I found it informative and powerful.

Taste Makers is a book about seven amazing women who impacted US culture and cooking: Chao Yang Buwei, Elena Zelayeta, Madeleine Kamman, Marcella Hazan, Julie Sahni, Najmieh Batmanglij and Norma Shirley. The book goes into detail about the lives of these women - not only their culinary work but also about they changed American culture during the last century. Each chapter was very interesting and I enjoyed reading about everyone but the book somehow the book lacked the excitement of some others on the topic. Mayukh Sen is a good author but having a woman's perspective on the biographies might have added energy. At points, the book reads like a text and the writing is very 'dense'. That said, recommend this book and appreciate learning about all the amazing women.

*This book was received as an Advanced Reader's Copy from NetGalley.

For every Julia Child, there is a woman who's name has been overshadowed in history, despite numerous contributions to cooking and the steadfast dedication to their culture's cuisine. Some, like the lucky seven in this book, get to have a little light shown on them occasionally.

I read a lot of food history, and I can freely admit that it apparently isn't enough; I hadn't heard of any of these women until reading this book (except maybe Marcella Hazan, but I can't place the where of it, and Julia Child of course). And it's a shame that I haven't, told through the author's applied voice, these women got to come alive in the pages and tell their story; and all of them had a very valuable story.

Chao Yang Wuwei, Elena Zelayeta, Madeline Kamman, Marcella Hazan, Julie Sahni, Najmieh Batmanglij, Norma Shirley; these are the women, that depending on what era you grew up in, you may have owned a cookbook or viewed a show that had them featured. Their legacy was bringing light to their individual cuisines and promoting it in a country that didn't often take to change (and arguably is still working to improve on that). They pioneered ways for future chefs to be able to contribute.

I enjoyed reading both the histories and the accomplishments of these ladies. Most had to overcome great obstacles even outside not fitting the 'standard American diet' and this makes their accomplishments all the more awe-inspiring as a result. While the book is brief (nearly half is notes and resources, which speaks to the research performed), it is full of information and instead of being boring as a recounting of history can be, it instead brings you in to learn about these women and want to see them succeed. I also like that the book didn't hold back on what caused some of their obstacles and the troubles that they ran into. It's important for people to know all of history, even the parts that we don't like very much or would choose to ignore.

Definitely an interesting book and a must-read for anyone interested in food history.

Review by M. Reynard 2021