Published in Gastronomica, Summer 2022
Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America
Mayukh Sen
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2021 288 pp. $26.95 (hardcover)
In his debut book, Taste Makers, journalist Mayukh Sen showcases the lives of seven immigrant women who vitalized America's culinary landscape with the flavors of their homelands. Sen absents himself as an authority, choosing instead to serve as a medium through which each woman's personality and food voice is brought to life for a 21st-century audience. Tenderly weaving together biographical sketches, Sen begins the tremendous work needed to center key figures who have been historically marginalized by an increasingly monolithic food establishment—one whose power is synergized, rather than objectively critiqued,by the people and institutions at the apex of food media. Scholars have been drawing attention to this troubling dynamic for much of the 21st century, and Sen joins a young cadre of journalists who are working to illuminate, unsettle, and democratize a system that has historically demeaned women, people of color, and non-European immigrants.
To accomplish this goal, Taste Makers lingers on select individuals who have shaped America's food history—namely Chao Yang Buwei (1889–1981), Elena Zelayeta (1897–1974), Madeleine Kamman (1930–2018), Marcella Hazan (1924–2013), Julie Sahni (1945), Najmieh Batmanglij (1947), and Norma Shirley (1938–2010).[1] At least a handful of these luminaries will be familiar to American culinary scholars and to older generations of well-read home cooks, but Sen animates the culinary lives, struggles, and passions of these figures for younger generations. Gathering details from popular media, scholarship, cookbooks, autobiographies, interviews with friends and family, and, in the case of Sahni and Batmanglij, with the women themselves, Sen contextualizes each protagonist within the culinary ethos and historical era during which she entered the United States and explores her contributions to the nation's globalizing palate.
Sen opens his book with Lizzie Black Kander, the editor of The Settlement Cook Book (1901), a best-selling community project that gathers recipes with German, Jewish, Eastern European, and American origins.[2] In his introduction, Sen draws attention to Kander's Americanizing tendencies, which were expressed in her both her roles "as a social worker who pushed for immigrants to assimilate" and as a community cookbook editor who wanted contributors "to mute any differences that revealed they were born outside America" (p.xi, xii). Taste Makers thus begins by underscoring how the United States has selectively accepted immigrant contributions that camouflage, if not altogether eradicate, foreign traits.
Set among the seven chapters, a brief interlude featuring Julia Child draws comparisons with her rise to fame and the alternate trajectories of her immigrant peers, the latter of which were strewn with obstacles that either hampered each woman's inclusion in the elite ranks or strengthened her resolve to create alternative paths forward. With a delicate touch, Sen prods the staid portrayal of Child whose "origin story has been told so often, through so many media, that her life's plot points have congealed into an American myth" (p.61). In contrast, the immigrants featured in Taste Makers, with the exception of Hazan and Kamman, have been largely elided from mainstream histories despite their dazzling contributions to American food culture.
Working to correct this erasure, Taste Makers spotlights individuals who "helped popularize flavors that challenged the nation's dominant palate" (p.160). Each of the featured immigrants harnessed food as a means of cohering and articulating an identity that drew strength and culinary prowess from her nation of origin. Born in Nanking, China, Chao Yang Buwei attended medical school in Japan before settling permanently in the United States, where she wrote How to Cook and Eat in Chinese (1945). Translated into English by Chao's husband and her eldest daughter, the book marked a watershed moment, successfully conveying the complexities of Chinese cuisine to an American audience
Whereas Chao hewed patriotically to her Chinese heritage, the Mexican chef Elena Zelayeta took a far more assimilationist approach, catapulting to fame in California as a restaurateur, frozen food entrepreneur, cookbook author, and television personality. She also excelled as a cooking instructor at San Francisco's Center for the Blind, having lost her eyesight in her thirties. Like Zelayeta, French-born Kamman met with unadulterated acclaim for her expertise as a chef, restaurateur, and instructor—that is, until she began to take issue with Child, who openly derided French women as ignorant about French cuisine. Reveling in this tension, the media began labeling Kamman, an outspoken feminist, "with adjectives that now read as sexist dog whistles: abrasive, arrogant, feisty, imperious, [and] temperamental" (p.81).
Unlike Kamman who chafed at the establishment's hierarchy, Hazan maneuvered successfully through the ranks, becoming so popular that HarperCollins advanced her $650,000 for Marcella Cucina (1997). Indian-born Julie Sahni founded an eponymous Indian cooking school in 1973 and authored Classic Indian Cooking (1980), the first of what would become a series of canonical cookbooks lauded with the industry's top honors. She also became the first Indian-born woman to helm a fine-dining restaurant, Nirvana Penthouse, in Manhattan. Though still teaching and writing, her legacy has already begun to fade from public record.
The final two figures bypassed the establishment out of necessity. A refugee of the Iranian Revolution, Najmieh Batmanglij was unable to find a US publisher willing to print an Iranian cookbook in the mid-1980s, so she and her husband, Mohammad, founded Mage Publishers, which printed each of Batmanglij's eight English-language books. Initially driven to nourish her fellow exiles, Batmanglij would eventually garner wide appeal, becoming America's foremost authority on Iranian cooking. In a reverse trajectory, Jamaican-born Norma Shirley tried her hand as a chef in Massachusetts and as a caterer for Condé Nast in New York before returning to her home country. Back in Jamaica, as Sen describes, Shirley "could express her culinary voice without filter" (p.157). She did so with gusto, opening a series of restaurants so praised abroad by American media that they altered the recorded history of Jamaican food culture in the United States.
By placing these stories alongside one another, Taste Makers illustrates how America's food establishment has skewed the historical record. It also demonstrates a long-overdue shift in media focus, one that has begun to amplify, celebrate, and center the legacies of those immigrants driven to expand and enrich American food culture with the cuisines of their homelands. Given Sen's careful research and crystalline prose, Taste Makers proves a refreshing contribution to US culinary history, suitable for scholars and general audiences alike.
References
Chao, Buwei Yang. 1945. How to Cook and Eat in Chinese.New York: John Day.
Hazan, Marcella. 1997. Marcella Cucina. New York: HarperCollins.
Kander, Lizzie Black. 1901. The Way to a Man's Heart: The "Settlement" Cook Book. Milwaukee: The Settlement House of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Sahni, Julie. 1980. Classic Indian Cooking. New York: William Morrow.
Notes
[1] Sen deliberately chose to use Chao's family name first. In one of the book's introductory sections, "A Note on Names," Sen explains his reason: "My decision to order her name as Chao Yang Buwei's honors her fealty to her Chinese heritage. It is in keeping with the way she saw herself in the world" (p.xxv).
[2] Although originally published as The Way to a Man's Heart, the community cookbook was retitled The Settlement Cook Book, the name by which it is known today. As Sen notes, the best-selling classic has been reprinted in over forty editions.