TASTE MAKERS

Historical survey of American cuisine focused on how its development was enriched by transplanted cooks.

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. As “a queer child of Bengali immigrants to America,” Sen identifies with the feeling of isolation that the women experienced as they made their ways as teachers, restaurateurs, and writers. The author seeks “to trouble the canon of culinary brilliance” in a male-dominated field. Drawing on cookbooks, memoirs, interviews, and articles, Sen creates warmly appreciative profiles of each: Chao Yang Buwei, from China; Elena Zelayeta, born in Mexico; French chef Madeleine Kamman; Italian Marcella Hazan; Julie Sahni, who introduced Indian cooking; Najmieh Batmanglij, whose books afforded a rare insight into Iranian culture and cuisine; and Jamaican Norma Shirley. Buwei, who taught herself to cook while she attended medical school, arrived in the U.S. in 1921, accompanying her husband, who had been recruited to teach at Harvard. Like the other women, Buwei saw cooking as an expression of independence as well as creativity. How To Cook and Eat in Chinese, published in 1945, proved groundbreaking for Americans, for whom Chinese food meant little more than chop suey. Zelayeta, also self-taught as a cook, opened a Mexican restaurant in San Francisco that she continued to run even after she lost her sight to a cataract. Elena’s Lessons in Living, a self-help book published in 1947, was followed by many cookbooks. In 1950, she briefly hosted a cooking show on a local TV station and, soon after, established her own frozen food business. Kamman, who trained at Le Cordon Bleu, was praised as a “cook’s cook” and never attained the celebrity of her rival, Julia Child. As the author examines each woman’s culinary contributions, he underscores the influence of food writers, notably Craig Claiborne, in shaping America’s tastes.

Well-crafted, engaging portraits of culinary and cultural pioneers.