NOVEMBER 2021 - AudioFile
Tovah Ott delivers this unique narrative with focused intelligence. She skillfully narrates the stories of seven immigrant women who influenced American cooking and dining with a fine sense of their ethnicities—Chinese, French, Iranian, Indian, Italian, Mexican, and Jamaican. Ott reveals their personalities, travails, and successes. Author Sen ably tells their disparate stories with rich details of how each came to food and evolved their specialties: writing cookbooks (Marcella Hazan), hosting television shows and creating a brand (Elena Zelayeta), and creating eponymous restaurants (Norma Shirley). They “established their own identities outside their own country.” All succeeded on their own terms; some achieved fame, others helped their adopted country experience new tastes, and all dispelled previous notions of their native cuisine. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 08/09/2021
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. (Nov.)
International Examiner - Cynthia Rekdal
"A book that not only documents a remarkable collection of lives but chronicles the working methods of an exceptional writer…an extraordinary book."
NPR - Jenny Bhatt
"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."
The Observer Food Monthly - Killian Fox
"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."
Gastronomica - Alice McLean
"Tremendous work...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...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."
Mark Bittman
"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."
Jessica Valenti
"Reading Taste Makers 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."
O, Quarterly - Hamilton Cain and Joshunda Sanders
"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."
Hetty McKinnon
"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."
Book Riot - Senjuti Patra
"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."
Thrillist - Jessica Sulima
"Taste Makers is a great springboard for discovering cookbooks written by immigrant women who have made significant cultural contributions to American cuisine."
Los Angeles Review of Books - Sharmila Mukherjee
"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."
Charlotte Druckman
"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."
Financial Times - Nilanajana Roy
"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."
Ruby Tandoh
"Taste Makers 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."
BitchMedia - Rosa Cartagena
"Mayukh Sen is an award-winning darling of the food journalism world, and Taste Makers, his first book, is both a necessary addition to the food-writing canon and a lovingly crafted work of women’s history."
The Globe and Mail - Nathalie Atkinson
"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."
Susan Low
"[Sen's] insider-outsider perspective is what makes his voice distinctive ... It is possible – almost – to read Taste Makers 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."
Los Angeles Times - Bill Addison
"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. … Taste Makers 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."
Wall Street Journal - Roxana Jullapat
"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. Taste Makers 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."
Eater
"Mayukh Sen’s Taste Makers 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."
KCRW - Evan Kleiman
"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."
Monique Truong
"A gathering of voices that's altogether necessary, radical, heartfelt, and intimate."
Shondaland - Sarah Neilson
"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...[Taste Makers] 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."
Atlas Obscura - Diana Hubble
"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."
John Birdsall
"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. Taste Makers is essential history for understanding American food’s current reckoning with inclusion and diversity."
London Review of Books - Bee Wilson
"[A] perceptive group biography."
Megha Majumdar
"Taste Makers 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."
Vogue - Emma Specter
"[A] love letter to the immigrant women who defined food as we know it."
The Spectator - Olivia Potts
"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."
Star Tribune - Lee Svitak Dean
"...[S]ensitive and insightful profiles of those who didn't make the history books."
Book of the Month - Alicia Kennedy
"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. ...Taste Makers 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"
Nigel Slater
"A fascinating and impeccably researched book. Taste Makers is a joyous celebration of the cooks whose lives have enriched so much of our cooking and eating."
The Globe and Mail - Naben Ruthnum
"Resurrectional... The magic of Taste Makers 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."
Wall Street Journal - Moira Hodgson
"'Earth mother' doesn’t exactly describe the strong-willed pioneers of Mayukh Sen’s Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America. 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."
Library Journal
★ 10/01/2021
James Beard Award-winning food writer Sen makes the scope of his ambition clear in the introduction to this illuminating work: he seeks to "trouble the canon of culinary brilliance" by highlighting and contextualizing the stories of seven immigrant women (cookbook authors, teachers, and chefs) who transformed concepts of international cuisine in the United States. Sen's biographical essay format allows each woman's life story to shine. The sketches span 70 years of culinary history, including Buwei Yang's influential 1945 book How To Cook and Eat in Chinese and the career of Jamaican chef and restaurateur Norma Shirley, who died in 2005. The other subjects are Iran's Najmieh Batmanglij, Italy's Marcella Hazan, France's Madeleine Kamman, India's Julie Sahni, and Mexico's Elena Zelayeta; there's also a brief essay on Julia Child that ties into the others. Certain themes reappear throughout the book: the tension between presenting authentic dishes and accommodating American appetites; the evolution from home chef to teacher to cookbook writer and restaurant owner; the difficulty of re-establishing a career after a relocation. The extensive notes are a treasure trove for readers interested in historical cookbooks and food writing. VERDICT A must-read for those interested in culinary or women's history and the evolution of American cookbooks.—Rebecca Brody, Westfield State Univ., MA
NOVEMBER 2021 - AudioFile
Tovah Ott delivers this unique narrative with focused intelligence. She skillfully narrates the stories of seven immigrant women who influenced American cooking and dining with a fine sense of their ethnicities—Chinese, French, Iranian, Indian, Italian, Mexican, and Jamaican. Ott reveals their personalities, travails, and successes. Author Sen ably tells their disparate stories with rich details of how each came to food and evolved their specialties: writing cookbooks (Marcella Hazan), hosting television shows and creating a brand (Elena Zelayeta), and creating eponymous restaurants (Norma Shirley). They “established their own identities outside their own country.” All succeeded on their own terms; some achieved fame, others helped their adopted country experience new tastes, and all dispelled previous notions of their native cuisine. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2021-08-26
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.
