Taste Makers

Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America

By: Mayukh Sen

Narrated by: Tovah Ott

Length: 6 hrs and 25 mins

Publisher's summary

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 listeners look at what’s on their plate—and the women whose labor, overlooked for so long, makes those meals possible.

©2021 Mayukh Sen (P)2021 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"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." (Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning)

"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." (Jessica Valenti, author of Sex Object: A Memoir)

"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." (Charlotte Druckman, editor of Women on Food)

Seven fantastic stories about immigrant women who taught Americans to cook

I loved every story in this essay collection about seven immigrant women who revolutionized the way Americans eat.

My favorites were Chao Yang Buwei and Julie Sahni.

Many themes recur throughout the book.

Translation plays a crucial role in Sen’s narrative. Often, these women had their recipes translated by their husbands.

That did not always go well.

In truth, cooking itself is an act of translation. The women often found that they had to adapt ingredients and preparations to American kitchens and American tastes.

And then when publishing, they found an additional act of translation impeded their vision so that their books would sell.

White cookbook editors simply did not understand these women.

And if I am being honest, the tendency of immigrant food writers today to push beyond recipes and tell deeper cultural stories as Sen does here doesn’t just feel like a capitulation to SEO.

It feels like a revolutionary act that rejects the way these women’s stories too often were butchered so that their books would sell.

I hope Sen writes another book. His Afterword is a call to action for how to make the food industry more equitable.