Over the last five years, Mayukh Sen has been writing about figures on the margins of the American food world. His profiles act as counternarratives to a food canon long unconcerned with the accomplishment of non-white chefs. His new book, Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America continues this theme by resurfacing the stories of outsider food figures, some of whom were disappeared by a ruthless restaurant economy and an indifferent media.
Through the seven chefs, cookbook writers and restaurateurs Sen profiles – Buwei Yang Chao, Elena Zelayeta, Madeleine Kamman, Marcella Hazan, Julie Sahni, Najmieh Batmanglij and Norma Shirley – we see a shadow history of labor and food in America. Some of the women published foundational cookbooks such as Chao’s ambitious How to Cook and Eat in Chinese in 1945 and Batmanglij’s Food of Life, the definitive text on Iranian cooking, which she self-published in 1986. Others, such as Hazan and Kamman, had prolific and influential writing and cooking careers.
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