TASTE MAKERS

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.

In this dazzling debut, James Beard Awardwinning 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... A vibrant, empathetic, and dynamic exploration of culture, identity, race, and gender... Food lovers with a big appetite for knowledge will gobble this up.

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A must-read for those interested in culinary or women's history and the evolution of American cookbooks.

Making a lively book debut, James Beard Awardwinning 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... Well-crafted, engaging portraits of culinary and cultural pioneers.

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.

TASTE MAKERS is Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR One of the Millions's Most Anticipated Books of 2021

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. Through these stories, Sen reveals the work and the strife behind a culinary culture that doesn't acknowledge women's work as its driving force. In Taste Makers, though, these seven women become canonical.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Taste Makers is a great springboard for discovering cookbooks written by immigrant women who have made significant cultural contributions to American cuisine.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A gathering of voices that's altogether necessary, radical, heartfelt, and intimate.