Mayukh Sen - Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America

TASTE

MAKERS

TASTE

MAKERS

Seven Immigrant Women
Who Revolutionized Food in America

Mayukh Sen

W.W. NORTON & COMPANY

Independent Publishers Since 1923

For Sakti Sengupta (19512017), my father,
and L Lan Anh (19932020), my friend.
I hope Ill see you again someday.

As an immigrant, I understand how the soul gets lonely for its origins.

MADELEINE KAMMAN

O NE DAY in the 1880s, Elizabeth Black Kander spotted a boy selling matchboxes. The sight disturbed her.

The boy, a recent arrival from Russia, must have been 12 years old. His face was caked in dirt. Everyone in that store in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that day could hear him practically shouting as he offered to sell the owner matches for cheap.

Kander confronted the boy outside. Why wasnt he in school, she wondered aloud. He responded sincerely, telling her he needed to work to support his family.

The boys admission saddened Kander, but she also felt a flush of shamefor the kid, for herself. Kanders parents, Jewish immigrants from Germany, had come to the United States in the 1840s. They had done a remarkable job of blending in by the time Kander was born in 1858, mastering American English, American ways of dressing, the American art of making money. But in the 1880s, a new wave of Jewish immigrants from Russia like this boy made Kander worry. She found them so uncouth. Kander feared their behavior would reflect poorly on previous Jewish immigrants like her parents who had gone to great lengths to acclimate to America. Maybe these immigrants would inspire a new rush of anti-Semitism.

Kanders concern kindled a lifelong crusade as a social worker who pushed for immigrants to assimilate to America. It is a selfish motive that spurs us on, she would say of her mission, it is to protect ourselves, our own reputation in the community that we must work with tact, with heart and soul to better the home conditions of our people. As part of her project, she began working at the Settlement House, a social service agency in Milwaukee. She spent her evenings teaching immigrant Jewish women, many of them fresh from Poland and Russia, how to cook American dishes.

In 1901, Kander had the idea to compile a charity cookbook. The Settlement Cook Book: The Way to a Mans Heart (1901) was a bricolage of German, Jewish, Eastern European, and American recipes. In its 174 pages, the book presented more than five hundred recipes for a variety of dishes. Some were unmistakably American, like pot roasts, creamed cod, and Boston-browned potatoes, while others came from Jewish and German traditions, like kugel, gefilte fish, and pfeffernsse.

The Settlement Cook Book would go on to become one of Americas most enduring cookbooks, selling over two million copies across more than forty editions, many of which Kander herself revised. Subsequent editions would contain tips for housekeeping and cleaning. This wasnt just a cookbook; it was a manual on how to be an American woman. The preeminent food authority James Beard considered it one of his favorite cookbooks. The cookbook and its countless permutations meant a great deal, in particular, to Jewish American communities, passed along like talismans from one generation to the next.

Kander may have been working with sincere intentions. She wanted safety for her people and, in particular, for women. But scholars today acknowledge that Kanders aims were also somewhat patronizing, born of what some would refer to as an Americanizing impulse. She wanted these women to mute any differences that revealed they were born outside of America.

Whatever the case, its hard to deny that Kanders book shifted the publishing landscape in America, creating a future in which immigrant women could write cookbooks on their own terms. Kander would keep revising editions of The Settlement Cook Book until her death at 82 in 1940. The same decade she died, World War II would end, and more opportunities would open up in the American market for immigrant women to author cookbooks. By the 1960s, once-stiff American immigration laws would loosen, nudging America further away from ethnic homogeneity. The era that came immediately after saw an influx of talented immigrant female chefs and food writers from all around the globe. Upon arriving in America, some of these figures would find ways beyond writing cookbooks to showcase their food: Theyd teach cooking classes, or operate their own restaurants.

In this book, you will meet seven immigrant women who used food to construct an identity outside their home country. Quite a few plainly rejected any Americanizing impulse through their work, refusing to compromise their visions to satisfy a white American audience. Others wanted to have their food reflect the multicultural bent of their adoptive home. All of these women used their food to tell the world where they came from and what remained of it in America. They did so with no shame, only pride.

AT ITS CORE, this book is an attempt to trouble the canon of culinary brilliance, so often homogeneously male. I want to celebrate the lives of seven women who made an especially deep impression on the way America cooks and eats. Thanks to these women, stir-fry is no longer a puzzling pair of words, just as most Americans now know there is more to Italian cooking than pasta in a puddle of red sauce. The women in this book have all left their mark, but America honors some of them more than others. With this book, I seek to understand why.

When I first had the idea for this book in the summer of 2017, I wanted to tell the story of immigration in America through the prism of food. Thats not quite what this book ended up being. As I wrote, I found myself interrogating the very notion of what success looks like for immigrants under American capitalism, using food as my lens of narrative inquiry. Why focus on women, you may wonder? History is often sheepish in assigning authorship to women in any cultural sphere, including food. It follows, then, that immigrant womenmany of whom are doubly marginalized (at the very least)are especially vulnerable to such cultural deletion.

Capitalism can encourage artists, including chefs and cookbook authors, to suppress parts of themselves to cater to the markets desires. I started to see this book as a critique of capitalism: how it devalues labor to the point where it makes people into products, longevity in American memory contingent on your ability to sell yourself. These seven women, their food, and what they represent could fall out of fashion due to the ebbs and flows of the market, through no fault of their own.

But its awfully patronizing to frame any of these women as forgotten or overlooked victims of cultural amnesia. Such a narrative orientation renders them passive figures in their own stories. Ive tried to define these women in terms of what they accomplished, not in terms of what happened to them. In putting these women side by side, I hope to push against the individualistic notion of creative genius. Grouping these women together allows readers to see the shaping of food in America as the endpoint of collective labor, not the work of any one extraordinary mind.