Taste Makers

America’s modern culinary history told through the lives of seven path-breaking chefs and food writers

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Who’s really behind America’s appetite for foods from around the globe? This group biography from an electric new voice in food writing honours seven extraordinary women, all immigrants, who left an indelible mark on the way Americans eat today. Taste Makers stretches from the Second World War 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 challenges the way readers look at what’s on their plate—and the women whose labour, overlooked for so long, makes those meals possible.