Taste Makers
Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America
28 January 2022
Territory Rights — Worldwide.
Description
America’s modern culinary history told through the lives of seven path-breaking chefs and food writers
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.
Reviews
"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." — Nigel Slater
"Taste Makers is essential history for understanding American food’s current reckoning with inclusion and diversity." — John Birdsall, author of The Man Who Ate Too Much
"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... he succeeds in amplifying the voices of seven overlooked women to the levels that they always deserved." — Hetty McKinnon, The New York Times
"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." — Nilanajana Roy, Financial Times
"[Sen] paints a vivid, complex picture of his subjects… Sen is an excellent storyteller, and his portraits are immersive. Taste Makers is a well-researched book that shines light on seven women who helped to change culinary tastes in America." — Olivia Potts, The Spectator
"Sen traces the intimate details of these women’s lives and the broader social conditions that shaped – and in many ways stifled – their work. An important book that, like the work of the women it describes, deserves the widest audience." — Killian Fox, The Observer Food Monthly
"[A] perceptive group biography" — Bee Wilson, London Review of Books
Awards
Longlisted — Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, 2022
Also By: Mayukh Sen 
Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star
Hardback, 2025
A beautiful reclamation of a pioneering South Asian actress captures her glittering, complicated life and lasting impact on Hollywood
Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star
E Book
A beautiful reclamation of a pioneering South Asian actress captures her glittering, complicated life and lasting impact on Hollywood
