Well-crafted, engaging portraits of culinary and cultural pioneers.
Historical survey of American cuisine focused on how its development was enriched by transplanted cooks.
Making a lively book debut, James Beard Award–winning 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. As “a queer child of Bengali immigrants to America,” Sen identifies with the feeling of isolation that the women experienced as they made their ways as teachers, restaurateurs, and writers. The author seeks “to trouble the canon of culinary brilliance” in a male-dominated field. Drawing on cookbooks, memoirs, interviews, and articles, Sen creates warmly appreciative profiles of each: Chao Yang Buwei, from China; Elena Zelayeta, born in Mexico; French chef Madeleine Kamman; Italian Marcella Hazan; Julie Sahni, who introduced Indian cooking; Najmieh Batmanglij, whose books afforded a rare insight into Iranian culture and cuisine; and Jamaican Norma Shirley. Buwei, who taught herself to cook while she attended medical school, arrived in the U.S. in 1921, accompanying her husband, who had been recruited to teach at Harvard. Like the other women, Buwei saw cooking as an expression of independence as well as creativity. How To Cook and Eat in Chinese, published in 1945, proved groundbreaking for Americans, for whom Chinese food meant little more than chop suey. Zelayeta, also self-taught as a cook, opened a Mexican restaurant in San Francisco that she continued to run even after she lost her sight to a cataract. Elena’s Lessons in Living, a self-help book published in 1947, was followed by many cookbooks. In 1950, she briefly hosted a cooking show on a local TV station and, soon after, established her own frozen food business. Kamman, who trained at Le Cordon Bleu, was praised as a “cook’s cook” and never attained the celebrity of her rival, Julia Child. As the author examines each woman’s culinary contributions, he underscores the influence of food writers, notably Craig Claiborne, in shaping America’s tastes.
Well-crafted, engaging portraits of culinary and cultural pioneers.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-324-00451-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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