Tastemakers
11/11/21 - We talk with Mayukh Sen about seven immigrant women who remade American cuisine and his new book, Taste Makers. Plus, racism in the worlds of food writing and publishing and who gets to break out.
Transcript below.
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CREDITS
Executive Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Producer: Jordan Bailey
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Mercedes Gonzales-Bazan
Design Assistant: Brijae Morris
Ad sales: Midroll
TRANSCRIPT: TASTEMAKERS
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Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend
Ann: A podcast for long distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I’m Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman.
Aminatou: What’s up this week?
Ann: We are talking about women who have shaped the way we eat in America. I love this topic. Our guest is Mayukh Sen, who is one of my favorite food writers and profile crafters. He is a James Beard award winner, which is honestly a huge deal in the food world. And he has taught food journalism at New York University, since 2019. We chatted today about his new book, Tastemakers: Seven Immigrant Women who revolutionized food in America, which contains profiles of women chefs, whose cookbooks honestly, sadly have long fallen out of print, most of them, but whose influence is undeniable.
[theme song]
Ann: I love this book as a work of narrative storytelling as a work of reclaiming history and the way that I felt, I really got to know these women over the course of these many pages. I really, really recommend it for the food nerd in your life for the history buff in your life. And, uh, here I am with Mayukh.
[interview begins]
Ann: Mayukh, welcome to the podcast.
Mayukh: Thank you for having me. And I'm so excited to be here.
Ann: I loved your book so much, truly. One thing I really appreciated is, you have so much context in this book for your process and like how you approach what you set out to do here. I would love to kind of start there maybe, and talk a little bit about how did you narrow this down to seven stories? Where did you begin to like, think about who belonged in a book like this?
Mayukh: That's totally. I mean, it's definitely a process. So I first had the idea for this book back in 2017, a friend of mine, just, just like, oh yeah, I see you have like a literary agent, you know, maybe you're the person to write a book about immigration and food and you know, back then I was what, 25 years old. I was a staff writer at a site called food, 52, you know, while I was there, I had written quite a few stories, uh, centering on immigrants, especially immigrant women and immigrant women of color and subjects who were not, uh, in my view at least sufficiently honored by the majority white food establishment in their lifetimes. So I wanted to kind of, uh, restore some dignity to their stories and tell them the stories of the legacies in full, right. Uh, so I had already had that kind of budding portfolio and so when my friend suggested that to me, I was like, huh, interesting, let me like put that, you know, in my back pocket, whatever it was, I was, I was 25, but I felt 12 years old. You know, I was definitely not ready to write a book fast forward. Like a year later I decided to go freelance. And one of the things that I have on my mind then is like, okay, you know, I think maybe a book-length project feels appropriate for me at this stage in my career right now. I wanted to make sure I was including a mix of figures who might be more well-known like Marcella Hazan, for example, I'm sure quite a few listeners know of her. You know, she's the Doyenne of Italian cooking. Her famous a tomato sauce is a standby for many home cooks. Uh, and I wanted to include more popular names who, you know, might kind of provide an entry point for some curious readers, alongside names of figures who might not get as much attention as they deserve. So that was kind of one factor that I had in mind as I was curating the stories. But then it was also like I realized that I included a mix of folks who were really into the idea of assimilating into America, adopting the American way and having their food reflect that in some way. And those who are kind of like me who have no interest in that at all and are just kind of like, no, this is where I'm from. And I'm going to, you know, shout that difference as loudly as possible, because that is my identity. And they express that through food.
Ann: So many questions, maybe just talking about that last bit, you said there where it's something that I think about a lot when I read the stories of people who were on the margins in their time, and as you say, maybe really desperately wanted to assimilate or be recognized by a certain cultural establishment. I find myself wondering if they were of your generation, would that have been the case? You know, like how much progress has been made in terms of wanting to be accepted and honored by what is still a pretty white, straight English language speaking, you know, American Canon.
Mayukh: Exactly. I think that impulse still exists and I can speak for myself. I definitely had a lot of, and there's still traces of me that do have that kind of, uh, you know, impulse and this desire to be, uh, validated by these institutions. I am quite fortunate to have been recognized in certain ways by the food stuff was from or whatever early in my career. You know, I've been doing this for five years now. And when I look back on what my life was like before food writing happened to me, I'm like, I could never have predicted this. But when I look back too, on my writing in those early stages of my career, you know, I see why the tractor establishment attention, you know, because it was very polite in pushing back against like some of the problems that are embedded in the establishment. My answer to your question really is like, I don't see a ton of progress because where kind of money and capital is concentrated has not shifted meaningfully enough for that to really change. Like I have to keep my mouth shut a lot as someone who is very far left as a food writer, because I need to feel to survive and have the lifestyle that I want in this country. And I'm not going to be able to do that. If I speak my mind as much as I would like to in this industry, the industry is still just barely left of center on a good day. It's like pretty conservative from my view, you know, and I think that the, uh, industry responds and gives money to folks who want to assimilate and kind of become part of the establishment or at least gain their approval in some way. So until there are more independently owned media companies or other institutions, he, I don't know, I don't know. It's tough because all institutions are problematic in some way. Right. You know, you know, until that happens, I think the impulse will still exist for a lot of younger folks, you know, because that's kind of the one path to success that has been outlined for a lot of us. But I will say for me, once I did get that approval early in my career, I wanted to make sure that, you know, it opened up all this access to capital and opportunity that I otherwise would not have had as like a person of color whose name like no one can pronounce. And I wanted to use that to actually do some more boundary pushing work, you know, rather than be like, okay, cool. Now I have to adopt the language of this club. And now that I've been welcomed into it, you know what I mean?
Ann: You spoke earlier about saying, look, I'm going to tell the stories and find the through line later. And I'm wondering if there is an easy to summarize through line here. I mean, we talked a bit about what makes some of these women different from each other in terms of how they relate to like dominant forces in American food. But I'd love to hear more about what unites them,
Mayukh: All of these women, they had pretty, uh, from creative impulses as cooks and chefs and food writers, and they wanted to find a way to express them without any sort of filter, you know, in their most full form. They all have just kind of that basic desire. And I think that is what unites them. That might seem like a really mundane point to make. And what differentiates each of these stories, like you say, is, is happened to varying degrees of success because some of their voices ended up being diluted because of the way that publishing trends worked, you know, in certain areas and others were able to kind of express things without filter because of where they were on this sort of financial support that they had. Like for example, you know, one of my book subjects is Najmieh Batmanglij who, uh, is an amazing Iranian food writer and cookbook author. She wrote the canonical food of life in the mid eighties, but you know, when she came to America in the early eighties was right after the Iranian revolution, which she had fled as a refugee. And, uh, it was also around the time they were on hostage crisis as a result, when she tried to sell her Iranian cookbook to major publishers, it was like anathema to them. They're just like, no, like we're not going to take this or, oh, sorry. Uh, our lists are full, you know,
Ann: Like an entire culture is not trending right now. Like…
Mayukh: Exactly. So as a result, she and her husband Muhammad, they basically started their own publishing house. They published your first, uh, English language cookbook through that. And they've published all her other cookbooks, uh, through that as well, you know, in the decades that followed. And so basically she had to forge her own path independent of kind of the publishing slash food establishment to really make a name for herself. And she did, but she was just basically like, I have no interest in navigating this space that so clearly has no room for me. You know, I'm just going to make that space for myself. And so I find stories like that. So inspiring. It's like, you know, you're just basically saying like, screw you establishment. I'm going to, you know, blaze my own trail.
Ann: The other thing I have really been reflecting on since reading your book is just the importance of having documented history. Probably a couple of years ago now the music writer and critic Jessica Hopper was on the podcast and we had a conversation about how, when things are not documented, when you don't have a history of, you know, she was talking about women in music. If you don't have a documented history, every single person then feels like they're inventing, they're not reinventing or building on this rich legacy that actually exists. There's the perception that every generation must start from zero, you know, when you don't have it documented. And so I'm wondering about that aspect of this too. Like, did this feel like putting a stake in the ground for this history or like making something that would last?
Mayukh: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I tried not to kind of put or invest too much kind of imagined self-importance into my own book. So this kind of goes back to my process, but like, you know, what I found really helpful and especially for establishing kind of the foundation of each chapter was to find women who had written memoirs or memoirs to cookbooks, let's say, and that kind of layer would just be the foundational layer of each chapter, because I wanted to make sure that I was hearing each woman, you know, speak in their own words. And in the case of, you know, my two surviving subjects, the affirmation notch be a button on glitch. And, uh, Julie Sawhney from India, you know, obviously I had access to them speaking in their own words cause I like interviewed them for hours. So that was fine. But, uh, everyone else, you know, I relied on their memoirs, but almost all of them are out of print now. And so it did feel meaningful in some way to kind of be nudging readers back towards these, uh, books that might be out of print or kind of quote unquote lost to history in some way. But it is my hope that after people read my book, they will be prompted to seek out these other really extraordinary books authored by these actual women so that they can, you know, have the pleasure of experiencing them speak and write in their own voices like I did, because that was one of the best parts of this book, because like writing a book is pretty torturous in a lot of respects, but to spend so much time with one person and kind of live inside their mind and it's like, cool to just like know someone so intimately like that. But so many of these books, they probably like up marked on places like Amazon or like what $500, $600 or something like that. It was, I definitely had to dish out a lot of money for these books. I'll just say that,
Ann: What can you learn about a person by reading? Maybe just a recipe that they wrote. There are a few examples in this book too, of women who are no longer living who didn't really leave robust memoirs or not robust memoirs that you could access the record of women in my family is a lot of just recipes, no other context.
Mayukh: Oh, totally. Yeah. I mean, I was going to say usually the headnote of a recipe, which has all the text that proceeds the ingredients and everything, you know, uh, that is where I look for the good stuff and everything like that. But it's really tough to read recipes in that way and kind of access a creative person's inner life emotionally. It's tough for me. Certainly. I think that there's a lot that you might be able to learn in terms of their culinary philosophy though, you know, in terms of what kinds of ingredients they used, you know, like this is something that a really, really wonderful cookbook author who was not the subject of one of my seven chapters, but nevertheless came up, her name was Grace Achu. She was from China. You know, she's mentioned briefly in my first chapter, but she used a can of cream corn for some sort of soup and decades later, the use of a can of creamed corn soup is, uh, is probably not aged quite well to some folks who might say that's inauthentic quote unquote, or that's not true to the actual Chinese recipe at hand, but it reveals a lot about kind of where we were in American history at that point, which was 1962 and how she sought to reach certain readers and which readers she even sought to reach. She was most likely writing for white, middle-class housewives, you know, who may not have had access to certain ingredients, but, you know, to have cream corn soup was the best next best option, you know, and it's close enough and the spirit of that recipe is preserved. So it sounds like that was pretty illuminating, but you know, that, wasn't one of the challenges that this book, honestly, because I, in spite of like calling myself a food writer or whatever, I'm very much not a cook, you know, I'm a begrudging cook, I will say, um, you know, when I have to cook for certain stories, I'm just like, okay, I'm going to get ready for like this tornado in my kitchen. You know, just like, it's just like, it's bad. Um, and um, my brain doesn't operate that way, you know, in terms of the food writing, you know, the writing comes for the food for me. So that was one of the fun challenges of this book is like, how do I read a recipe in a way that illuminates the character?
Ann: Yeah. I'm thinking about a family recipe for like a kind of branch flavored party mix I'm from the Midwest. The minimum that makes is like eight gallons. And I was like, well, there's a lot of info right there, right in the yield. You can learn a lot about where who's making this.
Mayukh: Exactly. And for what occasions.
Ann: So if the food kind of comes second to the writing for you, why do you find it such like a compelling angle through which to write about the word?
Mayukh: I think it's because food writing, at least in my mind for a long time was, um, the genre that many people associated with a lack of rigor or seriousness. Uh, and that's certainly, you know, the mindset that I had about this genre, uh, before I made a living off of it. And as a result, you know, when I came to food, writing by total accident in 2016, I was like, okay, you know, I want to honor this quiet tradition of food writers who've come before me who have used food as a way to talk about the world and the realities that we all inhabit rather than using food as a way to kind of distract from the terror of our daily lives, right. And our political realities. And so I think that's why it's compelling. It's because there are some times, and I don't want to knock other food writers. You know, I have tremendous respect for so many of my colleagues in this industry, but I think that the way that a lot of food media functions, because of desire for profitability, let's say, or just financial health in general, you know, a lot of it does tend to be the fluff and diversion and everything like that. And it feels very anodyne and it feels very safe. And that's just not quite the way that I see the world, or that's not quite the way we want to engage with the world as a writer. And so, as a result, I'm like, well, I'm here, I'm writing about food, you know, and I may as well use it to make a statement in some way. So I don't really want to play it too safe, but what someone eats, what someone cooks, who does the cooking in a certain household can reveal so many stories about, you know, gender, politics, race, what have you, you know, it provides access in narrative terms to a wealth of different topics. So it's like, yeah, why not? Using food, which is this universal entry point into telling those larger stories just feels like a natural way to look at the world. Right?
Ann: One thing I really appreciate is acknowledging the various circumstances that these women are in. You know, I mean, I'm trying not to use the word intersectionality because we sort of a misuse shorthand, but you know, writing about their disabilities, their class status, their, um, you know, languages, things that really inform people's experience, certainly in the US indefinitely, you know, everywhere else, I'm sure to describe those circumstances without kind of reducing it to a jumble of a label and acknowledging the stuff in a way that feels like real to their identities without making it just like a kind of social media legible shorthand. I mean, I guess I'm just going to say, how did you deal with intersectionality?
Mayukh: No, totally. Yeah. I don't know. Thank you for pointing that out. You know, I thought a lot about myself and my own career and how I feel others have framed me because, you know, I I'm bordering on self-parody at this point by like starting every other sentence as a queer person of color, but truly, you know, like as a queer person of color and a child of immigrants, I, like I said before, I did get establishment attention early, but I could feel in that moment, something started to change, you know, where people who like to not give, excuse my language to your two about me, you know, beforehand, all of a sudden we're like, oh, it looks like he's someone to know. And the fact that I was like this brown, like twelve-year-old child, you know, it was like even more for a lot of white liberals and other folks who are kind of adjacent to that group. Um, you know, to be like, oh yeah, he's someone we should know, you know, he's trending at this moment. But those people, by that same token, they never really engaged with the substance of my work. They didn't really actually read what I had to say that can turn so easily into ugliness and dismissal, just to be like, reducing me to just these superficial aspects of my identity and kind of flattening whatever struggles are embedded in, you know, those aspects of my identity, just because, you know, it makes you feel good about who you're aligning yourself with. I saw so much of that in my years of food media, I sound ancient, you know, like it, it really was so tiring to just like, kind of see that from folks who have power all the time. And so, as I was writing these stories, I was like, wow, what a disservice I would do to each of these women, if I were to say, as someone who, you know, she had a disability or, you know, she was a working class woman, yada yada, you know, that kind of stuff. You want to bring some nuance to those aspects of their stories to make sure that all those complications are really honored in the appropriate way. And you want to try and empathize with each of these figures who are so unlike you in a lot of ways, and one way to do that is to tease out any of those commonalities. And so that's what I found myself doing when I was writing this book.
Ann: I want to talk about the subtitle then, because it is so difficult to distill like the nuance of hundreds of pages into the subtitle. And, you know, just based on the previous question, distilling it to seven immigrant women, but it occurs to me, there's probably, you know, a bunch of other adjectives or a bunch of other labels that they also have in common, curious about it. Was it hard to come down to that subtitle?
Mayukh: Absolutely. You know, um, I was kind of toggling between seven immigrant women and seven women who came to America and changed food forever, something like that, you know, some sort of construction because it's tough, especially kind of dovetailing with the previous question of like, you don't want to reduce, you know, the complexity of someone's lived experience to just these superficial labels. And I worried that I was doing that and saying, you know, seven immigrant women, but maybe I'm selling myself short there because it's a fact that, you know, all of these women were immigrants and that informed the ways in which they approach their careers and their cooking. And that is truly, you know, that is the through line here. And also just from like logistical, I guess, perspective. I don't know if that's quite the word, something like seven women who came to America and the yada yada forever, it's an absurdly long subtitle. There's just simply not enough room on a book. That was kind of the cold reality of things when I was choosing subtitle. But yeah, it was a struggle, you know, I do hope that readers don't feel as though I am flattening the experiences by leading on a superficial label, especially because one thing that I tried to do with this book is show that there's so many different facets to the quote unquote immigrant experience in America and this kind of scratches the surface of some of them, but, you know, it's, it's so multifaceted. And I try to honor that through this group biography
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Ann: I don't want to end this interview without actually talking about the story of at least one of the women in this book, and I'm open to your suggestions of others, but like, I sort of want to talk about Norma Shirley in part, because she's the last profile in the book, maybe others would say the opening profiles kind of the important one, but I maybe writer to writer, I'm like, mm, this is what you wanted to leave us with as Norma Shirley is my suspicion. And so maybe you can talk a little bit about her story because I am guessing that most listeners like me know next to nothing about her.
Mayukh: First of all, it was very intentional to enter with her story, but we'll get to that in a second. So Norma Shirley was a wonderfully talented chef and a restaurateur who was born in Jamaica, I believe in 1938. And she had a culinary career in the states in late sixties, uh, throughout the seventies and the early eighties, she lived in the Berkshires in Massachusetts and then in New York for a few years. But then, you know, she basically tried in those years, especially in New York to Mount her own restaurant that would reflect her culinary sensibility, which was essentially to making cooking, filtered through French technique. Yet that didn't quite happen for her in the early eighties, because it was really difficult for her to get a restaurant concept like that off the ground. She couldn't find investors. She had few connections in the food establishment who could have helped her. And so as a result after those five years, you know, she found fulfilling work, working as a food stylist and caterer for Conde Nast. But after that, she was like, okay, I want to go home now to Jamaica. You know, I feel too disconnected from my homeland and perhaps that is where I can express myself without filter. And that's exactly what happened. Starting in 1986, she opened her first restaurant in Jamaica. And after that, she just opened a spate of restaurants in her name, you know, things like Norma's on the Terrace and everything, you know, all Jamaica. And she became a star. It was only after that point that the American food media started to be like, oh, maybe she's someone we should know, you know, and you know, it started with in 1992, uh, there was this Vogue article and they called her like the Julia Child of Jamaica. And that just kind of stuck to her, basically everyone in the American food video, whenever they talked about Norma Shirley, they're like, she's the Julia Child of Jamaica, which is a more troubling construction than it is illuminating. But regardless, uh, she became a legend at home and she inspired many people, but I found something so, uh, kind of unsettling, but it's also inspiring that she had to go back home. She had to literally leave America. She, a Black immigrant woman, had to leave this country just to realize her vision and find attention for it. Not only within Jamaica, but outside of it, she went home because she wanted to cook for her own people. You know, she wanted to cook for Jamaicans and she wanted them to see the beauty in the ingredients that were on the island that they may not have seen before. And it was just accidental that the American, uh, you know, food media and establishment were like, oh yeah, she's pretty great too. You know, but that wasn't her intention creatively. Her intention was to just do the work for her own people. So it was inspiring in many ways. Uh, the fact that she was able to kind of reroute this idea of who her audience was and who she was cooking for and creating for yet, you know, the circumstances that rerouted her towards that were pretty upsetting. It was like the early eighties and America, the American food stamps one was deeply racist. And of course it did not provide easy access to capital, to a Black Caribbean immigrant woman like herself. So I wanted to end the book on her story because it's kind of a damning indictment of not only the American food slash just this country in general and who it kind of makes room for in terms of creative survival. She's the one subject of mine who did not have a memoir. And she died in 2010, so she was no longer around for me to talk to her. So that was a challenge in writing that chapter. You know, I couldn't be like, okay, well we read her book or, oh, let me talk to her on the phone. I had to rely on a lot of interviews she gave and, you know, interviews with her family members and people who were close to her and a professional orbit and everything like that. So that was tough, but I hope I pulled it off.
Ann: The other thing your book really has me thinking about is as mentioned, much of it is historical. I know that Julie and Najmia are still living and still cooking, but a lot of it felt like, knowing what we know now, look at all these huge missed opportunities when like these women have robust creativity and drive and like innovation are not given the capital or the opportunity that they really deserve. It had me thinking about the fact that like, I am not a voracious consumer of food media, or I'm not like a fan of celebrity chefs, but I did find myself thinking about like, who am I missing now? Like, no doubt, this is still happening. Because as you said, at the beginning of our conversation, the establishment has not changed that radically in this country. Do you apply the same lens to modern cookbooks? Like all the ways the establishment is still working?
Mayukh: Yes. Uh, so I mean, writing this book in general was such a clarifying exercise because I've had my fair share of really upsetting experiences in this industry. You know, I've been the target of such racist, homophobic vitriol from people in power, people who may imagine themselves, liberals who are secretly quite racist and have made me feel like a speck of dirt on their shoe. You know, that's just how they talk to me. So writing this book made me kind of understand how my experiences operate in the sort of continuum in that regard. Like the power has not changed in a significant way to mitigate the chance of anyone on the margins feeling as small as I have throughout my career. But, you know, I do think that last year, the very public, I guess, problems is the easiest work to go with your I'm at publications like Bon Appetit and the Los Angeles Times food sections, I think exposed a wider swath of consumers and general audience members to the many problems that exist within food media. As a result, I have seen some, you know, increased attention of independent creators and magazines and my good friend, Alicia Kennedy, who has a wonderful newsletter. Uh, she is someone who's deservedly blown up over the past year. And I see a lot of folks kind of look at her as, you know, the food writer who's working right now. And I'm like, good. That's how it should be. And I'm, I'm biased obviously. Uh, and you know, another name is Stephen Satterfield, who was the star of a high on the hog recently on Netflix. But he also is the founder of Whetstone magazine, which is a wonderful, independent food publication. So I've seen more attention to figures like those two, I just mentioned from general audiences, but that's just like on Twitter, you know, I think it remains to be seen how much people with their politics will be able to survive materially and like in the years to come because a lot happened last summer, I would just say this. And I hear from other folks in food media, how all the opportunities that were presented to them last summer are no longer available to them because interest has faded. And a lot of that initial interest may have been performative. So cautiously optimistic that things are going to be changing, but writing this book made me like a little cynical. It's just the history cyclical or whatever.
Ann: Yeah. I'm curious if you have thoughts for people who are listening to this, who are consumers of cookbooks of cooking, who are on the consumption end of food media, you know, you mentioned Alicia Kennedy's newsletter and Whetstone. Do you think that there is like a critical framework that consumers can have to say, okay, actually I'm not playing a part in replicating some of these issues or like I am directly giving my attention to maybe someone who is trying to come from a place of authenticity.
Mayukh: Totally. I think it really is about the wallets. And I know that we can't spend our way out of these systemic problems, you know, and I wouldn't want anyone to mistake me for saying that, but I really do think it is just a matter of sort of looking at your bank account and being like, okay, am I giving money to this publication that is headed by this person who has done very racist thing, or am I supporting this independent creator and allowing them a chance to just like survive and live? One thing I try to be really cautious about in the book. And I want it to be clear, uh, in the final version of the books that the onus should not fall entirely on the consumer. These are system-wide issues that we can't individually solve, but we have some power as long as we live under capitalism. You know, we do have, um, some way of making our voices heard and the most meaningful, obvious way from a consumer standpoint is to make sure you're allocating your money towards, uh, people or organizations whose values are truly progressive.
Ann: I love that. Are you feeling like, you know, your work kind of continues in this vein or are you feeling like maybe it's time for a little bit of a different direction?
Mayukh: I truly don't know. You know, I will say that I am really grateful for the life that food writing has given me and kind of the opportunities to tell, you know, these specific kinds of stories. So I teach at NYU, I teach food writing. And even just through that, I am introduced to so many really brilliant students who truly want to write about food for the rest of their lives, or at least, you know, for the next few years, that is like their passion. And they have the chops, you know, they're really, really strong writers. And I want to make sure that I am doing everything in my power, however minimal it is, to make sure that they get some space in this industry. And they get the opportunity to tell these kinds of stories in a way that will surprise me and work maybe in the same vein as I have for the past few years, but, you know, do it in a different way and, you know, have a different approach. So I want to make sure that I'm nurturing the next generation talent. I know I'm like 29 years old, but I truly do feel like there are a lot of folks who deserve a chance within this pretty exclusionary industry. I will probably always have the itch to tell these kinds of stories. And there's so many other figures throughout history who deserved that kind of attention. I don't think I'll abandon this genre. You mentioned kind of looking at my clips on my site and you might see that I also write about other topics beyond food, like film, for example. And I hope that I don't box myself in over the next few years and that I'm giving myself an opportunity to apply this sort of framework about honoring, uh, the fullness of folks who've been misunderstood or misremembered by history to other creative fields like film, for example. Yeah. I just, I don't know. I want to have fun. I think that I've really worked my ass off and I'm tired, you know, like I still want to be able to make money and everything like that, but I also hope that this book will open up an opportunity for me to do things beyond what I feel like I need to be doing, or what I feel is, you know, the right next step for me, as difficult as it was to write this book, I really loved doing it. There were times in the despair where I would just send it from my laptop and be like, I love this whole exercise of like, figuring out how the sentence should be structured and where it should go and what details should follow, what, like I'm total dork about that stuff. But it gives me so much pleasure. Um, and so I never want to lose that feeling with whatever I do next.
Ann: Thank you for saying that because as someone who takes a deep and real pleasure in the process of like researching and interviewing and writing, I feel like it's not okay to say that these days, like, you know, writers are all like, I'm so tortured and I hate anyone who isn't tortured. And so I love hearing that.
Mayukh: Totally. Yeah. I don't want to sanitize things because it was very difficult in a lot of ways. And I was, but yeah, it was, I mean, I just, I love it sometimes, you know, it's like, okay. You know, maybe I do exist on this earth for a reason. You know, it's to feel pleasure in doing these sentences regardless of how other people perceive those sentences. And if they think they're trash.
Ann: I love that. Let that be our substantive sentiment to end on. I have a fluffy question for you headed out. We often ask guests about their favorite snack. I have to ask you because you're here under the pretenses of food in some ways. So top snack or snacks, plural, if you must.
Mayukh: Oh my God. Okay. Hold on. I have like a document… [laughter]
Ann: Like a doc of your favorite snacks?
Mayukh: Okay, well, it's like a document of like my favorite things in general. So it's like my favorite film, but your performances on TV and, and movie is a favorite albums because I anticipate this question sometimes. So it's like, I gotta be, you know, on it. It's like a recipe or what a recipe should be. Exactly. Um, let's see. I'm trying to think of the best one. Okay. Well, I have custard written in caps, exclamation points, which is hilarious. Um, no. Okay. I'm going to go with this one. Let's go with Munchos. So do you know those chips that are kind of like, um, potato chips, but like they're little like airier and kind of, I get them at like CVS and stuff like that.
Ann: Like a pop chip could never, but like–
Mayukh: Exactly. Absolutely zero comparison, right?
Ann: Yeah. It’s the same idea of like a puffy crunchy.
Mayukh: Yes. Yeah, exactly. But it's like a, you know, beautifully executed. I think it's a tie between that and a pick the other one. I will–
Ann: Just read the whole list.
Mayukh: Okay. Hold on. Okay. Ready? It's like a mix of like meals and like snacks. Actually. It's mostly snacks. Hershey's cookie and cream bar or cookies and cream bar or whatever. It's called dosa, uh, banana pudding. But I like a lot of puddings in general. Let's see, um, egg tarts, like the egg custard tarts, which have different names, uh, Nilla wafers, that specific brand. Great. It'd be two, uh, ginger snaps also the cookie, a genre, ginger chews. I love cheesecake Boston cream pie.
Ann: I see a through line here. Actually. You were like semi hard custards, extra custardy custards.
Mayukh: It's just the custard family is, you know, a favorite in this household. And then I feel like I'm missing one. That is, oh, actually, you know, I was texting my friends, uh, the other day about, remember a tasty cake. They had those like, are they still have it's on past tense? Um, it was like crumpets or whatever. They're called like butterscotch, crumpets. So good. I haven't had them in years yet. I hanker for that taste. So maybe I'll go to food town right now and get some we'll see. But yeah.
Ann: I would love it. If that's where this ends is, you just like clunking down the mic and headed to food town for some crumpets.
Mayukh: It might just happen. You never know.
Ann: Oh, it has been such a pleasure chatting with you. Thank you for this book and your entire body of work. It is a joy to have you on the podcast.
Mayukh: Thank you so much for having me. I'm honored to be a guest as a longtime listener. So thank you and thank you for your work.
[interview ends]
Ann: We'll link in the show notes to Mayukh’s website and to purchase Tastemakers: seven immigrant women who revolutionized food in America. It's out November 16th.
Gina: Special thanks to Imani Leonard for editing this episode,
Aminatou: I will see you on the internet, my love.
Ann: See you on the internet.
[outro music]
Aminatou: You can find us many places on the Internet: callyourgirlfriend.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, we're on all your favorite platforms. Subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. You can call us back. You can leave a voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Our logos are by Kenesha Sneed. We're on Instagram and Twitter at @callyrgf. Our producer is Jordan Bailey and this podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.