Mayukh Sen Transcript

 Mayukh Sen Transcript

Kerry Diamond:
Hey everybody, you're listening to Radio Cherry Bombe. I'm your host Kerry Diamond, coming to you from Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller center in the heart of New York city. Today's guest is Mayukh Sen, the author of Tastemakers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America, which is out this November.

Mayukh shares the story of how his book came to be and talks about his seven subjects, and there sometimes overlooked culinary contributions. I loved talking to Mayukh and getting to know him. He's an important young voice on the food scene, he's also a lot of fun, and Tastemakers is an important book. So stay tuned for our conversation.

Today's show is supported by Kerrygold, the maker of beautiful butter and cheese made with milk from Irish grass-fed cows. I love my Kerrygold. We'll hear a word from them in just a minute. And we have a new sponsor today, Modern Sprout. If you love house plants and herbs, you're going to love learning about Modern Sprout. I'll share more about them later in the show, and I'll let you know what I ordered from the Modern Sprout website just this morning.

I'd also like to thank everyone who joined us at our Fries with Friends Party at Insa, the Korean barbecue and karaoke spot in Gowanus Brooklyn. There were fries of course, and some memorable karaoke performances, although I wouldn't necessarily put mine in that category, and we got to try the new fry sauce from Sir Kensington's, a fun honey mustard that you can use in a dozen different ways.

Want to snack your own bottle of fry sauce? Visit the Sir Kensington shop on Amazon. Check out our show notes for the link. Let's hear from Kerrygold, and then we'll talk with Mayukh.

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Kerry Diamond:
Mayukh, welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe.

Mayukh Sen:
Thank you so much for having me, I'm very, very excited. A long time listener over here.

Kerry Diamond:
I'm happy to hear that. Well, I'm one of your new fans. I mean, I've always known your articles, but it was so nice to meet you this weekend at Cherry Bombe cooks and books.

Mayukh Sen:
Yeah. I was so honored to be on that esteemed panel of these luminaries in the biography world.

Kerry Diamond:
It was fairly esteemed.

Mayukh Sen:
Yeah.

Kerry Diamond:
It was nice to see you up there with them.

Mayukh Sen:
Yeah. Thank you.

Kerry Diamond:
And you had a cheering section in the room. I certainly noticed.

Mayukh Sen:
Yeah, that was very sweet and unexpected. I'm just going to enjoy this little moment while it lasts, because I know it will last forever.

Kerry Diamond:
So let's jump right in. Why did you want to write this book?

Mayukh Sen:
Oh yeah. So the story begins back in 2017. So that's when I first had the idea for this book. Back then, I was 25 years old. I was a staff writer at a site called Food52, which I'm sure many listeners are familiar with. In my time there, I had began writing a lot of stories centering on the lives of figures who, I guess belonged to marginalized communities.

So people of color, women of color, Black women, immigrants, immigrants of color, immigrant women of color, queer people, et cetera. Some fall under all of those umbrellas. And these were usually people who were ignored or not sufficiently honored by the White food establishment in the same way that figures like Julia Child, or James Beard, or Craig Claiborne had been in their lifetimes and even after their deaths.

What I was doing in writing those stories was trying to re-circulate their legacies and also teach myself because, maybe we'll touch upon this but I came to food writing so unexpectedly and I came there as a total idiot, and now I'm 5% less of an idiot. And so writing these stories was also my way of schooling myself very publicly and educating myself.

But anyway, I had began amassing a very small body of work, in this genre of posthumous profile, you could say, and a friend of mine suggested to me, "Oh, I wonder if there's a book in here somewhere. Maybe it's about immigrants in food." And I was like, "Huh, that's interesting. I'll put that in my back pocket." But there was a lot going on that year, I was 25, I didn't know anything, so I just tabled it.

Kerry Diamond:
Now you dropped a little nugget in back then that I need to go back to about you getting into food writing.

Mayukh Sen:
Yeah.

Kerry Diamond:
It sounded accidental.

Mayukh Sen:
Oh, very accidental. Yeah. That's an understatement. I began my career in food media in 2016, I was 24 years old. So I'd grown up wanting to be a film critic. I read entertainment weekly, I loved Pauline Kael, I memorized every best actress nominee at the Oscars from 1960 onward, as a high schooler, just total nerd stuff.

And so that's what I wanted to do with my life. And so after I graduated from college in 2014, what I started doing was I began freelancing, writing about topics like film and television and music for places like Vice and Vulture and the Fader. But basically every aspect of the culture, but food.

And so, fast forward to summer 2016, I get an email from the amazing Kenzi Wilbur who at that time was the managing editor of Food52, and she was like, "Hey, we're hiring for staff writer at this site, that's a cooking site and also an e-commerce site, and we want someone who is not a food person. We don't want someone who is a cooking enthusiast or really into restaurants. We want someone who is just going to be able to write about food in a way that reaches this wider segment of the audience that we haven't tapped into yet."

And I was like, "Huh, that's interesting." But I thought it was so hilarious even when I got that email, because I had always perceived food writing to be the domain of this rich, straight White man. Maybe it was like Mystic Pizza or something that lodged that image in my head, because there's that stuffy restaurant critic who comes at the end-

Kerry Diamond:
Ratatouille.

Mayukh Sen:
Exactly. Yeah. Ratatouille, that's such a pervasive image in our culture. And so I was like, "Oh, this is just not my world." But I was 24, I needed a full-time job, and salary, and benefits, and everything. And culture writing gigs were so hard to come by back then and they are even more scarce now. So I was like, "You know what? I'm going to see how this goes." And I was also craving the trust of an editor who was going to allow me to write deeper and longer stories, because back then I was firing off hot takes about American sniper and stuff like that.

Kerry Diamond:
That's a great story. You got scouted essentially.

Mayukh Sen:
Exactly. And it was a rocky start definitely, because I was the only person of color on the editorial team at Food52, and a lovely crew of women who were there, White women, all of them moved in Bed-Stuy, the same genre of firsthand, but I love them so much, all of them, they taught me a lot.

But I definitely felt alone in the sense that I was writing from a different center of gravity than all of my immediate peers, and I think that held true as well within the larger context of food media. So it was tough, but I made it work for me I guess.

Kerry Diamond:
And you did write some beautiful pieces that we'll talk about in a little bit.

Mayukh Sen:
Thank you.

Kerry Diamond:
Okay. Back to the group biography, how did you choose the seven women?

Mayukh Sen:
I wanted to make sure that I found subjects, so gave lots of interviews in their lifetime or wrote memoirs or memoirist cookbooks, enough material that would allow me to hear how they spoke. And in the case of my two living subjects, Julie Sanya and Najmieh Batmanglij, that wasn't exactly rocket science because I could call them up and be like, "Hey, so... and I heard them speaking in their own voices, but otherwise it was like speaking to the dead, how do you find their material?

So that was the main point that I wanted to make sure I was hitting when I was curating these seven voices. I also wanted to make sure that it was diverse, from a racial perspective, from a class perspective, and just in terms of geographical spread as well. But it was tough, I mean, there're some women who I really thought there was enough material in the proposal stage and then when I got to writing, it turned out no, they're there, and it made me very upset and I wrote about this in the afterward of my book.

But I so wish that for some of these figures, especially journalists like myself who had thought to write down their stories or the gatekeepers had allowed these women to write their stories on their own so that folks like me generations later, can work from that material.

But it was tough definitely. I wanted to make sure I was providing a mix of figures who are maybe more well-known, closer to household names like Marcella Hazan, for example, alongside other names of fingers whom more people should know, yet do not. The reason for that is just because I want to make sure that there's an easy point of entry for casual readers who might be interested in food.

I'm sure that many readers will pick this up and be like, "Oh, Marcella. Yeah I know her, I mean who are all these other women?" So.

Kerry Diamond:
You mentioned three of them so far, tell us the other four.

Mayukh Sen:
Yeah, totally. So, the first subject of my book is Ching-He Huang from China, and then there's Elena Zelayeta from Mexico. There's a little interlude on Julia Child who was not an immigrant, but we can talk about that maybe in a sec. And then there was Madeleine Kamman from France, Marcella Hazan from Italy, Julie Sahni from India, Najmieh Batmanglij from Iran and Norma Shirley from Jamaica. So, those are the seven plus Julia.

Kerry Diamond:
Tell us a quality shared among all the women.

Mayukh Sen:
Oh, I mean, this is going to sound so cliche, Hallmark Cards, but resilience, I mean they all faced immense hardships. I mean Elena Zelayeta for example, from Mexico, she lost her sight as an adult and she taught herself to cook after losing her sights. That is just one example of challenge that these women faced in their lifetimes yet they were able to make such a profound impact on the American palette, so to speak in spite of those hardships.

And I think that each reader who picks up this book sees that these women, they made room for themselves in an industry that was not necessarily designed to accommodate them. They really made an impact in spite of those challenges.

Kerry Diamond:
Let's talk about the research because five of the women as you mentioned are no longer with us.

Mayukh Sen:
Yeah. So, my first step was to find their memoirs. Lucky for me, a lot of them did have memoirs, although those even presented some challenges, for example, Madeleine Kamman from France, her memoir called her When French Woman Cook, which is a total masterpiece of a cookbook and group biography like mine actually and memoir, it doesn't have a ton of information about her life in America. And so that was a challenge.

And then Norma Shirley from Jamaica, she didn't leave behind any books of her own cookbooks or otherwise. And so I really had to rely upon video interview she gave and she had a bunch of television appearances that I could look at to make sure that I understood how she spoke, how she presented herself in the world, et cetera.

So that was the foundational layer of each chapter. It was making sure that the skeleton of each woman telling her own story in her own words was there. And then after that, the added layer was speaking to people, friends, family members, people in their professional orbits, anyone who remembered them, who could give me more insight into who they were and what they cared about and what they wanted to do with their cooking. That was the second layer.

And then the third was fun digging through the archives. So a lot of this book was written during the pandemic. So I didn't necessarily have access to a library, but what I did have access to is ProQuest and newspapers.com, my two best friends. And so as a result, I was just sifting through so many of the scanned articles from back in the 1940s and 1930s on these women.

And I was trying to cobble together some chronology of each of their lifetimes, and also see how the press rendered them in their lifetimes and whether that conflicted or agreed with the way that they saw themselves and want to present themselves. So it was three parts.

Kerry Diamond:
Was it hard to find a publisher?

Mayukh Sen:
I was very lucky to have had my book go into auction, so I ended up going with W. W. Norton & Company, and my editor there is Melanie Tortoroli, who's incredible. She edits many cookbooks, but also a lot of narrative nonfiction. And she is totally wonderful. But the two other houses who bid on my book were not necessarily food publishers and I met with many, many food publishers yet they passed probably because my book did not have any recipes in it.

And I think that that is probably a factor that to them limited its commercial potential. It was interesting that... it wasn't tough to sell this book necessarily, but I did feel as though I had to be credentialed in the right ways, have the right awards and the right by-lines and everything like that before I could go out and sell this book, because I realized that I don't look like a typical person who usually succeeds in this industry.

I'm a queer person of color, I'm a child of immigrants, I have two first languages in addition to they want to English. So I knew that the cards are stacked against me in some way. It could have been more challenging, but it was not exactly walk in the park.

Kerry Diamond:
Okay. Do you feel that's changing a little bit? I noticed today, Joanne Lee Molinaro, the Korean Vegan, hit the New York Times bestseller list.

Mayukh Sen:
I saw that, which is wonderful. I think that last summers goings on did move the needle a little bit. But I don't know how much the underlying structure has changed. Yeah, it's tough. I'm pretty cynical about this stuff and I've been in this industry for five years and without reopening any of my wounds, I've experienced so much racism and homophobia, especially from people at the very top of this industry, and I feel so scarred and I don't have a ton of faith that things will change fundamentally, as long as power stays the same and the concentration of capital is the same.

That's why I'm so inspired by independent creators who are rising in our industry right now, like Stephen Satterfield at Whetstone, for example, that's a Black owned, independent media company. My friend, Alicia Kennedy, who has her marvelous newsletter. She's someone who's blown up deservedly over the past year. So.

Kerry Diamond:
Brian Terry's imprint.

Mayukh Sen:
Exactly. Brian Terry began that and things are changing slowly, but let's see where the money is in five years.

Kerry Diamond:
But what are five years for you to be in the food media?

Mayukh Sen:
Yes.

Kerry Diamond:
I mean, it's cracked wide open.

Mayukh Sen:
It did, I mean, I joined Food52 the month before Trump got elected. So I think that was definitely a curious time to join the industry for sure.

Kerry Diamond:
Let's take a quick break and we'll be right back with Mayukh Sen. The folks at Modern Sprout are supporting today's episode and I couldn't be more excited because I love house houseplants and I love growing herbs at home. Just this morning, I ordered Modern Sprouts, cilantro garden jar, and their mint garden jar.

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Now back to my chat with Mayukh Sen, author of Tastemakers. I'm curious how you felt after writing the book. It's so hard to write any kind of book. It's draining, it's emotional, it's all of those things, but you delved into the lives of these women who had been marginalized. What was the impact on you when it was all done?

Mayukh Sen:
Yeah. That's a great question and no one has asked me that yet. I had a lot of anxiety still lingering. I wanted to make sure that I was really capturing the fullness of each woman's legacy. And part of my concern had to do with the fact that the book shrunk overdrafts, my first draft was what Ruth Rochelle famously calls a vomit draft.

It was just, everything's on the page and it was so overwritten, and very much a... how old was I? 26, 27, when I sold that book, it was 26 yeah. Very much I was writing in a way that I had something to prove basically, I want to dazzle with my sentences.

And then I revisited that first draft and was like, "Oh my goodness, I cannot decipher any of these sentences and you're making the most mundane point into something that is so unnecessarily florid. So let's take a step back." Then I had a concern as I worked through drafts that I zapped out any beauty from the sentences and made them just boring, and tedious, and buy the book ABC.

So was a concern. But I also worry that I lost some of the spirit and fullness of each woman's story in making those cuts. And so I hope it doesn't read that way, and I'm not fishing here, please don't reassure me or anything like that, but that was one big concern. But it also did have an effect on me in the sense that in writing some of these stories, I was just reminded of so much of the pain that I carry from these past five years of things that have happened to me, let's say, in the industry.

I found some comfort in telling these stories because I realized that I was not alone, I could fit myself into this larger continuum of discrimination that exists in the American food media. There was also... I think that I had to spend some time with those wounds. And so that was tough.

Kerry Diamond:
Was it hard to be impartial and journalistic?

Mayukh Sen:
And that is a great question.

Kerry Diamond:
Knowing what these women had gone through?

Mayukh Sen:
Yeah. It was tough. I knew that I did not want to sanitize these stories in any way, not even too much, and over-correct for some perceived historical imbalance, because I think that that was an issue with some of my earlier work at places like Food52, where I was taking the story of a figure whom the food establishment had ignored or marginalized further when they were already on the margins and been like, "Actually this person was amazing and they were the best ever. Whoa."

And just over-corrected for that imbalance in a way that it paves the way for another writer, years later to be like, "No, here's actually the truth of this person's story and what they gave to us through their cooking." And so I wanted to make sure that I was not opening the potential for that to happen in writing this book.

Kerry Diamond:
We mentioned the art of the biography panel that was part of the Cherry Bombe Cooks and Books conference a few weeks ago. And you on the panel along with the biographers of Julia Child, Anthony Bordain, James Beard. When I was putting the panel together, I did not realize that the only mainstream biographies were of White people.

Mayukh Sen:
Yeah.

Kerry Diamond:
And that I knew there was no Edna Lewis biography, even though there's a lovely book of essays about her, but there's no Edna Lewis biography, there's no Madhur Jaffrey biography. I know you're not surprised.

Mayukh Sen:
Yeah, I'm not surprised at all. And I will say that the events of summer 2020, definitely a move the needle in some way and it reminded gatekeepers that there's an audience for these stories and it's actually violent to box them out of the industry in some way.

In writing this book, I also realized that each of these women face such challenges from the publishing industry. I was thinking of Najmieh Batmanglij from Iran who came to America shortly after Iranian revolution in 1979. She initially fled to France as a refugee and then realized that it wasn't the most hospitable place to raise her brown children.

And so she came to DC in the early 1980s and she'd written a cookbook back in France, she had the credentials. And so she tried to sell a cookbook of her own of Iranian cookbook in the early 80s in America and she just got silence or polite rejection from every publisher she sent out the query to.

And so, instead what she did was she and her husband Mohammad just started a publishing house of their own and they publish what is now called Food of Life, which is the Iranian cookbook in America, and she's published all of her cookbooks under that publishing house. But the history of discrimination in the cookbook and food publishing world, it runs so deep as a result of that. I don't know that the events of last year are going to be enough to erase them.

Kerry Diamond:
There're some hope on the memoir side.

Mayukh Sen:
Yeah.

Kerry Diamond:
I think slow... I mean, we get sent most of the memoirs that come out and they tend to still be by White authors, but you see a little bit of change on that front. And then we did a piece on self publishing in the current issue of our magazine, and that is where the change is coming from. But I think that's been forever. I mean, you talk about, you just gave us a great example of someone who had no choice but to self publish.

Mayukh Sen:
Totally. And I mean, just the financial burden of self-publishing is unimaginable. You really need to have some material security for that to happen, at least I imagine.

Kerry Diamond:
I actually just bought someone's e-book, that's an option where you don't have to lay out a huge amount of money.

Mayukh Sen:
Totally. Yeah.

Kerry Diamond:
And I think it was maybe 12 recipes, and that's the way to start. I mean, that's not going to revolutionize the cookbook industry, but at least it's a way to start to get your name out there and your work out there.

Mayukh Sen:
Absolutely.

Kerry Diamond:
And if the gatekeepers are pulling those gates down on you, that's one option.

Mayukh Sen:
Yeah, no, that's actually a good point. Yeah. And it's not a too burdensome. Yeah.

Kerry Diamond:
One person who has not faced any of these issues at all is someone who you do write about in the book, and that's Julia Child. I called it a short chapter. Are you calling it an interlude?

Mayukh Sen:
Yeah. We're calling it an interlude, but short chapter, I think suffices. Interlude, little, fancy-schmancy. So.

Kerry Diamond:
Tell us about this interlude. I knew that was in there, but I was still surprised when I got to it.

Mayukh Sen:
Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah. So it was not actually in the first draft of the book, but real quick. So that interlude is just a 2,500 word piece about Julia Child and how she came to cooking and reminding readers that she did face many, many challenges in the industry and getting her start and she faced a lot of sexist discrimination.

She was rising to the top yet at the end of the day she was also a White American woman, and that eased a lot of barriers to access, otherwise obstructing the seven women I write about in this book. And I wanted to make sure that readers understood that because Julia Child is a figure who looms so large in this book. She is present as a character in some chapters, like the Madeleine Kamman chapter that follows.

Listeners who aren't familiar, Madeleine Kamman she was from France and the press often liked to characterize her as a Julia Child's antagonists, someone who dared to punch up against this Titan of the American food world. And she, Madeleine Kamman certainly paid the price for it. She had immense talent, many, many accomplishments yet she was almost always, even in death framed in terms of this perceived conflict with Julia Child and this 'jealousy' that she had, which I thought was so unfair.

So I want to make sure that I was situating a Julia Child rise in the right way before we got to Madeleine Kamman story, A. But B, she pops up in other chapters in some ways. Norma Shirley from Jamaica, for example, she was called by the American press, the Julia Child of Jamaica and the Julia Child of the Caribbean.

And that is a rhetorical device you could say that has been applied to so many of the women in my book. Marcella Hazan is the 'Julia Child of Italy'. Then Julie Sahni is the Julia Child of India. And it does a disservice to the women themselves and also to Julia Child, frankly, it flattens everyone's legacy. It creates more confusion than clarification. I found it so troubling.

So that's why I wanted to write about Julia Child, she's someone whose act of reverse immigration you could say, her culinary epiphany in France, and then her return to America was one of the factors that kick started this culinary revolution in America.

Kerry Diamond:
I have to put you in touch with a young writer we're working with, Abena Anim-Somuah.

Mayukh Sen:
Who?

Kerry Diamond:
Who did a piece for a Julia Child issue called “Edna Lewis is not the Julia Child of the South.” Because it's just lazy today.

Mayukh Sen:
It is so, so lazy. And I was so disappointed to see a certain major publication, I will not name which it is. The one that has a lot of power and influence.

Kerry Diamond:
Okay. So that wouldn't be us.

Mayukh Sen:
Yeah. But they called Norma Shirley the Julia Child of Jamaica. And I was like, "Oh my goodness."

Kerry Diamond:
Recently?

Mayukh Sen:
Yes. It was just a few months ago.

Kerry Diamond:
Oh stop. Any writers out there listening, you're not allowed to use that anymore.

Mayukh Sen:
Yes. Please don't. Yes.

Kerry Diamond:
The Julia Child to fill in the blank, retire that. You bring up the term assimilation a lot in the book.

Mayukh Sen:
Yeah. That was something that I thought about quite often as I was writing this book, because you'll notice that in the early chapters of the book, a lot of these women saw assimilation as a path to success and financial viability in America. And to do that they may have had to dilute the flavors of their home in some way, or work around the hesitations of their White middle to upper middle class American audiences, to tell them a bit about where they came from and what the food tasted like.

As you read the book and travel through each of these stories, you'll notice that assimilation may have become less of a concern for a lot of these women. I talked at great length already about Najmieh Batmanglij, someone who in self-publishing those Iranian cookbooks of hers, she was initially writing for members of the Iranian diaspora.

The fact that she ended up reaching so many non-Iranian readers was a happy accident and now she's widely revered and respected. But something similar happened with Norma Shirley, she tried to make it as a restaurant term in America in the early 1980s, she wanted to cook Jamaican food with French flair, tried to open a restaurant in New York at that time and she couldn't secure enough capital to make that happen.

And so she decided to go back home to Jamaica and start cooking for her own people. And it was only then that the American food media finally took notice of her and her talents and started calling her the Julia Child of Jamaica, et cetera. And so, I hope that when readers spend some time with this book and these stories, they understand that assimilation is not the only path to success.

And it took me a few drafts for me to thread that into the book because I began to look at my own career and just the past, four or five years of being in this industry I came into this industry with something to prove because I felt like such an imposter and I still do, but I felt as though the way to mitigate any feelings of fraudulent, let's say, was to get the right awards and get the attention of the food establishment.

But then once that happened, I was like, "I'm not happy. I don't feel fulfilled. And what is fulfillment look like for me?" And I was asking myself that question as I wrote this book, and I found the answer in a lot of the stories of these women.

Kerry Diamond:
I hope you found some fulfillment writing this book because it's such a beautiful book.

Mayukh Sen:
Thank you so much. That means a great deal to me because I have no idea how it's going to be perceived by the public, so I'm just going to close my eyes, not read any good reviews or anything like that.

Kerry Diamond:
Yeah. Stay away from the comment section.

Mayukh Sen:
Absolutely.

Kerry Diamond:
I want to ask you about two women you've written about, but not in this book. As you mentioned earlier, you've made a career of writing about marginalized women. Tell us about Princess Pamela.

Mayukh Sen:
Yeah. So Princess Pamela was a Black woman from the American South, who came to New York and began to sell food restaurants in what is today the East Village outfit city area in New York, that ran from the 1960s until the 1990s. And they were wildly popular and they provided space of refuge for a lot of folks from the South like Ted Lee, for example, and Alexander Smalls and others from that same region who missed a taste of home.

And she herself was this vibrant personality. She could be a domineering in some ways, but she was also incredibly charismatic and so many people had very, very fond memories of eating at her restaurants, yet in the late 90s, she disappeared without a trace. And I wrote a story on her back in February 2017 when I was still a staff writer at Food52, and I was so intrigued by her story because I was someone who grew up watching unsolved mysteries with Robert Stack.

The story was as much about the competing theories as to what became of her and her whereabouts today as it was about her legacy and the lives that she touched through her cooking, and just the New York that vanished with her. Because to me, her literal disappearance also felt so symbolic in the sense that she had been scrubbed and disappeared basically, from the dominant narratives of food in America.

Mayukh Sen:
And that is something that falls on so many Black women in particular in this industry. And so I went into that piece as I was reporting it, I wondered if that hypothesis was correct. And many of my conversations confirmed that, that is indeed what happened to her.

Kerry Diamond:
How do you feel about the book being re-issued finally.

Mayukh Sen:
I'm so glad. I'm so happy that my piece could play some very, very minuscule part in introducing people to Princess Pamela's life and work. And I hope that it prompts more people to buy that book, wherever she is in this world. I hope she understands that she's still touching a lot of people with her cooking.

Kerry Diamond:
That book is beloved.

Mayukh Sen:
It's gorgeous. Yeah.

Kerry Diamond:
Yeah. I'd love to ask you about Anne Rosenzweig. You wrote a wonderful story about her as well. Why did you feel Anne had been marginalized?

Mayukh Sen:
Anne was the chef of New York restaurants like Arcadia, that some listeners may know about, in the 80s and 90s. And she was an amazing chef and still is, she's still alive, she's still with us. She really, really turned a lot of heads with her cooking at those restaurants in the 80s and 90s, yet she also made a name for herself being very outspoken about various forms of discrimination that exists in this industry, including sexism.

And that in my sense in reporting the story on her, which came out in heated in 2019, was that she paid a big price because she was speaking out about sexism before it was acceptable, let's say, or fashionable or easy. And I saw her as... just through my reporting on her as a kindred spirit in the sense that she wanted to punch up all the time yet she lost a lot of fans potentially.

And as a result of those folks whom some may term 'difficult to women' once you get more easily written out of history. And so I was so intrigued by her story and I wanted to know what had become of her ever since she stepped away from the public eye in the early aughts, I believe. And what was interesting and an ethical question as I began reporting this story is, does she want this attention? Does she want to be found at all?

And I didn't want to be invasive in any way or disrespect, how she wanted to be preserved in public memory. And so it took some time for me to gain her trust, to tell her story, but I'm so glad and grateful that she opened up to me and her story provided such a rich window into just what it was like to be a woman cooking in the 80s and 90s in the American restaurant industry and the various challenges you face if you do not have any interest in assimilating into the aggressive machismo that runs rampant in this industry.

Kerry Diamond:
Let's do a little speed round.

Mayukh Sen:
I'm in.

Kerry Diamond:
Okay. Coffee or tea? I see you're drinking something.

Mayukh Sen:
I'm a cold brew guy. I'm gay, it's a stereotype. I feel like there've been 50 articles in the past, three years about how gays drink their cold brew. So, yeah, I'm one of those.

Kerry Diamond:
One of your most treasured cookbooks.

Mayukh Sen:
I mentioned this earlier, it's When French Women Cook by Madeleine Kamman. I mean, it's just such a beautiful document of memories and recipes, some of which I've cooked now, I'm a very timid cook, I have to say.

Kerry Diamond:
We're going to get into this. Your most used kitchen tool. I'm wondering, is it the microwave?

Mayukh Sen:
No, no, no. The sheet pan, does that apply as a kitchen tool? Yeah. I tend to burn my dinner on the stove, even bacon sets off my fire alarm. So sheet pan it is.

Kerry Diamond:
Okay. What is the song that makes you smile?

Mayukh Sen:
Oh my goodness. Okay. Let's see, a song that makes me smile, because I like to cry when I listen to music. I would say Tunnel of Love by Dire Straits. Dire Straits is my favorite band. And my music taste is very VH1 classics.

Kerry Diamond:
Okay. I love it. Oldest thing in your fridge.

Mayukh Sen:
Is this block of tempeh. I just don't know what to do with it. It's been around since the spring. So it's stinking up the joint.

Kerry Diamond:
I was going to ask what the expiration date on that is.

Mayukh Sen:
I'm not sure either, but I haven't even picked it up to look. So.

Kerry Diamond:
Last pantry purchase.

Mayukh Sen:
Okay. So I was nervous about this because I'm like, what qualifies as a pantry purchase? Because I know a lot of people say pasta and rice and flour. I have muffins in my pantry, does that count? No.

Kerry Diamond:
An English muffin?

Mayukh Sen:
No. They're corn bread muffins.

Kerry Diamond:
Okay.

Mayukh Sen:
They're in my pantry.

Kerry Diamond:
A box of unmade cornbread muffins?

Mayukh Sen:
No, they're made.

Kerry Diamond:
They're actual made cookies.

Mayukh Sen:
Okay, wow. I should've picked something else.

Kerry Diamond:
You know what, a pantry item is whatever you want it to be.

Mayukh Sen:
No, let's just say it's actually MSG. Okay. That's the other most recent.

Kerry Diamond:
Since you're so into film, what are you streaming?

Mayukh Sen:
Oh my goodness. Okay. This is embarrassing. So I actually... in my spare time, I like to just relax. And so I've been getting back into soap operas. I grew up watching soaps. I was an ABC kid, so it's One Life to Live and General Hospital were my programs. Now only General Hospital is on, but I watch that APM every day. You'll just hear me in my apartment be like "Play General Hospital on Hulu," into my remote. So I've been watching General Hospital. Yeah.

Kerry Diamond:
Favorite food film.

Mayukh Sen:
Ooh, favorite food film. Okay. I've been thinking about this a lot. I would say there is a beautiful, a Hindi movie called English Vinglish, which stars the person who's been called the Meryl Streep of India, which is a late great Sridevi. It's just a gorgeous performance at its center of this woman who makes a lot dues out of her home in India and then comes to America and then tries to learn English and also realizes her worth and value in cooking. And it's a gorgeous, and it's one of the best screen performances I've ever seen.

Kerry Diamond:
Do you know if it's streaming?

Mayukh Sen:
It's not. I really wanted to screen it for a series that I'm doing at Metrograph actually next month, in November for my book, because it inspired me so much yet we could not obtain a print. So my sense is that it's tough to maybe find-

Kerry Diamond:
That's a bummer.

Mayukh Sen:
Yeah. It came out nine years ago, but it might be available for purchase on YouTube or something like that.

Kerry Diamond:
Okay. Dream travel destination.

Mayukh Sen:
So my mother is from a village in the Indian state of Wester Bengal called Berhampur and I went there last time when I was four. And I remember so much, but I'd love to go back to just see if the images that exist in my head align with what is there today and just understand more about where she came from. She's my best friend in this world and we've gotten even closer since my father died a few years ago. And so, I want to see what home is like for her or was back then.

Kerry Diamond:
She must be so proud of you and the book.

Mayukh Sen:
Yeah. I mean, I don't know how she feels. I hope that she feels proud, but more importantly, I just hope that when she reads this book she sees some part of her experience as an immigrant reflected, because I just cannot imagine how difficult it was to come here in the early 80s wearing saris and raise two kids, or learning a different language. I mean, my goodness, talk about resilience. She's the epitome of that.

Kerry Diamond:
Okay. Last question. If you had to be trapped on a desert island with one food celebrity, who would it be, and why?

Mayukh Sen:
I would say probably Valerie Bertinelli just because her whole vibe as a cook it aligns with my own, at least in my head. And then I loved One Day at a Time back in the day, and she was wonderful on it. So I think that we'd have a lot to talk about. She could teach me a lot about cooking, I think.

Kerry Diamond:
Oh my God, tears in my eyes. It's so funny. Well, it's been so much fun talking to you. I hope this is just the first of many conversations.

Mayukh Sen:
Yes.

Kerry Diamond:
And we're so thrilled you wrote this book. I think it's such an important book and I really, really encourage everybody and our audience to go get a copy.

Mayukh Sen:
Thank you so much and thank you for all that you do with Cherry Bombe. I truly appreciate it. You pave the way.

Kerry Diamond:
I don't know about that, but I'm happy to consider you a new friend.

Mayukh Sen:
Thank you. Likewise.

Kerry Diamond:
All right. Thanks for coming on the show.

Mayukh Sen:
Thank you for having me.

Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. Thank you so much to Mayukh Sen for stopping by. His brand new book Tastemakers is out this November. If you love culinary biographies and learning about women in this industry, put Tastemakers on your reading list.

Thank you so much to Kerrygold and Modern Sprout for supporting our podcast. Radio Cherry Bombe is a production of Cherry Bombe Magazine. If you enjoyed this episode, we've got lots of other great ones, like with Anthony Bourdain biographer, Laurie Woolever. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Don't forget to sign up for the Cherry Bombe newsletter over at cherrybombe.com, so you don't miss any of our podcast episodes or upcoming events. Radio Cherry Bombe is recorded at Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller center in New York city. Thank you to Joseph Hazan, studio engineer for Newsstand Studios and to our assistant producer Jenna Sadhu. Thanks for listening everybody. You are the bombe.