Creating Room for Ethnic Voices in the Culinary Conversation

Source: Aditya Desai

BY STAFF WRITER ADITI DESAI ‘24

This past summer, my family — like many others — hunkered down and stockpiled whatever we could get our hands on. From jars of ghee (clarified butter) to frozen vegetables, we reorganized our pantry to make room for more food. Given the abundance of ingredients which lined my kitchen, basement, and pantry, I made it my goal to read as many cookbooks as possible. And I don’t mean paging through recipes, drooling over majestically styled pictures, and scanning ingredient lists to look for which creations were the least time-consuming — I mean really reading everything, including the author’s biography to learn about their unconventional culinary origins and kitchen mishaps. I mean bookmarking pages with torn post-its sticking out like flags. I mean reading recipe titles and ingredient lists out loud, verbalizing the components of each dish so that I can hear and feel their textures. I found the entire process thrilling. Being stuck at home, these cookbooks gave me a way to experience new cultural palettes and decipher a new sort of language.

Of course, I knew that the next step would be to make some of the dishes. Though I did gain pleasure from reading and engaging with the rawness of the uncooked ingredients on the page, the process of cooking and building something from scratch took me out of my home and into the valleys of Italy and the farmers markets of France. I committed pictures to memory, comparing my “Italian Marcella Cucina” cookbook’s images to my pan roasted tomatoes as they bled a vibrant red hue and their skin blistered unevenly on one side. I spent hours learning about the different types of flour used to create the fluffiest bread texture and the specificity of cheese profiles on pasta dishes. The hot-blooded, acidic, and intentionally-crafted recipes found in each cookbook prompted me to create, they reminded me of what it means to be fearless of flames, and they pushed me to become so immersed in another culture that it feels like I am traveling while sitting on my one-legged kitchen bar stool or hovering over the stovetop.

While I filled most of my summer excavating the cookbooks I found stashed at the back of the shelf in my family’s kitchen, I quickly noticed how limited my choices were. There were over twenty cookbooks neatly stacked on top of each other like vertical dominoes — some jutting out from the middle — waiting to topple over onto the flour jar. Each was decorated with both text and vivid images of cubed tomatoes or glasses of red wine. But, when I named each of the recipes I learned about and cooked — creamy orzo with cheese, burrata and strawberry bruschetta, spaghetti with fava beans — I heard uniformity. I heard names of dishes heavily based in a Western canon, dominated by very specific ingredients and similar flavor profiles. My cookbook collection, though home to recipes that pushed me past my culinary boundaries, is not comprehensive enough to be a library. It severely under-represents different parts of the world, including my family’s home of India.

Growing up, I watched my mother hesitate before transcribing or sharing her recipes, not because it was a top-secret family treasure, but rather because she wasn’t sure how to translate her ingredients and steps to match American descriptions. “It’s not exactly one-half cup of tomato paste or two tablespoons of cumin seeds,” she would tell me. It isn’t roasting the pumpkin seeds on the stove for a specified amount of time, but rather letting them dry in the sunlight. In American cookbooks, recipes are bound by specific rules and formats. Ingredient lists are made precise by measurements, and instructions include precise methods to ensure nothing goes wrong. Much of the power of cooking is placed in the person who is writing the recipe and not on the individual who is experimenting, taste-testing, and making the dish. “I’m only one perspective of Indian cooking, not its sole voice,” my mother would also tell me.

This might be why my cookbook collection falls short in diversity. Many popular American cookbooks are written by white people. In America, the culinary sphere has been shaped by a very white, Eurocentric perspective, which has limited the types of stories that can be told through cookbooks. While some of the recipes may feature ethnic dishes, the recipes themselves are still curated by writers and publishers in the culinary industry — many of whom are white. So much about creating a cookbook is seeded in appealing recipes and culturally rich narratives; yet, without the support of a publisher, food stylists, and an eye-catching design, cookbooks aren’t picked up by general audiences. In other words, the success of a cookbook is not only about who has the story or vision for a recipe, but also about the people who turn these visions into tangible words and easy-to-follow instructions. Since the cookbook publication industry is dominated by white authors, editors, and publishers, chefs of color have a difficult time fitting in and pitching their ideas. In addition, many recipe curators are forced to modify their vision and suppress their identities for the sake of selling to a specific audience. With this power dynamic, our conception of food is heavily tilted in a direction of regularity rather than diversity.

Determined to find a cookbook that pushed the boundaries of the limited culinary sphere, I picked up a copy of Indian-ish by Priya Krishna from my local bookstore. The cover, decorated with a bright highlighter yellow and a bowl of green chillies, felt nostalgic, to say the least. Krishna is an Indian-American food writer and YouTube personality, a regular contributor to The New York Times and The New Yorker, and — most importantly — the author of a cookbook which challenges the traditional white-washing of ethnic recipes. Her name stands out as one of the few Indian-American female voices that have risen to popularity amongst American audiences. Indian-ish is an unapologetically glorious mixture of traditional Indian recipes and modern fusion of household ingredients. Like Indian food, Krishna’s cookbook is a mural of color, packing in both practicality and flavor while tracing her family’s cultural heritage and history as immigrants. What amazes me the most is how she lets the recipes speak for themselves — making no revision in ingredient lists or modification in steps. As she noted in a recent conversation, “we [colored cookbook authors] are in this odd double bind when we’re asked to provide substitutions for our ingredients, and yet, those same ingredients we grew up with. I felt like I am constantly self-conscious about the fact that someone might not be able to find chaat masala or curry leaves: how do I accommodate that person?”

For much of American history, food media has been made for a white audience by a white-dominated industry. Transitioning from this uniform realm into one which is not only more diverse in authorship, but also more flavorful and accessible, requires audiences to appreciate and understand cultural traditions rooted in food. As Krishna mentions, she has debated including substitutions (olive oil in place of ghee, or paprika instead of garam masala) and italicizing words in her cookbook to accommodate the white reader. But, in the end, she decided not to make these revisions. In doing so, she underlines the importance of committing to a dish in its original, unedited form.

As I sat down to eat my Kadhi, a warm yogurt-based soup recipe from Krishna’s collection, I took in the comforting cumin flavors and the aroma of fresh cream. I smiled as I read how Krishna’s mother first taught her how to make their family’s favorite meals before she went to college. The truth is that cookbooks capture memories which transcend the boundaries of the kitchen. They’re beautifully crafted love letters written to honor one’s age-old family soup recipe or to capture a culinary innovation. The best cookbooks are so much more than ingredient lists followed by images cast in perfect lighting. They’re documentations of the most intimate memories — of flouring counters and spilling soup, of unrisen bread, of too much salt, of impatient tongue burns. Some recipes are shy, while others are outright humourous. But what binds these recipes together is a common desire to honor one’s family and culture. They’re time capsules to be shared with others, travelling from an author’s kitchen to a reader’s plate. Authors elect to share these narratives. To immerse ourselves as readers in these diverse voices, recipes, ingredients, and stories enables home chefs and culinary experts to be their fullest, most authentic selves. By doing so, we learn that cooking is not only about bringing a meal to the table for comfort and sustenance, but is also a way of bringing a new cultural palette to our tables.