Translating Taste
I love great food writing, but unfortunately don’t think I see enough of it. So I was excited to attend a conversation tonight between several food writers and chefs that I admire at the Mulberry Street Library. They were on a panel called: “Translating Taste: Food Writing Across Cultures” for the World Literature Festival.
The chefs/authors on the panel were:
Nasim Alikhani - the chef and owner of the Iranian restaurant Sofreh in Brooklyn, which also happens to be the place where I had the best meal of my life a few years ago. If you haven’t been, you must go. The tahini and date salad, the chicken smothered in ginger apricot sauce, and the aromatic ice cream sandwiches are all outstanding.
Abi Balingit - a Filipino dessert chef and food blogger who runs The Dusky Kitchen account and is the author of Mayumu: Filipino American Desserts Remixed
Kayla Stewart - A James Beard Award-winning food writer and journalist who coauthored the cookbook Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes from the Matriarch of Edisto Island alongside the late Emily Meggett (the said matriarch of Edisto). This one was an exciting one for me as I spent some time in Edisto last summer learning all about the food and culture there.
Moderating the panel was Mayukh Sen, the James Beard Award-winning author who wrote Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America, which was one of my favorite books that I read the year it came out.
The conversation revolved around food and memory, how elders don’t write down recipes or use measuring cups or spoons, and what gets lost in translation when writing about food from another culture for an American audience. It was a great discussion that surprisingly brought tears to my eyes a couple of times.
Back when I was an editor at a publishing imprint, books about food that weren’t cookbooks rarely came across my desk, which is a shame, because some of my favorite books are ones that think deeply about food and culture or beautifully intertwine a narrative around food and eating. If you’ve never been moved by food writing, I present to you a shortlist of recommended writers and books:
Definitely read Mayukh Sen’s Taste Makers. I can’t recommend it enough. The short profiles of all these incredibly influential women will change the way you see the role of home cooks in the evolution of American taste.
Ligaya Mishan writes for the New York Times and once wrote the following gorgeous lines to describe the heat level of a spice rub that she ate at the Nigerian restaurant, Brooklyn Suya, in Crown Heights:
“There are three levels of heat in the spice rubs at Brooklyn Suya, starting with mild, which is in fact hot. Not too hot, just enough to open the pores and bring a faint sheen to the skin. It’s the next level up that slows you down, insists you take your time and pause every few bites. The highest level says stop. The mouth turns to kindling. A small sun is born.”
Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart is a masterpiece when it comes to weaving together a memoir and food writing in my opinion. There’s so much more to this book than those two elements, but her writing around food ended up being some of my favorite parts. I think about the scene where she laboriously makes jatjuk, a pine nut porridge, in a sort of homage to her mother, at least once a month.
