I like good food writing, and I certainly found this to be good food writing. I just don't think that Sen's totally accomplishing what he's set out to do here. In the introduction, Sen speaks a lot to capitalism and gender, two forces one cannot ignore in understanding how these women (and mostly women of color) experienced the food industry. But somehow, there's really no analysis of how most of these women came to cooking: through the gendered expectation that women cook to provide for their families.

I think this is most striking in two places - firstly and more subtly, in the way that many of their marriages fell apart when they began cooking for an audience outside the home, and secondly and more obviously in an aside where Sen writes that Madeleine Kamman's early exposure to cooking was her mother taking care to provide a home-cooked meal while on a 90-minute lunch break from a local factory. It's interesting to me that Sen doesn't choose to think more critically about traditional gender roles in the lead-up to these women's careers. And it's not like he doesn't have the space: each piece is 20 or 25 pages long, and the meat of the book clocks in at under 160 pages.

Sen's clearly talented, and I think the work he's beginning here is good and necessary. It's just unfinished, and there was room and talent for much more.