WHAT JULIE SAHNI TAUGHT ME

While writing about a little-known, path-breaking Indian chef for his debut book, Mayukh Sen unlocked a deeper understanding of his own mother’s food and her immigrant story. For Sahni, that cookbook was just one triumph in a varied culinary résumé that has involved writing and teaching

IN 1980, the Indian-born chef and food writer Julie Sahni broke new ground when she published her first cookbook, Classic Indian Cooking, in America. A tome of recipes drawn mostly from North India, the book was delicate in its precision. “There is no mystical secret behind Indian cooking,” she wrote. “It is, in fact, the easiest of all international cuisines.” It was a landmark text for its time: Sahni asserted the innate worth of Indian food while convincing America that getting, say, rogan josh on the dinner table wasn’t hard.

For Sahni, that cookbook was just one triumph in a varied culinary résumé that has involved writing and teaching. She also served as the executive chef of two Indian restaurants in Manhattan—Nirvana Penthouse and Nirvana Club One—in the 1980s. This stint reportedly made her “the first Indian woman to be a chef at a New York restaurant,” as The New York Times claimed.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I was unaware of this particular achievement three years ago when I began work on my debut book, Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food In America, a group biography of chefs and food writers who came to America and expanded the nation’s appetite. Sahni graciously welcomed me into her life when I approached her in early 2019. That life, I would learn, provided fertile narrative terrain.