Behind Every Great Dish: 7 Women Who Paved The Way for Food History
Reclaiming the flavours, voices and innovations lost to time.
When we discuss the world’s great cuisines—French, Indian, Mexican, and Persian—we often mention the chefs, cookbooks, or techniques that “put them on the map.” But behind those dishes are countless women whose hands perfected the recipes, preserved the traditions, and passed them down, often without recognition, credit, or even a recorded name.
Yes, women have always cooked. But they haven’t always been remembered, outside of, say, their family, as stories of grandma’s famous pasta or mom’s unbeatable Biryani are retold around the dinner table.
From anonymous household cooks in royal kitchens to enslaved women who preserved foodways under duress, the stories of women in food history are often hidden between the lines. In this article, we revisit a few of these voices and the dishes they left behind, to understand better how women shaped our taste of home, celebration, and survival.
1. Abby Fisher: Cooking despite Silence
Abby Fisher was born into slavery in South Carolina and she couldn't read or write, but in 1881, she became one of the first Black women in the United States to publish a cookbook: What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking. The recipes were dictated to someone else, but the flavours, measurements, and stories were hers.
Her book offers a rare glimpse into post-slavery Southern cuisine from the perspective of a woman who had lived through it. Dishes like okra gumbo, sweet pickled peaches, and green tomato preserves are not just recipes; they’re survival stories, stitched together with memory and precision.
And yet, for over a century, Fisher’s contributions were largely forgotten. Her cookbook resurfaced only in the 1980s, discovered at a rare book fair in San Francisco. Today, food historians cite her work as one of the earliest and most authentic records of African-American cooking, a reminder that even if history doesn’t record you, flavour might.
2. The Women of the Senzala – Brazil’s Unsung Culinary Architects
In the kitchens of colonial and imperial Brazil, flavour wasn’t born in grand halls; it simmered in the senzalas, the slave quarters. There, Afro-Brazilian women transformed limited ingredients and brutal conditions into what would become the soul of Brazilian cuisine.
They had no recipe books. No restaurant empires. Their names were rarely recorded. But the culinary legacy they left behind, from acarajé to feijoada, is etched into Brazil’s national identity.
Take feijoada, often called Brazil’s national dish. While its precise origins are debated, many historians agree that enslaved African women played a major role in shaping it. They worked with what they had: black beans, dried meats, discarded pork cuts. These were cooked low and slow, seasoned by intuition and memory, creating a stew that was nourishing, bold, and deeply symbolic.
These women didn’t just cook; they preserved. Oral traditions, spiritual practices, and communal rituals were embedded in their food. In many ways, they were archivists of a disappearing past and architects of a new, syncretic culinary identity, one that blended African techniques, Indigenous ingredients, and Portuguese influence.
Even today, dishes like moqueca, vatapá, and canjica trace their lineage to the hands of these unnamed cooks. While the spotlight often shines on contemporary chefs, the true mothers of Brazilian cuisine remain largely unacknowledged, their genius folded into every bite.
3. Kamalabai Ogale – The Marathi Matriarch of Modern Home Cooking
In 1970, at a time when women’s voices were still rarely found in bookstores, Kamalabai Ogale published Ruchira, a Marathi-language cookbook that would quietly become one of the most influential texts in Indian culinary history.
Ruchira wasn’t flashy or stylised. It was practical, handwritten in tone, and deeply rooted in everyday Maharashtrian life. More than a recipe collection, it offered guidance on seasonal ingredients, proportions, preparation rituals, and homemaking, capturing a culture that had, until then, lived mostly through oral instruction from mother to daughter.
Ogale’s genius wasn’t in reinventing food; it was in documenting it. At a time when packaged food and modernisation were rapidly changing Indian kitchens, she created a cultural anchor: a book that preserved not only the what and how, but the why of Maharashtrian cuisine.
To this day, Ruchira is passed down as a wedding gift, stained with turmeric, annotated in the margins, and always close at hand—a generational bridge made of paper and ghee.
4. Ruchira Ramanujam – The Quiet Archivist of South Indian Kitchens
Ruchira Ramanujam isn’t a TV personality or Michelin-starred chef. But for readers of her blog Tadka Pasta and co-authors of The Everyday Healthy Vegetarian, her voice is unmistakable: personal, precise, and deeply rooted in memory.
Alongside her sister-in-law, Ranjini Rao, Ruchira has been documenting everyday South Indian vegetarian cooking for years. Their recipes, from rasam to mor koozhu, are often wrapped in family anecdotes, regional context, and gentle instructions: like waiting for mustard seeds to “dance and pop” before adding the curry leaves.
Much of her work lovingly reflects Tamil Brahmin culinary tradition, but it doesn't stop there. Her lens is inclusive of the wider South Indian table, everyday meals, festival foods, and even modern twists, always grounded in home-cooked authenticity.
In an online world crowded with content, Ruchira’s work feels like a handwritten letter, one that helps readers remember not just how to cook, but why. Her writing preserves rituals that don’t always make it to cookbooks: the timing of a tempering, the silence before the first taste, the feeling of cooking for someone you love.
5. Maideh Mazda – The Diplomat of Persian Kitchens
Long before Persian food trended in cookbooks or on social media, Maideh Mazda was introducing it to American readers, gently, graciously, and with a deep sense of tradition.
Born in 1922 in Baku to an Iranian family and raised between Baku and Tehran, Mazda carried her culture not just in her language and hospitality, but in her cooking. Her 1960 cookbook, In a Persian Kitchen: Favourite Recipes from the Near East, was one of the first of its kind—a clear, accessible guide to Iranian cuisine for Western audiences.
At a time when “Middle Eastern food” was rarely represented beyond clichés, Mazda offered real dishes with real stories, adapted for availability but never diluted. The book reads like a bridge between homes: saffron, rice, and herbs carefully measured for American kitchens, but steeped in her family’s memory. She didn’t just share recipes; she passed along rituals: the preparation of ghormeh sabzi, the slow layering of tahdig, and the quiet, fragrant ceremony of Persian tea.
As the spouse of a U.S. Foreign Service officer, Mazda lived all over the world, hosting diplomatic events where her food became a form of cultural exchange, long before “gastrodiplomacy” had a name. She gave lectures, ran demonstrations, and created space for Iranian culture through flavour.
In a Persian Kitchen would go on to be reprinted over 19 times and remains a foundational text for anyone exploring Iranian cooking in the diaspora.
6. Asma Khan – Changing the Kitchen and Who Gets to Speak In It
Asma Khan didn’t go to culinary school. Her first restaurant didn’t have a celebrity chef behind it. And yet, her food and her voice have become some of the most influential in the global dining conversation.
Born in Calcutta, India, Khan moved to the UK for academic study and found herself turning to home cooking for comfort, guided by the Mughlai and Bengali recipes of her childhood and her mother’s influence. In 2012, she began hosting supper clubs in her London flat. These meals, served on shared tables, weren’t just about food; they were about memory, lineage, and giving recognition to the home cooks so often left out of the culinary spotlight.
In 2017, she opened Darjeeling Express, a London restaurant run entirely by women, many of whom are South Asian immigrants with no formal culinary training. Several are “second daughters,” women who, in Khan’s words, grew up with the burden of not being the son their families wanted. By centring these women and letting them lead the kitchen with pride and purpose, Khan reimagined what a restaurant could be.
Her 2019 feature on Netflix’s Chef’s Table made her the first British chef to appear on the show, and she used the platform not to showcase technique, but to challenge the structure of the professional kitchen. She spoke of class, caste, gender, and labour, offering a model where the restaurant wasn’t a battlefield, but a site of dignity and recognition.
Asma Khan doesn’t just feed her guests. She restores voices, rebuilds stories, and re-centres women in a space that has too often erased them.
7. Edna Lewis – The High Priestess of Southern Cooking
Before Southern food was stylish or photographed under moody lighting, Edna Lewis was writing it down, in her voice, on her terms.
Born in 1916 in Freetown, Virginia, a town founded by formerly enslaved people, Lewis learned to cook using fresh, seasonal ingredients from her community’s farms and gardens. Her style was precise but unpretentious: wild greens, fresh buttermilk, crackling cornbread, and stews simmered low and patiently.
In 1976, she published The Taste of Country Cooking, a landmark book that celebrated Black Southern cuisine with both elegance and accuracy. It was more than a cookbook; it was a culinary memoir. Each recipe came with context, ritual, and deep pride. Lewis insisted that Southern food was not just “comfort food.” It was cuisine, worthy of preservation, celebration, and respect.
She wore pearls in the kitchen. She quoted Emerson. She cooked for politicians and poets. But most importantly, she gave a voice to a food culture that had long been misrepresented or stolen outright, especially from Black women.
8. Mashama Bailey – Chef as Storyteller, South as Centre
If Edna Lewis wrote the book, Mashama Bailey is composing the remix, equal parts homage and evolution.
Trained in French technique but grounded in her Southern roots, Bailey co-founded The Grey, a restaurant built inside a former segregated Greyhound bus station in Savannah, Georgia. It’s a powerful setting, one that carries both historical weight and the audacity of reclamation. And from its kitchen, Bailey serves oxtail, foie gras, pickled shrimp, and pepper pot, often on the same menu.
But what she’s really serving is perspective.
Bailey honours the food of her grandmothers while pushing its boundaries, reinterpreting African American cuisine not as nostalgia, but as innovation. Her 2019 Chef’s Table episode was lauded for its quiet, self-assured power, a portrait of a Black woman leading her kitchen without apology and with enormous skill.
In her 2021 book Black, White and The Grey, co-authored with business partner John O. Morisano, Bailey reflects on food, identity, and the racial dynamics of collaboration, again using food as a means to speak harder truths.
