Cultural connections
League of Kitchens, immigrants share recipes, unite people
NEW YORK – A plate of vegetarian samosas welcomed our group of five to the Brooklyn apartment of Afsari Jahan.
It was a delicious way to start our 2
1⁄2-hour workshop, “A Taste of Bengali Cooking with Afsari,” taught by Jahan, who grew up in Rajshahi, Bangladesh, and has lived in the Bay Ridge neighborhood here since 2000.
None of us knew exactly what to expect from the cuisine of this South Asian country. But that was partly the point.
The class we attended in December is just one offering of League of Kitchens, a unique cooking school where immigrants teach classes not in some state-ofthe-art professional kitchen but in their own homes.
It was founded by Lisa Gross, the daughter of a Korean immigrant mother and a Hungarian Jewish father. It grew out of her own “yearning” to learn to cook her grandmother’s recipes.
“After college, I fell in love with Korean food, but my grandmother had passed away,” she said. “Whenever I tried to cook a Korean dish — whether the recipe was from the internet or a cookbook — something was missing. So I started fantasizing. What if I had a Korean grandmother to cook with? What if I could find people like my grandmother to teach people to cook?”
It took a year to get League of Kitchens up and running. Gross interviewed close to 300 people and then invited 40 to 50 of the most promising applicants back for in-home cooking auditions.
Launched in 2014, the school now has 11 instructors from 11 countries: Nepal, Mexico, Uzbekistan, Japan, Greece, Argentina, Trinidad, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, India and Lebanon.
“Our instructors are amazing home cooks,” said Gross, who clearly understands the debt Americans owe to their many immigrants, who brought to these shores everything from pizza and pierogi to hummus and bahn mi.
Our vegetarian-Bengali workshop in December is one of two taught by Jahan, who works in the garment business in Manhattan. She also teaches a full-day “immersion” workshop that includes recipes for fish and meat.
After introductions, we tied on our aprons and got to work in Jahan’s immaculate, well-organized kitchen.
The menu included Palak Paneer, or spiced spinach cooked with homemade farmer’s cheese, as well as homemade chapati, a wholegrain flatbread, which she called their “everyday bread.”
We watched her pour vinegar into a kettle of boiling milk to separate curds from whey, as she demonstrated how to make fresh cheese. And we all took a turn rolling out chapati dough and then carefully flipping the bread over as it cooked in the hot, dry skillet. (She flips the bread with her fingers, but the rest of us resorted to tongs.)
She explained that this kind of from-scratch cooking is routine in her homeland: “Ours is not a fast-food culture.”
And it’s not a wasteful culture, either.
“We don’t toss anything,” she said “Most of the time we don’t even peel potatoes. We use them with the skins.”
At the end of the class, we sat down to enjoy the meal we’d cooked. She also had some other dishes to sample, including her award-winning rice pudding.
Her secret, she said is using Kalijira rice, which has miniature grains.
And we had been advised to bring containers for leftovers, so we all took some of our handiwork home.
(You won’t find Jahan’s recipes here because they are a little tricky to make unless you have her on hand to demonstrate the fine points.)
Hugs all around
Gross is especially proud of the home setting aspect of League of Kitchens, which she says “humanizes” immigrants and creates “opportunities for people to connect with each other.”
“When you are a guest in someone’s home, there is an immediate intimacy,” she explained. “It feels personal. It’s not like just reading a headline in a newspaper.”
And the feeling goes both ways.
“Some of the instructors at first have a little bit of trepidation about hosting strangers, but after cooking a meal together, a genuine connection is made — usually with hugs all around. It’s life-expanding for the instructors too,” she said.
The cost for League of Kitchen’s short workshops is $110; the longer sessions are $175. More information can be found at leagueofkitchens.com.
You can watch clips from League of Kitchens workshops on YouTube, including one in which comedian Stephen Colbert interviews Gross and attends a cooking class.
Kimchi outreach
Of course, you don’t have to travel to take a cooking class taught by an immigrant. Milwaukee doesn’t have a school like League of Kitchens — although Gross talks about bringing it to other cities — but there are plenty of opportunities here to learn about ethnic cooking.
Saehee Chang, a South Korean native who lives in Whitefish Bay with her family, believes that sharing kimchi and other dishes from her homeland helps bring people together. She teaches cooking (as well as Korean drumming) at various venues around the Milwaukee area.
At a recent kimchi-making class she taught to ninth-graders at Bay View High School, “students were curious about my culture,” she said, “but they also shared information about their own cultures. And we talked about differences and similarities between Korean and African-American cooking.”
Food bridges gaps, she said.
Another case in point: a cooking class she taught to a “Young Scientists Club” at the Urban Ecology Center at Washington Park. Among the students were some Burmese refugees who spoke little or no English. But participants soon discovered “you can cook together even if you don’t speak the same language,” Chang said.
For her, this kind of outreach hits close to home.
Chang and her German-born husband are both naturalized American citizens. And her parents immigrated to the
United States seven years ago, she said, adding that her mother was a refugee from North Korea to South Korea during the Korean War.
You’ll find recipes and more information about Chang’s Korean cooking classes, Korea Konnect, at innograte.net/koreaKonnect. She also has her own brand of kimchi, Kosari Kimchi, which she’ll be selling at the Milwaukee Winter Farmers Market at the Domes on March 4 and April 8, and at the Shorewood Farmers Market in the summer.
From India with love
India is the homeland of one of the Milwaukee area’s best known and most popular cooking instructors, Alamelu Vairavan. She emigrated from South India in 1967.
She has a televised cooking series, “Healthful Indian Flavors with Alamelu,” with a companion book by the same name. The series was begun in 2011 and filmed at Milwaukee Public Television. Episodes can be viewed at MPTV or on the Create channel.
Vairavan finds that her students want to learn not just about cooking — “but they are also eager to learn all about India, which is the world’s largest democracy.”
She periodically conducts culinary tours to Little India in Chicago, where the group visits a grocery store, spice market and clothing store, among other places. And, of course, there’s time to enjoy an Indian meal.
To find out about her cooking classes, recipes and books, go to curryonwheels.com.
And the melting pot of classes goes on.
For a taste of France, you might check out Alliance Française de Milwaukee, which offers periodic cooking classes. Or contact cooking instructor Ann Pollet directly at thefrenchforks.com.
Latin-inspired classes are available at Antigua, 5823 W. Burnham St. in West Allis, where chef Nicolas Ramos, an immigrant from Mexico, teaches courses such as Mexican Fiesta and Spanish Tapas.
The Milwaukee Public Market at 400 N. Water St. is a great place to check for cooking classes. In its changing menu of courses, you’ll often spot one taught by a foreign-born chef.
So throw a dart at the world map and get started.
As Gross asserts: “You can use food and cooking to share culture and to connect across the differences.”