When Lisa Kyung Gross first tried to recreate the Korean dishes her grandmother made when she was a child, none of it tasted as good. Things were always slightly off.
“I realized that so often there are little nuances, tricks and detailed tips that are left out of cookbooks and internet videos,” she says. “Often there are sensory-based cues, like ‘When it sounds like this, do this’ or ‘When it feels like this, do this.’”
Kyung Gross craved the face-to-face interaction with an elder expert that improves a dish in subtle ways — like is the onion supposed to be sliced root-to-tip or along the equator? When does the lid go back on a pot?
“When you learn from a person, it’s just so much richer because you get more of the personal and cultural context of the recipe,” says Kyung Gross, the daughter of a Korean immigrant and a Jewish New Yorker.
She was so convinced that everyone should learn dishes from an elder that she went on to found The League of Kitchens in 2014, a network of culinary workshops hosted by immigrant home cooks either online or at the instructor's home.
This fall, the League takes the next step of releasing a cookbook with 75 family recipes representing dishes from Mexico, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ukraine, Greece, Afghanistan, India, Argentina, Japan, Uzbekistan, Lebanon, India and Nepal.
There are instructions for dishes ranging from a Slavic cold borscht, to a Middle Eastern fava bean dish, a Bangladeshi winter omelet to an African peanut butter stew with chicken and vegetables, and a Mexican tomato soup with pasta.
“Different recipes require a different amount of time, but nothing is hard. This is all everyday home cooking,” says Kyung Gross, who has made everything in the book and has gotten raves at home, including from her two girls, 7 and 10.
The recipes in “The League of Kitchens Cookbook” aren't fancy dishes with hard-to-get ingredients. The point was to celebrate the homey, so-called "peasant food" that real people eat every day. The Afghan instructor was stunned that her dish of eggs, tomato, garlic, chili and mint was even going to be codified. “Everyone knows that,” she said. To which Kyung Gross gently replied: “No you don’t unless you’re Afghan.”
The cookbook has meticulously assembled ingredients and instructions, walking readers carefully through each step, repeating amounts, specifying the exact dice, and careful about when pot lids are taken off and replaced. It stands in contrast to so many cookbooks that are heavily condensed.
“There’s a kind of trend right now in cookbooks where the cookbook writer or the chef says, ‘I’m leaving it loose because I want you to trust your instincts and I want you to learn.’ That’s great if you know what you’re doing,” says Kyung Gross.
“It sounds good, but often it’s sort of frustrating for the home cooks. I want our recipes to turn out tasting like our instructor’s food. Then, when you know what it’s supposed to turn out like, then go wild.”
Jacqueline Quirk, who helped edit the book for Harvest, an imprint of HarperCollins, used it to connect with her Persian background, making rice tahdig, which leaves the rice crispy at the bottom.
“I think everyone can find something in here that is at least a flavor that resonates with home for them. It really covers a lot of bases in that sense,” Quirk says.
To craft the recipes from the 14 chosen instructors, Kyung Gross would do a Zoom cooking lesson with each of them. They would make the dish and measure everything, even using a ruler if necessary.
“Because I was cooking live with them, I would notice those things like, ‘Did you just turn down the flame? OK, you have to note that,’” she says. “We really wanted to capture in very minor detail all of those measurements.”
Food writer and co-author Rachel Wharton would then watch the videos over and over and write down the recipes, which would then be sent to Kyung Gross to cook again, sending any questions back to the instructor until the final dish got the green light.
Kyung Gross regrets that she never got the chance to learn dishes alongside her grandmother and, in many ways, her cooking network and new cookbook have been created in the elder woman's honor.
"Whenever I’d want to help her in the kitchen, she would always say, ‘Don’t worry about cooking. You should go study. Studying is more important,’” recalls Kyung Gross, who earned a master's degree from Tufts University and a bachelor's from Yale University.
“She really wanted me to have professional opportunities that she didn’t have... And, in her mind, she equated cooking with being stuck in the kitchen.”
The League of Kitchens teaches students to create a dish — and any supporting or associated side dishes or sauces — while also managing to humanize the immigrant experience, face-to-face.
“When you go into someone’s home, and particularly when you're a guest in their home, there is a space for a kind of intimate, interpersonal connection that’s so hard to find otherwise,” says Kyung Gross.
“Every one of our classes starts with people feeling sort of awkward, uncomfortable because they’ve just knocked on a stranger's door and maybe gone to a neighborhood they’ve never been to before," she says. "And at the end, everyone is hugging. People are exchanging phone numbers. They feel like instructors are their new favorite aunt.”
