Cookbook author Priya Krishna was a world traveler as a kid. Because of her mom’s job in the airline industry, Priya was able to go to China, Egypt, France, and more, chronicling all of the new foods she tried on her travels in her journal. Now, as an adult, she’s turning her childhood travelogs into the cookbook she wishes she had growing up — Priya’s Kitchen Adventures. She tells Dan why she thinks anyone who wants to become a better recipe writer should write recipes for kids, and we hear from some of the young recipe testers she worked with on the book.
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The Sporkful production team includes Dan Pashman, Emma Morgenstern, Andres O'Hara, Nora Ritchie, and Jared O'Connell. Transcription by Emily Nguyen and publishing by Julia Russo.
Interstitial music in this episode by Black Label Music:
- “Hip Hop Slidester” by Steve Pierson
- “De Splat” by Paul Geoffrey Fonfara
- “Gust Of Wind” by Max Anthony Greenhalgh
- “New Old” by James Thomas Bates
Photo courtesy of Marc J Franklin.
View Transcript
Neha: Tell me about how the two of you work together on the recipes.
Radhika: When we were testing the recipes, I mostly cooked and Rishika tasted gave feedback, but she also helped with a lot of the easier recipes
Rishika: I tasted and I also helped on little things like stirring and cracking eggs.
Dan Pashman: This is 6-year-old Rishika and 13-year-old Radhika, talking with their mother, Neha, about testing recipes for a new cookbook.
Neha: And you're a super picky eater Rishika. So how did the cookbook help you with your picky eating?
Rishika: It helped me a lot. I got encouraged to eat more food.
Neha: And different kinds of food?
Rishika: Mm-hmm. I tried that panzanella once and it was so delicious.
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Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful, it’s not for foodies, it’s for eaters. I’m Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. So how did the kids you just heard get this coveted gig as recipe testers? Well, their cousin wrote the cookbook. That cousin is Priya Krishna. You’ve heard Priya here on the show before, she’s a reporter for The New York Times food section, and next week she’ll release Priya’s Kitchen Adventures: A Cookbook for Kids.
Dan Pashman: Back in 2019, Priya published Indian-ish: Recipes and Antics from a Modern American Family. It was a tribute to her mom’s mashups of Indian and American dishes, with recipes like “roti pizza” and “dosa potatoes with lime and ketchup.” Priya describes her new kids cookbook as the little sister to Indian-ish. Later on we’ll dig into that idea more, and talk about how these two cookbooks fit into the larger themes of Priya’s work.
Dan Pashman: But first I wanted to talk with her about the story behind this cookbook for kids, which features recipes from a wide range of cuisines. The seeds for the idea were planted in Priya’s childhood. Growing up, travel was a huge part of her life.
Priya Krishna: I had a Lisa Frank suitcase. Do you remember Lisa Frank in the '90s?
Dan Pashman: Vaguely.
Priya Krishna: It was like that artist that did, like, the unicorns and butterflies that looked like colorful explosions.
Dan Pashman: Right, right, right.
Priya Krishna: My mom used to, like, make fun of me because I would just dump all sorts of useless crap in the suitcase, like a doll that took up half the suitcase ...
Dan Pashman: LAUGHS]
Priya Krishna: My, like, Gameboy, and to this day I'm like ... I travel so often, I'm still horrible at packing.
[LAUGHING]
Dan Pashman: Priya's mom, Ritu, worked for the airline industry for decades, first as a software programmer, then as a manager. One big perk of the job? Free plane tickets. But there was a catch. She could only get free standby tickets. The whole family could go anywhere that the airline was headed to, for free, if there were empty seats on the flight at the last minute. If the flight was full, they were out of luck.
Priya Krishna: A big chunk of my childhood was just days spent at airports. You know, we had destinations in mind of where we would want to go and sometimes we would end up on a plane to the destination we wanted to go, sometimes we'd end up somewhere unexpected, sometimes we'd end up going nowhere at all because our fate was dependent on standby lists.
Dan Pashman: What was like the most extreme disparity between a place that where you thought was the leading contender for where you were going to go and where you ended up?
Priya Krishna: I mean, I think it was usually when we like packed for the Caribbean and then we ended up back at home ....
[LAUGHING]
Priya Krishna: And I had dreams of like being on the beach in the afternoon.
Dan Pashman: Right.
Priya Krishna: But I would just be in like suburban Dallas with a suitcase full of swimsuits.
Dan Pashman: Right, like this is not the Carribean.
Priya Krishna: Yeah.
[LAUGHING]
Dan Pashman: When they did go somewhere, the family had traveling down to a science.
Priya Krishna: We would be going through the security line and my mom would be militant. Like, never use the circular bins because you'll always leave stuff in the circular bins. Hold on to your boarding pass, keep it in your pocket at all times, like keep it in your hand because in some international countries they require you to show your boarding pass after you go to security. She taught me, you know, the best games to pass the time on the plane. This is before the era of in-flight entertainment. You know, we would play War and Mad Libs. To this day, I refer to cities by their airport codes not as cities because that's just how we were raised.
Dan Pashman: Right.
Dan Pashman: Throughout her travels, young Priya was often thinking about food. But not always in ways you might expect. Like when they served the in-flight meal on the plane ...
Priya Krishna: I would go from person to person during dinner service and ask if they were using their pack of butter and I would just store it in my fanny pack. I guess just for like if you need emergency butter. And I remember one time we landed in India and it was, like, July the heat was like oppressive.
Dan Pashman: Oh god.
Priya Krishna: And I had my fanny pack full of butter packets ....
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]
Priya Krishna: And I think we were like in Delhi and my mom just saw like liquid trickling down my leg, and was like, "What is in your fanny pack?"
[LAUGHING]
Dan Pashman: Did it ever come in handy, was anyone ever like eating a piece of toast, cooking something, and like, "What I wouldn’t give for a pad of butter?" [LAUGHS]
Priya Krishna: I’m ashamed to say that I think I ate a lot of them just by themselves. Just straight butter
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING]
Dan Pashman: Priya says she was an adventurous eater — it wasn’t all straight pats of butter. She went around the world with her family, keeping a journal of her travels, and of all the foods she tried along the way.
Priya Krishna: I just remember we went to China and I became obsessed with green tea and things flavored like green tea. Like, we went to France and I had chocolate mousse for the first time and it just, like, changed my .... changed my life. I had a crepe for the first time. I had a scone in England for the first time. In Egypt I tried hummus for the first time. This was the pre-Sabra era. And then, you know, my mom and I, we both loved talking about food, so like, after every trip, we would just talk about the things that we ate. We would just be so excited about like, "I wonder what was in that?" So we would come home, and my mom's first instinct, I feel like, when she tastes something delicious in a restaurant, is always like, I can make this at home.
Priya Krishna: Like, any challenge, she is up to. So we would taste something, we would come home, and my mom and I would do research, if we had like, neighbors who were from that country, we would ask them what they thought, and we would set about making our own version. And sometimes the version adhered. We were trying to make a version that was exactly the same as what we had, but sometimes we would put our own twist on it. You know, like my mom coming back from London, having discovered English breakfast, but making a version in which she stirs cumin seeds into the baked beans and puts chaat masala on top.
Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS] Take that, English people.
Priya Krishna: Yeah, yeah. [LAUGHS] Exactly, reverse colonization.
[LAUGHING]
Dan Pashman: Her mom’s enthusiasm for cooking rubbed off on Priya. As a kid, Priya loved experimenting in the kitchen. But even when she was in middle school, when she should have been old enough to make at least some basic meals by herself, her parents still weren’t so keen on that idea.
Priya Krishna: There are a number of reasons for this. One, I was left-handed, and they were all right handed. And they — just the sight of me using, like, a knife with my left hand was very jarring for them. The second thing is I had a horrible habit of leaving ovens on, leaving stoves on ...
Dan Pashman: That sounds like a better reason to not let you cook.
Priya Krishna: Yeah. I was just so forgetful. And so if I cooked, it was usually with heavy parental supervision, so this is like how my mom and I bonded, is like we would set aside an afternoon, set aside an evening, and she would closely supervise me as I cooked.
Priya Krishna: And when I was little, you know, a lot of it was my mom and I kind of making things up as we go, getting recipes from friends, but eventually I got really interested in kids cookbooks. And I was gifted one called the Pretend Soup Cookbook. And I loved that cookbook for so many reasons, it introduced me to like popovers and green spaghetti, a.k.a. pesto with pasta. I'd never tried these things before. But I remember one thing that stood out to me from that book — and a lot of the kids cookbooks that I was gifted in the, you know, coming years was like, the food felt like kid food, like it felt like I was reading off a kid's menu. And I was one of those kids who, like, didn't always want the kid's menu food. I wanted the adult food. And I think I wanted to feel like I could make food that adults would want to eat, and that would make me feel grown up.
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Dan Pashman: As soon as she graduated college, Priya dove into a career writing about food. She worked for the food magazine Lucky Peach for a while. She moved onto writing stories and recipes for Bon Appetit, and started making videos for their increasingly popular YouTube channel. In 2019, she published Indian-ish, which became a bestseller. It also got a reaction that Priya wasn’t expecting.
Priya Krishna: I started getting a lot of calls from children's book authors, and [LAUGHS] they said, "The tone in Indian-ish feels really youthful. We were wondering if you've ever given any thought to writing for kids," and, you know, I thought about like, okay, I could write like a children's book.
Priya Krishna: But then I was home, and my mom was showing me the Pretend Soup cookbook, and then, my mom was like, "Remember you used to write all those things that you used to eat in your journals?" I started reading my journals, and I was like, hey, there's like a pretty nice template of recipes here. And I thought, like, my childhood is a pretty cool — makes for a pretty cool narrative. This kid who gets to travel the world because her mom has this cool job in airlines. And so I just like went to my agent and was like, I would like to write a kid's cookbook. And in many ways it felt so out of left field, but in all these other ways, it just felt like a continuation of what I've always wanted to do with my work.
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Dan Pashman: Coming up, Priya figures out exactly how she’s going to write a kids cookbook that will continue the work she did on Indian-ish. But first, Priya recruits as kids recipe testers, and does not get the feedback that she was expecting. Stick around.
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Dan Pashman: Welcome back to The Sporkful, I’m Dan Pashman. If you’re a fan of Priya Krishna’s, you’re probably also a fan of Sohla and Ham El-Waylly, who also do videos for The New York Times food section. So I hope you’ll check out our new podcast, Deep Dish with Sohla and Ham. In each episode Sohla and Ham deep dive into a dish to share a surprising story behind it. Then they head home to cook up something inspired by it. It’s part detective show, part quirky quest through history, and part cooking class.
Dan Pashman: The final episode of season one was about bagels. Now, most bagels today are rolled by machines, but Sohla got to learn how to hand-roll bagels from someone who has been doing it for years: Steven Natali.
CLIP (STEVEN NATALI): My father owned the bagel store for 27 years.
CLIP (SOHLA EL-WAYLLY): Oh wow.
CLIP (STEVEN NATALI): And I said, you know, Dad, I want to learn how to roll bagels. because that's a skill. That's a real skill. Now it's like, I'm a robot for bagels, you know?
Dan Pashman: Steven showed Sohla how he rolls the perfect bagel, and then Sohla, who had never rolled bagels before, gave it a try.
CLIP (STEVEN NATALI): All right, I guess we can work with that. Oh, yeah, we're going to have to work with that.
CLIP (SOHLA EL-WAYLLY): [LAUGHS]
CLIP (STEVEN NATALI): I don't think we have any other option.
Dan Pashman: You’ll have to listen to the whole episode to hear how they turned out, and to hear the larger story of the bagel bakers’ union of the 1930s and '40s and their battles with the mob. This is a tale that includes everything from baker pranks to death threats. All four episodes of Season One of Deep Dish are right here in The Sporkful feed, just scroll back to January and February to check them out.
Dan Pashman: All right, back to my conversation with Priya Krishna, whose kids cookbook Priya’s Kitchen Adventures comes out next week and is available for pre-order right now.
Dan Pashman: In 2021, Priya was a seasoned recipe writer, and bestselling author. But she’d never written recipes for kids. And when she was younger, cooking in the kitchen, she’d often forget to turn off the stove. So she realized her recipes needed to talk to two audiences: kids, and their parents.
Priya Krishna: You're like, all right, I don't want them to have to do, like, intense chopping. I want minimal special equipment required, food processors, blenders. I want it to be like, to just be like self-contained, like a kid, a cutting board and, you know, maybe some measuring cups and a pot — minimize cleanup, because who's the person who's gonna end up doing the dishes? The adult.
Dan Pashman: So the recipes needed to be accessible. But she didn’t want them to sound like the kid's menu. She wanted her readers to feel like they were cooking grown-up food, from all over the world. In the France chapter, there’s a recipe for artichokes with butter. From Mexico, she has watermelon Agua Fresca. From Japan, Salmon Onigiri. But how best to create recipes from a range of cuisines in a way that kids could understand them?
Priya Krishna: I feel like anyone who wants to become a better recipe writer should write a recipe for kids, cause it really teaches you, like, how to write clearly and how much jargon we use in recipes. Certain phrases have become so common in cookbooks that we just don't think about what they actually mean and if it's the clearest way to say something. Like, saute onions until translucent. I was like, well, I don't really think that's a useful instruction for a kid. What does that mean? What is translucent? So you think, like, okay, saute the onions until you can, like, smell that they're getting sweet, till you can almost see through them and into the pan.
Priya Krishna: One of the hardest ones was folding whipped cream into chocolate. At first, I literally just had it as like fold whipped cream into chocolate. And then I had that moment where I was like, "Oh, wait, that's not actually clear at all."
Dan Pashman: Right.
Priya Krishna: You know?
Dan Pashman: Kids are like trying to fold a shirt or something.
Priya Krishna: Yeah, exactly.
Dan Pashman: Right.
Priya Krishna: And so I was in a group chat with a bunch of friends and I was like, "If you had to describe folding chocolate — whipped cream to chocolate to a kid, how would you describe it?" And I got a bunch of responses and then I basically read the responses and then got whipped cream and the chocolate out and sort like physically doing it.
Dan Pashman: Like, in a very literal way. Like, I'm gonna do exactly what this tells me to do.
Priya Krishna: Yeah, exactly. And I figured out like, okay, I have to — like you're, you're putting the spatula in, you're moving the bowl, while you're moving the spatula and you're doing it at a circular motion. And you really like break down what are the steps involved in folding. And as I was writing this, I was like, you know what? Like, an adult recipe should just explain what folding is.
Dan Pashman: Right.
Priya Krishna: Why do we say fold and assume everyone knows what that means?
Dan Pashman: In the book Priya ended up describing folding like this: “What you do is scoop the whipped cream into the bowl with the melted chocolate is as few scoops as possible. Then use a rubber spatula to slice vertically down the middle of the chocolate and cream, lifting some of the cream and chocolate mixture over the rest, while moving the spatula in a wide circular motion.”
Dan Pashman: And that sounds pretty good, but to be sure it worked, Priya assembled a team of kid recipe testers. Some of her relatives have kids, so she got them involved, and those relatives enlisted more kids.
Dan Pashman: You've written recipes, Priya, for major publications — Bon Appetit, New York Times. And I know that in that process you work with high level pros who are giving you feedback on your recipes. Compare that feedback to the feedback of your little kid and tween recipe testers.
Priya Krishna: I have never worked with better recipe testers.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] Why?
Priya Krishna: They were amazing. I feel like, you know, when you're an editor, they teach you, like, the compliment sandwich. Like, start with something nice, then give the feedback, then say something nice again. Kids don't know about compliment sandwiches.
Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]
Priya Krishna: They just are going to tell it to you exactly ... Exactly as it is. Exactly how they felt. I found it very refreshing. The feedback I got was just so clear cut. They didn't mince words. Oftentimes they either loved it or they hated it. Like I remember there was a noodle recipe that I developed from the Japan chapter, and one kid just said, "Yucky," like he literally was just like, "Yucky.
[LAUGHING]
Dan Pashman: And did that one make it in?
Priya Krishna: I cut it. It's not in the book anymore.
Dan Pashman: Oh okay, a I'm like, I don't remember seeing that one. Are there any other specific bits of feedback that stand out?
Priya Krishna: Kids would really pick up on things that I just didn't think that they would pick up on.
Dan Pashman: Like what?
Priya Krishna: So like, you know how crepe batter is like this really amazing balance of sweet and salty so that it lends itself to both putting Nutella in it ...
Dan Pashman: Right, or ham and cheese.
Priya Krishna: But you can also put ham and cheese.
Dan Pashman: Right.
Priya Krishna: And it's mild enough, but flavorful enough that it can go in both directions. A kid wrote exactly that in their feedback. They were like, "I tried the crepe by itself and I was so amazed at how it could taste equally good with cheese as it did with chocolate." And I was like, wow, that's really ... That's really profound.
[LAUGHING]
Dan Pashman: Sometimes the feedback went beyond observations, and turned into really useful notes. Like when Radhika, Priya’s cousin who you heard at the start of the show, was testing the Dahi Bhalla from the Indian Chapter. Here’s Radhika:
Radhika: When I tried that the first time, it was really good, but there were leftovers. So I let them sit overnight, and the next day, everything marinated together and became even more flavorful and really delicious.
Dan Pashman: Priya liked that note so much, she included it in the Dahi Bhalla recipe in the book. But there’s another kind of reaction she sometimes got that she also loved.
Priya Krishna: The best feedback I could get — and this didn't always happen. Sometimes it was like a kid hated broccoli to begin with, and they still hate broccoli [Dan Pashman: Right.] after making this recipe. But sometimes it was like, "I don't usually like tomatoes, but roasted in this dish, I really liked them."
Dan Pashman: That was the feedback from Rishika, the other kid you heard at the start of the show. Rishika overcame her dislike of tomatoes to eat them in the panzanella.
Priya Krishna: Rishika ... She hates so many foods.
[LAUGHING]
Priya Krishna: She has so many food preferences, and so it was an interesting test, especially with Rishika, to be like, "Can I get Rishika to like corn?"
Dan Pashman: The answer to that is yes! She did! Rishika said that she really liked the corn when recipe testing, even though she had a hard time eating it, because she had lost so many of her baby teeth. And both kids did more than test recipes for the book, they’re in many of the photos.
Priya Krishbna: Oftentimes we would just put the dish in front of them and be like, "Do what you would do with this," or like, "Cook it how you would cook it," and we would end up with a photo that we didn't expect. Like for example, we put a bowl of ramen in front of Radhika and she sort of struggled to use the chopsticks but eventually kind of figured it out, and so in the book you see this series of photos of her, like, figuring out how to use chopsticks and feed herself the noodles.
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Priya Krishna: They are the unofficial mascots of the book. They not only tested recipes, but they were hand models and actual models in the book. I really wanted brown faces, brown hands. I wanted people to know that this was coming from a brown narrator, and I feel like they sort of just became, like, perfect stand ins for my younger self.
Dan Pashman: So Priya looked for recipes with her younger self in mind, recipes that felt exciting and grown up. That means there are recipes for udon with soft boiled egg, stewed fish, and an Egyptian koshari with a spicy vinegary sauce called Daqqa.
Priya Krishna: What I didn't wanna do was dumb down the flavors of the recipe. That was one thing I didn't touch. I wanted the recipes to feel clear, straightforward, but if they called for fish sauce, I wanted to keep the fish sauce in. If they called for chilies, I wanted to keep the chili in. And I would include a note that's like, if you don't like spicy, omit the chilies, decrease them. But when I say creating recipes that are simple and straightforward, I did not want that to mean whitewashed.
Dan Pashman: And Priya didn’t just want this book to look different from other children’s cookbooks, which as a whole are not super diverse. She also wanted to approach travel stories for kids in a different way. So alongside a photo of with her family, visiting England when she was younger, she writes that the British violently colonized India for hundreds of years. In the section on Trinidad and Tobago, she writes about the South Asians and West Africans who came through the country as forced laborers. She learned about some of these stories firsthand during her own childhood travels.
Priya Krishna: When I was writing about, for example, Egypt, I was reading my diaries and one of the things I noticed was going to the Cairo Museum and there being nothing there. Like it was such a sad museum with so little of the country's history and asking my mom and my mom explaining that all of that was in the British Museum, that the real Rosetta Stone was in the British Museum. There was just a replica in the Cairo Museum. And I don't think at the time I really understood about colonization and about, you know, the fact that so many of these countries have basically been pillaged for their wealth, but it just felt important to just not shy away from that, to talk about it.
Dan Pashman: And the more that Priya talked with kids, the more confident she became that they were ready for a cookbook like this one.
Priya Krishna: I'm really impressed with the way my cousins talk to their kids about racism, about inequality. Like, I spoke at my nephew Kai's class and he asked me what my preferred gender pronouns were and what my experiences were dealing with inequity in my industry. And I was like, you know what, like, we can have these conversations with kids.
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Dan Pashman: For Priya, this cookbook is about more than recipes and travel stories from around the world. It’s also about reframing what kind of food is accessible, what kind of food a kid, or grown up, could whip up when they’re in the mood.
Priya Krishna: I grew up in a world where in food magazines and cookbooks, the idea of simple and weeknight, the recipes you associate with that are very, like, white coded. And my hope is that that notion just doesn't exist for the next generation. And I think it starts with what people see as simple every day, weeknight, easy — and I try to use those words in this book. I try to normalize that as I make this ful on a weeknight, this, you know, easy hummus, this, you know, weeknight dal.
Dan Pashman: If a recipe was presented to an audience in food media, if the recipe sort of came from a non-european place, right, it would sort of be presented like: here’s a project ...
Priya Krishna: Yeah, like a project recipe. exactly. Exactly.
Dan Pashman: Right, but like if you are used to cooking with these ingredients, it’s something you could throw together on a Tuesday night.
Priya Krishna: Or like they would only choose the dishes from a cuisine that were like 12 ... like 15 ingredients.
Dan Pashman: Right.
Priya Krishna: You have to make like six spice blends, all these sub recipes. But every cuisine has difficult recipes and easy recipes.
Dan Pashman: As I said earlier, Priya calls this new kids cookbook the little sister to her previous book, Indian-ish. Her mission with Indian-ish was not just to explore her own Indian-American heritage through food, but also to challenge the very idea of what an American cookbook could be.
Dan Pashman: In 2019, the year Indian-ish came out, I had Priya here on the show, along with Madhur Jaffrey, the legendary Indian American actor and cookbook author. Madhur had written several iconic Indian cookbooks for American audiences starting in the '70s. She was always working to persuade non-Indians to get more comfortable with Indian recipes and ingredients, to stop viewing them as so foreign and different. At the live show where she and Priya were my guests, we discussed how much progress had been made.
Dan Pashman: I want to play a clip from that conversation for you, because this is something that I think about often. Are you cringing? [LAUGHS]
Priya Krishna: I’m like so — that was one of my favorite things I did for Indian-ish. I’m also like ... what was I like?
Dan Pashman: It was great. You were phenomenal, and I still think about that conversation a lot. And here's one clip that I think about very often.
Priya Krishna: Okay.
CLIP (PRIYA KRISHNA): In categories, like on Amazon, they separate books from American and International. And any book that, basically, isn't like roast chicken is put into the international category. But like, I was born in America. I was raised in America. And my parents now have lived in America longer than they have lived in India. We are as American as the roast chicken people. So I just wanted to [AUDIENCE LAUGHING] — I don't know, I just wanted to make it very clear, like this is an Indian cookbook but it’s also an American cookbook. We can be both. They’re not mutually exclusive.
Dan Pashman: So now here we are five years later. Where do you think we are since you said that?
Priya Krishna: I think progress has been made. Like I will say, in 2020, 2021, I saw a lot of authors of color getting big, big book deal, a lot of authors of color getting to write books that felt more like general reference books, people like Sohla, people like Hetty McKinnon, getting to write these books that were just ... These are just ... This is just how to cook, this is just everyday recipes.
Dan Pashman: Right.
Priya Krishna: I will say I still ... I still see Indian-ish get filed in international sections at Barnes Noble. And even though I put American family on the cookbook, people — I mean, people still don't — people just see Indian and they put it in international.
Priya Krishna: I think that if you just look at the apparatus of cookbooks in general, it's still a lot of white people at the top, a lot of white editors. I think we just have to think about who are the people in power and who are the decision makers. So, like, yes, we can be giving people of color cookbook deals, but then how are we treating those authors of color? How are we categorizing their books? How are we editing their books? Are we whitewashing their recipes? Are we treating their food in a way that feels true to them? Or are we trying to make it palatable for a white Western audience? And I think in that realm, we still have a lot of work to do.
Dan Pashman: Separate from the sort of internal machinations of the industry, the food cookbook publishing industry, just in terms of the way many average Americans view different cuisines, like in terms of the perception of Indian food [Priya Krishna: Yeah.] as being "foreign" versus just as American as roast chicken, where do you feel like we're at with that?
Priya Krishna: I actually think we've gone ... We've done ... We've done ... We've done good work.
[LAUGHING]
Priya Krishna: I get tagged weekly in people making dal, people making saag, people making aloo gobi, and they're not Indian. I think that we are at a really interesting moment where people's weeknight food is getting a lot more diverse.
Priya Krishna: I think cookbooks are to thank. I think TikTok is hugely to thank. Obviously, still, if you look at, you know, the top cookbooks, they're still white authors, white recipes a lot of the time. But I think just day to day, anecdotally, seeing what I'm seeing on my Instagram, I think we've made a good amount of progress. I feel really proud. I once wrote, like, "I want everyone to be making dal," and I think a lot of people are making dal.
Dan Pashman: Right! Yeah!
[LAUGHING]
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Dan Pashman: That’s Priya Krishna. Her new book is Priya’s Kitchen Adventures: A Cookbook For Kids. It comes out April 30th, but you can preorder it right now. You can also read her food writing at The New York Times, and check out her video series "On The Job" on The New York Times YouTube Channel.
Dan Pashman: We are giving away a copy of Priya’s Kitchen Adventures! To enter to win your copy, all you have to do is sign up for The Sporkful newsletter at sporkful.com/newsletter by May 10th. If you’re already on our mailing list, you’re already entered to this and all of our giveaways! Open to U.S. and Canada addresses only. Sign up now at sporkful.com/newsletter.
Dan Pashman: Next week, I talk with the iconic songwriter and record producer Benny Blanco. Hes collaborated with artists including Ed Sheeran to Justin Beiber to Rihanna, and many more. And now, he’s written his first cookbook. Turns out, this guy is obsessed with food. We're gonna talk about his love of food, and his love of throwing crazy house parties in L.A. That’s next week.
Dan Pashman: While you wait for that one, if you’re a picky eater or a parent of picky eaters, I hope you'll check out an episode from a few weeks back. It’s about growing up as a picky eater, and why so many people still judge picky eaters. Check out that episode wherever you got this one.
