March is Women’s History Month, a time to honor women’s accomplishments in various fields. However, sexism is still present in the food industry. An age-old stereotype persists — women who cook are housewives, while men who cook are professional chefs. Only 22% of head chefs in the U.S. are female, and even those who do find success face harassment and unequal pay. This list of women cookbook authors highlights the very prevalent contributions of female chefs to the culinary industry. These 15 chefs combine their expertise with their culture to create masterpiece recipes, demonstrating that women who cook at this level are professional chefs.
Kristina Cho
Cho grew up doing homework and helping out at her family’s Chinese restaurant in Cleveland. Her first cookbook, Mooncakes and Milk Bread: Sweet and Savory Recipes Inspired by Chinese Bakeries, is one of the first modern English cookbooks on Chinese baking and won two James Beard awards. Her second book, Chinese Enough: Homestyle Recipes for Noodles, Dumplings, Stir-Fries and More, wasreleased last October. Cho studied architecture in college and pursued a career in this field, but found it unfulfilling. In 2017, she began her blog, Eat Cho Food, where she shares recipes. Her latest dishes include savory taro cake, shrimp and chive crystal dumplings, and mooncake ice cream sandwiches.
Bethany Kehdy
Kehdy is a Lebanese-American chef specializing in Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and North African food. Her cookbooks include The Jeweled Kitchen, Pomegranates and Pine Nuts, and The Jeweled Table. Her recipes include leek dolma and kibbeh. Kehdy was born in Houston but grew up in Beirut, Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War. In 2001 she won Miss Lebanon, then competed in Miss World in 2002 to raise funds for university. While visiting family in Hawaii, her uncle asked her to stay and help run his restaurant. In 2008, she moved to London and launched her blog, Dirty Kitchen Secrets, to share Lebanese food heritage. In 2010, she founded Taste Lebanon, which gives food tours across the U.K.
Andrea Nguyen
Nguyen’s recipes include almond shrimp balls and lemongrass beef stir-fry. She was born in Vietnam but fled to California at age six during the 1975 Fall of Saigon. After working as a bank auditor and a university administrator, she began writing restaurant reviews. While creating the proposal for her first cookbook, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, she wrote articles on Vietnamese cooking for newspapers such as the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal. She has since written numerous cookbooks, including The Bahn Mi Handbook, Vietnamese Food Any Day, and The Pho Cookbook, which won a James Beard Award.
Kiano Moju
Moju’s debut cookbook, AfriCali: Recipes From My Jikoni, showcases a Californian approach to African Cooking. Moju is of Nigerian and Kenyan descent. She grew up in Oakland, spending summers on her grandparent’s ranch in Kenya. She is a producer, director, and video host. Until 2019, she produced for Buzzfeed’s Tasty, where her videos gained over 100 million views. She now runs her own production studio, Jikoni Studios, where she has produced cooking videos for Food Networks and the USDA. Her non-profit, Jikoni Recipe Archive, documents the legacy of African and diaspora cooks, preserving this culture for future generations.
Sonoko Sakai
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Sakai’s most recent cookbook, Wafu Cooking: Everyday Recipes With Japanese Style, applies Japanese ingredients to everyday Western dishes, for example, using miso to enhance bolognese. Sakai was born in Queens but was raised between the U.S., Mexico, and Japan, as her father was an executive for Japan Airlines. Before entering the food industry, she was a documentary writer and producer and a film professor at UCLA. She then wrote articles and recipes on Japanese food for the LA Times and published her first cookbook, Poetical Pursuit of Food: Japanese Recipes for American Cooks. In 2008, she traveled to Japan to learn artisan noodle making and began teaching classes. In 2011, she created the organization Common Grains, which promotes Japanese food with a focus on grains. She has also written a children’s book called Mai and the Missing Melon.
Paola Velez
Velez is a pastry chef who grew up between the Dominican Republic and the Bronx. Her cookbook, Bodega Bakes: Recipes for Sweets and Treats Inspired by My Corner Store, features desserts with an Afro-Caribbean influence, such as guava lemon bars, coquito cheesecake, and plantain sticky buns. After training at a French culinary school in Orlando and studying under a chocolatier in Brooklyn, Velez moved to Washington D.C. and worked as a pastry chef at Milk Bar, a famous dessert restaurant. She co-founded Bakers Against Racism, a movement to raise money for social causes through baking. In 2020, the organization hosted the largest bake sale in history that united over 3,000 bakers nationwide to raise $2 million for Black Lives Matter.
Najmieh Batmanglij
Batmanglij was named the “grande dame of Iranian cooking” by the Washington Post in 2018. She grew up in Tehran, Iran but was forced to flee the country during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. While living in France, she studied cooking and published Ma Cuisine d’Iran, translating her mother’s recipes into French. She then moved to Washington D.C. and published eight English-language cookbooks, including Silk Road Cooking, A Taste of Persia, and Cooking in Iran. In 2023, she opened the restaurant Joon in Vienna, Virginia, where she is the executive chef.
Hari Beavis
This 25-year-old is from the English countryside and is a self-taught cook. Her cookbook, Country Comfort, includes rich and feel-good recipes, like steak sandwiches and pasta ragus, as well as quick cooks for busy lives, like a one-pan salmon curry. She gained fame for cooking classic meals on her TikTok, which now has 525k followers. Beavis uses her platform to promote body positivity and raise awareness for breast cancer while focusing on aiding Gen Z with mental well-being through her cooking.
Clarice Lam
Lam was raised in LA by immigrant parents from Hong Kong. After high school, she pursued modeling for 10 years, which allowed her to travel the world and gain an interest in foreign cuisines. After retiring from modeling, she attended the French Culinary Institute for Pastries, then worked as executive chef at The Chocolate Room in Brooklyn. In 2012, she opened The Baking Bean, a bakery offering natural, seasonal desserts. Her debut cookbook, Breaking Bao: 88 Bakes and Snacks From Asia and Beyond, celebrates Asian ingredients and heritage through desserts. It should also win an award for most creative cookbook title.
Julia Turshen
Turshen combines a love of cooking with a passion for social justice in her 2017 book Feed the Resistance: Recipes + Ideas for Getting Involved, whose proceeds were donated to the ACLU. She grew up in New York in a Jewish household. While studying English in college, she interned for Food & Wine magazine, a cookbook author, and a food show producer. After college, she co-authored many cookbooks and worked as a private chef, before releasing her first solo cookbook, Small Victories: Recipes, Advice + Hundreds of Ideas for Home Cooking Triumphs. In 2019 she started the podcast Keep Calm and Cook On, which discusses the intersection of food with various areas of life. She has written for The New York Times, the Washington Post, Vogue, Bon Appétit, and more, and sits on the Kitchen Cabinet Advisory Board for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
Nok Suntaranon
Suntaranon owns a Thai restaurant in Philadelphia named after her mother, Kalaya. She is from Yan Ta Khao, Thailand, where her mother owned a curry paste stall, but grew up with her grandmother in Bangkok. She worked as a flight attendant for Thai Airways before moving to Philly and opening Kalaya. She won a James Beard award in 2023 for best chef. Her 2024 cookbook, Kalaya’s Southern Thai Kitchen, also serves as a life manual, including the teachings she learned from her mom.
Claudia Roden
This 89-year-old author and cultural anthropologist is one of the leading writers on Middle Eastern cooking. She has authored 20 cookbooks covering cuisines from across the Middle East and North Africa, including The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, The Book of Jewish Food, and Arabesque— A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon. Roden was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt, and is of Syrian-Jewish descent. She moved to Paris and then London, where she began cooking but struggled to find Middle Eastern ingredients. Her cookbooks include recipes for couscous, kebabs, and apple latkes.
Lara Lee
Lee is an Australian chef of Indonesian and Chinese heritage. She is a food writer for numerous publications, including Bon Appetit, The New York Times Cooking Section, Food & Wine, and The Guardian. Her two cookbooks, Coconut & Sambal and A Splash of Soy, include recipes such as nasi goreng and sambal potatoes. Lee originally pursued a professional dance career but was forced to stop due to an injury. While working in technology sales in London, she began selling Indonesian dishes at a street food stall. Her success led her to quit her job and attend culinary school. She then opened a catering business serving high-profile venues and guests such as the British royal family.
Toni Tipton-Martin
Two of Tipton-Martin’s cookbooks, The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks, and Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking won James Beard awards. Tipton-Martin worked as a food and nutrition writer for the LA Times directly out of college. Later, at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, she was the first Black person to be a food editor at a large U.S. newspaper. As a culinary and cultural historian, Tipton-Martin researched influential cookbooks by Black Americans and collected recipes, focusing on broadening the story of African American food to include the working class, middle class, and upper class.
Joanne Lee Molinaro
Lee Molinaro is also known as the Korean Vegan. Her cookbook, blog, website, and TikTok all share this name. Lee Molinara’s parents fled North Korea, and she grew up in Chicago. While working as an attorney in 2016, she began her blog that re-imagines traditional Korean dishes with plant-based adaptations. In 2020, she began posting on TikTok about her experience as a Korean-American lawyer. After a video of her cooking went viral, she started using the account to share recipes while telling stories about her family. She currently has 3 million followers.