Rachana Rimal is demonstrating how she chopped vegetables in Nepal, before she came to the US. The grey-haired grandmother gently lowers herself and her pink sari to the spotless kitchen floor and wedges a handmade iron contraption called a chulesi under her crossed legs. She takes a cauliflower floret and uses both hands to push it with impressive deftness across a bare curved blade sticking up from the base. “When I came here, I had to learn how to use those,” she says, gesturing at a nearby cutting board and chef’s knife, which in comparison seem almost like a children’s cooking set.
Cooking has always been a vital part of Rimal’s life, and it’s evident she finds both joy and pride in it. Growing up in Kathmandu in a house with 45 members of her extended family, the kitchen was always bustling, and she’d trail her mother learning recipes that had been in her family for ages. Now, decades later and half a world away, she is teaching a small group of students in her suburban New Jersey home some of those very recipes.
Photo: Kristin Teig
Photo: Kristin Teig
Rimal is an instructor with the League of Kitchens, which organizes intimate, immersive workshops led by highly skilled immigrant home cooks in their own New York City–area kitchens (and, since COVID, online). Through the hands-on preparation of classic dishes using traditional techniques, each class is a deep dive into the foodways of a specific culture, guided by hosts keen to share their expertise and stories. Some six thousand students have taken classes in the decade since it began, but now the cooking school is opening its kitchens to the world via its debut cookbook, The League of Kitchens Cookbook: Brilliant Tips, Secret Methods & Favorite Family Recipes from Around the World.
Lisa Kyung Gross founded the company in 2014, a decade after she had first found herself in need of a grandmother. She had been raised very close to both of her own, one an immigrant from Hungary and the other from Korea. But living on her own as an adult, she yearned for something no cookbook or online recipe could quite teach her: exceptional home cooking with the care, skill, and time-tested detail that only a grandmother could provide.
“I tried to teach myself, but nothing tasted as good as when my grandmother made it,” she recalls. “I realized that there are small details and nuances and tips and tricks often left out of written recipes and those are the difference between something being good and something being exceptional. So I had this fantasy of finding another grandmother who I could cook with and learn from in her home kitchen.”
Photo: Kristin Teig
Photo: Kristin Teig
Gross wrote the book alongside the 14 instructors—all grandmothers who have been cooking recipes passed down in their families for generations, hailing from Mexico, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ukraine, Greece, Afghanistan, India, Argentina, Japan, Uzbekistan, Lebanon, India, and Nepal. This treasure trove of global recipes—rich with cultural context and specific, practical culinary detail—stands it apart from other cookbooks and includes personal stories, family traditions, and secret tips.
