The League of Kitchens Cookbook

Join us for a special book talk celebrating the launch of The League of Kitchens Cookbook, a vibrant collection of recipes and culinary wisdom from immigrant women across the globe. This debut cookbook brings together 14 home cooks’ treasured family recipes from Mexico, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ukraine, Greece, Afghanistan, India, Argentina, Japan, Uzbekistan, Lebanon, and Nepal. More than just a cookbook, it’s an invitation to explore global flavors, honor immigrant contributions to our food culture, and bring delicious, healthful dishes into your own kitchen.

The program will feature a discussion with Founder and CEO of the widely acclaimed League of Kitchens Cooking School, Lisa Kyung Gross alongside cooking instructors, Yipin Benon and Damira Inatullaeva.




About the Speakers:
Lisa Kyung Gross is the founder/CEO of League of Kitchens, a unique culturally immersive cooking experience in New York City and online where immigrant women, who are exceptional home cooks, teach their family recipes. LoK has been featured in Food and Wine Magazine, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Oprah Magazine, and on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, among others. Saveur called it "The multicultural cooking school you've been waiting for." 
As the daughter of a Korean immigrant and a Jewish New Yorker, Lisa was raised on one grandmother's denjang-guk and the other's matzoh ball soup. League of Kitchens is born out of her love of cooking, her connection to the immigrant experience, and her desire to connect people across differences. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters.

Yipin Benon was born in the small town of Silly in Burkina Faso in West Africa, though she grew up living throughout the country. Her father, a teacher, would move to a new town every few years to work at a different school, bringing Yipin and her seven brothers and sisters with him. They were her closest friends, so she never felt alone, even at a new school—they would walk to and from classes every day as a crew, always there for each other.
Yipin always helped with the cooking when she was growing up. As a very young girl, she learned the art of making a cooking fire—carefully building a stand out of rocks to hold the pot and gathering sticks, dried leaves, and other kindling to ensure the larger cooking logs would catch fire. When she was seven, she was assigned her own dish: Tô. These cornmeal-based dough balls are a staple of Burkinabé cuisine, and with the guidance of her mother and older sisters, Yipin soon became a master at making the perfect tô.
In 2010, Yipin moved to New York City, where she went on to get a master’s degree and become an accountant. She also became well-known in her community for the delicious West African food that she would make and sell on 125th Street in 2011-2012; she now loves to teach her West African friends in New York how to recreate the food from their home countries with ingredients in the United States. Today, she lives with her husband and three young children in the Bronx.

Damira Inatullaeva is originally from Samarkand, an ancient city that lies on the Silk Road, which she refers to as “the historic crossroads of East and West.” She loved growing up in such a diverse country, where she learned to cook from her mother, grandmother, mother-in-law, and friends of many backgrounds. 
For Damira, food, family, and culture are inseparable. She fell in love with cooking as a child on her grandmother’s farm, helping to prepare meals for her large family, which included many grandchildren. Damira and her husband left Uzbekistan in 2013 to be closer to their three children who were already living in the United States, and to do something new—Damira believes it’s always important to try new things and to have many life experiences.
While she was still in Uzbekistan, Damira was a doctor until her country’s mandatory retirement age of fifty-five. Now, she is doing what she loves most: cooking and hosting people at her dinner table. In 2018, she cooked the first ever Uzbek dinner at the James Beard House, which was also the first halal meal to be offered there. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn and has three grown children and four grandchildren.
Damira’s remarkable meals have been featured by Food & Wine, Smithsonian Magazine, The kitchn, The Splendid Table, Grub Street, Epicurious, Tasting Table, Chowhound, Brooklyn Magazine, Epicure & Culture, Quartz, Eater, and Brooklyn Based, and the Chicago Tribune.



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• Please contact programs@mcny.org with any questions or ticketing issues.
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