HostJane · Follow
Published in · 6 min read · Mar 6, 2023
Prodigiously talented, one young American chef named Ali finds inspiration following top women chefs including Julia Child, Dominique Crenn, and Hélène Darroze to survive the male-dominated world of professional cooking. On the threshold of her career, Ali hosts online cooking classes from her kitchen chopping board on HostJane.com and enjoys creating healthy, low carb, historical twists on classic American dishes.
A true American girl follows her inner lodestar even in times of adversity. She finds courage to take on the unknown, and isn’t daunted by the institutionalized gender discrimination that roils the restaurant business. We support her, because the statistics are bleak. Massive gender inequality in the restaurant and food industry — right across the nation — men still accounting for 80% of chefs and head cooks with only a tiny fraction of the 1,460 Michelin star restaurants across the USA even having a female head chef.
Whatever veneer Netflix’s popular cooking reality TV shows and their male stars have given the industry, the glamor doesn’t camouflage the actual reality addressed in a Chef’s Pencil 2022 study that evidences not just in the U.S but mirrored across other highly-industrialized economies, women are marginalized. Only a small handful of Women chefs are able to wealth generate in an industry where harmful inequalities prevail.
From top level celebrity chefs to culinary students starting out, the policy conditions around education and workplace HR practices in the restaurant business including decision-making on hiring, training, pay, and promotion of women are tightly controlled to favor continued male ownership.
In the United Kingdom, only 18.5% of over 250,000 professional chefs are women. Sweden, which represents itself on official websites as “a feminist government” and is often characterized as a progressive society for gender roles, doesn’t even have one single female head chef in any Michelin-starred establishment in their entire country — a confronting barometer of the scale of the problem. Peggy Chan, a female head chef in Hong Kong describes a chauvinistic assumption that pervades in her industry, “that men — and only men — should be running commercial kitchens.”
Faced with the archaic reality, Chef Ali decided to try a new tack inspired from the American Girl dolls that were part of her youth and themed around historical settings to teach U.S. history. Before selling her company to Mattel, American Girl’s founder Pleasant Rowland had the idea of telling stories from America’s past through children’s dolls. Ali — a fan of Rowland — buried herself in library research and decided to apply that idea to food with a line of historically-accurate recipes that reimagine culinary dishes of national, state and regional importance from America’s revolution and frontier past, integrated with Ali’s cooking flair, and her own secret sauce. A kind of “patriotic food”.
Ali’s centerpiece recipe is her 1778 Apple Pie inspired from recipes recorded in history books as being popular with patriots at the Continental victory at Saratoga in 1777 and the Treaty with the French in 1778. Scouring local markets and farms to find the right type of Apples and recreating past methods of pie baking, Ali developed her all-American version from historic notes published in John T. Edge’s cookery reference, Apple Pie: An American Story.
Another example of Ali’s researched recipes, Emancipation Grits, a modern twist on fresh Hominy Grits from a historical Library of Congress (LOC) record of dishes served on January 1, 1863, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Extraordinary French twists on New Orleans Gumbo, Jambalaya, and legendary Po’ boys from the New Nation (1783–1815) period formulated with the assistance of historic Congressional records are a hallmark of Ali’s cooking. She has delved into America’s rich and tumultuous history to create dishes filled with the cooking flavors of France, the Netherlands and England — the Old World Europe which established modern U.S. cooking traditions.
Her cooking is described by her best friends as “never-even-thought-of” culinary gems that lift traditional Southern cuisine. Ali credits her LOC research on 1700s and 1800s cooking as helping to bring back to life forgotten American traditional dishes and a cooking style used during the American War of Independence.
Using food methods documented in what is now Boston, Massachusetts, that trace back to the Civil War era and Reconstruction (1861–1877) when these dishes first appeared on American dining tables, Ali’s well thought out and prolific menu provide recipes that are as delightful to read as they are as satisfying on the tongue.
However, perhaps the most novel aspect of Ali’s cooking comes through her experimentation in gastronomy, where she has pulled off combining historical American recipes with cooking methods made famous by 1970s female cooking icon, Alice Waters who broke new ground when she opened Chef Panisse in 1971.
“It’s soooo good it doesn’t even taste like keto!” is Chef Ali’s trademark tag line in cooking classes. Finding ways to promote her unique recipes without her IP being stolen has been tough. With mixed results, HostJane lent Ali use of the company Tik Tok account to showcase the recipes she doesn’t mind sharing. She can work in any kitchen and demonstrates her skill and hands-on approach to turn simple ingredients found in any Walmart or Whole Foods into mouthwatering, weight-conscious meals on even low budget shopping lists.
Everyone loves eating good food. This Women’s History Month (Mar 1-Mar 29) where the history of Women’s suffrage is reflected upon in schools and colleges across the nation, isn’t it true that a national conversation about the gender discrimination that confronts professional women chefs preparing food in a male-dominated industry is yet to be had? It’s completely missing and should include American women like Chef Ali and her thousands of female peers looking for careers in catering. Since celebrity male chefs never use their platforms to address gender inequality in their business, there’s never been a better month than March.
We see Ali’s unapologetic cooking style and entrepreneurial creativity mixing the raw taste of America’s most loved flavors with historic cuisine, and inside that, her boldness of spirit to share the message imparted to young women and girls by Pleasant Rowland’s American Girl brand. That you can be the best.
If you love food and appreciate the soul of America’s cooking, you’ll love Ali’s Tastyykitchen, and your taste buds will thank you later! She is easily HostJane’s best studio pick for March 8, which is not incoincidentally, International Women’s Day as we strive to #EmbraceEquity.
Book chef Ali exclusively on HostJane. She runs a 1 hour long healthy cooking class to show how her historical treats combined to make modern versions of keto heart chocolate and pasta dishes. Her cooking is centered on selection of healthy, low in cholesterol ingredients that avoid saturated fat for healthier hearts and lifestyles.
There is so much good about Ali’s interesting brand of historical (patriotic!) American cooking she has already held online cooking classes with customers from both sides of the U.S., Hawaii, the U.S. Virgin Islands, as far away as Toulouse and a military family living in Japan.
