Fatima Ali, a young Pakistani cooking enthusiast and an alumna of the Culinary Institute of America in New York, made waves in the national high cuisine scene when she won an episode of Food Network competitive cooking show Chopped. A few years later Fatima would get an even bigger break when she was invited to compete in season 15 of the highly acclaimed show Top Chef. While Fatima was not chosen as the winner of the Top Chef, she won the fan favorite prize. However, shortly after filming of this show Fatima was diagnosed with Eewing’s Lymphoma, a rare form of cancer, with only a year to live. The book Savor: A Chef’s Hunger for More by Tarajia Morrell captures Fatima’s incredible story about love for flavors and for life, as narrated by her from her hospital bed. This is a book that very well-written and is a page-turner for the sheer joie de vivre it possesses, despite being a story of a life short lived.
Savor is a story of a young woman and her lifelong aspirations of experimenting with food, a journey that began in her Nano or grandmother’s kitchen in Karachi, Pakistan. As a memoir, it predictably takes the readers along a path of discovering new flavors, new ways of cooking food, and traces Fatima’s journey from Pakistan to the Culinary Institute of America in New York, and through her internships at various restaurants in Manhattan. But this book is so much more. It takes the readers in a heartwarming journey of a young girl coming to age, finding her own identity as a queer Muslim woman who makes her way through the male-dominated cooking scene in the US. It is also a story of the strong women who came before her, her grandmother and her mother who made her journey possible.
Savor is also a story of Farezeh, Fatima’s mother, a pathbreaker herself in many ways. The book goes back and forth between the first person narratives of Fatima and Farezeh, as each woman navigated societal gender norms to set their own paths. The book starts with Fatima’s first memories of experimenting with ‘cooking’ at her grandmother’s kitchen, her visits to the market with her mom, and her memories of her father introducing Fatima and her brother to new food that he would bring back from his business travels. During these market visits Farezeh, Fatima’s mother, would round up poor hungry kids, and feed them delicious lunch in a local restaurant. While the early chapters focusing on Fatima would be about her childhood happy memories, Farezeh’s story told us about her divorce – still a taboo in Pakistani society, and her temporary migration to Austin, Texas in the US. As Farezeh went back to school for a degree in Child Development, Fatima and her brother Mohammed or Mo had to navigate an unfamiliar social context in their primarily White Texas suburbia. This was the first exposure to the US for Fatima, a country to which she would return later to fulfill her dreams of becoming a sous chef.
The second half of the book focuses mostly on Fatima’s own coming to age story, and her increasing curiosity about food. But it also focuses on family dynamics, sibling love, navigating the complex terrain of a step family, child sexual abuse, and much more. This is a story, above all, about tenacity and resilience, traits that she learned from Farezeh who would go to open her own child educational center for children with learning difficulties in Karachi. After her high school graduation in Pakistan Fatima would come back to the US, this time as a student at the Culinary Institute of America. This will be the start of her career as an executive chef and a restaurateur in the highly coveted dining scene in Manhattan. But this is the time when Fatima, free from the direct supervision of her family and trying to make a place for herself in the world, got to think deeply about friendships, work ethics, and her own sexual identity. Through Fatima’s evocative narrative and Morrell’s writing, the readers get to an almost visceral experience of the sheer hard labor of working as a chef. We get to live, work, and love the world through eyes of Fatima. We get to savor the flavors of olives on Fatima’s study abroad visit to Greece, do late night runs at NYC’s restaurant kitchens, climb up the stairs of her walk-up apartment in Kips Bay in midtown Manhattan, and shop for spices in the famed Kalustyans grocery store on Lexington Avenue. We also get to share excitement about getting called for ‘Top Chef’ show and the immediate heartbreak of receiving the devastating news of her health diagnosis.
The last part of the book is about Fatima’s steady decline in health, her sense of intense grief, but also of her resolution to share her story with the world. The book here, once again, starts sharing first person narrative of Fatima’s mother Farezeh. This is also the part of the book that might become emotionally hard for some readers. Fatima’s pain was too much. But Farezeh’s account of navigating the US insurance system and healthcare bureaucracies made Fatima’s treatments even more complicated than it needed to be. After her diagnosis, Fatima appeared in Ellen DeGeneres’ show in 2018, and it was incredible to see how brazenly she would laugh about her fate. But in this book, we get to know about the intense pain she was under. At the end of her life, Fatima chose to pass away peacefully, surrounded by those who loved her the most. Fatima’s biggest dream was to inspire other little brown girls who would dare to charter new paths for themselves. Through her life, though short-lived, she has definitely done so.
