Ayesha Curry just debuted her new cookbook, The Seasoned Life: Food, Family, Faith, and the Joy of Eating Well (Little, Brown and Company), and it is full of stories and recipes that mix in Jamaican, Asian, American Southern influences, and more.
In her new cookbook’s introduction, she writes:
Good food has the power to make the moment. I grew up in a Toronto suburb called Markham, and my mom had a salon set up in the basement of our home. When I was 6 or 7 years old, I remember sitting in the kitchen of our home, watching my sitter, Dora, make Trinidadian curry and roti for my mom’s clients every Saturday. I would run back and forth from the basement to the kitchen passing out the warm, wrapped-up roti. Good food made everyone okay with the occasional wait.
Growing up in Toronto, I took it for granted that it was perfectly normal for people from every corner of the world to live together. In our neighborhood, there were northern Indian restaurants on nearly every corner. And if it wasn’t Indian, it was a restaurant serving Ethiopian, Greek, or the best darn Chinese food you’ve ever tasted.
This melting pot of culture made me feel right at home with my Jamaican-Chinese-Polish-African American heritage. (At school, kids called me “The United Nations.”) But when I was 14 years old, our family moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. It was a big change, but a good one. I’m now a lover of biscuits and sweet tea! North Carolina is also where I first encountered the best barbecue I’ve ever tasted. Today, I like to say that I am a passionate duel citizen: I love both my home countries—and their food.
The first time I heard that Ayesha Curry was mixed race and part-Asian was from a Facebook post about how she registered to be a bone marrow donor. Mixed-race people have a much harder time finding life-saving bone marrow donors, and Ayesha Curry did a cheek swab because there was a drive to get more mixed-race Asians to register.
The introduction of her cookbook gives a peek into Curry’s upbringing in Toronto, Canada and North Carolina, as well as how her first dates with now husband NBA MVP Stephen Curry went (there were chai lattes involved). Other gems are the wonderful family stories sprinkled throughout the cookbook.
Ayesha Curry has already accomplished a lot in her life — at 27 years-old, she has been dubbed a “millennial mom” to two young children.In addition to the debut cookbook, Curry currently has a pop-up restaurant, International Smoke, at the Mina Test Kitchen in San Francisco and will be opening her first restaurant, of the same name, in Waikiki next Spring.
Often heralded as a perfect mom and wife, Ayesha doesn’t hesitate to express in her book that cooking some of the more involved recipes doesn’t happen everyday for her. What keeps the notes in the book interesting is that she includes both simple, homemade recipes with more complex ones. Stephen Curry even has one recipe in there. (The cutest page is possibly a short interview between Ayesha Curry and her daughter Riley, who sometimes cooks with her mom).
Excerpt above reprinted with permission from Little, Brown and Company.