Raj Tawney's "Colorful Palate" — Reviewed by Ariana Taveras

In his debut memoir Colorful Palate, Raj Tawney promises a “tale of the mixed experience, one of millions that rarely gets told,” through the food he helped prepare and enjoyed with his family in his formative years. Tawney’s story starts off a bit clunky—prose mirroring life—when a less than perfect first day of school in white suburbia ends in tears. After school, at just five years old, Tawney awakens to his unique identity when his mother comforts him by teaching him to make Loretta’s Tandoori Chicken. While dunking meat into a spice-filled bowl for marinating, she reveals that she is not Indian like his father, but Puerto Rican and Italian—a surprise for Tawney. The chapter ends with a recipe for this meal. In fact, each chapter of the book ends with the recipe of a food prepared or eaten, an unexpected sensorial entry into Tawney’s world. The recipes are named after the women that made them—Elsie’s Meatballs, Loretta’s Lolis, Elsie’s Arroz con Habichuelas—demonstrating that each meal is not just food for the belly, but food from the heart. About cooking a meal with his mother, Tawney writes, “My role as her assistant not only was a duty I took seriously, but it also relaxed me…As the minutes passed, my day’s woes were dissipating…”

In the text, Tawney leans into his relationships with his mother and grandmother, remembering their stories to contextualize their recipes and to honor them. While helping his Puerto Rican grandmother make meatballs, he asks her how she learned to make the Italian dish, and she responds, “‘I learned from Anthony Papa. His mother expected me to know…I wouldn’t have been a good wife if I didn’t.’” It’s easy to empathize with these women who worked tirelessly under the pressures of cultural and familial expectations. Here, the book shines in the same place it leaves us wanting more. Tawney only nudges up against the intimacies of the experience of being multiracial, instead leaning into the experience of having a healthy taste for international delicacies.

Tawney’s best moments appear when he pulls back the curtain on the complicated adult relationships that governed his childhood. He recalls sitting on a staircase in a dark house, listening to his mother sob uncontrollably for reasons he did not know. He recounts memories of his mother learning of and conforming to Indian culture, while his father seemingly made no attempts to learn about Italian and Puerto Rican culture. Though Tawney points to these places of discomfort, he misses the opportunity to truly face or investigate them. The morning after his mother is made to feel like an outcast at an Indian gathering, she makes her husband his favorite breakfast—Lolis—which she learned to make from his own mother. Disappointingly, Tawney’s father breezes past the peace offering with a “No thanks, not hungry,” and the chapter jarringly ends once more with a recipe.

We are made to read between the lines—it’s not just the mix of cultures that is isolating to a child, but an emotionally absent father. It is not just that his mother is not Indian, but that her husband won’t embrace all parts of her. It is not just culture that’s the culprit causing his outsider-ness, but politics and class—which Tawney writes about too briefly.

Throughout, Tawney’s kitchen succeeds by serving up a metaphor for time: time with family, time for traditions, for grieving, investigating, inventing, making mistakes, and eventually, becoming independent. However, there is a world in which this book is two hundred more pages of deep storytelling. In that world, Tawney allows his complex history to grow into its own shape instead of cutting each chapter short for the sake of a cookbook-esque form. In that world, he trusts us with his unconventional story, and in his own words, is “unapologetic about its lack of classification.”