Cooking as Connection: A New Book Celebrates Immigrant Home Kitchens
- Rebecca Gilbuena
- 17 hours ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 16 hours ago
In Back of House, a new cookbook from photographer-writer duo Ryan Stopera and Diana Albrecht, food isn’t simply something to plate and serve. The book features 12 recipes and the histories behind them, shared by home cooks whose lives stretch across borders and generations. It is part photography book, part oral history, part love letter to immigrant labor in kitchens big and small. And, yes, there are recipes—though not the kind that tell you precisely how many teaspoons.
“This is not a traditional cookbook,” Ryan says. “Some of the recipes are written as if by an immigrant mother—you have to just know it to feel it.”
Ryan and Diana each documented six cooks, split the photography and storytelling, and shaped the project together. The result is a hardcover book that they hope will sit not on a kitchen shelf, but on a coffee table—somewhere easy to reach when friends or family are gathered. The stories matter as much as the dishes. Maybe more.
Ryan talks about the process of building trust, listening to cooks talk about their families, their histories, and the weight of being immigrants in a country that has grown increasingly hostile toward them.
“Over the last year and a half, I’ve been able to strengthen existing relationships and have really intentional conversations,” he says. “The book reminds us how beautiful our communities are—how much richness is already here.”
The project itself is a testament to community power: seed funding from a grassroots cultural grant, followed by a community-led fundraiser that covered nearly half of the printing cost. People didn’t just believe in the book. They invested in it.
The Forward: A Call to Eat Together
Food critic and cultural storyteller Ali Elabaddy wrote the forward. For him, food is where relationships sharpen and soften all at once—like Ramadan dinners where families rotated houses, sharing meals and stories late into the night.
He points out that restaurant “signature” dishes often trace back to line cooks and dishwashers—the unnamed innovators in the back of the kitchen who adapt recipes on the fly, mixing old memories with the ingredients they have access to. Back of House honors that spirit and the people whose cooking shapes how all of us eat, even if their names are rarely known.
Ali also frames the book as a call to action in difficult times. When politics grow harsh and immigration becomes a lightning rod for anger, community meals become acts of resistance.
“Forming community is the first step,” he says. “But feeding that community—showing up in both the joyful moments and the hardest ones—that’s what actually sustains us.”
Nat’s Drunk Chicken, and the Legacy of Feeding Many
One of the stories in the book belongs to Nat Mendez, whose recipe for “drunk chicken” is an adaptation of their grandfather’s.
Their grandfather, who immigrated from Mexico and was deported multiple times before becoming a citizen, helped form Wisconsin’s first migrant farm labor union. His life’s work was about improving conditions like housing, pay and food for other workers building their lives far from home. His cooking, too, was meant for gatherings.
Nat’s adaptation combines their grandfather’s original beer-and-adobo marinade with a soy-sauce-based technique used for tenderizing skirt steak in her family. Two recipes from two sides of the family, woven together the way identities are: over time, through conversation, through improvisation. Nat's father tasted it and said, “Damn, this chicken is really good,”— high culinary praise!
In a time when immigration is often discussed through fear instead of reality, Back of House asks us to slow down, to sit at a table and remember that every culture has passed down recipes like gifts.
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