The Writer Who’s Teaching Kids How to Eat
Co-creator of book series ‘Kalamata’s Kitchen,’ Sarah Thomas went from self-publishing to Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment
In the storybooks that the sommelier-turned-writer Sarah Thomas read as a child, the protagonists never looked much like her. That barely mattered. Their worlds were too captivating for her to notice.
Before she was pouring wine at New York’s Le Bernardin, long before she passed a punishingly difficult exam to achieve Advanced Sommelier certification, she was just a little girl who loved books. Thomas inhaled the works of Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl during the sticky summers she spent visiting family in South India during the ’90s. The principals in these stories, Thomas observed, were always going mad for a taste of something: of black walnuts, of treacle tarts, of toffees that grew so tall that they disappeared into the sky.
She identified with these characters’ cravings fiercely. Her parents, immigrants from the Indian state of Kerala, cooked well and entertained often in her hometown of Somerset, Pennsylvania. Thomas longed for ice cream. For slices of pizza. For the deep-fried Indian snack with spiny arms, twisted into tight coils, called murukku.
