On last night’s episode of The Late Show, Stephen Colbert featured the League of Kitchens, a recreational cooking school meets social enterprise in New York that runs immersive cooking classes taught by immigrant female home cooks in their own homes. Part of what makes the League so great is that it looks for the right hosts and invests in training them; another aspect is that it empowers the women and puts them in control of the exchange by staging the classes in their own domains. For the two-part segment, Colbert spoke with founder Lisa Gross and then made the jaunt out to Kew Gardens, Queens, to take a one-on-one class with Mumbai native and Indian cooking instructor Yamini Joshi. Colbert danced with Joshi like it was Bollywood, confirmed the healing power of large amounts of butter, and in return for his lesson shared with Joshi the traditional American rituals of eating canned whipped cream for dessert and taking a post-meal nap at the dinner table.
