First off, don’t let the photo above mislead you. Yes, I’m holding my latest favorite recipe book but we don’t eat our chickens. In actuality, I am polling the hens to see whether they prefer I use their eggs for cottage cheese pancakes or fudgy icebox brownies. Both recipes are among other standouts in Phyllis Grant’s new book, “Everything Is Under Control.”
Despite the title, which probably bugs potential readers in this time of out-of-controlness , Grant’s book might be the perfect pandemic read. Like peeking in someone else’s diary, you get a vicarious thrill flipping through its pages. Stuck in your home, you can travel through Grant’s interesting life. I guarantee she’ll recharge your kitchen battery.
Here’s the basic premise: a California girl graduates high school and moves to New York to study ballet at Juilliard. A lot of pressure. She gives up dance to work in a famous kitchen under a tempestuous chef. Even more pressure. She matures, falls in love, becomes a wife, and a mother experiencing severe postpartum depression. All the pressure.
Through it all, Grant finds comfort and pleasure in food. Cooking relieves the pressure.
The matriarchs of her family make appearances. These were some of my favorite passages. Their ways of cooking differ from hers. But she still uses her grandmother Phyllis’s KitchenAid mixer, circa 1943.
About three-quarters through the book, you get to the recipes. Grant explains that they’re designed as cooking templates for you to adapt to the stuff in your own fridge. Two cooking tidbits I will always remember about this book: that a pigeon is done when “it’s firm like an excited woman’s breast”, and that guests who leave a little wine in their glasses at Grant’s parties may ingest it at the next party as part of a braise.
Part memoir, part cookbook, it’s really a delicious stew of contradictions. I loved how casual but intense the book feels. How short but meaty its chapters. How it reads like poetry and also like a diary. How sometimes her stories whetted my appetite and sometimes completely grossed me out. How the cover could be pomegranate seeds or drops of blood.
Isn’t that what life in a pandemic is? Daily contradictions? Click here to purchase from an independent bookseller.
By the way, the hens voted for the brownies and I have to say they were so rich and velvety, I felt like a vulgar little Persian concubine eating them straight from the pan at 9:30 on a Tuesday. The secret ingredient that makes them so fab? Cinnamon.