Everyone is afraid of Elizabeth Zott. Some fear her brilliance, some the razor-sharp pencil she keeps in her hair, and some the fourteen-inch knife in her bag (because every respectable cook uses only their own knives).
A bizarre twist of fate carried her from the Hastings Research Institute, where she dreamed of working on abiogenesis (the theory of how life arises from inorganic substances), to television—where she hosts the country’s most popular cooking show, “Dinner at Six.”
“Cooking is chemistry,” she says. “And chemistry is life. It gives us the power to change everything—including ourselves.”
Meanwhile, her five-year-old daughter, Madeline, raised under the supervision of a police dog for explosives and investigations named Six-Thirty, tries to find Nabokov and Norman Mailer at the school library—and to build a family tree that must include a place for Calvin Evans, just shy of five minutes being a Nobel laureate in chemistry, a fairy godmother, a grandfather in a striped prison robe, and a grandmother who hid from the tax police in Brazil…
First time in Russian!