Recipe for success? Not always

“Lessons in Chemistry” by Bonnie Garmus has been on The New York Times best-seller list for over 30 weeks. It’s a funny, intensely feminist, thought-provoking novel about single mother Elizabeth Zott, living in California in the 1960s, who uses her authentic scientific skills to achieve reliably perfect results on a TV cooking show that’s enthusiastically embraced by a vast audience of women.

When pitching the idea for the show to his boss, Elizabeth’s producer Walter Pine says, “Did I tell you that Mrs. Zott can cook? I mean, really cook. She’s an actual chemist. Works in a lab with test tubes and things. Even has a master’s in chemistry. … I was thinking we could play up her credentials; give housewives someone to relate to.”

The boss is unimpressed. “You’re killing the show before it even gets started,” he tells Walter, pooh-poohing the idea of Elizabeth wearing a lab coat on set and demanding “tight dresses, suggestive movements. … What was that thing she said last week, about being unable to solidify helium at absolute zero. Was that supposed to be a joke?”

You can see what Elizabeth is up against. Yet she stands her ground.

“These are just normal housewives you’ll be talking to,” Walter tells her. Elizabeth glares back in a way that scares him. “There’s nothing average about the average housewife,” she corrects.

My book club discussed “Lessons in Chemistry” during our December gathering. As much as I enjoyed the book, I admit I don’t cook a la Liz Zott. Which has led to an unfortunate record of cooking and baking mishaps.

One of the worst was last January, when the previously mentioned book club (12 women) gathered at my house. Each host serves desserts and wine to accompany the literary criticism and conversation. I’d made chocolate cupcakes, paired with ample pours of pinot noir.

Everything seemed to be going OK until I noticed that about half of every cupcake wasn’t being consumed. Did I neglect to add sugar? Too much salt? Weird texture?

Nope. It turned out that my practically lifelong obsession with cutting back on calorie-heavy oil in recipes and replacing it with applesauce or pumpkin or mashed bananas resulted in cupcakes that firmly adhered to their paper liners. Nobody could extract the entire cupcake without scattering crumbs all over themselves, the floor, and the furniture.

This was pretty embarrassing. I blame my mother and grandmother for my recipe-modifying ways. Although my German-born grandmother was an excellent cook, she practiced the pinch-of-this, scoop-of-that method of measuring ingredients. Over time, her pinches and scoops became highly accurate, with tasty results.

My mother, although competent in a kitchen, embraced the availability of mid-20th-century convenience foods, and preferred to use frozen, canned, and prepackaged ingredients instead of making everything from scratch. Her repertoire of dishes–meat loaf, spaghetti with tomato sauce from a jar, baked chicken, roasted pork loin, mashed potatoes, cake from a box mix–was reliable but not adventurous.

There was an occasional presentation of liver, mostly fed to Pal, the Dachshund/beagle lurking beneath the table. I guess my dad liked liver, but I sure didn’t.

So I adopted my grandmother’s pinch-and-scoop methods without acquiring her expertise, producing wildly unpredictable results.

This approach is not encouraged by rigorous magazines such as Cook’s Illustrated, which offers recipes tested by an army of professionals with proven techniques plus an explanation as to why everything works and, sometimes more importantly, why they don’t work.

It uses step-by-step illustrations, photos, tips on substitutions, reviews of popular ingredients and cooking technologies, and more. I used to glance through its issues and consider taking a more science-based approach to cooking. But I quickly relapsed into my casual ways, with predictably uneven results.

Determined to do better after reading “Lessons in Chemistry,” I planned to follow instructions to the letter when preparing brownies for a casual Christmas dinner with friends. I followed the recipe exactly, down to using an actual measuring cup for oil (instead of pouring what appeared to be a suitable quantity into a coffee cup, or not using oil at all) and baking at the proper temperature in a well-lubricated pan for the recommended length of time.

Assorted knowledgeable cookbooks advised not to take the brownies out of the pan until they cooled completely. Fine. After removing the fragrant concoction from the oven at the end of its recommended baking time, I went for a walk on Christmas eve (chilly, but sunny), feeling smug about my newfound discipline.

When I returned to the kitchen and tried to remove the brownies, intending to smear them with chocolate icing for the next day’s feast, they wouldn’t budge. It was as if they had melded with the metal that contained them.

I scraped and dug out the now-hardened chocolatey mess, cursing Martha Stewart (who told me that oiling the pan would work as well as using a pan liner), then dumped the crumbs into a bowl. A panicked Internet search advised mixing the crumbs with milk, apple juice, and a bit more sugar. Then baking them again to make a pudding cake. Although unattractive, it turned out to be edible. So much for chemistry.

Book club is meeting at my house in a few days. Cupcakes will not be served. Just to be safe, there will be veggies, crackers and dip on the table, along with cookies produced by a baker with skills much better than mine.

This month’s book is the intriguing “Weather” by Jenny Offill, in which narrator Lizzie (a different Lizzie than the Elizabeth in “Lessons in Chemistry”) finds her otherwise agreeable, unexceptional life becoming distorted by by the fast-approaching disaster of climate change. It’s short, succinct, and compelling because it allows ordinary existence to bump head-on into global crisis.

And the evening’s wine will be upgraded to several bottles from California’s Francis Ford Coppola winery, which will be sure to make up for past baking-induced shortcomings.

Karen Martin is senior editor of Perspective.

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