"Everything is Under Control: A Memoir with Recipes," by Phyllis Grant

Phyllis Grant’s “Everything is Under Control: A Memoir with Recipes” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) is a small book, and each chapter is made up of a short series of short (usually one to four sentences each) vignettes. This is an unusual but quite effective technique. Grant writes of her life as a dancer at Juilliard, then a chef at prestigious restaurants in New York, then a wife and mother in Berkeley, California. She also writes of her grandparents and her parents, especially her mother. She is candid and generous in writing about problems she has dealt with in her life, especially that of postpartum depression. There is joy too, most notably the joys of family and parenting, and the joys of gathering, creating and eating good food (about which she writes with detailed, vivid appreciation). The last 30 pages of this short book (232 small pages) are given to recipes. As someone who loves going to good restaurants, and who appreciates her husband’s excellent cooking, but seldom cooks herself, I must admit I more or less skipped over this last section. However, rather surprisingly, in this pandemic stay-at-home era I have started occasionally cooking again (as I used to in the early years of my marriage and of raising my daughter). Perhaps one of these days I will try, despite their somewhat complicated nature, some of Grant’s recipes.