Here is a sample of their conversation, and I can’t help thinking I’d like to sit at dinner with them and try to keep up. She falls in love with a fellow scientist, a man both brilliant and slightly mad, as she is. So she makes her name on the telly, teaching cookery as you’ve never known it before – as a science.

Elizabeth Zott wants to study abiogenesis for God’s sake, no less than the origins of life, but that goes pear shape because she’s a woman and the very worst obstacles are thrown in her way along with endless casual misogyny. Laugh-out-loud funny, shrewdly observant, and studded with a dazzling cast of supporting characters, Lessons in Chemistry is as original and vibrant as its protagonist.Woman’s liberation in the 1960s has never been so powerfully portrayed as in this book, where a woman is up against the male world of scientific research. She’s daring them to change the status quo. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn’t just teaching women to cook. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking (“combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride”) proves revolutionary.

Which is why a few years later Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show Supper at Six. True chemistry results.īut like science, life is unpredictable. Except for one: Calvin Evans the lonely, brilliant, Nobel–prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with-of all things-her mind. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman.

A page-turning and highly satisfying tale: zippy, zesty, and Zotty.”-Maggie Shipstead, best-selling author of Great CircleĬhemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman.

“It's the world versus Elizabeth Zott, an extraordinary woman determined to live on her own terms, and I had no trouble choosing a side. It reminds you that change takes time and always requires heat” ( The New York Times). A must-read debut! Meet Elizabeth Zott: a one-of-a-kind scientist in 1960s California whose career takes a detour when she becomes the unlikely star of a beloved TV cooking show in this novel that is “irresistible, satisfying and full of fuel.

Lessons in chemistry a novel