Grand Dishes

May 17, 2021
In this delightful debut, a pair of British Gen Z’ers pay homage to grandmothers with dishes inspired by a generation whose culinary contributions reach far beyond their homes. In an ambitious effort to document the recipes of “grannies of all ages, backgrounds and ethnicities” the authors visited grandmothers in Cuba, Greece, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Russia, the U.K., and the U.S. Along the way, they encountered “grannies wearing pink wigs chainsaw demonstrations,” and splashed in lakes and stoked fires outdoors with their subjects—each sharing her own stories of food and family. On one visit, an 87-year-old Cuban abuela makes a no-frills plantain soup, while an emigré in Hampstead recreates her Russian mother’s piroshkis. A Tanzanian-born granny attributes her youthful complexion to a lifetime of cooking with yogurt, which is generously used in her Gujarati dry vegetable curry. Woven throughout are paeans to other grandmothers from such well-known cooks and food writers as Argentine chef Francis Mallmann and Anna Jones, the latter of whom shares the “five commandments” of her Mam’s Yorkshire pudding (starting with “don’t be scared of heat”). Like the time-tested recipes within it, this is made with love and enriching in more ways than one.