“Cooking is serious science. In fact, it’s chemistry.” These words may not seem revolutionary today, but 60 years ago the suggestion that an element of women’s work could be approached with the rigor of a laboratory experiment was bold indeed.

The earnest speaker of this truth is 30-something scientist Elizabeth Zott, the protagonist of Bonnie Garmus’ debut novel “Lessons in Chemistry.” Elizabeth’s surprise platform? The set of 1961’s hit TV cooking show “Supper at Six,” of which she is the reluctant host. How Elizabeth lands in front of the camera, rather than under a fume hood, receives frank, satisfying treatment in this briskly paced, often funny, occasionally troubling, brew of a book. 

Garmus sets her story in Southern California in the 1950s and early ’60s – a time of shirtwaist dresses and cars without seatbelts, “back when the big wars were over and the secret wars had just begun.” The era, Garmus makes abundantly clear, was no picnic. For all but the most powerful, it smacked of suffocating conformity, infuriating inequality, and dismal expectations. A young woman with a singular passion for science was, as Elizabeth might say, a fish out of H2O.

The path from a chemist-who-cooks to a cook-expounding-chemistry begins in 1952 at Hastings Research Institute where Elizabeth works in a crowded lab. The situation is far from ideal. She scrounges for equipment, gets mistaken for a secretary, and suffers a steady stream of rancor from her jealous, sexist boss. 

Read full review at csmonitor.com

Go to csmonitor.com