Everyone is afraid of Elizabeth Zott. Some are afraid of her mind, some are afraid of the razor-sharp pencil she wears in her hair, and some are afraid of the fourteen-inch knife in her purse (after all, every self-respecting cook uses only their own knives). A strange twist of fate led her from the Hastings Research Institute, where she dreamed of studying abiogenesis (the theory of how life originates from inorganic substances), to television, where she hosts the country's most popular cooking show, Dinner at Six. 'Cooking is chemistry,' she says. 'And chemistry is life. It gives us the power to change everything, including ourselves.' Meanwhile, her five-year-old daughter Madeline, growing up under the watchful eye of a mine-detection dog named Six-Thirty, is trying to find Nabokov and Norman Mailer in the school library, and to build a family tree that should include the soon-to-be Nobel laureate in chemistry, Calvin Evans, a fairy godmother, a grandfather in a striped prison uniform, and a grandmother hiding from the tax police in Brazil....