Everyone is afraid of Elizabeth Zott. Some from her mind, some from a sharpened pencil that she wears in her hair, and some from a fourteen-inch knife from her purse (after all, every self-respecting cook uses only his own knives). A bizarre zigzag of fate led her from the Hastings Research Institute, where she dreamed of working on abiogenesis (the theory of the origin of life from inorganic substances), to television, where she hosts the most popular culinary show in the country, “Dinner at Six.” “Cooking is chemistry,” she says. – And chemistry is life. It gives us the opportunity to change everything, including ourselves.” Meanwhile, her five-year-old daughter Madeleine, growing up under the supervision of a mine-detecting dog named Six-Thirty, is trying to find Nabokov and Norman Mailer in the school library, and also build a family tree on which there should be a place for Nobel laureate in chemistry Calvin Evans, and the fairy godmother, and the grandfather in a striped prison uniform, and the grandmother who hid from the tax police in Brazil... For the first time in Russian!