“Oh, my God. Don’t tell me you just arrived three weeks ago and you’re exploring now. I have to tell you where to go,” Victoria Granof tells me less than five minutes into our first conversation over the phone.
We’re talking about restaurants I must visit in Gowanus — the neighborhood I currently reside in after moving from Washington, D.C. to New York City —and the nearby Red Hook, Granof’s neighborhood. There’s Claro, an Oaxacan restaurant that makes everything by hand, including the masa, cheese, chorizo and moles. There’s Hoek, a pizza joint in Granof’s neck of the woods that serves up Roman-style, wood-fired pies alongside a view of the Statue of Liberty. And there’s ACQ BREAD CO. (short for anti-conquest bread Co.), a small-yet-outspoken bakery that operates out of a townhouse in Carroll Gardens.
If there’s anything that I took away from our conversation, it’s that Granof really knows food. For her, food isn’t merely an entity of sustenance — it’s an art form. Granof attended culinary school and trained as a pastry chef before she fell in love with her current professions as a food stylist, recipe developer and visual director. As for how she got into the food media industry, Granof says, “It’s a fun story.”
Granof has since worked with various big-name publications like Food & Wine, Vogue and InStyle. Her clientele includes DoorDash, Häagen-Dazs, Perrier, Smirnoff and Nespresso, just to name a few.
Granof’s latest project is a cookbook, titled “Sicily, My Sweet: Love Notes to an Island, with Recipes for Cakes, Cookies, Puddings, and Preserves.” It includes recipes for meyer lemon and bay leaf gelato, jasmine-scented almond milk mousse and fruit pudding made from white melon and orange blossom. Each recipe is accompanied by beautiful food photography — which highlights Granof’s craft — personal anecdotes and in-depth write-ups.
In anticipation of the book’s October release, I spoke with Granof about her personal relationship with baking, her favorite childhood dessert and her fondest memory of working with one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, Irving Penn.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Tell me a little bit about “Sicily, My Sweet.” What was the inspiration behind the book?
It’s actually my second book on Sicilian sweets. My first one was [published] about 20 years ago and it came out the day before September 11. I went on a book tour and everybody wanted to know where I was when the towers fell, so that kind of got lost. At that point, I was just starting my career in New York. I moved from LA and I hadn't done anything here. It was just a fluke that I got that book deal at all. I hadn't done enough styling. I hadn't gotten enough experience in the world and in food and in New York and anything like that.
It wasn't really the book that I wanted to do. The substance was there, but visually it was awful. Since then, I've always wanted to go back and do it the way I knew it should have been done, and that is what “Sicily, My Sweet” is. I was really fortunate to get Hardie Grant, a great publisher who has supported the vision and visuals for this book. They let me make it as crazy looking as I wanted to.
The cover for this book is incredibly stunning — I know they say don’t judge a book by its cover, but this book’s cover grabbed my attention! What was the creative direction behind the cover?
I would say it's a very strong cover. And it's very in your face and bold and beautiful — it’s just unabashedly beautiful. It's not shy and neither is Sicily, you know. I wanted the book to look different as well as feel different and really portray Sicily as distinct from other parts of Italy. What inspired me to do this was as much kind of a visual exploration and a visual statement for myself as it was just exploring Sicily and pastries and desserts.
I feel like cookbooks — I’m going off on a bit of a tangent, but maybe not — used to be the solution to problems. I think — and this is very subjective because I’m in food media — that food books and cookbooks can become art books. The culinary arts have become an actual art form that people can appreciate passively. You can read cookbooks just for the beauty of them and the information and not for cooking a recipe. I think the culinary arts are reaching that point, where you can watch the Food Network and not ever want to cook anything in the same way that you can buy a cookbook and not want to bake anything. It was in that spirit that I created this.
What’s so fun about this book is that in addition to the beautiful visuals, each recipe is accompanied by a brief story or a little history lesson. How did you find that balance between storytelling and recipe development?
I laugh and I say that Sicily is kind of pre-art-directed and so are all the pastries. That's fundamentally what really appealed to me about specifically doing books on pastries. There is so much history just built into every pastry and why it’s there, in Sicily specifically, and it’s so caught up in the history and the different civilizations that have been there. There’s a political and social reason for almost every pastry there. And so it’s built into it. There's no recipe for something without a reason for it being there.
Why focus on Sicily specifically?
It's a personal thing. Here's a bit of a history lesson: My family was originally from Sicily, and we're talking before the Spanish Inquisition of 1492. Sicily, at the time, was part of the Spanish Empire. The Alhambra Decree ordered the expulsion of Jews from Spain and all of its territories and possessions, including Sicily. My family was one of those families. They fled to the Ottoman Empire — Turkey and Greece…that’s where they settled.
I grew up with food, language and cultures that I thought might be Turkish. So, I went to Turkey because I was interested in my roots. But when I arrived and explored the country, I went, “Oh, wait, this isn't it.” I mean, it's nice here, but this isn't what I was looking for. And it puzzled me.
Then, purely by chance, I was working as a pastry chef and had read about this pastry chef in Sicily, this older woman who was lamenting the fact that it was a dying art because none of the younger people wanted to learn how to make pastries. I thought, “Oh, I want to go do that!” I literally just went on a whim and found her. And I realized that she was Sicilian and had the key to all the things that I have remembered culturally.
Take me through your culinary journey. What has your career in food been like? And how did you find your way into food styling?
It's a fun story! My mom, who worked as a lawyer, was very active in the women's movement. And so when I said I wanted to become a chef, she was appalled. At the time — this is in the early 90s — cooking in a kitchen was still menial labor. It wasn’t the art form that it's become or the expression it’s become. It was a struggle. Instead of doing that, I went to art school, which somehow was more respectable, and studied visual arts. I then worked as a designer with architects and in my spare time, I would bake for restaurants. In the middle of the night, I would bake and sell them to these places. And I realized I really, really loved it. So, I lied my way into my first job. And then from there, I trained as a pastry chef and then I went to culinary school.
At one point, I was working in a restaurant and one of the investors was a photographer, a food photographer. They fixed me up with him and I met him at his studio once. He was shooting a cookbook and there was this woman there who was cooking and arranging the food for the camera. I wondered, “Who is she?” and later, was told she was a food stylist. He gave me the names of stylists to assist and then, I assisted one.
I was working with Bon Appétit magazine, which was still in Los Angeles at the time. They said they would send me to New York to shoot covers with the photographers because, I guess, they saw something special in me. And then one day, I just decided, “I think this is where I need to be.” So, that’s how I got into food styling! I also worked collaboratively, I should say, with the photographer, Irving Penn. Together we did the food photographs for Vogue for 10 years.
Was there a specific photo shoot or encounter with Irving Penn that was incredibly memorable?
Oh, my God, so many of them! Well actually, my very first job with him: It’s an image of my hand wearing a latex glove, holding an enormous lobster claw, and my other hand has a little antique hammer smacking it against the claw to break it. That was the very first time I ever worked with him. He didn’t even call me by name. But it was also the first time I spoke out for myself. Maybe it was a naïveté of youth? I don’t know, but it didn’t occur to me to just keep my mouth shut. During the shoot, Penn said he didn’t have anyone to hold the lobster. And I said, “Oh, I can hold it.” My hands in one of his pictures, you know, it’s just one of those things!
I also got to make those creative decisions. And he approved them. I was the one who got to source that 47-year-old lobster in the photograph. I also rented some antique hammers from a prop house. It was just the first time where I was making creative decisions. I was speaking out for myself. I was working with a master. I felt really good about that moment. Like, “Oh, I can really do this.”
Is there a favorite dish (or even dessert) you enjoyed eating growing up?
My grandmother used to make these little, savory turnovers with meat inside and chopped-up hard-boiled eggs. And there’s one thing my mom did make that I really liked. She used to call it her “frustration meal.” It would be — it’s crazy — spaghetti with butter, parmesan and cottage cheese. It's actually really good.
What do you hope readers will take away from “Sicily, My Sweet”?
I'm deeply involved in the theory of chromophobia right now, which is fear of color. My belief, shared by a couple of people who are beginning to write about it, is that color is being drained out of elitist Western society and lack of color has become kind of an unspoken identifier for an elite, white community. The chicest thing is, you know, a black dress or a white sofa or a silver car. And when that segment of the population starts talking about color, it’s really kind of a veiled reference to something foreign. It means “not like us,” and that’s become this unspoken subliminal message that is very disturbing to me.
I do hope that color in this book loses its power as that kind of a signifier and instead, is an empowering statement. I also hope readers realize that Sicily is different from other parts of Italy for really important reasons. A lot of it has to do with it having been conquered by all these different civilizations that left their mark on the food and the pastries. And I hope readers [are encouraged] to explore it a little more. But don’t travel there in droves and ruin it! Just appreciate it passively.
