“Sicily, My Sweet: Love Notes to an Island, with Recipes for Cakes, Cookies, Puddings, and Preserves,” a soon-to-come cookbook, will be featured at M.Judson Booksellers Oct. 27. The book shines a light on Sicilian pastries.
Its author, Victoria Granof, strolled back to her home in Brooklyn, New York, on a Friday afternoon while discussing her upcoming book touching on a decades-long career in food styling, love of food as an art form and Sicilian history.
“I wrote a head note on the recipes, but it’s not like, ‘Serve this with a cup of tea,’” Granof said. “It’s all really informational; a lot of history, a lot of anecdotes.”
Granof has been featured in magazines including Vogue, Bon Appetit and The New York Times Magazine, but before all that, she was a woman trying to find her home.
She has a connection to Sicily that relates directly to its past. She spent most of her upbringing believing her family descended from Turkey. As it turns out, that wasn’t the case. Her family is ancestrally from Sicily but during the Spanish Inquisition, the family was exiled and turned to the Ottoman Empire, settling in Turkey.
Searching for roots in the 1990s, Granof took a trip to Turkey but didn’t feel the connection. Later, she read an article about a Sicilian pastry chef and decided to go find her. When she got to Sicily, she realized she’d found her home. The feeling was confirmed later when she traced her ancestry.
Granof was already traditionally trained as a chef at Le Cordon Bleu and eventually transitioned to food styling. According to her, food styling at the time was over-propped and too perfect, especially in her native California. A desire to pursue more creatively driven and conceptual food styling eventually took her to New York City.
In September 2001, she published her first cookbook focusing on Italian pastries, “Sweet Sicily: The Story of an Island and Her Pastries,” but walked away feeling like she had more to give artistically.
“You know, I hadn’t been working that long,” she said. “I hadn’t been styling that long. I didn’t have my aesthetic, my brand, I didn’t have clients, I didn’t have my reputation. I didn’t really have anything. So (the publishers) had all the power.”
Twenty years later, her new book reflects personal growth and global changes. It is designed both for carrying out recipes and passive enjoyment, with Granof having full creative control over its design.
“Sicily has been occupied and dominated by many, many different civilizations,” Granof said. “A lot of it has to do with politics and religion, but the pastries and the desserts and the sweets have really been the place where you can still see all of these cultures coming together.”
Granof will host an Italian dinner and book signing Oct. 27 at M.Judson Booksellers at 130 S. Main St. in Greenville. The dinner will include four courses with wine pairings. The ticket price includes a copy of the book, entrance to the event and dinner. Tickets can be purchased at mjudsonbooks.com/event/sit-down-supper-with-victoria-granof. The event begins at 6:30 p.m.
