Victoria Granof on Being a Food Creative
And finding beauty where it is
The introduction of Victoria Granof’s new cookbook, Sicily, My Sweet, includes two photo collages splashed across full-page spreads. Images of hands holding citrus, a floating spoonful of honey, a few fuzzy sheep, a ripe fig, religious icons, a single pistachio, a tiled stairway, all appear to be cut out by hand and glued to the page, as if we’re looking at a handmade scrap book. The perspective and proportion is wonky, the colors loud, the tumble of images somehow both discordant and aligned at the same time, and it all works. Gazing at these pages, I felt a certain energy, a spark, that I didn’t fully understand until we sat down to talk with Victoria about her work and her creative process.
As regular listeners of the show know, we love to ask guests how they got started in food media, and their responses often involve juggling portfolio1 and multi-hyphenate careers. In other words, having various irons in various fires. Victoria’s origin story is no exception, going back to her early years toggling between working as a chef and a food stylist in LA’s wild celebrity scene of the 90’s (although her stories may be a bit more colorful than many we’ve heard2). From the start, however, Victoria objected to the unsexy term portfolio careerist and instead dubbed herself a food creative, to highlight her favorite part of the work — and the part where she excels — the observing, the collecting of information, the imagining, the dreaming up, all the work that goes on before she arrives at a photo shoot or at her keyboard.
These days, Victoria lives in New York and divides her time between her own writing, ghost writing cookbooks, directing, and mentoring, and she speaks about her work with as much energy and excitement as someone just getting started. The key to such longevity and sustained creativity, she explains, is to “figure out how your brain works,” and for Victoria, this means feeding her creative spirit by actively observing the world around her and being open to influences. When she’s out on the street or riding the subway, she’s not on her phone, she’s not texting, she’s not listening to podcasts. She’s not focused solely on where she’s going. Instead, she’s noticing the world around her, looking for things that don’t seem to make sense, listening for sounds that surprise her, discovering light and beauty in the everyday. By maintaining a soft focus, not seeking out anything in particular, but staying open, she’s collecting, registering, and then allowing her own mind to create the connections.
“I get input from all different areas, and then somehow, it cooks, it simmers around, and it comes out an amalgam of all things I’ve let in.”
It’s seems fitting then to learn that Victoria spent years traveling to Sicily and researching the recipes, history, and stories for her new cookbook, Sicily, My Sweet. The resulting collection is colorful and rich in both content and design. Victoria describes the vibe as bawdy and baroque to reflect Sicily as she knows it. In art directing the book, she was determined to push back against the “idea of chromophobia3 that has infected Western society.” She refused to cave into any idealized, white-washed versions of Sicily and its sweets.
I'm going to show you what happens when you get there and you see what's around you….I wanted to give it all the color, all the authenticity, and not to be so romanticized about everything.
We hope you’ll get the book to see how well she succeeded in her mission - and why the collages make so much sense.
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Links from the episode:
Victoria Granof Website
Her Instagram
Her newsletter: Delicious Tangents
George Dolese, food stylist
Smashbox Studios, LA
Victoria’s Creative Coaching
Sicily, My Sweet, by Victoria Granof
The Ultimate College Cookbook, by Victoria Granof
Sweet Sicily, by Victoria Granof
Check out the Everything Cookbooks Bookshop to browse all books mentioned in the show (purchasing books here supports the show, independent bookstores, and authors. A win-win-win! 🏆)
Next week on EVCB:
Next week (Episode 132), we welcome our first repeat guest, Adam Roberts, to discuss his debut novel, Food Person, a story about cooking, ambition, friendship, and yes, publishing. We talk to Adam about his pivot from food writing to fiction and how his experience as a ghost writer inspired the plot. Adam employs a lot of real-world popular food culture and media to bring the story to life. It’s a juicy and fun chat about how cookbooks get made - even a fictionalized one.
Bye for now. I’ll be back here next week and hope to see you. In the meantime, keep on writing, reading, and cooking. ✍️📚🍳
Molly and the EVCB gang
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WTF is a portfolio career? by Anna Mackenzie, startup advisor, mentor and writer of Anna Mack’s Stack.
Check out Victoria’s newsletter, Delicious Tangents, to read some of her saucy stories.
Read an excerpt from David Batchelor’s book on Chromophobia. “The notion that colour is bound up with the fate of Western culture sounds odd, and not very likely. But this is what I want to argue: that colour has been the object of extreme prejudice in Western culture. For the most part, this prejudice has remained unchecked and passed unnoticed.”
Victoria has the most amazing food media stories -- so happy she is sharing them on @delicioustangents
Really enjoyed this episode and the links provided here are so helpful!