Looking at the latest bestsellers, many of the names you see there also have their own brands, TV shows, that sort of thing. So how to explain 57-year-old Phyllis Pellman Good? She has none of the above, just books with recipes containing dishes like ham loaf and cheeseburger soup based on recipes from women around the country. And she’s sold more than Ina Garten, Giada De Laurentiis and Jamie Oliver, with pproximately seven million copies of her “Fix-It and Forget-It” series in print.
It probably helps that Good creates straightforward recipes, as the New York Times’ Gina Bellafante discovered. Her books dispute the perceived notion that cooking is a pastime and food a powerful expression of status and style. The recipes, presented in plain black and white, are never accompanied by photographs. Preparation time rarely exceeds 20 minutes. Organic ingredients and rarefied flavorings are eschewed. Foreign influence is reduced to tortilla casserole and Polynesian chicken.
She became a cook when she and her husband were grad students in Morningside Heights. “The one clear memory I have is that I wanted to make chicken corn soup,” she said. She began to study her mother’s recipes but found true inspiration in a Betty Crocker cookbook. It spelled things out clearly, and that’s when I began to feel more secure,” Ms. Good recalled in the kitchen of her home in Lancaster, Pa. “The step-by-step aspect to the books,” she added, “the inclination to make it look easy, all grow out of my not knowing what to do at the stove.”