By Ceyenne Doroshow, ed. Audacia Ray $18; Red Umbrella. Project; 114 pages
From an early age, Ceyenne Doroshow learned that cooking could be a recipe for survival. With Cooking In Heels: A Memoir Cookbook, the transgender caseworker and LGBT program coordinator offers 40 Southern-style favorites that feed the soul as well as the stomach.
In Doroshow's childhood home in Brooklyn, the kitchen was both a refuge and a battleground.
"In one way, the kitchen was like my heaven," she writes. "It was my little island where my brother didn't go, where my father was conflicted about going. But it was also the place where I got my beatings, because my dad really hated the young lady I was becoming."
Those beatings prompted Doroshow to leave home in her teens, sleeping in parks or riding the train all night until she sought housing at a homeless shelter. Because Doroshow is a transgender woman, she was directed to a men's shelter, where she lived in fear of male residents discovering her gender identity.
At the shelter, Doroshow sought refuge in the kitchen once again. She served meals so often that most of the shelter's residents assumed she was a staff member.
"…I have learned that being charming and helpful is the best way to survive," Doroshow writes.
While working as an escort later in life, Doroshow was arrested and charged with prostitution. She spent 28 days in a men's prison, where she earned the respect of male inmates by showing them how to make their bland prison food taste better. To pass the time during long days in her prison cell, Doroshow began writing recipes on scraps of toilet paper and cooked up an idea for book.
The Red Umbrella Project (RedUP), an organization dedicated to empowering the voices of people in the sex trades through storytelling, is publishing Cooking in Heels. Doroshow's story provides a poignant backdrop for recipes that helped her "grow family where it needed to grow."
The recipes range from classics like "Crowd Pleasing" Mac n' Cheese and "I Should've Done This Before" Quiche to unique twists on Southern favorites like Spicy Ginger Wings and Curry Vegetable Cups. Recipes like Economic Zeppoles use only a few inexpensive ingredients, harkening back to Doroshow's days of making something out of nothing.
Like her childhood hero, Julia Child, Doroshow peppers her recipes with helpful hints. She suggests baking mac n' cheese in a muffin pan instead of a baking dish to limit portion sizes and reminds the reader more than once that "the longer you marinate, the better the meat!"
Cooking in Heels brings a playful, loving voice to the kitchen table. As Doroshow said in the video for her book's Kickstarter campaign, "No matter what somebody's gender is or their beliefs, I believe food can bring everybody together."