The Family Recipe

Growing up in Manhattan Beach, Kevin Mills knew of the existence of a kitchen at home--”It was the room with the fridge in it.” Out of it appeared great meals. All was well with the world. And then, he says, “I went away to college and my mother didn’t.”

Things were OK for a while, until he saw his bank account being slowly but inexorably depleted by a steady diet of pizza-to-go and Chinese takeout. He switched to “food that could be bought for 50 cents,” stuff like instant Ramen noodles, Pop-Tarts.

Finally he called home for one of mother Nancy’s recipes. She told him how to roast a chicken. She didn’t think to tell him to remove the bag of giblets.

Never mind; more of Mom’s recipes would come in the mail, and before long he had a life-sustaining--if basic--culinary repertoire. Pasta aplenty, garlic bread and the like.

Home again after his junior year at Cornell, he was savoring Mom’s cooking while resisting parental pressure to get a summer job. One day, as he and Nancy were driving, she seized the moment and said, “Let’s write a cookbook!”

She recalls, “We were in the car on the freeway. He couldn’t get out.”

Not missing a beat, Kevin replied, “Let’s call it ‘Help! My Apartment Has a Kitchen.’ ”

It took two years--and 43 rejections--to find a publisher, but in 1996 “Help!” hit bookstores and went on to sell 80,000 copies. Now mother and son are back again with “Help! My Apartment Has a Dining Room--How to Have People Over Without Stressing Out.”

Kevin’s text accompanies Nancy’s recipes for dishes ranging from tandoori chicken to Greek salad and includes such advice as:

* “Don’t make four things that are the same color unless you want to have a color theme.”

* When serving wine, “take off the price tag. Or replace it with the price tag from your stereo system.”

* Remember that your party is not a big deal to your guests, “just a free meal and a chance to look in your medicine cabinet.”

Nancy, a dedicated cook, onetime home economics major at Cornell and longtime freelance journalist, had always wanted to write a cookbook and was thrilled at the prospect of a mother-son collaboration. Kevin just thought he’d pacified her.

Publisher Found the Book Very Humorous

He was to learn “my mother had powers that I wasn’t aware of.” Nancy kept sending out the proposal, which consisted of a humorous introduction by Kevin and 10 recipes from Nancy’s extensive files. Too basic, the publishers told her. Boring.

The 44th time was the charm. Rux Martin, an editor at a small publishing house, Chapters--now part of Houghton Mifflin--called to say she’d laughed like crazy: “Is the book still available?”

For Kevin, it was the moment of truth.

“I’d been very passive. I helped her put together the proposal . . . to get her off my back. The last thing I ever wanted to do was work with my mother.” He smiles. “It’s still low on my list.”

Nancy, 57, says she persevered because she felt she couldn’t let Kevin down. Her 28-year-old son says she kept him in the project by using the same powers of persuasion she’d once used “to get me to clean up my room.”

“She strung me along with the hope of money,” he adds. There was an advance: $8,500. And then mother and son really got to work--long distance.

Having graduated from Cornell, Kevin had married his college sweetheart, Jody, and they were living in St. Louis, where she was in medical school at Washington University. Nancy would fax the recipes, he’d test each one and they’d have weekly or biweekly telephone summit meetings to discuss which would make the cut, which would end up on the kitchen floor.

There were culinary disasters. Nancy forgot to put the sugar in the lemon meringue pie. Kevin made some pork chops that became “sort of a permanent part of the pan.” But eight months later, in 1996, “Help! My Apartment Has a Kitchen” was in bookstores. To the astonishment of all concerned, it has done very well.

“A lot of older people were buying it for younger people,” says Nancy.

Adds Kevin, “I think it started out as sort of a gag gift.”

As for “Help! My Apartment Has a Dining Room” (Houghton Mifflin), Kevin says, “It’s for people like me who still use the forks they’ve accumulated from takeout restaurants.”

In other words, for 20-somethings who are intimidated by the very thought of having guests for dinner. All 100-plus recipes fall into one of three categories--easy, very easy or not so easy. Says Kevin: “If entertaining were easy, they never would have invented the potluck dinner.”

In writing the cookbooks, he says, “there’s a very clear division of labor. Everything that requires labor and skill is my mom. All the practical advice and knowledge comes from her. I’m in charge of bringing it back to Earth” for people who don’t know a cutlet from a cutting board.

“The recipes don’t use words like braise and saute,” adds Nancy. And “there’s no special things like kumquat oil.”

The “mom tips” and “mom warnings” define basic terms such as kneading, describe an anchovy (and why it’s wise to serve anchovies on the side) and points out that red onions are actually purple.

They Learned How to Work Together

Now, anyone who has ever coauthored a book--and lived to write again--does not emerge unscathed. But writing a book with your mother? With your son?

In five years of collaboration, they agree that they’ve had only one argument, and that was over Kevin’s introduction to the first book. Nancy called him on “trying to skate by on surface humor.” He responded by suggesting that she “find another collaborator.”

By the second book, he found, “we had sort of a vocabulary. We knew how to talk to each other. And she knew exactly how to prod me without nagging.” With Nancy living in Manhattan Beach, and Kevin in Playa del Rey, the logistics are simpler this time.

Both Bart (Nancy’s husband) and Jody (Kevin’s wife) are credited in the book for being “willing lab rats.”

“My main involvement was eating the food,” Bart says. “I certainly wouldn’t have vetoed anything, but I might have had a less joyful expression on my face” after some tastings.

“I just tasted--and laughed at the funny things Kevin wrote. And I washed the dishes afterward.” He also baby-sat his grandson during a book signing and researched the book contract. But mostly, he insists, “I just sit back and bask in the reflected glow.”

Jody, who is taking time out before starting to practice family medicine, says she ate a lot while sampling and offering opinions.

At home, Kevin does the cooking.

“I like to read cookbooks,” Jody says, “and think about making things.”

He Learned About Writing From His Mom

In the writing, editorial content sometimes created debate. Kevin had vetoed as “off-putting” the onion and leek curry that Nancy wanted in the first book. At her insistence, it made book two.

But on the whole, Kevin says, “Mom is much more forgiving of me than someone unrelated to me.” She insists, “I think of Kevin as a collaborator, not a son. I’m a big fan of Kevin’s humor.”

Part of the virtue of their books, Kevin believes, is the mother-son aspect, “the son who needs to know these things but doesn’t want to hear it. It’s sort of like having Mom in the kitchen, but you can close the book and put it on the shelf” at any time.

“I learned a lot about writing from my mom,” he adds. “My whole childhood my parents [both freelance writers] were always off in another room working” in some mysterious manner. Now, he knows that a writer doesn’t “just doodle and wait for inspiration. You have to get a certain amount done every day.

“This was a nice melding of personalities. I need her to crack the whip. She needs me to lighten her up a bit”--such as when she says “something nice and knowing about capers.”

Nancy gleaned from him knowledge of contemporary language and culture. “I think a lot of people my age are afraid of people his age. I’ve learned to relax with this younger generation, and I have to credit that to him.” This has served her well in interviewing young, hip celebrities for her freelance work.

The easy give-and-take that has developed between them has been a happy result of the collaboration. Nancy doesn’t hesitate to say, “One of the happiest days of my life was when Kevin went away to college.”

Kevin acknowledges having been “a sniping teenager. It wasn’t dysfunctional. It was typical. I guess I’ve reined in my sarcasm so Mom is now in on the joke.”

The new book also reflects Nancy’s interest in international foods developed during the 12 years the family--which includes older sister Bonnie Trenga--lived in London. There is also a nod to vegetarianism, partly to please Kevin’s wife. Though a dedicated carnivore, he sees that “it’s possible to be satisfied with eggplant”--now and then.

He Hopes to Go On to Other Types of Writing

Success as a cookbook author is a mixed blessing for Kevin, a college history major. It helped pay the bills while Jody did her residency at UCLA.

Still, he says, “I don’t see cookbook writing as my life’s work. It’s given me a forum for writing, but ultimately I want to write longer than two paragraphs. I tend to have an opinion on everything, but it’s difficult to have an opinion about black bean lasagna.”

A stay-at-home father to 4-month-old Joseph, Kevin does the cooking--using only recipes from the “Help!” books.

Nancy boasts, “He makes chicken Kiev for lunch, which I think is very impressive.”

The cookbooks, Kevin knows, have also been “a very good laboratory for me to work on my writing.” (He is now working on a humorous men’s guide to pregnancy.)

Although together they have earned about $80,000 from the first book, that’s over a five-year period, Nancy points out. “It’s not an easy way to make a living.”

This category of books, says Nach Waxman, owner of Manhattan’s Kitchen Arts & Letters, is “of interest to a good number of our customers,” including parents of recent college graduates with their first apartments who “don’t know anything about cooking but can’t eat out all the time.”

“These are basically books for people finding themselves forced to cook . . . ,” Waxman says. “If you told them to drain spaghetti, they wouldn’t know which end of the strainer to use.”

Now mother and son, both chocoholics, are at work on book three, a collection of chocolate recipes for Houghton Mifflin.

“Definitely a labor of love,” says Kevin, who used to eat chocolate chip cookie dough straight out of the mixing bowl. Thanks to acquiring an agent, their advance jumped from $12,500 on the second book to $30,000 for the chocolate book.

The cover credit on their books reads “Kevin Mills and Nancy Mills.” Nancy says, “Since I’m the older one, I could decide whose name should go first. Without Kevin, these books would not have come to pass.”

And, without his mother’s urging, he might still be eating 50-cent foods. He knew his life had changed forever when he began bragging about a double oven. As for the “Help!” books, Kevin says, “I don’t know that we’ll continue to other rooms of the house.”

To which Nancy replies, “Well, we could do the patio. . . .”