Vegetarian cookbooks: Reviews
I love meat but, mainly for economic reasons, I find myself cooking more meals with vegetables at their heart. Eating ethically-reared meat is more and more of a luxury, so almost by default I find myself getting closer to Professor Tim Lang’s latest advisory which suggests we eat meat just once a week. More chefs and cookery writers are edging away from meat so there are lots of books around to spice up vegetarian meals.
Of the new releases, the standout is Sally Butcher’s Veggiestan which romps through vegetarian dishes from the Middle East. Warm, richly spiced dishes are complemented by cool yoghurt and zing from wonderful preserves such as tomato pickle with nigella seeds. The Paul McCartney-compiled Meat Free Monday Cookbook) has an impressive number of contributing chefs (including Anna Hansen, José Pizarro and Giorgio Locatelli) and gets the balance right between the fresh, healthy and seriously indulgent. However, this is not a book you can follow rigidly unless you have a lot of prep time at your disposal – I would love to be able to whip up a Green Pea Curry or Melon Gazpacho for a Monday afternoon snack, but would never find the time.
Children are often suspicious of food that contains too many visible ingredients; it’s better to go for simple dishes. For these turn to River Cottage Veg Every Day! – nothing startlingly original, but lots of hearty, nourishing food – my family loved the stuffed squash and practically everything in the bread section. Simon Hopkinson’s The Vegetarian Option has caused controversy by bravely including chicken stock (I also admit to using chicken stock frequently in vegetable based dishes) but don’t be put off – the book covers all the vegetarian standards and more with his unerring good taste and attention to detail. The kids in my family particularly loved his savoury tomato or beetroot jellies.
If you need to cook something really impressive, reach first for Maria Elia’s The Modern Vegetarian which is a book full of simple yet imaginative ideas. I love the Thai inspired fennel, cardamom and coconut soup (enlivened with a good glug of Pernod) and the ginger-beer battered tofu with Asian mushy peas. You also won’t go far wrong with Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty – my favourite dish is the intensely sweet yet savoury caramelised garlic tart.
Cafe Paradiso is an vegetarian restaurant in Cork which many people go out of their way to visit, and proprietor Dennis Cotter has produced a number of beautifully written, thoughtful books about vegetarian food. His first two are particularly cheffy – think complete meals rather than a mix and match approach. The most useful is probably his latest as it strikes more of a balance between everyday and special occasion food.
In this country our love affair with Mediterranean food goes back centuries, and vegetable cookbooks indulge us, covering everything from the specialist, such as the glut-busting Cooking With Courgettes, to the all-encompassing, including Antonio Carluccio’s marvellous Vegetables and Viana La Place’s Verdura.
A highly entertaining precursor to these is Giacomo Castelvetro’s 1614 work The Fruit, Herbs and Vegetables of Italy. Written before tomatoes and chillies became popular, it can be comically outdated (lentils are very bad for you, apparently, and “only eaten by the lowest of the low”) but there are some very relevant, simple and intriguing recipe suggestions on everything from broad beans to hop shoots.
Jane Grigson was a fan of Castelvetro, praising his “humorous clarity” something I think that also applies to her Vegetable Book. Again, staunch vegetarians should turn a blind eye to the smattering of meat dishes – it is authoritative on everything from rare and exotic vegetables to the few foraged foods she thinks worthy of attention. It’s always the first book I go to for advice on anything to do with vegetables.
Finally, if you want something definitive, what should you go for? Every vegetarian I know seems to have at least one Rose Elliot book and most would recommend her New Complete Vegetarian. Maddhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian is astounding in both scope and depth of knowledge and is one of the few books which explores all those seaweed-rich Japanese dishes. Finally American Deborah Madison’s The Greens Cookbook is full interesting flavour combinations. I particularly like some of the smoky, Latin American bean dishes in which I don’t miss the meat at all.
Only a couple of these books are written by vegetarians and some contain recipes for meat, but I reckon if they provide a few fresh ideas and show the rest of us that it’s no hardship to eat meat-free meals, that really shouldn’t matter. Do you prefer vegetable cookbooks by vegetarians, or are you happy to trust books by omnivores?
Vegetarian, Raw and Vegan with Bill & Sheila
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