Cookbook Survivor: Deborah Madison, Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone
Saturday's Child Is Going to Eat His Vegetables
My basic ethos when it comes to cooking is that I cook for the people who will be eating what I make. So when my college student child is home, I don’t cook the things I know they don’t like. When it’s just my partner and myself, I don’t cook the things I know only I like. When it’s just me, I don’t cook that elaborately because it’s just me. Cooking is hospitality: it’s about making people happy.
So if I have vegetarian and vegan guests over, I am delighted to cook the best meal I can possibly make for them, which I will also enjoy eating because they do. I simply do not get why some meat-eaters insist on viewing the existence of vegetarian or vegan eaters as a mortal insult.
However, as a result, I’m kind of annoyed at times by the quality of some vegetarian-focused cookbooks. I was given the Moosewood Cookbook way back when I first started cooking, for example, and I remember that I was almost always unhappy about the outcomes. I’m sure that was on me, but this was the same period when I was cooking heavily from The Silver Palate and the Frog/Commissary cookbooks and liking the results (even the vegetable dishes).
Some of the issues with older vegetarian cookbooks (or vegetable recipes in books that include meat dishes) are familiar. A lot of recipes feel like meatless versions of meat-centered dishes and end up reinforcing that sense that you’re giving up something. A lot of older vegetarian cookbooks not only struggled to cook towards vegetables that could hold up a dish, they were undercut by blandness. You can still see this to some extent on cooking competitions like Top Chef—if contestants are forced to produce vegetarian or vegan dishes, especially in quickfire or improvisational rounds, many of them struggle to produce strong flavors when they can’t use butter, meat stocks, cream, and so on. Moreover, at least some of the pantry that you really need or want in making vegetarian food sing out requires knowing how to build flavors in South Asian and East Asian cuisines in particular—and even there, it can be a nuisance to have to be strictly vegan or vegetarian. (For example, I’d hate to lose access to katsuobushi, dried smoked tuna flakes, in making a dashi broth, though there are some good vegan strategies for making a good one.)
More recent cookbooks (and restaurants) have made up for this a lot—including by drawing on cuisines where vegetarian and vegan dishes are the bulk of what many people eat. Still, I do find when I look through some of the books I keep around that a lot of recipes still don’t grab me, especially when they’re organized in terms of particular vegetables or grains. I don’t think there are that many vegetables, fruits or grains which hold up a whole range of dishes the way that particular cuts of meat do, and when they do, I don’t tend to think of myself as building a meal around that vegetable. E.g., tomatoes are in a great many things that I like, but I don’t often say to myself, “Tonight we’re having tomatoes” except in the late summer when the garden is producing so many good ones. The best vegetarian and vegan books do a good job of winning me over to thinking that way, though.
Madison’s cookbook, the original edition, feels to me like it’s on the bubble between the two, still tethered to that old era of vegetarian cooking while looking ahead to something better. (The new edition may be a lot better, but I don’t own that.) There’s a few “this should have meat in it but it doesn’t” recipes. There are a lot of recipes in it that fall into the “I don’t need a recipe for that” camp, pastas and salads particularly. There’s a big section of recipes built around particular vegetables, grains, and fruits that mostly doesn’t grab me when I read through the book—partly because of the “too many recipes” problem I’ve talked about before. But it also feels like a valuable reference cookbook and periodically I do use it. Most signally, it has a lot of good technical advice about vegetables and grains from storage to basic cookery.
Today I’m going to make a chickpea-tomato stew with romesco sauce and some polenta with gorgonzola both because I like both dishes and because this will let me use a few things up that I’ve got in the fridge, including some good stoneground coarse cornmeal from Castle Valley Mill.