APRIL 2014
Three years ago, I retired the chili party that I used to give in Italy at the end of August. This was a shame, because I liked my party and thought that the chili made a nice reprieve from the ubiquitous barbecues of summer. Two of the twenty-four regulars at my party were vegetarians—one reluctantly, under a doctor’s orders. A doable number, it seemed to me: for years, I put out a bowl of pasta al pesto just for them. Then, from one chili party to the next, everything changed. Seven formerly enthusiastic carnivores called to say they had stopped eating meat entirely and would like to join my vegetarians for the pesto. Worse, on the night of that final party, four of the remaining carnivores carried their plates to the kitchen table, ignoring the cubes of beef and pancetta, smoky and fragrant in their big red bean pot, and headed for my dwindling supply of pasta. “Stop!” I cried. “That’s for the vegetarians!” Aggrieved, they replied, as in one voice, “But we’re kind of vegetarian now.” Some have yet to forgive me for scooping the pasta off their plates.
Until that summer, the only books I had read about food proscriptions and taboos were Leviticus and Deuteronomy, those inadvertently comic masterpieces of the Old Testament, so addictive that I keep copies on my laptop. But since then I have collected a stack of vegetarian food histories with names like Eat Not This Flesh (by Frederick J. Simoons), The Heretic’s Feast (Colin Spencer), and The Bloodless Revolution (Tristram Stuart), from which I’ve learned first, that people have been arguing about eating animals since the day they began eating or, more to the point, not eating them, and second, that the history of their arguments is a hermeneutical minefield. Take your pick. There is the ascetic argument, which can be religious (monks, holy men, and hermits, attached to the discipline of renunciation), or the philosophical one (as old as Pythagoras, whose belief in the transmigration of souls is said to have led generations of like-minded Greeks to follow a “Pythagorean diet”), or the mystical one (shamans, saints, and quantum physicists, searching for the ecstatic union or trippy oblivion produced by hunger hallucinations). Then there is the natural-man argument, which Rousseau, with a nod to Plutarch, used in making the claim that eating meat was an aberration, a sustained assault on the innocence and empathy of childhood, and produced “cruel and ferocious” people, like the English. (English vegetarians preferred “like the Tartars.”) There is the caste, or “spiritual identity,” argument, like the one advanced by Brahmans who renounced flesh in order to distinguish themselves, in matters of high-mindedness and noble breeding, from the hungry poor. There is the ethical, or animal-rights, argument, which holds that the pain and terror suffered by slaughter animals is morally indefensible. There is also the health argument (doctors and nutritionists, alarmed by the rise in illness and obesity in a high-fat Big Mac world), and the carbon-footprint argument (environmentalists, equally alarmed by the amount of energy consumed, and ozone layer depleted, by the livestock industry that feeds that world).
Then there are the subsets of rejection. There are the orthodox Jains, who will eat the visible sprouts and leaves of root vegetables but not the roots themselves—which is to say, they will eat plants but not “kill” plants. There are the vegans, who will refuse not only animal flesh but anything that living animals produce, including honey (because it comes from bees), eggs, milk, and by extension, cheese. Some vegetarians will refuse fish but happily consume oysters, clams, and mussels—on the ground that those mollusks, having neither eyes nor a central nervous system, do not qualify as “real” animals, capable of feeling. The list goes on, because at the end of the day vegetarianism turns out to be a highly idiosyncratic spectrum. It runs from the strictest vegans to the “kind of vegetarian” vegetarians, who will eat fish and occasionally chicken, and even indulge themselves, once a year, in a Christmas rib roast, to the ladies who lettuce-leaf lunch and their stick-figure daughters, dreaming of a size 0 dress, who will ram their fingers down their throats in order to throw up whatever meat they are made to eat.
I’m not a vegetarian. I would describe myself as a cautious carnivore. The “cautious” dates from a trip to Texas in the mid-seventies, for a book that introduced me to the pitiable state of industrial feedlot cattle, crammed into pens to be fattened on quasi-chemical feed laced with antibiotics and hormones, to say nothing of the frantic baying of ranch yearlings driven through chutes to be branded and cut by cowhands, their testicles fed to the foreman’s dogs. Not much later, I was in Europe watching the tubal force-feeding of French ducks and geese, for foie gras. But the truth is that I worried much more about myself than about those animals. What drugs and diseases was I ingesting when I ate their meat? For that matter, what waste was I consuming with fish bred and raised in the dirty waters of industrial fish farms? Today I buy organic meat and chicken and milk and eggs, and the fishmonger at Citarella knows me as the woman who calls and says, “I don’t want it if it’s not wild.” (You can’t win this one, given the size of the dragnet fleets now depleting nearly every marine habitat on the planet.)
That said, I am unlikely ever to give up my applewood breakfast bacon, or the smoked salmon on my bagels, or the prosciutto that’s always in my fridge. A week ago, I read about an Ibérico tasting in the Financial Times. It had reminded the writer of an episode of the British sitcom The Royle Family, in which the son invites a vegetarian girlfriend home for dinner and nobody knows what to feed her until his grandmother suggests, “Very thinly sliced ham.” I’m with the grandmother, and should add that Spain’s Ibérico pigs lead pampered and pristine lives in oak forests, feasting on tasty acorns.
Today, the best reason for people like me to love eating plants probably has less to do with vegetarians and their theories than with the great carnivore chefs and cookbook writers who started making vegetables delicious by approaching, say, a cauliflower with the same culinary imagination that they would otherwise apply to a Mexican short-ribs braise or an inside-out porchetta. It was about time this happened, given the dreary vegetarian cookbooks that had prevailed since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when a Lancashire housewife by the name of Martha Brotherton—her husband, Joseph, was the Nonconformist minister and animal rights crusader who helped found the Vegetarian Society of the United Kingdom—published what appears to have been the first one in the English language.
Mrs. Brotherton called her book A New System of Vegetable Cookery, and its particular evangelical mission was to banish all sinful pleasure from whatever legume was in your pot. Her culinary precepts, though not her book, outlasted her by more than a hundred and fifty years—as evidenced by the preachy vegetarian communes and collectives that began to proliferate in this country in the sixties and seventies, when a generation of postwar babies came of age. Those collectives were defiantly artisanal. Remember the breads and the carrot cakes that weighed nearly as much as the people eating them? The most enduring (and evolving) collective was the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York—perhaps because for some years the healthfulness of the food was often camouflaged by blankets of sour cream, or seasoned with liberal splashes of soy sauce (with paprika running a close second), or even on occasion tossed in a somewhat unnerving combination of yogurt and mayonnaise. The original Moosewood Cookbook, assembled in 1977 by the Moosewood founder Mollie Katzen—who went on to become a consultant to Harvard’s dining and “food literacy” initiatives—was exemplary in its “Eat it, it’s good for you” style. The drawings were as folksy as the food, and, as if to drive home the point, the recipes were handwritten. Within a few years, it had sold a million copies.
In 1979, two years after Katzen’s cookbook appeared, a young California chef named Deborah Madison left her job at Alice Waters’s restaurant, Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, to open a vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco. She called it Greens, and you didn’t need to be a vegetarian to want to eat there. Greens has been described as the first high-end vegetarian restaurant in the country. It was (and remains) minimalist rather than minimal, with glass walls looking out over San Francisco Bay to the Golden Gate Bridge and the soft hills of Marin County, and more to the point, with food that looked, and tasted, like something you had always dreamed of eating. “Farm driven” is how Madison described the menu. People kept asking for her recipes, and eight years later she and a Tassajara-trained cook named Edward Espé Brown, whom she’d met studying at the San Francisco Zen Center, put those recipes together as The Greens Cookbook and transformed the experience of a home-cooked vegetarian meal. The cookbook, like the restaurant, wasn’t at all admonishing or self-righteous. Words like “healthy” were not in evidence. The operative words were “fresh” and “bright” and “flavor,” and if you weren’t a vegetarian there was nothing really to prevent you from sneaking some ham into Madison’s recipe for herbed corn pudding, or adding a little beef or veal to her mushroom lasagna—the first lasagna I ever made—or a bit of pancetta to her winter-vegetable soup. If you were a decent cook, you knew at a glance that those deceptively simple recipes would stand up to some guilty tampering—and as often as not, you discovered that they didn’t need it. For most of us, that was a revelation.
Madison’s recipes are still deceptively simple. Her books—among them the encyclopedic Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, from 1997—have none of the riotous potlatch spicing and herbal jumbling of Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty or the sublime caloric decadence of Ruth Rogers’s and the late Rose Gray’s River Café Cook Book Green. But she is materfamilias to the dozens of other chefs who are rapidly turning vegetables into, as it were, the cash cow of the cookbook trade. Depending on which polls you read, and whether it’s herbivores or carnivores who have framed the questions and done the counting, somewhere between 5 and 19 percent of all Americans are now vegetarians or kind-of vegetarians, and between 2 and 9 percent are vegans. The market they represent, at a time when most book publishing is either in crisis or in Kindle, has been irresistible to writers hoping to strike pay dirt with a cookbook. At Kitchen Arts & Letters, the Lexington Avenue bookstore where I buy my food histories and cookbooks, the number of people shopping at its vegetarian and vegan shelves has just about doubled in the past ten years—and not only because of the rise in vegetarian conversions suggested by those polls but because of all the carnivores who have got interested in making whatever vegetables they do eat tastier.
Nach Waxman and Matt Sartwell, the patron gurus of Kitchen Arts & Letters, call this “the Ottolenghi effect,” because it was Ottolenghi’s strictly vegetarian Plenty, which came out in 2010, just a couple of years after his meaty, eponymous first cookbook appeared in England, that definitively took vegetables out of the good-for-you niche and into the “You’re going to love this” sales stratosphere, and sent every envious meat-eating chef in search of what could be called a vegetarian feeding frenzy. Even Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall—who had famously celebrated his passion for animal flesh (as in the lambs and chickens cosseted, killed with kindness, and cooked with “respect” on his River Cottage Farm) in a cookbook called Meat—entered the fray last year by writing a new book, Veg.
Vegetable Literacy is Deborah Madison’s thirteenth book and her turf revenge. It turns the tables, though you probably won’t know this until you read the recipes and discover, as I did, that while there is predictably no marrow or pancetta in Madison’s cardoon risotto, there is permission to simmer it in a “light chicken stock,” and even an acknowledgment that vegetable stock might “overwhelm” the flavor of that delicately bitter member of the sunflower family. I started cooking immediately, guiltless at last at my own stove, trying out soups in which the choice was water, vegetable stock, or chicken stock—especially the ones with chicken stock listed first. (Perhaps to mollify the purists, Madison’s The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, which came out this spring, remains unbendingly vegetarian; it’s new mainly in that it now flags every vegan-friendly recipe with a big V and adds 200 recipes to the original 1,400, making it, at nearly seven hundred pages, the OED of vegetarian cuisine.)
The clue to Madison’s heretical chicken stock is the word “vegetable” in her title. Before Vegetable Literacy, the meaning of “vegetable” in a cookbook’s name was largely a function of its author’s reputation and its audience’s expectations—which is to say that the people who had rushed to the store to buy Alice Waters’s third book, Chez Panisse Vegetables, were unlikely to be shocked that the vegetables in a stew called Beans Cooked in the Fireplace were meant to be sautéed, with bacon, in duck or goose fat, any more than the people who had bought Madison’s ninth book, Vegetable Soups, were likely to be shocked by the absence of anything remotely resembling bacon, let alone goose fat, in her potage of mustard greens and black-eyed peas. The field is muddier now. Food writers new to the vegetarian canon tend to use “vegetarian” and “vegetable” interchangeably. (The shrewdest may have been Fearnley-Whittingstall, whose Veg, wittingly or not, let you end the word for yourself, according to how much “vegetarian” you hoped to find when you opened it in your kitchen; in fact, there isn’t a trace of meat, fish, or fowl lurking among his plants.) Or they include the kind of conspicuously “carnivore” disclaimer that Simon Hopkinson, the chef responsible for Roast Chicken and Second Helpings of Roast Chicken, produced when he put a recipe for the broth of that estimable bird at the beginning of a book called The Vegetarian Option in 2009. (Not a vegetarian’s vegetarian, the people who bought the book complained.) But Vegetable Literacy is first and foremost a book about vegetables, not about the kind of people who don’t eat anything else—and, as Aristotle could have told anyone he found browsing the shelves of some Athenian Kitchen Arts & Letters, the fact that all vegetarians eat vegetables does not mean that all vegetable eaters are vegetarians.
The book is sly. Think of it as a pro-choice cookbook decorously wrapped in carrots and beans and lettuce leaves. Apart from the chicken broth, you won’t find anything “animal” listed in Madison’s recipes, but read what she has to say about some of those recipes, and you will detect the beginning of a stealth operation—a call to sit down at the dinner table together and put an end to the testy herbivore-carnivore divide. I should have guessed that Madison herself had crossed it, years earlier. And no doubt I would have if I’d looked more carefully at the author’s bio on her jacket flap, and discovered that she had sat on the board of the Southwest Grassfed Livestock Alliance (a piece of information discreetly dropped onto the end of a list of worthy commitments, right after her place on the board of the Seed Savers Exchange), or if I’d found the old interview in which she confessed to being “not a strict vegetarian,” and cheerfully added, “I eat everything, and eat whatever is served.” But I didn’t. A few weeks after I got the book, I took out a bowl of leftover wild rice that I’d served with a leg of lamb the night before. My first instinct was to chuck it, but, given that the book was right there, next to the fridge on the kitchen counter, I looked up wild rice in the index, turned to a recipe with the appetizing, if somewhat oxymoronic name Savory Wild Rice Crepe-Cakes, and glanced at the short passage with which Madison introduces all her recipes. “Try them with a dab of sour cream flecked with chives and smoked trout,” it said. Trout? In a Deborah Madison cookbook? A license to poach on those sacrosanct vegetarian preserves? That was the moment I really started reading.
In no time, I was cooking Rio Zape Beans with Salt-Roasted Tomatoes, under the spell of this suggestion: “If you crave smoke with your beans, cook these with smoked pork shanks.” For more “smokiness,” I made my broth from the carcass of a smoked chicken, the way Madison allowed that she does whenever a neighbor with a smoker brings her one. I even doubled the amount of spices, as carefree in collaboration with a vegetarian recipe as I’d been when I bought Greens more than twenty-five years earlier—and rarely since. Soon I discovered bacon among the “good companions” that Madison suggests for collards; meats among the good companions for her potatoes; and—introducing a recipe for turnips in white miso butter—her paean to the fish soup, its clam broth sweetened by white miso, that she always eats during stopovers at the Atlanta airport. I bought the miso and made fish soup and, a couple of days later, her extremely delightful turnips.
Madison, of course, had never kept anyone from fiddling with a recipe before. She simply hadn’t mentioned the possibility, perhaps for fear of offending any of her millions of constant readers for whom détente, let alone the thought of a pork shank sitting in Deborah Madison’s bean pot, would amount to capitulation. But now she was out of the culinary closet, embracing difference. Her good companions for heritage and ancient wheats were braised and roasted meats, and if you didn’t want meat with your farro, white bean, and cabbage soup, that was okay, too. The relief shows. Vegetable Literacy is a happy book—warm, chatty, and immensely informative without being at all didactic—and the odd thing is that Madison has never written so much or so well or so attentively about vegetables as she does now.
It had been easy to love Greens, maybe because the few vegetarians I knew back then were the kind-of ones, and the serious ones hadn’t become so pious. And I had often cooked from Vegetable Soups, the book in which Madison, who by then had married and moved to the country outside Santa Fe, introduced me to a battery of Mexican herbs and interesting grain-and-vegetable combinations (as in masa dumplings and summer squash in a spicy tomato broth, which I have to admit my husband hates) that I probably wouldn’t have found in any of the other cookbooks I owned twenty years ago. But my eyes had glazed over when I opened Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone for the first time. It weighed more than The Raj Quartet (a better read, but still bone-bruising if you happened to be reading in bed), which in itself discouraged browsing, one of the great pleasures of owning a good cookbook. Besides, there was no way anyone could browse through 1,400 (now sixteen hundred) recipes—not unless she was a vegetarian running out of things to make and willing to put in four years, trying a different recipe every night. Vegetable Literacy, by contrast, has 300 recipes and a lot more text. Read it as an introduction to your inner garden—a painless lesson in botany, sensibility, and appreciation that lets you celebrate the depth and beauty of plants in the context of whatever else you’re making. The result may be that, like me, you will soon be serving Madison’s corn and coconut-milk curry with a platter of grilled pork (a “good companion”), her sorrel, watercress, and yogurt sauce over a piece of salmon (another good companion), and little pieces of chicken (yet another) tossed with the tofu cubes in her soy and five-spice braise.
When I was reading Vegetable Literacy for the first time, the book that surprisingly came to mind was Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Meat, which begins with a disquisition on good husbandry, takes you through the rituals of nurturing and feeding and slaughtering, and deposits you at your stove, cooking with an unexpected understanding of—and strong sense of connection with—the animals you are about to cook, the aromas that will fill your kitchen, and the flavors you will soon taste. Vegetable Literacy does the same for vegetables. “It started with a carrot that had gone on in its second year to make a beautiful lacy umbel of a flower” is how Madison begins, in her own garden. She noticed similar flowers blooming on herbs like parsley, anise, chervil, and cilantro, and quickly discovered that those herbs not only were related botanically to one another but shared the same culinary characteristics and correspondences as the big vegetables in their Umbelliferae family—the carrots, fennel, celery, parsnips, and celeriac—and would “flatter” those vegetables in a dish. She started experimenting. She curtailed the teaching and traveling she had been doing for years. She called this “committing to a garden”—tending to it, finding the richest organic soils for it, learning to plant and turn it in the company of fat worms, glossy beetles, “exotic wasps,” and the occasional “creepy” desert millipede. She carried everything edible that it produced into her kitchen and tasted all the affinities she had reaped.
Madison describes her project as “cooking and gardening with twelve families from the edible plant kingdom.” Each chapter of Vegetable Literacy is about one of those families. They are not necessarily small families (or even all the possible families), and in a few cases the consanguinity can be fatal. Think of a big extended Italian family with an uncle in the ’Ndràngheta, or an Arab one with a rogue nephew in Al-Qaeda, when you learn that the potatoes, peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes in Madison’s garden are in the same family—botanically speaking, the Solanaceae—as the night-blooming datura, the base of my favorite perfume but stupefying if you stick your nose into a blossom and sniff, let alone sprinkle it onto your eggplant Parmesan. (And, by the way, beware of eating green potatoes; you won’t die, but as Madison learned, dutifully sampling one for her Solanaceae chapter, you will never forget the cramps.) Madison sticks to the cousins you would want to eat for dinner, opening each chapter with a section on the properties of the family, and then, one by one, on each of those edible cousins, with a look at its history, advice on its varieties and cultivation, some kitchen wisdom as to what parts of it to use (or not to use), and of course, her thoughts on its good companions: the herbs and spices and other vegetables; the sauces and cheeses; and scattered judiciously among them, the fish and meats. By the time you get to the recipes for that plant, she has moved you seamlessly into a state of high anticipation and appreciation—which is to say, you have become a starving connoisseur. The recipes are perfect.
By now, there are ten or fifteen other new (to me) vegetarian cookbooks on my study floor. Most will soon be dispatched to Housing Works, and none have made me miss the garden I tend in Italy in the summer, the way that Deborah Madison just did. I miss the May peas and favas, the June garlics and onion shoots and basil, the July arugula and zucchini, the August melons, eggplants, and tomatoes, and the first pumpkins of September. Oddly, I no longer miss my chili party, or even regret those ten pricey pounds of beef abandoned in their red bean pot. I find that I’m not much in the mood for meat lately—well, maybe my breakfast bacon, or my monthly porterhouse fix, or one of Madison’s good-companion roasts, braising in a pot of vegetables and herbs. But as often as not, I eat those vegetables first, and most of the meat goes in the fridge.
A few weeks ago, eight of my Italy friends turned up in New York at the same time, and I decided to get them together for a dinner party. I cooked one of my favorite recipes, a hot pot involving lentils, spicy Italian sausages, and prunes. Two of the friends were vegetarians—one had been at that final chili party—so I did what I usually do, and made a pasta al pesto just for them. This time my carnivores actually took the meat they were served, but when I got to the table I discovered that most had dipped into the pesto, too, and were eating it before I could take it back. Later that night, cleaning up in the kitchen, I asked my husband if everyone we knew could possibly be turning vegetarian. He found the question ridiculous. He said I should know by now that if you put people who lived in Italy anywhere near a bowl of pasta, they would take some, and it didn’t matter if they were carnivores or herbivores, Americans or Italians. (He is an anthropologist and thinks like that.) I wonder. I pointed out that the sausages were the first “real” meat we had eaten all week, and that we’d already had vegetable soup one night (admittedly, with pancetta), and salad for dinner twice—and never mind if one of those salads had anchovies in it, and a little tuna. “That’s kind of kind-of vegetarian,” he said. “Different.”