Mark Bittman: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian

By JULIETTE ROSSANT Are big cookbooks better than small ones? Does their size make us feel like we get our money's worth and that there will be more options, more to discover, or just plain more? Super Chef cracked open Mark Bittman's oversized tome, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food (Wiley 2007) in part to see why it had garnered a James Beard nomination, and in part to see how a non-vegetarian would write a meatless cookbook. In fact, there is no reason not to use this cookbook for parts of every meal – and still continue to eat flesh. A good vegetarian cookbook – and this one is good – is useful for everyone without being condescending to carnivores. We all need to eat our vegetables, the more the better, and the better cooked the better. Try hunting for what he left out. It isn't easy to find something he missed. Vietnamese Summer Rolls – they are here on p. 743; Macaroni and Cheese (rich and simple) - that's on p.461, Barley Pilaf on p. 539, and plenty of vegetarian burger recipes (pp. 657-667). It would be hard to exhaust the book's 2,000 recipes quickly. But the idea is that these are simple recipes, foundations - good in themselves, but better to teach you how to cook like a vegetarian, or at least prepare you to eat richly but without as much meat. Who is this book for? Pretty much everyone who needs to expand their vegetarian repertoire and get inspired to eat more healthfully. But it's a great book to give to older children and young cooks starting out who seriously want to explore the kitchen (with an adult). They will learn what seitan is and how to cook with it (p. 668- 672); they will use it as a reference book for information on new vegetables they discover in the local supermarket (and want to try); and the book is full of useful diagrams like how to clean leeks (p. 311), and charts on oils (p. 757). It is, for all its bigness, not just a recipe book. The strength of this book is Bittman's encyclopedic presentation of related information on how to eat well. Big books like Bittman's prepare home cooks to tackle more complicated, and perhaps shorter, cookbooks by other chefs. Previous articles: Mark Bittman: Best Recipes in the World [Cookbook Reviews - complete] Technorati Tags: superchefblog, Juliette Rossant, super chef, celebrities, chefs, food, restaurants, cooking, branding, cuisine, blogging, food blogging, Mark Bittman --> back to Super Chef