When you think about vegetarian cooking in America, it's hard to underestimate the influence of Mollie Katzen and herMoosewood Cookbook. What started out as a self-published book was eventually picked up and published by Ten Speed Press in 1977, and then updated twice asThe New Moosewood Cookbook, once in 1992, and again in 2000. Since its inception, the book has helped vegetarian cooking make its way from the fringe to something more mainstream. And just as the American palate has evolved over time, so has Katzen's own cooking, as exemplified by her brand-new book,The Heart of the Plate: Vegetarian Recipes for a New Generation. In it, the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame inductee writes in a friendly tone that's firmly grounded in decades of experience, while serving up exciting new flavors and a more relaxed, contemporary approach to meal planning. It's the kind of meat-free (and vegan) home cooking that many—omnivores and carnivores, included—will welcome.
In a recent conversation, Katzen made plain that she dislikes labels such as "vegetarian"—and explained why. She also discussed her mission as a cookbook author and how her own cooking has changed in the 40 years since she helped found the seminal Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York. Read on to learn more and to sample three new recipes fromThe Heart of the Plate:Coconut-Mango Rice Noodle Salad;Sweet Potato–Chickpea-Quinoa Burgers; andSeasonal Fruit-Herb Saladitas.
万博官网Epicurious:The subtitle of your new book is "Vegetarian Recipes for a New Generation." How would you compare this "new generation"—and its notions of vegetarianism—with cooks and eaters in decades past?
Mollie Katzen:I came on the scene quite a while ago. It was from a very different origin, the whole idea of being vegetarian—not that there's any one reason to shift your diet to plants, or even any one definition ofvegetarian. I've been avoiding the word, even if it's in the title of the book, because for most people, it really ends up being a statement about meat—as in, the absence of meat. Or if you're vegan, the absence of animal products. But what I've found over the years was that [labels] frustrated me greatly, being myself a tremendous vegetable lover.
My idea of a meal is a big pile of vegetables with a few other things added, whether or not there's meat on the plate. My vegetarian thing was never about meat or not; it was a massive vegetable obsession. But for a lot of people, there was an obsession with meat, and then anything but. Over the years, I met so many self-defined vegetarians, and it was all about "I'll be happy with pizza, nachos, and bagels," which are all things I wouldn't be happy with. So I realized that the definition ofvegetarianneeded to be discussed.
My vegetarian thing was never about meat or not; it was a massive vegetable obsession.
In my day, vegetarian was a generational statement. I think that's why we got the wordgenerationin that secondary title. It was very much about our own statement of who we were, in the late '60s and through the '70s—defining the counterculture, differentiating ourselves from our parents' culture of the '50s and '60s. It was a coming-of-age identity frame for a lot of us. We wanted to express a love of nature, and a concern about the environment, and a sense of the spiritual, and a sense of our own rebellion against our parents. It was a lovely alternative, the whole lifestyle as a statement for a lot of people.
In my early recipes—and I can laugh about this, and I still love them—there are casseroles for which I spared no cheese or sour cream. But a lot of that was because I was concerned about the mothers of my rebellious friends who were worried that they wouldn't have enough heft to their diet, and to prove that you could have enough. We were young; we weren't watching our waistlines.
Vegetarian then was, in a way, replacing the proverbial hunk of meat in the center of the American dinner plate with a hunk of something else. My early recipes came out in squares—the kugel, casserole, lasagna—so the main dish was replaced and the sides were the same: a side of vegetables, a side of salad. I kept with that model for the most part [in my new book], but with a new-generation idea that I've seen happening—and one I hope continues, because I like it: that the definition of vegetarian is not so rigid.
For a lot of people, it'sI'd like to eat less meat. I'd like to eat more vegetables. I'd like to have lighter dinners several times a week. I'd like to go without meat or fish several times a week.Or, turning it around,我想经常有植物性食物。And I love that because that's me. It's what my food has become. For me, vegetarian these days refers to the food and not the person. Most people want that now, at least part of the time. There are so many options at restaurants, so much more available at farmers' markets. It's no longer necessarily the big identity type of thing. It's not who I am, but what I'm eating.
For me, vegetarian these days refers to the food and not the person.
Epi:Tell us about some recipes inThe Heart of the Platethat really excite you, because of the flavor combinations or some other element that feels new.
MK:The first difference between now and 20 years ago is olive oil. Oil was a passing thing in my earlier cooking. There was butter or oil, and the oil was generic. There's much more awareness now of which oils are really good. So, [I like to] use olive oil for so many things, and use high-end oils for finishing. With flavor, I use coconut in savory dishes more often. One of my favorite recipes isCoconut-Mango Rice Noodle Salad: rice noodles cooked in coconut water then mixed with cashews, julienned green beans, mangoes, cucumbers. The Southeast Asian kind of palate—I'm loving that.
I pickle things more often. I pickle onions and use them both as a topping and as an ingredient. I pay a lot more attention to different kinds of vinegars, keeping in mind where they come from. If I'm doing a Spanish-themed almond dip, I'll use a sherry vinegar. I love using nuts especially because I don't use meat in my recipes, and I want to give people good, healthy oils. I have a walnut sauce for pasta, [and] an almond pesto. One of my favorite dishes is a Tan Tan noodle that's made with a chili paste and mixed with peanut butter and garlic over noodles, tofu, and water chestnuts. Chili paste as a base has become a bigger part of my cooking.
Texturally, I love juxtaposing and having a collaboration on the plate with several different things that complement each other. I love mashed vegetables: mashed carrots, mashed parsnips, mashed celery roots. I ended up with an entire chapter on them!
The fun thing is that you sit with a spoon and eat a mashed something and [you have] all the comfort food qualities. But you can spread one of those mashes on a plate, add a grilled vegetable on top of that, sprinkle it with some grains, and top it withsaladita—fruit-and-vegetable combos that are kind of like a cross of salad and a salsa—which is another new thing I do. It is so satisfying, so contrasting with the soft warm mash.
Epi:Are there any ingredients that have fallen out of fashion for you?
MK:I hardly ever use sour cream anymore. I'm much more inclined to use yogurt or crème fraîche. [Same with] really bland cheese like Monterey Jack. My tendency now is to use a more flavorful cheese, and less of it, for melting purposes. I'll go for a fresh white cheese like aqueso fresco,ricotta salata, or a not-too-salty feta rather than a Monterey Jack.
Over 40 years ago, vegetarian cuisine didn't really exist [here in the United States].We really had to look to other cultures for vegetarian foods because other cultures had a lot more options. The early Moosewood had a lot of stuff from the Mediterranean, Greece, the Caucasus. Tabouli, hummus, and things like that weren't known then. They were very exotic and very alternative. We found vegetarian food all over the world, but the American version—who knew what that was? And so I would just put my tools— eggs, cheese, sour cream, butter—together. That's what I knew to do. I didn't know about seasonings, and fresh herbs weren't readily available. Garlic, you added just a small clove to things.
Epi:You talk about vegetarian not as an identity but rather as what's on the plate. People who consider you a proponent of vegetarianism might be surprised to hear that.
MK:I've never been a proponent of vegetarianism. It's interesting because I've never told a single person in my life that I think they shouldn't eat meat or I think they should be a vegetarian. That's been ascribed to me, and it's very understandable because that's how I cook, that's how I know how to cook best. But I myself eat meat sometimes. People ask me when did I change or reverse myself, but I never did either… If you look in my early works, I never do the whole "you should be a vegetarian." It was more like, "Many people prefer to eat vegetarian and some of the reasons include… and if you want to eat that way, here are your recipes." That's pretty much the whole thing.
But I did go for years without eating meat or eating very little of it, depending on what was going on in my life. I couldn't eat a steak but I could eat a few bites. I would want any meat I was to eat to be sustainably raised, and I would want very little of it.
This brings up something I like to let people know: I do not write cookbooks for myself. I don't write to say, "This is what I eat." I'm not a huge fan of eggplant. It's not my favorite vegetable; there are things I like more than other things. When you write a cookbook, you have to objectify your palate. Other people are going to be cooking these recipes. I'm writing my cookbooks to try to give other people things that I think they would like to eat. It's a service job. I'm of service to my readers: I want to teach people how to be home cooks. I care more about whether people are cooking at home than whether they're cooking meat and potatoes or vegetarian.
I want to teach people how to be home cooks. I care more about whether people are cooking at home than whether they're cooking meat and potatoes or vegetarian.
Epi:If your early books were about putting a sturdy square serving of food in the center of the plate, what is your vision forThe Heart of the Plate,as it were, now?
MK:I've broken it down into a more modular approach: I call it the mandala plate, the peace sign, the bento box—I love to think of this as the basic plate. My fantasy for how this book will get used is that people will put out the basics—three or four little dishes that go together and a big one. And people—vegan, meat lover, vegetarian, however they define themselves (of course, my first wish is that nobody define themselves at all, foodwise)—will all sit down to the same meal together. And then, if people want to add to it, [they can]. Because of that modular quality, it can be really beautiful, like the lion and the lamb sitting down together.
Epi:Looking back to the '70s, when you cofounded the Moosewood Restaurant, how didThe Moosewood Cookbookcome to be?
MK:We started getting requests [at the restaurant] for two things: People wanted recipes, and people wanted to have something for a second time. "I came in last week and I had this really good carrot soup. When are you having it again?" The other thing was, I—not everybody—really wanted to standardize a bit of a menu. I was trying to get a notebook of recipes so that we could do things the same way as each other. I was getting so many recipe requests and writing the same things down over and over that I decided to photocopy a few and stapled them together. I self-published a version for a few years. I was selling thousands of them in a town the size of Ithaca, and it was then that I sought out a publisher.
It was after the publications of饮食对一个小星球上and theVegetarian Epicure, andThe Tassajara Bread Book. Those books came out a couple of years before we opened Moosewood, and they blew everybody's mind. I call them the triumvirate of precursors to Moosewood: Frances Moore Lappé, Anna Thomas, and Edward Espe Brown. Those three classics, plus my cooking experience, were my inspiration. I give full credit, kudos, and gratitude to those three authors who came before me.
Epi:Looking to the future, how will people eat? Will we continue down the road of eating less meat and poultry and more fresh vegetables, more whole foods?
MK:我想用心的组合(吃)莫vement plus a medium-size plate plus the greater proportion of that plate being vegetables (at least 50 percent of the plate) plus a really fine way of seasoning it—people really learning how to be artful with salt, a fine drizzle of oil—equals people being healthier, enjoying their food more, having a more economic advantage, and eating well.
The other things people are short on in addition to money are time, skills, and space. I try to address the mindfulness [aspect], which can extend to your kitchen space and how you spend your time. There's a psychological openness to actually spending time cooking in the kitchen. People are blocked on that. I'll give them a recipe that takes 40 minutes and they'll say they don't have the time! But they'll watch a TV show, go online, go down the rabbit hole.
But I think there's a point where people get into the zone and something clicks for them, where they fall in love with cooking. And I think the things that help make such moments more possible is you get your cooking space to a certain level of readiness: You have a knife you adore, that feels good in your hand, and is really really really sharp. You have a project ahead of you, you know what you're doing, you've got elbow room, and you're not crunched for time.
