When you think of pioneers in the field of vegetarian cooking, Mollie Katzen’s name invariably comes up.
Katzen, who has inspired home cooks with her inventive vegetarian fare since the 1977 publication of The Moosewood Cookbook, based on the Ithaca, N.Y. restaurant of the same name, is now tempting palates with The Heart of the Plate, her 12th and most recent book.
The book’s subtitle, ‘Vegetarian Recipes for a New Generation,’ draws attention to the fact that the way cooks treat vegetables has changed dramatically over the decades.
“It was unheard of to not put butter on vegetables when I was growing up,” Katzen tells Cityline.ca.
“The best vine-ripened tomato, all you need to do is slice it, and don’t mess with it. One of the things that has changed since I wrote The Moosewood Cookbook so many decades ago is that vegetables are much better, and they’re more abundant and available than they used to be. You couldn’t get a good tomato, necessarily, unless it was a two-week period at the end of August. Even the availability of good olive oil, which was not in stores, large or small. That has all made it possible to have ‘simple’ be good. Simple can only be good.”
Katzen admits her personal style of vegetarian cooking has changed, too. When she was initially developing recipes at the Moosewood Restaurant, she felt the need to try to convince people that a dinner plate wasn’t incomplete if it lacked meat or fish. So she would structure her plates in a similar way, with a casserole or something equally weighty as the protein replacement, and vegetable sides.
Now that vegetables play more of a starring role in both restaurants and many home cooks’ repertoires, something Katzen is incredibly enthused about, she’s having fun playing with the perceptions of what we can do with them. She loves placing thinly sliced root vegetables in cold water, popping them in the fridge, and turning them into crunchy chips.
“You can play with the whole spectrum of textures, from crispy-crunchy, to totally mashed out. It’s all acceptable, and it’s all beautiful,” she says.
“These days what I’m enjoying so much is that often a signature way that a chef will show you their stuff is to show you how they do their vegetables. That’s the thing they’re proudest of, it seems, right now. It’s no longer, ‘I cooked the steak this way,’ it’s, ‘This is what I did with the asparagus.’”
Katzen’s sense of experimentation and play is evident throughout The Heart of the Plate in dishes such as ‘Golden Mango-Nectarine Gazpacho’, ‘Mushroom Popover Pie,’ and ‘Thai Tea Cheesecake with Chocolate Crumb Crust.’ Many of her recipes are vegan, and they’re denoted as such in the book.
Katzen admits she was relieved when we stopped demonizing fat in cooking — explaining that it’s remarkable what a good olive oil or a scattering of chopped nuts can do for a dish.
“They cross over to being seen as a gourmet item rather than a ‘You should eat this…’ item,” she suggests. “We’re being pulled into vegetables instead of pushed from behind.”
What’s your favourite vegetable to cook with? Share your comments below!