Vegetarian fare has come a long way
Veteran vegetarian chef savours ingredients of today
LAURA BREHAUT
Vegetable-focused cuisine has come a long way during acclaimed chef Deborah Madison’s nearly 40-year career.
She’s the author of 14 influential cookbooks.
Madison worked with Alice Waters in the early days of Berkeley, Calif.-institution Chez Panisse.
She opened Greens, one of the first farm-to-table restaurants in San Francisco. When she began cooking vegetarian food in the 1970s, it was ripe with connotations.
“We were very sincere, but we didn’t know anything. The food was stodgy and heavy; it had no basis in cuisine or anything for quite a while,” Madison says.
“If you were vegetarian, that’s what you were. Today, it can be on Mondays and (the rest of the week) you’re an omnivore … you can be whatever you want. I’m glad to see that actually. It’s loosened up in a lot of ways.”
In her latest collection, Madison looks back at just how far vegetarian food has come.
In My Kitchen features more than 100 recipes, some new and others revised to better reflect how she cooks today.
Ingredient lists are pared back, preparations are simpler and tastes are lighter.
As an example, she offers her eggplant gratin. At Greens, she included a layer of Gruyère cheese, concerned that guests “wouldn’t feel fed” without it.
Today, the golden-domed dish stands on full-flavoured, latesummer eggplants and ricotta Parmesan custard.
The richness of the late 1970s and early ’80s is a relic of the era, she says. As values have changed over the decades, so has access to a wider variety of ingredients.
“A lot of recipes reflect the fact that we have very different ingredients today then when I first started. And they’ve gone a long way toward making food better and sometimes even easier to cook,” Madison says.
From embracing a world of beans — including one of her favourite types, Rio Zape — to using “good fats” effectively, in the book she shares some of the key learnings gained during a career dedicated to vegetarian cooking.
Madison advocates establishing a connection with the food we eat, and educating ourselves on food politics: “Grow something!” and “Do research if possible.” She writes that growing her own produce has renewed her enthusiasm in cooking.
“It just brings everything into focus in a way that it doesn’t if you’re just getting it at Whole Foods in a big plastic tub. You don’t know who grew it, you don’t know anything about it, how old it is, what chemicals are making it stay fresh,” she says.
“If we can’t answer some questions, if we can’t find out the answers, we’re really in the dark about what we’re eating. And personally, I don’t want to be in the dark. I never take anything at face value when it comes to food anymore.”
While Madison follows a “mostly meatless diet,” she stresses that she doesn’t think of her food as being vegetarian or not vegetarian.
Recipes such as roasted tomatoes and fingerling potatoes with thyme, olive and capers are just as at home at the centre of the plate as they are accompanied by a steak.
“I think it’s hard when you get really tight about a pattern for yourself. ‘I only eat this’ or ‘I’m gluten-free’ … To me, it’s about opening doors instead of closing them. And that’s really what I’ve always been interested in: ‘Hey, it’s just vegetables,’” she says with a laugh. “It’s beautiful, it’s lovely, it’s delicious and you can have it, too. And you don’t have to call yourself a vegetarian.”