Vegetarians, rejoice!

As my husband was presented with his meal at a fancy black-tie dinner, I held my breath and waited for the well-worn line of his I knew was coming: ‘Aaaaand… the vegetarian gets stiffed again.’

Looking at his sad, solitary poached egg, artfully placed atop some sort of barely there green foam, I made sympathetic noises before turning to tuck into my beef Wellington and potato dauphinoise. (No sense in of us starving.)

He’s right, though. The vegetarian does get stiffed. I’ve been witness to this at his side for over 20 years now. The times in restaurants where he’s expected to pay the same for some melted cheese swirled into risotto as I might for a premium cut of steak. The restaurants that add a derisory single choice of a tomato pasta to a menu laden with meat options. I suppose that’s better than the restaurants that don’t even bother. I remember one London brasserie where the waiter snootily informed my husband they don’t really cater to his kind, which, in 2019, is unforgivable. I’ll never forget the time on a plane when both of us sat there staring, dumbfounded, as he was proudly presented with a pallid grey slab of steaming tofu – with literally nothing else on the plate. Some things just cannot be unseen. This was in business class.

If the vegetarian in my life isn’t getting stiffed, he’s being stared at as though he’s an octopus we’ve taught to speak. ‘You’re a what?’ my elderly relatives would ask. ‘But… what do you

The revolution has been slow in coming but it is, thankfully, here. It’s been interesting watching the rest of the world slowly understand that you won’t collapse in an anaemic puddle without meat. Frankly, vegetarian cooking can be so much more creative and certainly tastier.

Someone who has always championed making vegetables more than a sideshow is Jamie Oliver. My shelves are stacked with his cookbooks for that very reason. In amongst the meat, I’ve found plenty of ideas that carnivores vegetarians can enjoy. So I’m delighted that he has devoted an entire book to vegetables. This is the guy we’ve needed to push meat-free cooking over the line into the mainstream. And I’m even more excited that he is giving YOU readers the exclusive first look. At least in our own homes, thanks to Jamie’s trademark fuss-free approach, the vegetarians in our lives need never get stiffed again! Enjoy the issue.