Cookbook writing career spirals to new heights
When Martha Rose Shulman started cooking in the 1970s, her focus was healthy and vegetarian. She loved cooking, and vegetarian was a whole new world back then, so she began to teach.
Over the decades, she’s authored 25 cookbooks and found her cooking influenced by time spent in France, Mexico and the Mediterranean. While her approach has evolved, her intent has remained steady. Reliable recipes that taste good but still focus on health became her calling card and the focus of her New York Times column, “Recipes For Health.”
From her home in Los Angeles, the author of “The Simple Art of Vegetarian Cooking” and “The Very Best Recipes for Health” shares the inspiration behind her latest cookbook, “Spiralize This! 75 Fresh and Irresistible Recipes for Your Spiralizer” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $17.99) and tells us the plans for her next book.
Q. How did you start cooking and how did that evolve into a career writing cookbooks?
A. I loved cooking, and I started to cook when I was about 17. It was in the early days of vegetarian cooking in the ’70s and there wasn’t much that was good. I was always cooking. I just decided to make that my profession.
Q. How many recipes are in that repertoire now?
A. In the thousands. My very first book was “The Vegetarian Feast.”
Q. What do you think when you look back at that first cookbook?
A. The recipes are a lot more busy than my recipes are now. I was really trying to prove a point or show that vegetarian cooking can be really tasty. I was very excited about flavors, and eventually I moved to Paris, where I lived for 12 years. That had a wonderfully simplifying effect on my cooking.
Q. Are you a vegetarian?
A. Most of my written work is vegetarian. I don’t buy meat very often, but if I go to a dinner party and meat is on the menu I’m happy to eat it. I was vegetarian for a long time, and I think I reached a balance.
I grew up in a very meat-centric household, and then I had my quota. I can make some really good chicken dishes and a good beef stew, but I would never call myself an expert in meat cooking.
Q. Who are you aiming your recipes at then?
A. I write for people who really want good food and a healthy lifestyle. I also think people like my recipes because they work, they’re reliable and they’re not very complicated.
Q. Are you a recipe follower?
A. I follow my own exactly, because I know the results, but with other people’s, maybe just the first time. I do follow pastry recipes to the letter. That’s a whole different kind of cooking. I worked on Jacquy Pfeiffer’s cookbook, “Art of French Pastry,” so I became a convert to the precise.
Q. Your most recent cookbook is “Spiralize This: 75 Fresh and Irresistible Recipes for Your Spiralizer.” Why did you focus on spiralizing?
A. I was really glad to have that spiralizer book to fall in my lap. I don’t know that I ever would have tried a spiralizer otherwise. The publisher came to me, and I really got into it as a prep tool. I’m doing a latke party and I’m doing all the latkes that way, using recipes from the book. It is great for vegetable prep.
Q. What have you learned about tastes and trends in food?
A. There are a lot of trends I haven’t kept up with, which doesn’t mean I’m not interested, like the fermentation thing. Then there are things that remind me of where I was at in the ’70s, when I made my own yogurt and bread every day. I even had a yogurt business for a while in Austin.
I had a supper club where people came to sit-down dinners in my house once a week, for 35 people, and I charged. I did it in Paris as well. That helped me build a repertoire. I knew I never wanted to do a restaurant; that was above my head. I just always figured out ways to make a living doing what I love to do.
Q. Who are the food writers you read today?
A. The ones I always have. I am forever in love with the way Deborah Madison writes about food. I still go back and read Julia Child and M.F.K. Fisher. Kim Severson of the New York Times is just a wonderful journalist. I think Clifford Wright is incredibly scholarly and good.
Q. What’s your No. 1 necessity for healthier cooking?
A. Think produce. Move to think of vegetables not as a side dish.
Q. Who is the biggest influence on your cooking?
A. Julia Child, for sure, because of the generation I’m in she was the
biggest influence, and Anna Thomas, who wrote “The Vegetarian Epicure.”
Q. Do you have a recipe you want to be known for?
A. My black bean enchiladas were a signature dish.
Q. For people who don’t like or think they don’t like vegetables, what’s your suggestion?
A. Maybe just find one or two you can eat. I cannot digest Jerusalem artichokes. There are some people who just don’t have the enzyme required.
Start with one vegetable you can enjoy. Some of the tacos are a good way to try things. If people don’t think they like vegetables, try a taco and they might change their mind.
Q. What can you not live without in your kitchen?
A. Something that I love that a lot of people don’t think to have is a mortar and pestle. Not that I use it every day, but when I want to use it there is nothing you can substitute for it. Q. What’s next?
A. I’m working on a personal memoir, not a cookbook. I think I have a story to tell.