A vegan diet can be more than seaweed and sawdust
A young chef finds a strong appetite for her upscale recipes
Popular book injects some real spice into food that some may have spurned as boring,
OK, truth. When you hear the word vegan, is earnest the first word that comes to mind? Me, too. Makes me think brown rice. Maybe seaweed. Nothing wrong with it, but I’m just not interested. At least, I wasn’t.
And then I read a lovely new book by Mérida Anderson, a young, self-trained vegan chef who cooks the most inventive, intricate and delicately flavoured dishes, using local and seasonal ingredients, and serves them at what she calls a roving supper club with pop-ups in Vancouver, Brooklyn and Montreal, where she has lived for the past several months.
Vegan Secret Supper, she calls it — the supper club and the book, published in late spring. And I’m not alone in liking it: Already, the first print run of 4,000 has sold out and a second is in the works. The book, now out in Canada and the United States, will soon be available in Australia and the United Kingdom.
“I really think people are hungry for a creative and upscale vegan cookbook,” said Cynara Geissler, marketing manager for Arsenal Pulp Press, which published Vegan Secret Supper.
A spate of vegan cookbooks has come out in recent months, and Arsenal publishes other vegan titles, but “we knew this one was special when the recipe titles alone made our mouths water,” she said.
And here’s the thing: Anderson says most of the people who fill the seats at her events aren’t vegan. So it’s clearly the food drawing them.
Vegan Secret Supper had its beginnings in 2008 in a closet-sized kitchen in a small attic apartment in Vancouver, where Anderson was born. Once a week, on Sunday evening, she would serve a three- to fivecourse meal, featuring “an ever-changing vegan menu of seasonal, homemade foods, right down to the sourdough bread,” as she observes in the book’s introduction.
Within a year, as many as 40 people were turning up to her Sunday vegan suppers. And as word spread of what was an intimate dining experience and of Anderson’s inspired (and inspiring) food, so did her passion for cooking.
“Cooking for people is really the best feeling, especially when the room goes quiet as you serve a course,” she writes.
In 2010, she left home to travel east to New York. “I wanted to learn more about vegan cooking — and I wanted to learn more by doing,” she said in an interview.
Her 220-page book, subtitled Bold & Elegant Menus from a Rogue Kitchen, is lovely both to read and to cook from. The multi-talented Anderson, who has worked as a fashion designer, apprenticed as a hair stylist and curated a gallery and art space, among other occupations, developed the recipes, wrote the cookbook — and shot the artful food photos accompanying most of the 150 recipes.
She hopes the cookbook will tempt people, vegan or not, to try the recipes simply because they are drawn to the food and inspired by it.
As she writes in the book’s introduction: “Don’t be afraid to experiment with the recipes: consider them starting points for your own interpretations.”
People tell Anderson her cooking is delicate. It could be because she gives centre stage to her ingredients, rather than masking them with salt, fat or sugar, as much commercial cooking tends to.
Whereas many vegan cookbooks default to tofu and other soy products, this one does not: Only a handful of dishes call for tofu.
She tries to keep ingredients local and to serve produce during its growing season. “I like the idea of eating things in season,” she said. “I don’t like heavier textures.”
Anderson had wanted to write a cookbook for a while. “I started the Supper Club and thought I’d do a dessert cookbook,” she said. “Then I got more into the rest of the meal.”