As I am writing this, I’m eating a dinner of string cheese—in big bites, not, as the good people of Polly-O intended, in strings—and leftover radishes, which are like regular radishes, but older. This is not what I would call a meal prepared and consumed in the spirit of love, but that is not to say that I do not equate good food (real cheese, fresh radishes) with the strongest strains of affection. When my grandmother taught me to make banana pancakes, which we did every Wednesday night through much of my childhood, she would counsel “Hold the bowl” as I stirred, which became, in our letters to each other, code for “I love you.” At the beginning of Nigel Slater’s memoir “Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger,” the author puts it this way: “It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you.”
Surely none of this was on my mind on April 5, 2013, when I purchased “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone,” by Deborah Madison. I had, exactly a month previously, met a swell fellow, who happened to be vegetarian. Coincidentally, I then invested in a four-and-a-half-pound tome of recipes that I could prepare for him. I found Madison to be a charming and non-threatening psychopomp into the realm of what I imagined to be the half-dead, the eaters of what she frequently calls “plant food,” which, to me, sounded like “fish food.” Madison appears on the cover of my edition clutching two wooden spoons, her bangs artfully tousled, in a very tidy kitchen. As someone with not enough wooden spoons, ungovernable bangs, and a handprint on my dishwasher that will never wipe away, I was hooked.
Madison, I learned, grew up on a dairy farm in upstate New York and a walnut orchard in Davis, California, before she began to make a name for herself, as a cook at Chez Panisse and as the proprietor, from 1979 on, of the beloved Greens Restaurant, in San Francisco. Now she lives in Santa Fe, with a Labradoodle named Dante—“He looked like he would be a bit heaven and hell,” she told me over the phone—and her husband, the painter Patrick McFarlin, whom she met “over an olive-pitting pizza session,” according to a new edition of “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone,” published earlier this month. (Jane Kramer wrote about the book, as well as Madison’s latest, “Vegetable Literacy,” in her wonderful essay on vegetarian cookbooks in a recent issue of the magazine.)
The revised “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone,” from 10 Speed Press, has around sixteen hundred recipes (about two hundred more than the original), plus a new introduction. The original never felt particularly outdated to me; when one’s aim is to use fresh, local ingredients to cook simply and healthfully, one tends to avoid weird food fads (fermented black beans). “The book originally took about seven years,” Madison explained to me recently. “When I started, in 1990, everyone thought tofu was going to save us. And now we know that maybe we should pay more attention to miso and tempeh.”
There are other changes. Gone are the dated photographs (a photo-editor friend maintains that she can identify not just the origin year of a food image but its origin month). There are fewer stir-fries; sautés take their place. There are newly appreciated grains (farro), spices (smoked paprika), oils (coconut), and plant milks (almond, hemp). Madison notes that kale salads have made the leap from obscurity to ubiquity, and that you can acquire Greek yogurt without leaving the country. She no longer graces the cover—having been replaced by gilt outlines of plants on a matte purple background—but her bangs, grayer but still perfect, persist in the author photo.
Many of the heavier dishes have been lightened or removed, although Madison’s den-motherish empathy means that some things linger. For instance, a risotto gratin (butter, cheese, cream) that she’d planned to cut was given a last-minute reprieve. “I was giving a talk and I said, ‘That’s coming out, because it’s very rich,’ ” she told me. “And two women raised their hands and they said, ‘Oh, you can’t take that out, because we always make that for our birthdays, for each other!’ ” The risotto gratin stayed.
“I’ve never been a fan of canola or soy or corn oil,” she continued. “But they were out there, and a lot of people did like them. This time, I just took them out! If people want to use canola oil, they will. I’m not a policeman.” It’s true that Madison is a gentler guide in your endeavors than many other cookbook writers of today, who insist that you follow recipes to the letter before indulging in fantasies of experimentation. Madison is quick to commiserate. “I can barely follow my own recipes!” she told me. “We all say, all of us who write recipes, ‘Read it through.’ It’s your road map; it’s going to tell you where you’re going, and when you’re going to take that unexpected left turn. But even I will be making one of my recipes and say, ‘Oh, darn!’ ”
Her resistance to the didactic extends even further. “I don’t consider this vegetarian,” she told me, of the book. “I just see it as vegetables.” In the new introduction, she identifies herself as a locavore, and among the “honest omnivores who happen to like a lot of vegetables.” McFarlin, Madison’s husband, was a vegetarian when they first fell for each other (after a few decades of being acquainted but not getting along—“more like oil and water,” as she put it in an e-mail); at the fateful pizza-making, he grabbed her ankle, and that sealed the deal. “I just sighed and thought, At least I can cook for him, but I really wanted to change my identity at that point,” she wrote to me. A few years after they married, he succumbed to the charms of a Serrano ham, which he and Madison encountered at a Spanish winery. “He still likes his vegetable meals—AND bacon. Or a rib eye. But I think he loves the vegetables best,” she concluded.
After making my way through Madison’s revised epic, and finding that I still loved the book and the boy, it seemed like a dinner for friends was in order. My plan was to serve (brand-new) radishes with soft butter and sea salt, almonds roasted with thyme, asparagus soup, portobello-mushroom pappardelle, a salad-and-cheese course, and an olive-oil cake with berries and ice cream.
“I think your meal is very ambitious and that you’ll hate me forever if you do it all in one day,” Madison advised, before overhauling my menu. No soup, she suggested, and pasta with cauliflower, parsley, and bread crumbs in lieu of the pappardelle. “It’s less complicated to make, and good, I think. (I love it, in fact.) It will feel more springy even if it’s snowing in New York.” Done. She also suggested that I ditch the nuts and make the cake the day before, which I ignored, because I am a glutton for zero-hour cooking meltdowns.
Of course, on the day of the dinner, I found myself holding the cake together with one hand while texting a friend with the other, “please bring me whipping cream,” which all bad bakers know is the Gorilla Glue of pastry assembly. (“I’m very fond of elaborate cakes, especially when they’re made by someone else,” Madison writes.) The pasta turned out a bit dry, perhaps because I imperfectly doubled the recipe. But Madison’s lemon vinaigrette elicited oohs and ahs, and the cake, made fragrant by orange-blossom water, was—once its structural flaws had been mostly obscured by berries—superb.
As my guests headed out the door, I tried to tell one, for whom I’d never cooked before, that next time I’d nail the pasta. (“Don’t Apologize! When it comes to cooking for others, I have learned—am still learning in truth—that it’s best to keep your doubts and disappointments to yourself” is Madison’s sage and mostly impossible-to-follow advice.) It was O.K., though, I realized, as I dried dishes that the vegetarian and the photo editor were washing together, in a saintly manner. (It is impossible not to love people who wash your dishes.) As Madison put it, “You know, we’re just people, trying to sit down and feed ourselves as well as possible.”
Photograph by Laurie Smith.
