The Greens Cookbook: a review

Posted by kathryn in Reviews

I have a new cookbook: The Greens cookbook: extraordinary vegetarian cuisine by Deborah Madison – and it’s wonderful.

The Book

I haven’t heard of this book before, but I suspect my international vegetarian restaurant knowledge is woefully inadequate. In researching, I’ve found Greens is a really well known restaurant in San Francisco, that opened in 1979.

This book was first published in 1987, but has been out of print for a while. Just recently Grub Street in London have published a new, updated, gorgeous looking copy of the book.

The author, Deborah Madison was the founding chef at Greens and is largely responsible for the restaurants style, repertoire and ethos.

The recipes

The Greens Cookbook is a one-inch thick hardcover, filled with over 250 vegetarian recipes. While there are recipes offering simple, tasty five-minute dishes, most take a little more time. It’s not the sort of book I use a lot mid-week. However on the weekend, when I’m happy to spend a little more time, there are interesting, beautiful flavours and dishes available. The recipes include soups, salads, tarts, gratins, pasta meals, sandwiches, vegetable side dishes, desserts and more. Plus there’s a whole section at the end on how to match wines with vegetarian food.

While it’s a north American book, Deborah’s recipes are influenced by the food of Europe, Mexico, Japan, Northern Africa and many other countries. Each recipe is clearly laid out with ingredients in one column down the left and the method on the right of each page. Instructions are clear and easy to follow, even for the more involved dishes. Where there are several stages to a recipe, it’s split into sections, to make the instructions clearer and easy to follow.

I’ve been cooking a bit from my new book and the recipes I’ve tried so far include:

• Beetroot with walnut vinaigrette
• Spinach soup with Indian spices
• Winter vegetables with parsley sauce
• Buckwheat linguine with lentils, carrots and chard
• Sweetcorn, bean and pumpkin stew
• Leek and mustard pie
• Rhubarb and apple betty

Everything has worked really well. So far, I haven’t made any substitutions and have each time produced a tasty meal, with leftovers that have become even better the next day. Two recipes were particularly good. Both the winter vegetables with parsley sauce and buckwheat linguine were intriguing dishes. When I read through the ingredients and method, they seemed to be slightly worthy, “healthy” dishes. Old fashioned vegetarian food that would taste like it was too-good for you and yet the final outcome was light, finely balanced and simply delicious.

What’s so special about it?

There are a LOT of recipes to choose from and most importantly, they work, but there are two other reasons why I love this book:

• Stock-making: One of the most surprising sections is the chapter on making stock. While this is something I do sporadically, and slightly haphazardly, Deborah outlines guidelines and a long list of the different vegetables, herbs and spices that can be used in stock making. More significantly she then goes on to detail exactly what effect that food will have on the flavour of the stock. I never dreamed you could use the seeds and stringy bits from the inside of a pumpkin in a stock. While apparently lettuce, eggplant, nettles and mung bean sprouts are all, in the right circumstances, fodder for the stockpot. While I can’t imagine doing this for every soup I make, it’s a useful and unusual resource.

• Menus: At the end of the book there are six pages of seasonal menu plans, all using recipes from the book. I have a couple of cookbooks that feature these sections and I always find them useful and inspiring. In Deborah’s book each menu uses in-season ingredients and combines dishes where the taste, textures and colours complement each other. If I have people coming round for dinner I might cook a whole menu, but I often just pick a couple of dishes from a menu, to put together a flavour combination I might not have considered.

Health quota

This isn’t just a book for vegetarians, it’s also for people trying to fit more vegetables and variety into their diets.

There are no pictures in the book, which some people will find off-putting. However, if you can get past this, it’s a beautifully laid out cookbook with recipes and food combinations that are interesting and certainly not your bog-standard vegetable fare. Even simple meals, like sandwiches have an inspiring twist, like chipotle chilli puree on a toasted cheese sandwich and cream cheese enlivened with handfuls of fresh herbs.

This is a recipe book you can use for family meals, but also pull out for dinner parties and special occasions.

You can purchase a copy from My Amazon Store.

18 September, 2007