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Cooking by the Seasons: Simple Vegetarian Feasts Paperback: 208 pages ;
Dimensions (in inches): 0.60 x 9.18 x 7.62 There’s a lot to love in Allrich’s newest cookbook. She offers us lots of wonderful recipes that are different from the usual fare, easy to prepare, use items we’re likely to have on hand already, and are bound to be enjoyed by vegetarians and non-vegetarians alike. I love the fact that she considers a pound of pasta as enough for three or four servings, rather than the usual six or eight (who are those people feeding, anyway? Surely not my family!) I also appreciate that my beloved bread machine is not spurned as being insufficiently earthy (purists will find hand mix instructions included as well.) The book is organized around the four seasons, and each chapter begins with a brief description of the quarter and cross-quarter celebrations. Following are sections of Beverages and Bites (appetizers), Soups, Everyday Feasts (main dishes), Savory Sides, Seasonal Salads and Sweet Endings (desserts.) The recipes include vegan alternatives and many also offer other serving suggestions. Allrich includes a list of what one might want to include in a vegetarian pantry, and in appendices a list of resources, US to UK translations of cooking terms and ingredients, and metric/non-metric equivalents. She also has recipes indexed by both recipe name and by food category, which I find extremely useful (Golden Potato Soup, for example, is under G in the recipe index but also under both Potato and Soup in the category index.) The only quarrel I have with this book concerns Allrich’s decisions about what is seasonally appropriate. Granted, I live in an area that could be summed up by Mark Twain’s comment, “Nine months of winter followed by poor sledding”, but to me, basil pesto is for summer and ratatouille for autumn (how else to use up the garden excess?); she has both for spring. She seems to use many of the same ingredients for all the seasons; I would have preferred firmer divisions (hunt up a copy of Judith Benn Hurley’s Healing Secrets of the Seasons for an example of how this may be accomplished.) There is a difference between what might taste good and we can, with a little imagination, justify, and what is truly seasonal. As a guide to a seasonal approach to eating, two out of five pentacles.
As a vegetarian cookbook, five out of five pentacles.
Review by Karen Albeck |
