Some of the cookery books on my shelves, which I draw on from time to time. Sometimes I read them for pleasure; at other times I draw on the possibilities which the recipes suggest. Oriental cuisine is a major influence on my cooking, partly because of the range and style of cooking in the eastern kitchen, but also because vegetarian cooking has been part of oriental cuisine forever, from Japan, to the middle east, and on to the Mediterranean, It's a standard part of non-european cuisine. I'm not a vegetarian as you can see from the range of recipes on the blog, but I like vegetarian food.
Before the empire, even the Roman diet seems to have been largely vegetarian, which, given the bizarre and exotic recipes in the pages of Apicius, our principal source for Roman cuisine, seems hard to imagine. But Apicius was writing under the empire.
Vegetarian food is not hard to do, though it is hard to do well, but in the west, until close to the end of the twentieth century, vegetarian food was often two colours of pasta in a cheese sauce, unless you managed to find a decent vegetarian restaurant. In the UK, the Indian restaurant was a blessing. Good traditional and delicious vegetarian food, available as part of a cuisine which understood it as a choice, as reasonable as any other.
Likewise with wheat free dishes. For those of us with a wheat intolerance it is a choice which we had to make, or forever be at the mercy of our own metabolism. Though it isn't so hard now to find recipes and suppliers of alternative versions of products which used to be laden with wheat. The books in the picture show the range of styles of cooking and eating which I embrace.
No comments:
Post a Comment