Customer Reviews

The Savory Way

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Savory Way is a wonderful vegetarian cook book without being noticeably vegetarian. I have been working my way through the cook book since I received it as a gift in September '99 and have yet to discover any bad recipes. Some I've even made twice. The recipes are easy to follow and don't require very unusual ingredients. I would recommend this cook book to anyone interested in cooking good food that is not ordinary.

This book contains one of my all-time favorite recipes - Cold Noodles with Peanut Sauce. I have yet to make (or taste) another peanut sauce as good as this one.

The recipes are easy to follow, although some of the ingredients are difficult to get!

Overall, this book offers elegant and savory recipes for all levels of cooks, and I recommend it to anyone wanting to make a special meal.

`The Savory Way' is an early (1990) book from leading vegetarian cookbook author, Deborah Madison so, as Ms. Madison has a new book on the way, I thought it was high time for me to catch up with her body of work so I can give an informed review of how her new volume fits into her other books.

Ms. Madison is a former colleague of Alice Waters and Lindsey Shere at Chez Panisse who specializes in a very general way, like Mollie Katzen and Madhur Jaffrey, on dishes that fit into a vegetarian lifestyle. Note that the term `vegetarian', especially as used by these three authors, is extremely misleading, as it is much more appropriate to say that they construct meals of everything under the sun except meat, fowl, fin fish and shell fish. Both Madison and Jaffrey make extensive use of milk, cheese, yoghurt, and eggs.

Madison's objective in this book is, in fact, to cover as broad as possible a survey of what can be done without using animal flesh. The book's title may be a bit misleading to some foodies in that `savory' is often one of the words used to divide dishes in two great groups of `savory' and `sweet'. This book in fact includes two rather long chapters on sweets.

A first look at this book shows lots of headnotes to the many recipes. The first thing you need to know if you are put off by `chatty' recipe books is that these notes are almost exclusively devoted to an understanding of the cooking involved with the recipe and how to get the best results from your ingredients. While little stories about the historical provenance of a recipe may interest many, including myself, that is not what this book is about. On top of this, I firmly agree with the blurbed opinion from Mollie Katzen who compliments both her cuisine AND her writing. Almost all professional culinary writers are pretty good, or have an excellent copy editor at work on their prose, but Ms. Madison is a food service professional who writes very well. I often wish the soon to be beknighted Jamie Oliver had a bit more talent with words, as I find his books so comforting in spite of the heavy contribution from his editors.

The very first attraction of the book is its Table of Contents, which lists every single recipe title in the front of the book. This is doubly useful in that this relatively long book divides recipes into chapters covering eleven different types of dishes suitable for just about any time of the day, including a good selection of recipes very good for breakfast. The eleven recipe chapters are:

Quick Bites with 40 pages of recipes for sandwiches, toasts, and spreads.
Salads to Start or Make a Meal with 42 pages
Soups and Stews with 50 pages of thick, thin, and pureed soups, including a new one with my favorite fall ingredient, chestnuts.
Eighteen Quick Pasta Dishes for Five and Company, 32 pages
Stovetop Vegetables, 27 pages of sautes and braises.
Baked and Roasted Vegetables, 25 pages with ratatouille, gratins, tians, and other goodies.
Grilled Vegetables and their Sauces, 11 pages with two to six sauces per grilled dish.
Down to Earth, 26 pages on Rice, Potatoes and Beans (although beans appear throughout all chapters!)
Morning Foods for Day and Night, 26 pages of Eggs and Cheese and Cereals and Breads.
Finishing Touches, 31 pages of sauces, salsas, condiments, dressings, pastes, and you name it.
Desserts, 45 pages on Fruit Dishes, Cream Cheeses, Pastries, and Custards
Sweetmeats, 12 pages on sweet pastes, peels, syrups, dried fruits, and other dessert dressings.

Every recipe I examined is relatively simple to prepare with fewer expensive or rare ingredients than you may find with Jaffrey or Jack Bishop, and great tips on understanding the recipes and the ingredients.

The appendix is just right for the occasional home cook who is lost in the forest of equipment you can find in a first rate kitchen supply store such as the second floor at Zabars. Ms. Madison puts it all in perspective by highlighting all my favorite tools such as gratin and tian pots, the mortar and pestle, a few good knives, the food mill and the pizza stone and peel. The chapter on the pantry has lots for the novice and a few good tips for the foodie, such as the fact that Mexican olive oils can be very spicy. Possibly the best items in the Appendix are the lists of dishes for special purposes such as entertaining, feeding large groups, and fitting into a low fat diet (note that for the number of recipes in this book, this low fat list is surprisingly short).

The list of sources is short with no Internet sites provided, but I recognize that virtually all of these vendors are still in business. The bibliography is also brief, but hits all the right titles, especially Joy Larkcom's excellent `The Salad Garden'.

This book is a great resource for `liberal' vegetarians who simply eschew meat. I would add this to Madhur Jaffrey's `World Vegetarian', Peter Berley's `The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen', and Jack Bishop's `The Complete Italian Vegetarian' to create a great core vegetarian library. I cannot at this time compare this to Ms. Madison's other books, as this is the first I have read, although I sense many of her more recent books have a narrower scope, focusing on vegetable dishes. I plan to review her other books in the next few days.

Highly recommended for both vegetarians and foodies in general.

The Savory Way by Deborah Madison is a vegetarian cookbook that focuses on flavorful, interesting dishes. The few I have tried have turned out well, but there are some caveats to the book. First, Madison relies heavily on very fresh and hard-to-get ingredients, which is great but not very practical if you don't have a big herb and vegetable garden in your yard. Second, although the directions are complete, she does assume that she is writing for "intermediate" or advanced cooks. Beginners might be confused as to appropriate end points to some of the steps. Third, this is not the cookbood for you if you are new to vegetarian cooking or simply cooking a lot of vegetables. For example, there are only two recipes for fresh asparagus and no instruction on the basics of cooking any vegetable (I'm sure that is her other cookbook). If you want some specialty, delicious vegetarian recipes for any meal or course, this is a good cookbook. For basic vegetarian cooking, you should look elsewhere.

This is one of the best cookbooks ever. You can randomly pick out a recipe and prepare it for guests without ever having tried it before, and it will be a big success. Yum!

This is another excellent cookbook by Deborah Madison. It is packed full of recipes for just about everything. We have tried lots of the recipes, they have all been easy to prepare and delicious. Highly recommended for vegetarians and non vegetarians alike!

Madison sets up this book as if it is somehow drastically different from her other cookbooks, in terms of its reliance on unusual, expensive, out-of-the-way ingredients. She may have been living in rural Arizona when she wrote this, but being less reliant on those ingredients does not mean they are absent. I have a local farm-share but if I didn't I would never have heard of herbs like sorrel or lovage, or have access to fresh pattypan squash and yellow zucchini and heirloom tomatoes and an unlimited supply of basil, nor would it be likely that I would be able to afford these ingredients.

That said, I do have those ingredients, and the recipes for them have been fantastic! And many of the recipes are as easy to supply as she promises. And there are more faster, simpler recipes in this book than in her others. And the cooking process and advice are as usual spectacular.

So despite my problems with this book, I would recommend it to someone looking to cook exciting recipes from scratch using fresh produce and ingredients. Even if you don't have farm-fresh fruit and vegetables, there will be something in this book for you.

As I was very unkind to the author's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (as I should have been -- it's a mess), I felt like I needed to give fulsome praise to this one, as it deserves.

I was a vegetarian for 16 years, and this was one of my most relied-upon cookbooks. And now that I've finally left the cult, erm, lifestyle behind, I'm continuing to use The Savory Way.

Deborah Madison has a sophisticated palate, and these recipes are head and shoulders above those of MOST vegetarian cookbooks. Take Mushrooms Flagstaff, for example. It's a recipe she adapted from a nasty hippy vegetarian cookbook. In Madison's hands, it becomes an amazingly complex ragout of mushrooms, bell pepper and tofu, ideal for serving to omnivores. The pasta dishes here are all amazing, including the absolute pinnacle of macaroni and cheese recipes. I've never tasted one better, and she's right: It's even better the next day, fried in butter.

You can't go wrong with anything in this book, and its predecessor The Greens Cookbook is a pretty close second.

So many do-able and delicious recipes - all a bit out of the ordinary, yet deeply satisfying.