Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian: More Than 650 Meatless Recipes from Around the Globe (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Dried beans, dried peas, and lentils, also known as legumes or pulses, are among the earliest of cultivated crops..." (more)
Key Phrases: other spice grinder, noncorrosive lid, teaspoon whole brown mustard seeds, Middle Eastern, United States, Quick-Soak Method (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The author of seven previous cookbooks, including the classic Indian Cooking, Madhur Jaffrey is among today's most influential and authoritative food writers. Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian, a meticulously researched collection of more than 750 meatless dishes from around the globe, presents its author in superlative form, culling the best vegetarian home-style dishes from virtually every culture and cooking tradition. Jaffrey's book, filled with delicious, approachable recipes, has universal appeal, and should be part of every cook's library.

Divided into sections on beans, grains, and vegetables, and including chapters on vegetables, soups, salads, and sauces, among other topics, the book brilliantly juxtaposes recipes grouped by ingredient to reveal, finally, the way that ingredient is approached globally to make food. Thus, for example, Jaffrey's section on rice offers Persian Pilaf with Lima Beans, Palestinian Rice with Lentils and Browned Onions, and Risotto with Fried Porcini Mushrooms, among other pitch-perfect dish choices in this and other chapters. Less familiar ingredients like spelt, millet, and soybeans are removed from the realm of dubious interest and presented in compelling recipes, such as Spicy Soybean Patties with Mint. Throughout, Jaffrey provides definitive notes on ingredients (her full investigation of couscous types is one of many examples) and techniques, as well as a truly comprehensive glossary. Jaffrey also offers a small but charming section on drinks; her Fresh Lime and Ginger Syrup from India, to be mixed with ice and soda water, is a simple but marvelous summertime treat, and one more example of Jaffrey at excitingly full throttle. A ten-page section of color photos rounds out this expert collection. --Arthur Boehm

From Publishers Weekly

Jaffrey (author of the James Beard Award-winning Madhur Jaffrey's Taste of the Far East) offers an Asian-centered complement to Deborah Madison's European-focused Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. True to Jaffrey's title, the recipes here do hail from all over the world, but an Indian slant can be detected: a chapter on dried legumes contains Black-Eyed Pea Fritters from Nigeria, Boiled Peanuts Indonesian Style, and variations on Chickpea Flour Pancakes from India; a section on grains includes, among other things, the quickly made flatbreads of India, like Punjabi Village-Style Flat Whole Wheat Flaky Breads. Sometimes Jaffrey adopts vegetarian ingredients to make nonmeat versions of familiar dishes, such as a Mock Lamb Curry with seitan (wheat gluten), but more often she simply delves into the meatless tradition of a specific country and pulls up a signature dish (Savory Greek Pumpkin Pie). A chapter on dairy gives instructions for making yogurt, the Indian cheese paneer, mascarpone and other preparations, then describes a variety of ways these bases can be used (Yogurt with Green Mango or Homemade Indian Cheese Cooked in the Style of Scrambled Eggs). With its top-notch glossary of unusual ingredients and thorough information about vegetables, this is an excellent resource for those who like to make everything from scratch as well as those who want fast results. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 768 pages
• Publisher: Clarkson Potter; 1 edition (November 2, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0517596326
• ISBN-13: 978-0517596326
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 8.5 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (59 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #40,286 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

63 of 67 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Very Important Book for Learning about Food. Buy It!, March 16, 2005

By	B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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`World Vegetarian' by leading authority on Indian cooking, Madhur Jaffrey is one of those books you can tell after reading a page or two that it is worth your time and money if you are interested in learning new things about food.

It is important to note that the notion of `vegetarian' in the title does not mean that the book is all about vegetables, just as a vegetarian is not a person who eats only vegetables. A vegan or vegetarian is someone who avoids meat and, to some extent, products derived from animals. Some people whose vegetarianism is based on respect for animal life go so far as to avoid vegetables like root vegetables whose harvest may entail the death of insects or worms or other subterranean living animals. Ms. Jaffrey is a partial vegetarian, based more on Indian culture and tradition than anything else. And, her book includes major chapters on dairy products derived from milk and eggs.

This is a very big book, with very long chapters on all the big vegetarian topics. These are:

Dried Beans, Dried Peas, Lentils, and Nuts -122 pages
Vegetables - 200 pages
Grains - 186 pages
Dairy - 64 pages
Soups, Salads, and Drinks - 82 pages
Sauces and Added Flavorings - 54 pages
plus
Equipment, Glossary, and Resources - 32 pages

Even with 200 pages and 200 recipes, this very large section does not match the depth of books dedicated entirely to vegetables such as Jack Bishop's `Vegetables Every Day' or Elizabeth Schneider's encyclopedic `Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini'. In fact, Ms. Jaffrey has just 31 sections dedicated to different vegetables, while Ms. Schneider covers over 130 different named vegetables, but Ms. Jaffrey gives us some insights on vegetable cookery which I believe cannot be found elsewhere. It may not be that other books don't cover the same thing, but Ms. Jaffrey seems to have a way of putting things which makes them stick in your memory a lot more firmly than other writers' coverage does. For example, in dealing with the baking of red beet roots, Ms. Jaffrey says that baking white potatoes in tin foil leads to thoroughly unpleasant soggy skins and dry flesh, but the same technique is exactly what you want to do with beets, as the skin of beets in inedible.

Another way in which her facts are presented in an effective manner is when the section on greens discusses fourteen (14) different varieties of greens together so that similarities and differences between methods appropriate to each variety can be discussed.

Ms. Jaffrey is certainly true to her book title in that her recipes come from all over the world. She gives us the service of stating beside each recipe name the country or cuisine from which the recipe grew. While this may only be important to nitpickers like myself, she is careful to point out when recipes are from a purely Italian or Chinese source or from a hybrid recipe developed by Italians or Chinese who are transplanted to the United States.

The chapter on `Grains' is dedicated as much or more to dishes made with flour grains and meals, as in noodles and porridges as to the grains themselves, as in rice dishes. One of the clearest signs of Ms. Jaffrey's background is the fact that very little space is dedicated to yeast breads. Only five (5) recipes contain yeast and two of those are for pancakes. All other bread recipes are for flatbreads or breads with a chemical leavener. These recipes are welcome, as few appear in conventional books on bread, and I do not miss a fuller discussion of breads, as there are easily a dozen excellent books on bread which come to mind.

The other side of the coin is in the dairy chapter that includes recipes for homemade cheeses which I simply have not seen anywhere outside of Diane Kennedy's most recent book on the Mexican pantry. Among these recipes are homemade Indian cheese, unflavored and flavored with pepper or herbs; Latin American cheese (`Queso Blanco'), Italian mascarpone cheese and Syrian Cheese. And, just to be sure none of this effort is wasted, there are several recipes giving us things to do with our homemade Indian cheese. This chapter also contains a wealth of egg recipes that you will simply not see anywhere outside of a book dedicated to egg recipes or a large book on Indian cuisine. With a rather long headnoted homage to Julia Child, Ms. Jaffrey gives us an excellent recipe for the classic French omelet. You will succeed with this recipe, but mastering the technique may require a consult with Ms. Child's book or Jacques Pepin's book on technique.

All this means is that Ms. Jaffrey's decisions on what to include in this book and what to leave out is impeccable.

It may seem presumptions on my part to evaluate Ms. Jaffrey's recipes, but I did check out her vegetable stock recipe and found it agreed with all my experts' opinions on how and for how long to cook a vegetable stock. The only deviation from classic doctrine is that she includes a diced potato, but not until the broth has been brought to a boil and reduced to a simmer, so, I suspect the spud has no chance to make the stock cloudy.

In a sense, this book fulfills the promise of Jeanne Lemlin's `Vegetarian Classics' without padding it with cliched recipes for macaroni and cheese and pasta Puttanesca. Very, very few recipes in this book are familiar to me, in spite of the fact that I have walked my way through close to 400 cookbooks in the last 18 months.

This book is highly recommended for your armchair library when you are out of the kitchen, searching for new ideas and dishes.

117 of 130 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best veggie books ever, June 15, 1999

By A Customer

I bought a copy of this book in London and have been waiting for it to come out in the US to send to friends. It's one of the most extensive, easy to use and satisfying vegetarian books out there; it's quickly become a staple.

43 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary Cookbook - Not Just for Vegetarians, February 29, 2004

By	Westley (Stuck in my head) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Madhur Jaffrey is a renowned author of numerous cookbooks, often focusing on Indian cuisine. "World Vegetarian" is one of her most ambitious works, covers over 200 vegetable and non-meat recipes from around the globe. Although a relatively large portion of the recipes are from India or China, recipes from around the world are well represented: Mexico, Greece, Jamaica, Cyprus, Italy, Trinidad, Japan, France, Morocco, the United States and Native America, Costa Rica, Korea, Cuba, Indonesia, Africa, and Lebanon. Jaffrey also integrates a few recipes that she's developed herself, often borrowing from traditions of several different cultures.

The cookbook is divided into 6 main sections, with major ingredients organized in alphabetical order: 1) Dried Beans, Dried Peas, Lentils, and Nuts (azuki beans to urad beans); 2) Vegetables (artichokes to turnips); 3) Grains (barley to wild rice); 4) Dairy (eggs to yogurt); 5) Soups, Salads, and Drinks (cold soups to sweet soups); 6) Sauces and Added Flavorings (chutney to spice mixtures). Each ingredient is discussed in detail as are basic cooking and preparation instructions, such as peeling daikon, sprouting mung beans, and making basic polenta. As with all her cookbooks, Jaffrey's recipes are written clearly and easy to follow. In addition, each recipe has an introductory paragraph, where she explains some of the ingredients, tells why she loves the recipe, gives hints about good accompanying dishes, and so forth. Reading her recipes is like being in the kitchen with a good friend.

The final section is an extensive glossary that describes needed equipment and foreign ingredients. Finally, Jaffrey includes a one-page summary of places to find unusual cooking resources. Overall, "World Vegetarian" is one of the best cookbooks specializing in non-meat dishes that I've ever seen. Although it will be most appreciated by vegetarians, this cookbook will find a welcome home with anyone looking for diverse vegetable dishes or trying to cut back on meat consumption. Most highly recommended!