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Vegetable Literacy: Cooking and Gardening with Twelve Families from the Edible Plant Kingdom, with over 300 Deliciously Simple Recipes [A Cookbook] Hardcover – Illustrated, March 12, 2013
Deborah Madison (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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For over three decades, Deborah Madison has been at the vanguard of the vegetarian cooking movement, authoring classic books on the subject and emboldening millions of readers to cook simple, elegant, plant-based food.
This groundbreaking new cookbook is Madison’s crowning achievement: a celebration of the diversity of the plant kingdom, and an exploration of the fascinating relationships between vegetables, edible flowers, herbs, and familiar wild plants within the same botanical families.
Destined to become the new standard reference for cooking vegetables, Vegetable Literacy shows cooks that, because of their shared characteristics, vegetables within the same family can be used interchangeably in cooking. It presents an entirely new way of looking at vegetables, drawing on Madison’s deep knowledge of cooking, gardening, and botany. For example, knowing that dill, chervil, cumin, parsley, coriander, anise, lovage, and caraway come from the umbellifer family makes it clear why they’re such good matches for carrots, also a member of that family. With more than 300 classic and exquisitely simple recipes, Madison brings this wealth of information together in dishes that highlight a world of complementary flavors. Griddled Artichokes with Tarragon Mayonnaise, Tomato Soup and Cilantro with Black Quinoa, Tuscan Kale Salad with Slivered Brussels Sprouts and Sesame Dressing, Kohlrabi Slaw with Frizzy Mustard Greens, and Fresh Peas with Sage on Baked Ricotta showcase combinations that are simultaneously familiar and revelatory.
Inspiring improvisation in the kitchen and curiosity in the garden, Vegetable Literacy—an unparalleled look at culinary vegetables and plants—will forever change the way we eat and cook.
- Print length416 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTen Speed Press
- Publication dateMarch 12, 2013
- Dimensions9.43 x 1.3 x 10.29 inches
- ISBN-101607741911
- ISBN-13978-1607741916
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Featured Recipe from Vegetable Literacy: Ivory Carrot Soup with a Fine Dice of Orange Carrots
Serves 4-6
Ingredients
- 1 tablespoon butter
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 1 onion, thinly sliced
- 1 pound white carrots, scrubbed and thinly sliced
- 1 tablespoon raw white rice
- Sea salt
- 1/2 teaspoon sugar
- 1 thyme sprig
- 4 cups water or light chicken stock
- Few tablespoons finely diced orange carrots and/or other colored carrots
- Freshly ground pepper
- About 1 tablespoon minced fine green carrot tops
Directions
Warm the butter and oil in a soup pot and add the onion, white carrots, rice, 1 teaspoon salt, and the sugar and thyme. Cook over medium heat for several minutes, turning everything occasionally. Add 1 cup of the water, cover, turn down the heat, and cook while you heat the remaining 3 cups water. When the water is hot, add it to the pot, cover, and simmer until the vegetables are tender, about 20 minutes.
While the soup is cooking, cook the diced carrots in salted boiling water for about 3 minutes and then drain.
When ready, let cool slightly, then remove and discard the thyme sprig. Puree the soup until smooth in a blender. Taste for salt and season with the pepper. Reheat if it has cooled.
Ladle the soup into bowls, scatter the diced carrots and carrot tops over each serving, and serve.
Featured Recipe from Vegetable Literacy: Peas with Baked Ricotta and Bread Crumbs
Serves 2
Ingredients
- Olive oil
- 1 cup high-quality ricotta cheese, such as hand-dipped full-fat ricotta
- 2 to 3 tablespoons fresh bread crumbs
- 4 teaspoons butter
- 2 large shallots or 1/2 small onion, finely diced (about 1/3 cup)
- 5 small sage leaves, minced (about 1 1/2 teaspoons)
- 1 1/2 pounds pod peas, shucked (about 1 cup)
- Grated zest of 1 lemon
- Sea salt and freshly ground pepper
- Chunk of Parmesan cheese, for grating
Directions
Heat the oven to 375°F. Lightly oil a small baking dish; a round Spanish earthenware dish about 6 inches across is perfect for this amount.
If your ricotta is wet and milky, drain it first by putting it in a colander and pressing out the excess liquid. Pack the ricotta into the dish, drizzle a little olive oil over the surface, and bake 20 minutes or until the cheese has begun to set and brown on top. Cover the surface with the bread crumbs and continue to bake until the bread crumbs are browned and crisp, another 10 minutes. (The amount of time it takes for ricotta cheese to bake until set can vary tremendously, so it may well take longer than the times given here, especially if it wasn’t drained.)
When the cheese is finished baking, heat the butter in a small skillet over medium heat. When the butter foams, add the shallots and sage and cook until softened, about 3 minutes. Add the peas, 1/2 cup water, and the lemon zest. Simmer until the peas are bright green and tender; the time will vary, but it should be 3 to 5 minutes. Whatever you do, don’t let them turn gray. Season with salt and a little freshly ground pepper, not too much.
Divide the ricotta between 2 plates. Spoon the peas over the cheese. Grate some Parmesan over all and enjoy while warm.
With Pasta: Cook 1 cup or so pasta shells in boiling, salted water. Drain and toss them with the peas, cooked as above, and then with the ricotta. The peas nestle in the pasta, like little green pearls.
From Booklist
Review
—Yotam Ottolenghi, author of Plenty and Jerusalem
“I have long been a fan of both Deborah’s vibrant food and her many thorough, thoughtful cookbooks. In Vegetable Literacy she offers, with abundant warmth and generosity, observations from years of garden-to-table cooking. Filled with fascinating botanical notes and inspired recipes that really explore vegetables from the ground up—it is a pleasure to read. The writing is beautiful and the lessons are astutely down to earth.”
—David Tanis, author of Heart of the Artichoke and Other Kitchen Journeys
“Deborah Madison has taken vegetables to a whole new level. You’ll want to know what she knows—about botany, family pairings, and companion flavors on the plate. In cooking, Madison excels, but she’s also a natural with observation in the garden. Her passion is palpable, her scholarship tops, and her prose exquisite.”
—Amy P. Goldman, PhD, author of The Heirloom Tomato: From Garden to Table
“The are few people equipped with the curiosity, skill, and eye for observation required to construct a volume of this size and scope—and Deborah does it masterfully. Vegetable Literacy will shift the way both home and professional cooks think about the relationship between ingredients, and vegetables in particular. Using this book has felt like a missing puzzle piece snapping into place—inspiring, intimate, informative, and beautifully illustrated.”
—Heidi Swanson, author of Super Natural Every Day
“For those of us who love vegetables, Deborah Madison gives not only practical tips for buying them, but also a bounty of diverse recipes. This is a monumental cookbook from a gifted writer and one of the best cooks of our time.”
—David Lebovitz, author of Ready for Dessert and The Sweet Life in Paris
“In Vegetable Literacy, Deborah Madison elegantly folds together a joy of gardening, a fascination for botanical kinship, and an expansive knowledge of fine and simple cooking. This book is a nutrient-dense treasure.”
—Wendy Johnson, author of Gardening at Dragon’s Gate: a Work in the Wild and Cultivated World
“In her most exciting and innovative book to date, Deborah Madison shows us how the botany in our gardens can inform and guide our preparation and cooking of meals that will both delight and nourish us all. Come directly from the garden to the kitchen with Deborah, and you will never observe or use vegetables in an uninspired way again. This book feeds our imaginations and souls with more insights per page than any cookbook I know.”
—Gary Paul Nabhan, ethnobotanist and author of Coming Home to Eat and Desert Terroir
About the Author
DEBORAH MADISON is the author of eleven cookbooks and is well known for her simple, seasonal, vegetable-based cooking. She got her start in the San Francisco Bay Area at Chez Panisse before opening Greens, and has lived in New Mexico for the last twenty years. In addition to writing and teaching, she has served on the boards of Slow Food International Biodiversiy Committee, the Seed Savers Exchange, and the Southwest Grassfed Livestock Alliance, among others. She is actively involved in issues of biodiversity, gardening, and sustainable agriculture.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
It started with a carrot that had gone on in its second year to make a beautiful lacy umbel of a flower. I was enchanted and began to notice other lacy flowers in my garden that looked similar—parsley, fennel, cilantro, anise, as well as Queen Anne’s lace on a roadside—they are all members of the same plant family, as it turned out. Similarly, small daisy-like flowers, whether blue, yellow, orange, enormous or very small, bloomed on lettuce that had gone to seed as well as on wild chicories, the Jerusalem artichokes, and, of course, the sunflowers themselves. Were they related? They were, it turns out. And did edible members of this group somehow share culinary characteristics as well? Often they did. That led me to ask, What are the plant families that provide us with the vegetables we eat often, what characteristics do their members share, and what are their stories?
Cauliflower with Saffron, Pepper Flakes, Plenty of Parsley, and Pasta
For 4
I love this approach to cauliflower. In fact, I’d say it’s my favorite way to cook it. It’s golden, aromatic, and lively in the mouth. It’s good alone and very good spooned over pasta shells, which catch the smaller bits of the vegetable. Even a small cauliflower can be surprisingly dense, weighing a pound and yielding 4 cups florets.
1 cauliflower (about 11/2 pounds), broken into small florets, the core diced
2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for tossing the pasta
1 onion, finely diced
2 pinches of saffron threads
1 large clove garlic, minced
Scant 1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
4 tablespoons finely chopped parsley
Sea salt
8 ounces pasta shells, snails or other shapes
Grated aged cheese or crumbled feta cheese (optional)
Steam the cauliflower florets and core over boiling water for about 3 minutes. Taste a piece. It should be on the verge of tenderness and not quite fully cooked. Set it aside.
Bring a large pot of water to a boil for the pasta.
Heat the oil in a wide skillet over medium heat. Add the onion and saffron and cook, stirring frequently, until the onion is soft, 6 minutes or so. The steam will activate the saffron so that it stains and flavors the onion. Add the garlic, pepper flakes, and a few pinches of the parsley, give them a stir, and then add the cauliflower. Toss the cauliflower to coat it with the seasonings, add 1/2 cup water, and cook over medium heat until the cauliflower is tender, just a few minutes. Season with salt, toss with half of the remaining parsley, and keep warm.
While the cauliflower is cooking, cook the pasta in the boiling water seasoned with salt until al dente. Drain, transfer to a warmed bowl, and toss with a few tablespoons of oil and the remaining parsley. Taste for salt, then spoon the cauliflower over the pasta, wiggle some of it into the pasta crevices, grate the cheese on top, and serve.
With Shrimp: When wild Gulf shrimp are in season, take advantage of their sweet goodness. Peel 1 pound shrimp, then sauté them over high heat in olive oil until pink and firm, after 5 minutes or so. Toss them with chopped garlic and parsley and divide them among the individual pasta plates or heap them over the top of the communal dish. Omit the cheese.
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Product details
- Publisher : Ten Speed Press; Illustrated edition (March 12, 2013)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 416 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1607741911
- ISBN-13 : 978-1607741916
- Item Weight : 4.18 pounds
- Dimensions : 9.43 x 1.3 x 10.29 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #52,593 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #71 in Vegetarian Cooking
- #107 in Vegetable Gardening
- #135 in Whole Foods Diets
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Deborah Madison is the author of 14 cookbooks and countless articles on food, cooking, and farming. She is revered for bringing vegetarian cooking to a wide audience, including non-vegetarians, via Greens restaurant and her cookbooks. A bestselling author, her first cookbook was The Greens Cookbook and her latest two books are The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone and Vegetable Literacy, which was awarded both a James Beard award and an IACP award.
Well-known for her seasonal, vegetable-based cooking, Deborah got her start in the San Francisco Bay Area at Chez Panisse before opening Greens at Fort Mason. In 1996, she received the M.F.K. Fisher Mid-Career Award from Les Dames d'Escoffier and in 2016 she was inducted into the James Beard Foundation Cookbook Hall of Fame. In between she has received many awards from both the IACP (including Cookbook of the Year, twice) and James Beard awards (including Who's Who in American Food and Wine).
Deborah has lived in Rome, Ireland, San Francisco and New Mexico, where she presently resides. She has an office for writing, a small kitchen, and a large garden for growing food and flowers. She is also passionate about her farmers market, which she once managed and still uses weekly. A small Labradoodle takes her on long walks every day. Her latest book, which will be released in March, 2017, is called In My Kitchen.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2021
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Well written, beautifully presented and with something to catch your attention on every page, humble vegetables are transformed into tantalising gems of information and inspiration.
A wide variety of recipes, some old favorites given a new twist, some new and surprising uses of herbs and vegetables, provide an endless source of inspiration. This is definitely a book that I will turn to repeatedly.
The recipes are relatively simple, clearly written, and very tasty. I've tried new ingredients--tempeh, coconut butter, and black quinoa come to mind. I've learned new techniques--for example, presoaking lentils and adding salt to beans at the start of cooking, which has done wonders for my black beans.
Some of my new go-to recipes from this book are the basic lentil recipe, Rio Zape Beans with salt-roasted tomatoes (can sub black beans), pan-fried tempeh with trimmings, which I serve with salsa and lettuce leaf wrappers, roasted asparagus with chopped egg, griddled eggplant rounds, and heirloom tomato quinoa soup. I've tried many others and enjoyed all.
I noticed another review that complained about lack of depth in the information on vegetables. I'd say this is a cookbook that gives extra insight into ingredients and a few tips on vegetable gardening. For a book that focusses on in-depth nutritional information on vegetables, I like "Eating on the Wild Side".
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