Vegetarian dishes have been with us for a while, but what a rocky start. Until recently there were only one or two vegetarian dishes per decade available on a restaurant menu. Here’s a sketch of those decadic dishes, drawn in very broad strokes, possibly a gross simplification meant to be taken with at least a few grains of salt.
In the sixties there were quiches made with broccoli but not bacon, and there were crêpes. The “it” dish for the seventies was eggplant Parmesan (very cheesy, very oily, extremely heavy). By the 1980s the vegetarian option shifted to pasta primavera, an irritating dish that never limited itself to spring and that season’s vegetables. I suspect the reason was that ferns, ramps, fava beans, sweet little peas, tender amaranths, and other spring verdure are just now coming to light. Chefs who are devoted to seasonal cooking have gotten it right, but usually pasta “primavera”—even today—is rife with bell peppers and tomatoes, ripe only in months long after spring and, in some cases, even the summer months. The portobello mushroom became the vegetarian entrée of the 1990s. It has clearly been the easiest option for chefs to deal with when faced with a vegetarian customer because the mushroom is big, brown, and kind of like meat in that it isn’t sweet and it does have a chewy texture. Any chef could relate to it.
In addition to these long runs on particular dishes, a vegetarian might be offered a “vegetable plate,” a motley collection of all the unrelated side dishes drawn from a restaurant’s menu, or a plate of grilled vegetables. One dish was too much of everything, the other not enough of anything. Eating vegetarian can be frustrating, in fact, too much to bother with for some.
Today it’s not as much a vegetable or a recipe as a form: the bowl. I think of a bowl as an infantile mishmash of grains, vegetables, and probably an egg. And it’s especially infantile if you eat it with a spoon. I think one of the reasons “bowls” have become so popular is that they look great photographed from above, whether you’re a diner with an iPhone or a professional photographer. But food photography is a whole other subject. Don’t get me started.
Even among good chefs who are discovering the charms of vegetables today there is a kind of discomfort with vegetarian food, as if they don’t know what to do with the request for a meatless dish. It’s not really on their register of possibilities, so they do what’s easiest: a pasta, a mishmash. It can be very disappointing indeed if you care about eating well rather than just avoiding meat. A vegetarian request pushes many chefs way out of their comfort zone, so I understand why their offerings are mediocre. But it also can be infinitely better today when real cooks are cooking. Then the vegetarian items—whether they’re called out as vegetarian or not—have a good chance of being enticing, interesting, and well crafted.
While I’m not one for having a portobello mushroom or a collection of mismatched side dishes every time I go out to eat, when a vegetarian dish looks promising, I order it. I’m often impressed and inspired by the meatless dishes I find today and even more delighted when they aren’t labeled as vegetarian—when they’re just more good-tasting, beautifully presented items on the menu.
In Ireland, where so much of the food can be really good but very meaty, the best meal I had on my most recent visit was at a vegetarian restaurant in County Cork called Café Paradiso. There was plenty of focus, complexity, and color in that meal along with a soaring deliciousness. My agent had made the reservation and I wanted to tell her that she didn’t have to book a vegetarian restaurant on my behalf, but she said she wanted to eat there. She had before. Hands down, it was the best meal we ate on a trip that was filled with winsome foods and colors, and that was exactly why she had chosen it.
THE PROTEIN QUESTION
Patrick reminded me of a time when he was flying back to Arkansas to work on a bank advertising job. A Salisbury steak was served for lunch, but he didn’t eat it. He noticed the man in the next seat looking askance at him so he finally turned and explained that he was a vegetarian.
“But you look all right” was his neighbor’s response.
From my first book tour through almost the last tour, I’ve been asked if I get enough protein. It’s the question that won’t go away. People still ask it. Plenty of vegetarians feel that they get enough protein, some feel they don’t, but either way, I decided early on that the protein question was not one I wanted to spend my life answering. I saw it as a rather personal issue and one that we all relate to differently. And one’s sense of what’s enough protein, or the right kind of food, can change over time. This I know from being a cooking teacher for many years. In one class a woman who had been a vegetarian for more than twenty years confessed that she found herself dreaming of eating turkey night after night. What should she do? I’ve met others like her. Maybe they should eat some of their forbidden foods and find out why they have entered their dreams, their obsessions. Also, those for whom we cook, or we ourselves, may change with illness or age and want more protein in the form of meat. You just don’t know what will happen.
There are all kinds of reasons for the choices we make. For example, a friend who is a third-generation vegetarian from meaty Australia would be miserable if he had to eat meat. It’s simply not a taste or texture he’s familiar with, and he’s been a robust and successful artist throughout a long life.
And here’s a completely nonvegetarian issue. I have some friends who have the most wonderful organic farm where they grow the best tomatoes, which their helpers are welcome to take. An older Mexican man who works there refuses the tomatoes for which the customers pay a lot of money. Instead he prefers to go to a crummy supermarket to buy his tomatoes. Why? Because that’s where they speak Spanish, it’s where he mingles with his friends; it’s where he’s with his people, where he’s comfortable. That is what gives him nourishment, not the far better tomatoes he can have from the farm. We all bring something to our personal table.
Although not a meat eater for the most part, I admit that I find a plate of falling-off-the-bone short ribs utterly irresistible. The same thing happens with fish tacos and salt cod. Something just goes off in my brain when I encounter such dishes.
What does interest me is not the slippery protein question, but the gastronomic value of food. Does a dish or a meal give pleasure? Does its appearance delight the eye? Are all the senses stimulated and does the food cause you to smile? Does it induce conversation about other meals and dishes enjoyed? Does the food have a provenance that makes good sense? Does it provoke a feeling of appreciation? Gratitude? Does it matter if there isn’t any meat? And why doesn’t it? Or why does it?
How food is raised and where it comes from has held my interest for a very long time. This interest began when I heard the first line of the meal chant in the zendo of Tassajara in 1971: “Seventy-two labors brought us this rice, we should know how it comes to us.” It seemed an easy step from the rice in the bowl, the grain in the bread, or the vegetable on the plate to an interest in how food was grown, the conditions of farm workers, the provenance of seeds, the life of the soil, as well as the lives of the growers, farmers, ranchers, and their animals. Such an interest was not a big topic in the 1970s or even in the eighties.
Today everything is “farm-to-table” and all the tiresome iterations of that phrase—field to fork, vine to wine, spoon to soup. (These variations are not only banal but endless.) One thing we have had to do as chefs is encourage our customers to try something unfamiliar, be it lamb’s-quarters, or miner’s lettuce, or moss. And that’s just as true today, for our ingredients keep changing, as do our relationships with animals and plant foods.
When I was first being interviewed, those asking the questions weren’t interested in changing foods and flavors; they were interested in the protein question and after that, maybe, they asked about the recipes. I tried to establish that I wasn’t there to talk about vegetarianism, but about food in a bigger way and cooking that might include meat or not. But because I had been involv
ed with a vegetarian restaurant and written cookbooks full of meatless recipes, it was understandable that interviewers wanted to talk about vegetarian issues. Of course a meat cook, who happened to serve a lot of vegetables, could talk about whatever she wanted to. And today there are chefs who have vegetable-driven menus at their restaurants, but claim that they are most definitely not vegetarians, and they can speak about and cook all the vegetable dishes they wish to free from the taint of vegetarianism.
MANNERS
One problem for me has to do with manners. What do you say to your host? “Sorry, I don’t eat meat”? I know that many do that—and that the practice has extended to dairy, eggs, honey, grain, gluten, carbohydrates, and more. Sometimes it might be a way to encourage another into a meatless (or other) way of cooking, but to me it is generally rude. I really prefer to be flexible enough to just say thank you for whatever appears on the plate. Today with Meatless Mondays, scads of vegetarian and vegan cookbooks, and so many people not eating meat, this isn’t quite the issue it was in the past, but for many years it really did put a hostess through a lot of twists and turns to figure out what on earth to serve that wasn’t animal protein. I am happy to do that at home because it’s easy for me, but I’m loath to ask someone else who is more comfortable cooking meat to make a vegetarian dish for me.
This reminds me of the time that I attended a Slow Food board meeting at La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona, in the early 2000s. When I arrived the first person I saw was a man sitting on the steps of the hotel changing his sport shoes for a pair of cowboy boots. He had a big ice chest beside him. I said hello and he introduced himself. His name was Jim-Bill Anderson and he was from Canadian, Texas. He had a cooler of Corriente beef that he wanted us to taste.
That evening he grilled his beef. It was the first beef I had really liked and it got me very interested in the small Corriente cattle, the descendants of the first beeves the Spanish brought to America. When I got back to New Mexico I told my husband about this amazing beef and within weeks we drove to Jim-Bill’s ranch so that Patrick could experience it, too. When we got there, Jim-Bill’s wife, Deborah, announced that in deference to my being a vegetarian, we would have lasagna for dinner.
I was the rude one this time, protesting the vegetarian lasagna and saying that I’d hoped Patrick could taste the Corriente beef!
Jim-Bill got in his truck, drove to Canadian, nearly an hour away, and got some meat from his meat locker. It partially thawed during the drive back to the ranch, then he grilled it. The flame was too high, the meat too cold, and it was nothing like it had been for me weeks earlier. But the lasagna was delicious, and we had a good visit with the Andersons, and met the wild turkeys roosting in their trees and their herd of lively little Corriente cattle.
The downside to gamely saying to a host, “No, it’s fine. I eat everything,” is that when we happen to be eating out a lot, we are eating far more meat than we want to. Still, I’d rather a friend feel at ease with me at her table than not.
Another consequence of taking an open, flexible position came most clearly and sadly to me when two friends and I were staying with a family in a village in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. They had a big turkey that waddled around the courtyard all day making soft turkey sounds and fanning his dusty tail. On our last day there the turkey was gone. When I asked where he was the woman of the house pointed to a cazuela holding a turkey mole, our supper. Not only did the turkey no longer have his happy days in the dusty yard, but our tom had probably been intended for the family at some point. He was a tough and bony bird and there was nothing to do but express gratitude for the kindness of those who sacrificed their own meal by eating it.
And finally, others have loved to provoke me, offering me blood sausages, lardo, lamb’s necks, and the like. Will she eat them? Sometimes I do, but not always. It’s just a strange little thing that people like to do.
I often order a vegetarian meal in a restaurant because I prefer it. But I also order it because I really don’t want to participate in the Big Meat of stockyards and animal shipping. I also prefer organic foods and foods that have not been genetically modified. But I know that I have to set those concerns aside if I’m to join others at the table. If we’re part of a community we’re not necessarily in charge of our individual lives.
Where I live, in the Southwest, I have a neighbor a mere five miles away who raises grass-fed lamb, pastured pork, and chickens that lay the most delicious eggs. Another friend, a little farther away, raises grass-fed/grass-finished beef. Like all food people, ranchers are generous, making gifts of a roast, chops, bone broth, or eggs. I am on the board of the Southwest Grassfed Livestock Alliance (SWGLA) because I believe that as long as people eat meat, it would be best if it were raised to benefit the health and well-being of the animal, the land, the water, and the eater. Grass takes water, which means ranchers in this dry state have to change some old ranching practices into new ones, such as rotational grazing, shaping roads, and pulling up juniper trees to put the water back on the land; these practices ultimately benefit wildlife as well as cattle. One rancher I know has gone from having one kind of native grass to more than forty native warm- and cold-season grasses due to those very changes she’s made on her land. True, the beef that comes from these improved lands is costly and there’s not much of it, but those lacks shift the focus from a fast and easy weeknight chop to something eaten less often but valued far more.
Meat is a true luxury. Any animal’s life is. No animal willingly steps up to become our meal. All creatures want to live, and fiercely so. None are like the cartoonist Al Capp’s Shmoo. Shmoos were white, bloblike creatures that multiplied generously, consumed no resources, and happily became pork, chicken, or whatever humans wanted. If you roasted a Shmoo, it was pork. If you fried it, it was chicken. How convenient! But Shmoos don’t really exist; the closest we’ve come is tofu, which still requires land, water, and soybean farmers.
Even though I’m open to meat, I’ve long been puzzled about why we’ve felt that we have to celebrate something—Easter, Passover, Christmas—with a piece of flesh. It seems odd to me when there are other possibilities, but those other possibilities do take time to learn, to make, and to appreciate. Yet, if meat were scarce and deemed important, and you had observed all the fast days your culture required, then the feast days with their meat centerpieces would make sense—the meat had value; it was not an everyday food. But feasting and fasting days are not much observed in Western countries anymore. It seems that any day is a day for feasting, eating a chop or a steak, the tender, quick-to-cook cuts that industrial meat makes so cheap and accessible.
I don’t much like to attach a name to the way I eat, or the way you eat. Names—vegan, gluten free, vegetarian, paleo, kosher—can become divisive. What has really mattered more to me than one’s diet is the ability to view our differences as differences that are there for a reason and to find within us enough tolerance and understanding to overcome them—and also to know that they and we might change. I’ve seen my own parents and siblings change the foods they eat. My father became a vegetarian, my mother mostly. Mike is pretty much one; Jamie is not so interested in cooking but she buys mostly organic foods, and Roger does, too. Roger describes himself as a “meat eater of all types,” and says that on the average he and his wife have meat once or twice a week and they’re thinking of “just having eggs and no meat at all” for health reasons. I’ve changed also. I am thinking of small things, like the first time I bought real eggs and paid so much more for them, but never went back, or that I always buy organic butter and routinely buy almond milk because I like it.
Many of my recipes happen to be vegan, but that’s just it—they happen to. And some happen to be gluten free. And I like them. But I also love the culture of cheese making and don’t wish to be free of it entirely. That would be a loss to me of the tradition of humans making the effort to transform and preserve foo
ds, including milk. I am never tempted to use fake cheese in order avoid the real thing. I have bought the fake cheeses so that I have my own experience of them, but invariably they languish in the back of the refrigerator until, covered with mold, they go out. (I do try them before that happens.) On the other hand, it’s quite possible that someone will make a cheese-like substance that is really good and I’d like to be open to that. As for gluten, suffice it to say that I have a bumper sticker that reads, GRATEFUL FOR GLUTEN. I suspect there’s a lack of critical thinking when it comes to gluten.
If you’re truly vegan (or fill in the blank with whatever dietary channel you swim in) you can’t eat a lot of foods that others eat and probably you can’t eat in a lot of places your nonvegan friends may want to eat in. You’re divided. Separated. How can we cross the divides that we make if we can’t break bread together? There are a few rare individuals who are able to join in simply through their warmth, friendliness, and general good spirits, and still eat what they want to eat. I admire them. Richard McCarthy, the former president of Slow Food USA, is a vegetarian, but he is able to attend Slow Food’s Slow Meat conference with grace and intelligence and advocate for eating smaller portions of meat, rather than none. The last time we ate together was at a nose-to-tail meal in Denver. Although it was excellent, I envied Richard, for he was served vegetables while the rest of us hardly saw but a shred of one.
An Onion in My Pocket Page 19
