white bean and vegetable stew in red wine sauce

vegetarian cooking for everyone (1997)

But the idea for Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone came to me after teaching a weeklong cooking class at Esalen Institute in California many years ago. When it ended, I realized that it would be so helpful to have a big book, like the Joy of Cooking, that included all kinds of plant foods between its covers, a real soup-to-nuts kind of book. At that time, vegetarian cooking was something from the fringe, and some foods, like soy milk, for example, were downright obscure and could be purchased only at tiny health food stores. I wondered why some foods had to be hidden—couldn’t they be brought forward and included as ingredients, along with other foods, in one place? As it turned out, they could. For some time now, once-obscure foods have filled our supermarkets’ shelves—they’ve even found at gas stations and convenience stores. Today, in terms of food, the world looks very different than it did when I began writing Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. — Deborah Madison

People have called Deborah Madison many things: an expert on vegetarian cooking, a pioneering restaurateur, an award-winning cookbook author. But I’m going to call her a liar. Sorry Deb, but in 1997, when the first edition of Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone came out, soy milk was not an obscure ingredient only available at tiny health food stores. Vitasoy and Edensoy, the Remus and Romulus of plant-based milk, went national in the 1980s. I don’t blame anyone for fudging the facts a little to suit their narrative. We all have to create our own mythology, and Madison was integral to changing the way Americans viewed vegetarian food, particularly vegetarian restaurants.

Back in November, I wrote about Madison’s pioneering San Francisco restaurant, Greens, a genuine hotspot and tough-to-land reservation, which made vegetarian cooking desirable to the cultural elite. Back in the mid-80s you might have been able to score a carton of soy milk (and a lot more) down at the Marina Safeway, but a few blocks away in Fort Mason you had the privilege of spending your hard-earned trickle-down Reaganomics bucks on a tiny (but chic) piece of goat cheese and sundried tomato crostini.

Madison left Greens in 1985 to cook for the director of the American Academy in Rome, and she then moved to Santa Fe (who doesn’t?) to open Café Escalera with Chez Panisse alum David Tanis. After writing The Greens Cookbook in 1987 and two other cookbooks lost to time (1990’s The Savory Way and 1996’s America: The Vegetarian Table), she published the first edition of Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone in 1997. She’s right to compare it to Joy of Cooking. It’s similarly daunting and encyclopedic, containing 1200 recipes and chapters on everything from stir-fries and dumplings to pizzas, breads, and breakfast.

The book was instantly acclaimed, winning the International Association of Culinary Professionals’ Book of the Year and the James Beard Foundation’s Vegetarian Book Award in 1998. Anecdotally, I can’t help but feel like Madison’s recipes are more respected than they are loved. For having been (allegedly) this huge, game-changing vegetarian cookbook, I rarely read contemporary vegetarian cookbook authors or restaurant developers who name-check Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone as an inspiration.

Deborah Madison doesn’t seem to have a big cultural footprint, or a lot of name recognition, today. She was never on TV like Julia Child or Martha Stewart, but judging a mere mortal against these generational food celebrities is unfair. A better comparison might be between her contemporaries Ruth Reichl and Alice Waters. Reichl, a former restaurant critic and magazine editor, is now known mostly for her memoirs. She has a talent for connecting her personal story to the food she is cooking and eating. It’s easy to empathize with the heart-on-her-sleeve Reichl. Waters, whose career mirrored Madison’s in so many ways, is perhaps more famous now than she was even back in the heyday of Chez Panisse. We connect Waters with an ethos, a philosophy, a way of cooking and eating, more than any particular cuisine or dish. Because Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone is so comprehensive, it’s hard to get a feel for Madison’s personality or ethos, the signature techniques and ingredients that make a recipe hers.

The edition I own, The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, adds 200 more recipes to the original book, topping out at a cool 1400. It’s 750 pages long, yet when I was flipping through it last weekend, I couldn’t find anything I wanted to cook. Everything seemed a little fussy, a little staid, something I would briefly contemplate ordering at a restaurant before going for the veggie burger and onion rings. The braised celery root with long garlic crostini (pg 321) sounds lovely, but I’ll just have the Caesar. I’m sure the escarole calzone (pg 445) is transformative, but is it better than Prime’s Sicilian with ricotta, pesto and grandma sauce? If I’m being really real, Debbie’s flop calzone can’t hold a candle to Dominos thin crust, add mushrooms and onions, sub garlic parmesan sauce. Now I want pizza.

After about an hour sitting on the couch reading these boring-ass recipes, each one less appetizing than the last (onion frittata with vinegar and walnuts (pg 505); zucchini timbales with red pepper sauce (pg 519); yogurt with wine-simmered dried fruits (pg 611)… I just can’t), I looked in my cupboard and realized I still had five pounds of Rancho Gordo beans staring me in the face. Let me tell you one thing you don’t feel like doing while lying around for a month with pericardial effusion and bacterial pneumonia, cook heirloom beans from fucking scratch.

Luckily, due to the magic of my colchicine-antibiotic cocktail, I’m feeling like myself again and would very much like to cook heirloom beans from scratch. So I flipped to Chapter 10 (Beans Plain and Fancy), closed my eyes, and pointed to a recipe.

White Bean and Vegetable Stew in Red Wine Sauce (pg 286). Beautiful, perfect, gorgeous. This is a recipe that A) I won’t mind eating for a few days in a row, B) doesn’t have annoyingly expensive and hard-to-find ingredients, and C) has some idea or theme I’ll maybe be able to write about. It couldn’t be easier. I already have most of the ingredients at home. Just need to pick up some carrots and leeks, pray that the tiny Silverlake Whole Foods has celery root, and find the cheapest red wine I can tolerate.

Back at home with my celery root (thank you world’s smallest Whole Foods) and $5.99 primitivo (thank you world’s most hellish Trader Joe’s) I get to work. Oh, technically I didn’t have any white beans, but I did have a pound of sallow-hued Buckeye Beans (fka “Yellow Indian Woman” Beans, woke strikes again), so close enough.

Butter, red wine, carrots, leeks, thyme, bay—this is pretty much a beefless Bourguignon. The one wildcard is the celery root, which, if you’ve never eaten it before, has a consistency halfway between a potato and a jicama. It adds a bit of texture to an extremely soft, stewy dish, and its addition allows me to begin to decipher Deborah Madison’s opaque culinary heart. She’s a traditionalist, but she likes to freshen things up a little, both literally and figuratively. The celery root not only adds a bit of vegetal bite to a hearty, wine and butter-drenched bean stew, it also makes the dish a conversation starter. “Oooh, there’s something different in my stew. What is that?” “It’s celery root.” “Celery root? Ingenious, how’d you think of that?” “Oh I can’t take credit, it’s all Deborah.” Cut to Deborah, poking her head out of the kitchen, a satisfied (never smug) glint in her eye.

So Deborah is a secret ingredient chef, a “you’ll never guess…” chef. She’s not someone who hits you over the head with intense flavors, but she’s someone who will have you discussing her food after dinner, over espresso and winter jewel upside-down cake with pomegranate compote (pg 633). You might find her bean stew just a little bit bland. It’s nothing a squeeze of lemon, a few flakes of Maldon, and three shakes of crushed red pepper can’t fix. You’ll probably never make this recipe again. But next time you’re in the cramped, chaotic Silverlake Whole Foods, shivering in their sad little refrigerated produce closet, you’ll be able to stare into the baskets of anonymous root vegetables and think, with a Deborah-like glint in your eye, “hey, you’re celery root, I recognize you.”