Cookbook of the Week: Vegetarian Planet by Didi Emmons

I taught myself to cook from cookbooks as a youngster (see my last post for more about that), and in my early 20s, had my first foray into the professional food world when I got a job at The Fresh Market/Cheese Outlet, a gourmet store in Burlington, Vermont.

I was first hired to make gift baskets during the Christmas season, and amused myself by giving each basket a theme. I made collections based on the cuisines of Italy, and others filled with items sourced from France. I made baskets that would have paired perfectly with a reading of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and another, more sly, that included marinated fava beans, chianti wine and lamb sausage as an homage to Hannibal Lecter.

Once the holidays were over, I picked up a whole host of other tasks, including managing the store’s catalog and mailing list, and for a brief time, working in the kitchen. There, I washed spinach so thoroughly and slowly that it was determined I wasn’t cut out for a culinary life, and I was fired by the kitchen manager. When she herself was ousted, after the store’s proprietary recipes were photocopied in case she tried to abscond with them, I was soon rehired.

In any case, while this was my work life, my home life was filled with low-cost cooking explorations that fit within the budget of the newly employed. One of the cookbooks that was critical to me in that period of my life was Vegetarian Planet by Didi Emmons, a Boston chef who — through this volume — introduced to me the idea that meat-free meals could look like “normal” food, rather than be made with textured vegetable protein crumbles or some sort of sad, dry “loaf.”

The first recipe in the book is for Dried Cranberry-Pecan Coffeecake, which gets things off to a nice start. Beginning with breads and their cousins is clever, because most of the baked goods we know and love are naturally vegetarian, so a skeptic might be converted within the first few pages. What caught my attention, on page 15, was a recipe for Paximade, a Greek bread flavored with. anise, and of which I’d never heard. This discovery propelled me to read further, in the hope of finding other items I’d never before encountered.

And I did. There’s a recipe for Cranberry Ketchup in Chapter 2, and another for Peach and Five-Spice Chutney. Having grown up on classics of various world cuisines, plus tomes like the New York Times and the Joy of Cooking, both of which rounded up staple dishes and codified their making, these kind of freewheeling, inventive cooking was new to me. I ate it up. In later chapters, I got my first imaginary taste of Pad Thai and Papusas, alongside some of Emmons’ wild creations.

I read it, I cooked from it, and I still have it. To this day, no matter how many cookbooks I buy, I still get excited to open Vegetarian Planet.