Vegan Cooking: Cause for Sainthood or Culinary Menace?

My downstairs neighbor, who’s about to have a birthday soon – happy birthday, Mr. L – is a sweet young man who happens to be vegan. Ever since he moved in, almost two years ago, I’ve felt compelled to do two things: make fun of him, and feed him something tasty whenever he happens to come upstairs to hang out. While I’ve never had occasion to feed Mr. L a proper meal, now and then – say, while having a drink or two, sitting at the kitchen table – I have offered him snacks. Nuts, or some celery. This never satisfied my need to feel I’m being a good and gracious hostess. I don’t think Mr. L ever felt slighted, or even cared particularly, but I always felt kind of bad. I don’t like having people over and not being able to feed them ridiculous amounts of food.

The funny thing is that many of the things we eat on a regular basis are, in fact, vegan. The chili I make nearly every week is a vegan chili, for example; we unvegan it by eating it with cheddar and sour cream, but it starts out as something any vegan would accept. I have, in fact, served said chili to Mr. L and he enjoyed it. (If anyone is interested in a recipe, let me know.)

I have a basic problem with serious vegan cooking, though, which is that I think it tends to lead people toward cooking with things that I don’t regard as food. Butter substitutes strike me as just icky – not right. If you can’t use butter, okay, use olive oil, use vegetable oil, but these weird “all natural” margarines… I dunno. It just doesn’t sit well with me for some reason. And I don’t like the idea of things that aren’t meat that are pretending to be meat – TVP and the like. This is a cognitive thing, not a palate thing. But I can’t make myself change my mind about it. So I needle Mr. L a lot. He’ll be cooking something – incidentally, he cooks a lot, and our back hallway often smells really, really good as a result – and I’ll ask what he’s making, and it’ll turn out he’s whipping up some kind of barbecue tofu over brown rice type thing. It sounds good to me, but when I look carefully at the stuff he’s using… I just can’t deal. The lists of ingredients are too long and seem sneaky to me. Inevitably I go upstairs and start cooking my own dinner, and I use butter, wondering if Mr. L is offended by my cooking smells as a result. (He’s never complained, not even when we made beef stew.)

A few weeks back, perusing one of my cookbooks, I stumbled on a recipe for a vegan chocolate cake. It sounded plausible, if a little weird, and on the next page was a recipe for a chocolate-peanut butter vegan frosting that sounded actually damned good. I decided to take it upon myself to make these things and feed them to Mr. L, so I did. I thought, at first, that the cake was a little weird – it had a sort of tang to it that I didn’t really like – but my husband thought it was great, and he’s kind of snobby about these things. The downstairs neighbor seemed touched that I’d attempted a vegan cake more or less on his behalf and ate quite a few pieces of it. (The recipes are in the Moosewood New Classics cookbook, in case you’re curious; this is a book I turn to regularly and it has never led me to produce anything really disgusting. I recommend it highly.)
Shortly after this, the New York Times food section ran an article about Isa Chandra Moskowitz, who is, I gather, a well-known vegan chef. Mr. L and I discussed the article, and I thought, “I should read one of her books.” So at the library I found Vegan with a Vengeance,
Incidentally, this book would be a nice companion piece to the Heebie-Jeebies at CBGBs book I reviewed recently; Moskowitz is a nice Jewish girl/punk rocker, and her book really shows off both these influences.

So Moskowitz’s book looks good. I’ve now read it cover to cover and while I haven’t cooked anything out of it, there are many recipes that are up to both her standards and mine. Her standards are, obviously, that the food can’t have any animal products in it. But my standards are: I don’t want to use fake mayonnaise, or fake milk (I find rice and soy milks distressing, and I’ve tried to like them, I really have), or fake meat. So there’s a significant percentage of her book that really isn’t going to appeal to me (or my extremely carnivorous husband). But then there’s stuff like Parsnip-Scallion pancakes, on p. 90 – those sound really good. I love parsnips.

Another thing I like about Moskowitz’s book is that it’s obviously designed to appeal to people who’re really just starting out in the kitchen. It reminds of me of my beloved Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking in this way. Moskowitz is realistic about kitchen equipment and honest about what someone is likely and not likely to want to do in the kitchen. She also has a little of Colwin’s attitude about method and results – like, a little sloppy, fine, who cares, what the hell. Moskowitz calls it punk, Colwin calls it slobbe raffinee. Either way, you see it in these points: Colwin reminds you that you can cook spaghetti in an ice bucket, and that you can use a wine bottle as a rolling pin (I did this for years); Moskowitz points out that to slice garlic really really fine you’d best use a razor blade. Very true. “Not only will you get really nice even slices,” she says, “but you will feel cool as hell doing it.” Oh, so true.
Hats off to you, Ms. Moskowitz. And Mr. L, downstairs – you should pick up a copy of this book.