Product Description

Barbara Kafka has been shaping the way America cooks for three decades. She’s doing it again.

With her customary originality, thoroughness, and passion for great cooking, Barbara Kafka has created the cook’s ultimate vegetable resource: 750 original recipes showcasing everything she adores about the vegetable world, from the lowly green bean to the exotic chrysanthemum leaf—even stretching the definition to include potatoes, mushrooms, and avocados just because she’s crazy mad for them.

Her love of vegetables shows in every dish, each impeccably researched, consistently foolproof, and put to the Kafka taste test. Among these delectable dishes are dozens of essays, including personal reflections on the garden and migrations in the vegetable world, for example; all are erudite and unfailingly entertaining.

Kafka’s book within a book—an at-a-glance, we’ve-done-all-the-work-for-you Cook’s Guide—provides practical, encyclopedic information on how to buy, measure, substitute, and prepare every food that ever called itself a vegetable.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #339214 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 720 pages

Amazon.com
Barbara Kafka, inveterate food professional and cookbook writer, she of Roasting: A Simple Art, Soup: A Way of Life, and Microwave Gourmet among others, now brings us the last word on vegetables with the awe-inspiring and massive Vegetable Love: A Book for Cooks. This book has 200 pages dedicated simply to background information on vegetables--buying and storing, cutting, basic cooking techniques, yields and equivalences, etcetera. And then there are the recipes, all 750 of them!

She's a canny lass, Barbara Kafka, with as much respect for the culture of vegetables as for their preparation and cooking, and has divided Vegetable Love into four basic sections: Vegetables of the New World; Vegetables of the Mediterranean Basin, Europe, and the Arab World; Vegetables of Asia and Africa; and, Citizens of the World. For those inclined to think that vegetables come from supermarkets, Kafka takes you back to the roots, the origins, then revels in the ways in which these foods have found their way around the globe and into everyone's kitchen. Rhubarb, the pie plant of New England spring gardens, finds its beginnings in China and is as much at home in sweet pies as savory lamb stews.

You'll find recipes from all over the world in the New World section because that's the home of potatoes, green beans and their kin (Szechuan green beans anyone?), peppers, summer squash, certainly corn, but tomatoes and peanuts, too. Asparagus, beets, chard, carrots--those vegetable garden stalwarts--are found in the Euro/Arab section. Recipes are short, direct, to the point. Kafka minces no words.

But that's where the final sections come into play. One is Basic Recipes and Techniques, taking into account all manner of dressings, sauces, marinades, stocks, doughs, pastries, pastas, egg dishes, etcetera. And the other, that 200 page compendium, The Cook's Guide, fills in around the spare edges of the recipes. Vegetable Love is easily three books in one.

Barbara Kafka knows that when it comes to cooking for friends or family or oneself in this busy modern world, a recipe that is simple, brief, and to the point is like gold. With Vegetable Love Barbara Kafka delivers true wealth. --Schuyler Ingle

From Publishers Weekly
Kafka, a 20-year veteran cookbook writer whose credits include Roasting: A Simple Art and Soup: A Way of Life, allows vegetables to take center stage in this encyclopedic tome. Her collection of inspired recipes isn't about vegetarianism; many include meats, fish and dairy. Rather, it's about the pure enjoyment of the taste of vegetables: "the sweet seductive perfume of slowly sautéing onions, the impossibly vivid red of roasted peppers, the slow dance of eating an artichoke." Kafka's treatment is broad (she covers avocados, tomatoes and rhubarb) and includes classic dishes like Braised Fennel or Chilies Rellenos with Corn alongside more inventive fare, à la Green Bean Frappé, and A Satin of Oysters and Tapioca. Sections on unusual foodstuffs like nettles and cactus pads are fascinating, but less charming is the book's layout, which unhelpfully groups vegetables according to their area of origin. A generic "Cook's Guide" at the end strays rather startlingly from the book's trajectory, providing techniques and recipes for basic sauces, breads, stuffings and more, plus tips for choosing and storing various vegetables, which might have been more helpful in the sections featuring each vegetable. Nonetheless, Kafka has created an appetizing addition to the kitchen bookshelf. 50 photos. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Love appears at first an emotionally extreme hyperbole to describe someone's relationship to mere plant products, but readers of Kafka's newest cookbook may conclude that the term is wholly appropriate. Once again, she has triumphed with an outstanding, indispensable cookbook that not only summons the reader to get into the kitchen and cook but also constitutes a valuable and comprehensive reference tool. Kafka has imaginatively arranged her book by the vegetables'origins: corn, tomatoes, squash, potatoes, and peppers from the Americas; beets, carrots, cabbages, asparagus, artichokes, and broccoli from the Mediterranean basin; peas, eggplant, okra, rhubarb, and cucumbers from Asia and Africa; and onions, mushrooms, and herbs that appear seemingly worldwide. The recipes by no means reflect simply native techniques but treat these vegetables as they have been adopted and adapted worldwide. Kafka's vegetables interplay with meats, seafood, dairy products, and one another to create wildly diverse dishes from potato gratins to stews, chicken soups to pizzas, quiches to salads. She even finds ways to make ice creams from many of these vegetables. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Where is that book?
I am always looking for this book! Although I cannot fault the recipes, and there are truly some grand offers, the best part is the blue section in the back that explains what, when and how to best prepare this particular vegetable. When in a hurry, wondering if the microwave will destroy flavor, etc., this section gets opened on the table. It is already dog-eared and I have had it less than a year. Besides that - it is a pretty book! Great Gift for gardeners and a wonderful reference.

If you truly enjoy eating vegetables, this book is for you
One of the best cooking books in my library. A must when you are short of ideas and hungry. Bravo !

Vegetables - NOT Vegetarian
This book is called "Vegetable Love" and it is a great encyclopedia for cooking vegetables. It is well written, fiesty, and fun. It is NOT a vegetarian cookbook, and I am not sure why anyone would even think that it was. Vegetables are a side dish for most people in the western world and Kafka does a very good treatment of the subject. I have purchased several copies as gifts in addition to the copy I purchased for myself.