Food for bunnies. My father refers to this as vegetarian cookery and cuisine. Salads as well as vegetables – there must be nothing else, right? Indeed, there is. Vegetarian cuisine is arguably as diverse as’regular’ cuisine, and in some instances considerably more inventive.
Nearly thirty years back, Diet for a Tiny Planet and its companion cookbook, Recipes to feed a Small Planet, landed with a resounding impact that continues to reverberate. While many of the protein complementarity theories presented by Frances Moore Lappe have been disproven by subsequent research, the fundamental theories of nutrition and the amazing meatless and genuinely vegetarian recipes remain. The Moosewood Cuisine and The Enchanting Broccoli Forest were followed by an inundation of vegetarian haute publications.
Vegetarian cuisine is more than simply “meat-free.” There is an art to combining flavors and sensations in just the appropriate ways to create compositions that are alluring to both carnivores and vegetarians. For Hindustani chefs who practise Ayurvedic cuisine, food is more than sustenance; it is a gateway to higher consciousness, a form of meditation. There are three main components and six flavors (sweet, salty, acidic, bitter, piquant, and acidic) to be thought about during the cooking process for each dish, and an Ayurvedic meal is a feast over the eyes, olfactory, tongue, and intellect.
The finest vegetarian dishes are not’meatless’ variants of dishes that typically contain meat. “meatless” lasagna implies that the recipe is lacking an ingredient. Anyone who has eaten spinach pasta knows that nothing is missing – the combination of velvety cheese, spinach, and seasonings is ideal. Polenta with peppery black bean sauce does not require meat to be complete; when prepared properly, it dissolves on the inside of the mouth and clings to the ribcage.
Even within the umbrella of’vegetarian cuisine’, there are variants. Outside of Western culture, the majority of dishes contain little or no meat, so it wouldn’t be surprising that one finds vegetarian main courses in Indian or Chinese cuisine, as well as in Russian cookery and African culinary traditions. Many people base their primary courses on legumes and seeds. Peanut and walnut soups, hummus with seasonings and lemon, pickled black bean sauces positioned over noodles and bread as well as rice and semolina – Middle Eastern along with African cuisine offers all of these and more.

If one treats vegetarian cooking as a “substitute” for meat-based dishes, he or she will likely be disappointed. It is a style of dining and cuisine characterized by seasonings and combos that may produce dishes as an light and airy as a meringue and as dense and glutinous as the finest seven-grain bread. If you’ve never experienced a true vegetarian entrĂ©e – as opposed to a “meatless” or “meat substitute” – the best location to start is the Indian and Middle Eastern establishment closest to you. You will be astonished by the flavors and textures, and you are unlikely to notice the absence of flesh.