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Jeremy Fox made his name at Ubuntu in Napa, a vegetarian restaurant that earned a Michelin star, and today runs Rustic Canyon in Santa Monica.
What he does is treat a vegetable as others might treat a cut of meat, with the same technical ambition and the same reluctance to throw anything away. Leaves, stems, peels and cores are all used, and much of the book is devoted to basic preparations, ferments, sauces and preserves that then reappear throughout the dishes. It is how he gets vegetables to deliver so much flavour without taking a detour through meat.
His most talked-about dish is a cacio e pepe made with chickpeas, where the chickpea cooking liquid does the work that would otherwise require cheese and eggs. It tells you most of what you need to know about how he thinks.
The book is arranged alphabetically by vegetable and won a James Beard Award in 2018. It is not a vegetarian book in any ideological sense, it is a book about ingredients.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 320
Language: English
First published: 2017
The Kitchen Lab Selection
Chefs refer to it and return to it again and again. The book has had a greater impact in restaurant kitchens than in home kitchens, which is as good a mark of quality as any. Plenty of books have been written about vegetables, but this is the one that moved the whole field forward. It is also the hardest work. Half the book consists of things that need to be sitting ready in the fridge before you can cook anything at all, and that workload is precisely what separates vegetables as a side dish from vegetables as the main event. If you wonder why restaurant food tastes more intense than your own, the answer is often here.
