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Vegan: The Cookbook is the most comprehensive collection of vegan dishes ever assembled, with 450 recipes from more than 150 countries.
The book’s central idea sets it apart from almost everything else in the genre. Instead of starting with Western home cooking and replacing animal products with substitutes, Jean-Christian Jury collects dishes that were already vegan and had been cooked that way for generations long before the term existed. The reason is rarely ideological. In much of the world, meat was expensive, so everyday food was built around pulses, grains, root vegetables, fruit and vegetables for purely practical reasons.
The result is more atlas than cookbook. There are dishes from France, Greece, Italy, Vietnam, China and India, but also from the Seychelles, Gabon and Papua New Guinea, arranged in a way that reveals how the same problem has been solved in completely different ways depending on which ingredients were available. The range runs quite literally from Albania to Zambia.
Jury is a chef from Toulouse and ran the vegan restaurant La Mano Verde in Berlin, which attracted considerable international attention. The recipes, however, are not restaurant food but home cooking, presented with straightforward instructions and photography throughout.
For anyone who cooks vegan food, this is the reference book to reach for when ideas run out. For anyone who does not, it is still worth owning because it shows just how much of the world’s cooking has always been plant based without anyone needing to point it out.
Number of pages: 480
Number of recipes: 450
Number of countries: More than 150
Publisher: Phaidon
ISBN: 9780714873916
Language: English
First published: May 2017
