Cookbooks for More Than Cooking

Megan McArdle's "Holiday gift guide: Cookbook edition" in The Atlantic is the type of cookbook guide I really go for. She looks at books that teach you about cooking and food far more than books than merely compile recipes. The difference between following a recipe and making good food is knowing how to cook, and what affects taste.

This is especially true for specialty cookbooks, because it's far harder to cook when the palette is restricted. She mentions three vegan cookbooks that she particularly likes.

Vegan with a Vengeance and Veganomicon by Isa Chandra Moskowitz. These are, by far, the most fun vegan cookbooks I own. The recipes really are delicious, easily enough to recommend them to non-vegans. I've made brunch for non-vegans a ton of times who never recognized that they were having a vegan meal.





The Joy of Vegan Baking by Colleen Patrick-
Goudreau. Indispensible. Vegan baking is tricky--it turns out eggs are really, really useful. This book explains what it's doing and why, and incidentally, produces some pretty amazing desserts. The tofu chocolate mousse is the fastest, easiest, most elegant dessert you can whip up on absolutely no notice.





How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman. If anything, even better than the original omnivore book. Not all the recipes in here are vegan, but many are, and they're clearly marked. A number of others are veganizeable. But really, don't think of this as a book for vegetarians; it's a book for everyone who eats vegetables.

All these cookbooks can be found in my Milk-Free Bookstore on the Vegan Cookbooks page.