Israeli-English chef Yotam Ottolenghi is known as much for his many cookbooks (eight so far) as he is for the London restaurants that bear his name, and which he opened with his business partner, Sami Tamimi.
While the food served at Ottolenghi’s restaurants is not vegetarian, the chef, who eats meat and shellfish, was asked to write a vegetarian column for The Guardian newspaper in 2006. “I was slightly hesitant,” Ottolenghi writes in the introduction to Plenty (2010).
“After all, I wasn’t a vegetarian. The issue wasn’t close to my heart either and I had never given it much thought. Still, I understood the reasoning behind The Guardian’s approach. Ottolenghi had become famous for what we did with vegetables and grains, for the freshness and originality of our salads, and it only made sense to ask me to share this with vegetarian readers.
“It took me a while, though, to get to grips with my title, The New Vegetarian, and it made some Guardian readers extremely unhappy to learn that the new vegetarian wasn’t a vegetarian after all. A couple of angry letters to the editor stick in my mind and an incident where I suggested serving a salad with some barbecued lamb chops. Unfortunately, my editor missed this too.
“But with time the task has become more natural to me. Ottolenghi’s vegetarian image was rightly based on the fact that both Sami Tamimi – the other creative force behind the company and co-author of Ottolenghi: The Cookbook [2008] – and I were brought up in Israel and Palestine and were exposed to the multitude of vegetables, pulses and grains that are celebrated in the region’s different cuisines.
“The food I had growing up was a huge mixture of diverse culinary cultures – European at home and Middle Eastern all around – with an abundance of easily sourced fresh ingredients. The greengrocer’s where my mother does her shopping in the neighbouring Arab village always reminds me of this. It sells a fantastically fresh abundance of local and seasonal fruit and veg, what I call real fruit and veg because they look real, taste real and are grown by real people – that is, Arab or Jewish farmers and not nameless farmers across the globe [...]
“This multitude of ingredients and ways of making miracles with them have given me the perfect tools for making up dishes and turning them into recipes. This is also why vegetarian cooking didn’t turn out to be a chore for me. I like meat and I like fish but I can easily cook without them. My grandmother’s vinegar-marinated courgettes, or the ripe figs with ewe’s cheese we used to down before dinner, are as substantial and as basic as any cut of meat I used to have.”
Plenty is a collection of the recipes he wrote for that column – some of them updated – along with new dishes. If just the mention of meat is enough to put you off your dinner, you should probably avoid reading the introductions to the recipes, because the chef occasionally references the original inspiration for a dish, which might include meat or seafood.
The dishes in the book are primarily Middle Eastern or Mediterranean, with inspiration from elsewhere. They include marinated mushrooms with walnut and tahini yogurt, parsnip dumplings in broth, watermelon with feta, yogurt flatbread with barley and mushrooms, soba noodles with aubergine and mango, mee goreng, stuffed portobello with melting taleggio, burnt aubergine with tahini, saffron tagliatelle with spiced butter, and pear crostini.
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