Repurposing your Grandmother’s cookbooks
When it comes to old cookbooks, the wealth of options is almost entirely meat and dairy heavy. The world decades ago was much different in terms of which foods were prioritized, what was considered healthy, what was edible. Plant-based eating wasn’t the vogue term it is now. Vegetarians and vegans existed, but their impact on the food landscape was minimal. Meat and dairy-filled diets became the most nutritional, the ‘healthiest’ diet for a robust average-sized American for much of the twentieth century, and there are some who still believe it to be true.
As times haves changed, so has the landscape of cookbook offerings. Cookbooks dedicated to plants and plant-based menu items abound. You can now purchase a book on the many variety of salads. Vegan cookbooks for normally meat-heavy cuisines like Mexican and Korean have now flooded the marketplace with delightful plant versions of cultural favorites. Even for cookbooks that offer meat options, it’s expected that the work also come with loads of sides, salads, or appetizers that are fully plant-based.
All of this brings up the question: what to do with your old cookbooks? The ones that are rife with meat or dairy-filled dishes. The ones you grew up using. The ones perhaps your grandmother used.
There’s a tendency to see non-vegan cookbooks as impure, unusable because of the ingredients they call for and the end products they’re advertising. But just because an old cookbook calls for products you’re no longer interested in using doesn’t mean the entire work is unusable. There are a whole host of ways to find value in the book and in the author’s advice, whatever their beliefs on where food should come from. Below are some ideas.
Look at Cookbooks as providers of information
It makes perfect sense to think of cookbooks as books you go to for recipes. You look at a picture of the food, salivate, and read what it will take to produce that. But cookbooks provide so much more than this.
Many cookbooks offer heaps of other advice in their introductions, ingredient or cookware list, or in the description of their dishes that frequently go missed. Maangchi’s Big Book of Korean Cooking cookbook is an excellent example. The introduction to her book highlights key Korean ingredients not commonly used in other cuisines, along with a history and where you can perhaps find them. In understanding the nature of these ingredients, you can better find a suitable alternative if the ingredient is animal-based (fair warning here: many of her recipes call for animal-based products). You’ll also understand the kinds of cookware used in Korean cooking, all of which is key if you hope to make an effective Korean dish.
A couple of pages in the introduction of Maangchi’s Big Book of Korean Cooking
Beyond the introductions, cookbook authors oftentimes offer glimpses into the origins, traditions, and meanings behind various dishes. Even if these dishes call for meat or dairy, reading these helps you to understand why these meals are still important to their culture, and what it would take to find a suitable alternative. Which brings me to my next point.
Mix up your ingredients
Good advice for any situation where you find yourself without an ingredient, you can always switch up what a recipe calls for. It’s practical, and at times necessary. For fully plant-based eaters, this skill is practically essential when reading recipes out of any cookbook.
The good news is we’re blessed to live in an age where alternatives to common animal-based products abound. This certainly wasn’t always the case. Cheesy flavoring was achieved for years with nutritional yeast alone before plant-based cheeses finally achieved popularity. What this means for the modern vegan is that several recipes can easily be switched to make things fully plant-based. Just swap your milk, butter, or cheese with your favorite alternative and you’re all set!
Where this gets tricky is when a recipe makes meat the star of the show. There’s little we can do when Julia Child asks us to whip up a roast chicken or get a full roast beef. And yet even here, there are things we can do.
Grilled portobello mushroom ‘steaks’. Image from Vegan Hubb.
While there perhaps isn’t an alternative for every meat out there, there are a whole host of other plant-based proteins or other ingredients that mimic the taste and texture of meat. Portobello mushrooms have long been used as a substitute for recipes that call for sliced or ground beef because of its ‘meaty’ texture. Jackfruit, though not the greatest option protein-wise, can mimic pulled chicken and pork for sandwiches or salads.
And plant-based ‘meats’ abound. Not all of these are as unhealthy or rife with preservatives as Impossible or Beyond meat. Many are even destined to produce the exact flavor and texture of the meat version. (By way of example, Nasoya’s Plantspired Korean BBQ plant-based steak provides the flavors Korean BBQ lovers adore.)
All of this is to say, before tossing aside a recipe that calls for meat, ask yourself if there’s a way to have some fun with your ingredients. The more creative you are in preparing your dishes, the more you’ll get out of them.
Learn from the Masters
Two of my favorite cookbook authors are Julia Child and Marcella Hazan. They’re each credited with bringing real French and Italian cooking (respectively) to American home cooks, illuminating the exact techniques and ingredients that make gourmet French and Italian cuisine possible. Both were the culinary geniuses of their age. Both called for heaps of meat and dairy in their dishes. I don’t blame them; in their day, meat and dairy had the backing of nutritionists around the globe as being healthy and wholesome. Not to mention, French and Italian cuisines have historically promoted animal-based proteins and dairy products.
Image of Marcella Hazan from the New York Times.
But though I no longer seek out Julia and Marcella for one of their famous meat dishes (and there are many of them, not many of which one can translate into a satisfying vegan alternative), there’s still much they can teach us.
When it comes to cooking vegetables and preparing the way they do in Italy and France, there’s no better resource than Marcella Hazan and Julia Child. One of Hazan ‘s works Ingredienti explains just which vegetables are the best to purchase at the market, and how to prepare them in a way that keeps them fresh and ripe for cooking. All of Child’s works highlighted the importance of fresh produce, highlighting the specific flavors a cook should be aware of when preparing them (important knowledge for cooks used to using the canned or frozen versions of these).
Image of Julia Child from PBS.
You might be tempted to think Child’s works as impossible to make plant-based. Not so! Child knew how to make a sauce sing and come alive. And while this was oftentimes achieved with butter and cream, it wasn’t always. Nor are her sauces always impossible to translate into the plant-based sphere.
But what made Marcella and Julia so different as cookbook authors, what makes it worthwhile to keep their books even now, was how they gave their readers the confidence to pursue their own versions of the foods they lovingly prepared. When you start to love food and understand what it does, an entire world of options suddenly appears. Playing around with what you have available, and learning to make something delicious your own way, is one of the best things these authors can teach you. Forget about the ingredients; think instead about what you want your food to do.
Look at Recipes for Inspiration, not Instructions
And this is why keeping your old cookbooks is a good thing: it helps you to think creatively about food. Just because a recipe touts one way of doing something as ‘delicious’ or ‘the only’ way, doesn’t mean you can’t give it a try in your own unique plant-based fashion. Many of the world’s best plant-based recipes were created by recipe developers who were vegan but wanted that same feeling they remembered from the meat-based version and worked tirelessly to find a way to achieve it.
This process not only gives us creative license; it helps us become more mindful about food, a good lesson for us all to learn. It’s simple to follow a recipe and do exactly as it tells you, without thinking too hard about the ingredients it’s asking for and whether they’re the right ones. It’s a much harder but ultimately rewarding process to discover what you should be eating and adapt accordingly.