Books |
I heard this from a cow: “Vegetables would like a word with you”
By
Published: Aug 08, 2021
Category:
Food and Wine
The Weekend Butler included David Remnick’s conversation with John Kerry, who’s off to a climate summit in Europe to try to lower the temperature. It included this:
KERRY: There’s a lot of research and work being done now on the diet of cattle, for instance. There’s a thing called asparagopsis –— I believe that’s the right name — which is a seaweed that, apparently, in its early trials, has reduced if not eliminated flatulence from cattle.
One of the great blessings of editing Butler is having readers who are smarter than I am. My friend Randie and her partner have been touring the American West this month, collecting monuments and eccentricities. Quoting the Remnick-Kerry conversation made her open her haptop:
The problem with meat-eating isn’t just the methane released from cattle flatulence. It is also the amount of feed they require, the amount of water they consume, the amount of carbon required to maintain them to a certain age, the amount of nitrogen in their poop that makes its way into waterways. There is a huge carbon footprint associated with every phase of beef-farming. Eliminating the flatulence is hardly a fix. The only real fix would be cloning meat but that is still far too expensive. And really, why would anyone want to eat meat anyway when you consider the amount of cruelty that it inflicts on sentient animals meat isn’t even good for you. It is full of cholesterol and clogs your arteries and is the cause of most organ cancers and heart disease. Eating high on the food chain is bad because higher animals bioaccumulate tons of heavy metals, pesticides, herbicides, hormones, antibiotics, viruses, and the like.
We have been driving across country. Every time we pass a cattle car, I want to cry. It is 100 degrees out here, the air is full of smoke, and here are these poor mammals, stacked cheek to jowl in hot metal trailers, like so much cord wood. They are miserable and dehydrated, breathing the stench of their own manure and urine, lurching down the hot black asphalt highway to Death. When they get to the slaughterhouse, it is probably a relief for them.
After reading that, I bought fish for dinner and vegetables to sauté. And reached into the archives for the best vegetable cookbooks.
Patricia Wells has been a reliable friend for decades — I once had a dinner cooked by James Salter, no slouch in the kitchen, with recipes from Bistro Cooking. She also wrote Vegetable Harvest: Vegetables at the Center of the Plate , which offers meat dishes that pair well with vegetables – I’ll call it a good start. And no one has better credentials than Nina Planck — her parents were vegetable farmers, and she was director of Greenmarket, the largest group of farmers‘ markets in the United States. To buy her book, “The Real Food Cookbook: Traditional Dishes for Modern Cooks,” from Amazon, click here.
My go-to vegetable cookbook is V Is for Vegetables: Inspired Recipes & Techniques for Home Cooks — from Artichokes to Zucchini, by Michael Anthony, chef at Gramercy Tavern in New York, which is like saying he cooks as well as Kevin Durant plays basketball. His collaborator is Dorothy Kalins, who was the founding editor of Saveur and whose credit appears regularly on significant food books.
From my review:
This is a vegetable cookbook like no other.
First, in its format — as the subtitle suggests, it’s organized like an encyclopedia, with lovely illustrations and helpful pictures.
Second, in its simplicity. These are recipes that require no esoteric ingredients or elaborate preparation — this is gourmet home cooking.
Most original of all is the point-of-view. A great many cooks have adopted the vegetables-at-the-center-of-the-plate religion, with animal protein as a side dish, garnish, afterthought — or non-presence. (They ignore what the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki noted: “You have to kill vegetables too.”) Michael Anthony hasn’t surrendered to the Meme of Vegetables. He includes fish and meat recipes “because that’s the way I eat.” He just happens to like to eat vegetables more: “I am a cheerleader saying, ‘Hey, you can do this. Give it a try.’ I tell readers, ‘Set yourself up like this in the kitchen and you’ll be able to cook this quicker.’”
So the emphasis is on great taste. Which begins with vegetables in season: “We try not to be overbearing when it comes to our excitement about serving seasonal foods. But for me it’s a non-negotiable: If I can’t do it, then I won’t be cooking it.” [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
There’s much more in my review. To read more and, I hope, be seduced by more vegetables-than-meat cooking, click here.
To tempt you, here’s one recipe:
String Beans with Sesame Sauce
I discovered this way of cooking string beans in a friend’s home kitchen outside Tokyo. In Japan, sesame sauce is often served with beans and other fresh vegetables at room temperature. This simple preparation appears often in bento boxes as well as on the menus of small, casual neighborhood restaurants in Japan.
2 tablespoons toasted white sesame seeds
1 tablespoon mirin (sweet rice wine)
2 teaspoons white soy sauce or shiro dashi
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon sugar
1 pound string beans, tips trimmed and blanched until crisp-tender
3 scallions (green parts), thinly sliced
Crush the sesame seeds in a mortar and pestle. (Don’t worry about grinding every last seed.) Add the mirin, white soy sauce or shiro dashi, sesame oil, lemon juice, sugar and a teaspoon of water. Stir until combined. The sauce should be the consistency of loose peanut butter. thin with a little water if needed. Put the string beans in a bowl, drizzle with the sauce, and top with the scallions.
