I have been vegetable gardening all of my adult life, and own several shelves full of vegetable cookbooks, and I have a very high bar when it comes to buying new ones. Actually, that’s not true. I buy new ones in a fairly promiscuous fashion because that is my addiction, but I have a very high bar indeed for recommending that other people spend their hard-earned money on them.
So here’s what I have to say about Six Seasons: A New Way With Vegetables by Joshua McFadden: go buy it. Now. Read it. Think about it. It really will bring you to think in a new way about how to handle familiar vegetables. Take salads, for instance. I like salads well enough but am almost never really excited by them. They always seem a little predictable to me, and just throwing some meat, cheese, or eggy thing of some kind on top does not make them interesting in my view. McFadden’s way of putting a substantial “pad” of seasoned nut butter sauce, savory seasoned whipped cream, whipped seasoned ricotta cheese, or other interesting possibilities underneath the salad does make them seem new and like a real meal that I am happy to eat.
As good as the recipes are, I put this one in the “thinking cookbook” category, i.e. an idea-rich cookbook that will affect the food you put on the table whether you were actually following a recipe from the cookbook or not. Take the salad shown above, for example. I had a lot of lettuce in the garden, including some dark red lettuce that still looked beautiful but had grown the slightest bit bitter in hot weather. I kept tasting bits of the leaves, thinking about what would make them taste good. Ultimately, I whipped and seasoned some homegrown goat ricotta with olive oil and salt, and smeared the plates with it, then arranged the red lettuce and some sweet green lettuce on top. Then I put some of the ricotta mixture in the blender with an egg yolk and two cloves of roasted garlic, blended in more olive oil and some salt, and acidified it with lemon juice and white wine vinegar until it tasted just right, added some chopped marjoram because it seemed to fit in well, and used that as the dressing. I slivered shallot greens, soaked them in cold water briefly as McFadden recommends, pressed dry, and scattered them all over, and finished with warm leftover steak and bright sweet crunchy slivers of kumquat rind. The earthy rich ricotta dressing made the faintly bitter lettuce just right and complemented the steak beautifully, and dripped down to the whipped ricotta beneath to season it, while the kumquat rind added an electric zing. Delicious and interesting to eat. It isn’t a McFadden recipe per se but was entirely inspired by his methods and I would not have come up with it without reading his book.
The cooked vegetable recipes are very good too, as are the techniques. Just to name one, McFadden recommends grilling your vegetables “dry,” i.e. without oil, and then drizzling them with olive oil afterwards on the grounds that the burnt oil produces strange chemical flavors. Even if you like the ones grilled in oil, I think you’ll like his method better. Try it and see. I am also a fan of his section on pickles. These are not pickles that you can put on your shelf and keep forever. They are quick, delicate refrigerator pickles that serve as seasoning and garnish and add wonderful nuances to the flavor of vegetables.
This is a useful and excellent book at any price, but I do wish to point out that the Kindle version is a special bargain and I highly recommend it.
My urban homestead 