Rose Elliot's New Complete Vegetarian

Hardly a newcomer to the vegetable-centric category, British author Elliot has been dishing up meatless recipes for decades. The hundreds of recipes in this updated tome take advantage of ingredients not widely available when she wrote the Complete Vegetarian Cookbook in 1985, and offer a plethora of ideas for every course. She includes the basics with a refreshing lack of pretension—dishes have such direct titles as two-bean vegetable dish; carrots cooked in butter with lemon and parsley; cauliflower, egg, and potato bake; and blueberry plate pie. Options also include such dinner-party candidates as roasted red beet and goat cheese salad; soba noodle, edamame, and seaweed salad; stuffed eggplant in béchamel; and linzertorte. The recipes are accessible and concise (mostly two or three to a page), and vegan recipes are helpfully labeled. Though limited in number, the color photos are pretty and appealing. There's nothing fancy or out of the ordinary, but it's a helpful reference that will serve most vegetarians well. (Jan.)
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Britain’s leading vegetarian-cookbook author brings forward a comprehensive collection of recipes both attractive and practical. Elliot uses pasta extensively as backbone of many dishes that can seem hearty even to nonvegetarians. Since beans are so central to a vegetarian diet, she presents a useful table of soaking and cooking times. Nuts are also an important source of protein for vegetarians, and Elliot offers an unusual casserole of chestnuts in red wine. Cooks wedded to classic French cooking will find Elliot’s many variations on béarnaise sauce to improve and enrich dishes that might otherwise seem thin or bland. Recipes fit American kitchens very well, but Elliot sometimes reveals her homeland instincts by introducing such quintessentially British dishes as toad in the hole, here employing vegetarian sausages, or a Cornish pasty stuffed with eggs. Recipes that go beyond vegetarian to qualify as vegan have a symbol in their title for quick identification. --Mark Knoblauch