On to the Next Course

There are plenty of people happy that Deborah Madison’s long-awaited new book, “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone,” which has been described as the “vegetarian ‘Joy of Cooking’,” is finally in the offing. None more than Madison (right) herself.

“I feel like a new person,” says Madison, author of the best-selling “The Greens Cookbook” and “The Savory Way.” “I cannot tell you how great it feels. I thought I was through with food last year, but now I realize I was only obsessed with this endless book. Now that it’s starting to leave my desk, a little at a time every day, I feel great.”

Madison has been working on the 600-page, 800-recipe book for six years. It will finally be published by Broadway Books this fall.

“It came out of years of teaching cooking classes,” she says, “listening to questions people had, watching basic confusions they had about cooking. . . . Because people are vegetarians, they’re not getting a lot of help from other cookbooks that may be very good but are meat-oriented.

“That really hit me when I was researching the answer to a question a student asked about soy milk. She was interested in it not for political reasons but because her children are very allergic to cow’s milk. But everything I found was couched in these very special terms and called for things that were only available at health food stores.

“And there were all of these assumptions: that because she didn’t use milk, she didn’t use sugar and eggs. And those recipes are not very mainstream in their flavors. I wanted to put those ingredients in a setting that was more accessible to people who may be vegetarians but are not necessarily sharing the whole belief system.”

In fact, Madison, who founded Greens restaurant at the San Francisco Zen Center, seems to be getting weary of the whole vegetarian label.

“I’ve never felt that the most interesting thing you can say about my food is that it’s vegetarian,” she says. “But I am really in love with this side of the menu, with vegetables and their cousins. My food happens to be vegetarian, but it’s food for everyone; it’s not an exclusive matter. Vegetarians could use this book forever, but there’s no reason anyone else couldn’t also.”