Worldly Veggies

Vegetarian cookbooks are certainly big these days, and not just in the sense of selling well. Deborah Madison’s “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone” (Broadway Books, $35), published in 1997, weighs in at 4 pounds 3 ounces, contains more than 700 pages and offers 1,400 recipes. “Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian” (Clarkson Potter; $40) is a little lighter--only 3 1/2 pounds, but it contains more than 700 pages and close to 700 recipes.

Buy either of these and you will never need another vegetarian cookbook, unless you simply enjoy collecting books. Jaffrey winnowed her collection of recipes from 2,000 gathered over 10 years. Although known primarily for Indian cookbooks, she has limited the Indian recipes to about 20% of those in this book. The focus is international, based on her wide-ranging travels.

There’s a glitch or two--Salvadoran pupusas turn up as papoosas, and Mexican chilaquiles are an American style casserole of crushed tortilla chips, red kidney beans, raisins, olives and ancho chile sauce topped with grated Cheddar cheese.

But those are outweighed by Jaffrey’s inquisitive, analytical mind and her focus on food history and geography. Her commentary makes the recipes more interesting and informative. You learn, for example, the origins of the Indians of Trinidad and how their cuisine and food terminology evolved. Jaffrey is especially strong, of course, in writing about anything Indian, and her discussion of Indian dals covers what may be new ground for some readers.

Jaffrey considers beans and legumes so important that she starts the book with more than 100 pages devoted to them, compared to 31 pages of bean dishes in Madison’s book. “I think beans are relatively badly treated, are sort of unknown, really, in this part of the world,” she said during a recent visit to Los Angeles.

Like Madison, Jaffrey is not vegetarian, but she says she is cutting back on meat. There are no desserts in her book, just some sweet Asian soups and syrupy beverages; Madison devotes more than 40 pages to fruit desserts, tarts, cakes, puddings and cookies. This means you may want to buy both books. Then you will have just under 8 pounds of cooking inspiration.