Monday, March 8, 2021

Vegetarian Gothic (1975)




Vegetarian Gothic was published in 1975, after the Moosewood Cookbook had started to become famous. I think that's significant. I couldn't find much on the internet about Mo Willett or Daphne Hofsass, but the recipes are apparently also tied to a vegetarian restaurant (Kitchen of Krishna, once somewhere in Virginia) and the book is hand-lettered (like Moosewood). Beyond that, the differences stick out.

The cover caught my eye when someone posted it online. It's originally a regular trade paperback. The one I have a picture of has been "re-bound" to keep it in circulation at my local library. It's not a very chatty cookbook, and I find the handwriting to be somewhat difficult. I think the cookbook is very much of its time. A couple of the recipes call for cream of mushroom or tomato soup as ingredients, though they do include recipes for making them yourself. The herbs are all dried; the garlic is almost always powdered. I don't think granulated sugar is used at all, but honey is mentioned a lot. Milk powder, too.

I haven't tried any of the recipes. To be honest, I'm not really interested. It all sounds to me like it comes from the days when it was more important for your vegetarian food to be virtuous than for it to taste good. But here are a couple of non-tested recipes so that you can see what it looks like.