Table Of Content“Instead of trotting out vegetarian standards, Bruce and Mark have created exciting new explorations of meatless
cuisine. The result is a book filled with accessible and delicious recipes to serve to your family and friends. But even
more important, this is a lesson in combining flavors, textures, and familiar ingredients in ways that will wake your
slumbering palate and excite you to the possibilities of plant-based cuisine.”
— ROBIN ASBELL, author of Big Vegan, The New Vegetarian,and Juice It!
“After reading Vegetarian Dinner Parties, I feel as if I’ve traveled throughout the culinary universe armed with a
pan and whisk, ready to tackle a sweeping selection of worldwide cuisines. The recipes are eclectic and exciting and
after reading them, I just want to get into the kitchen to simmer, sear, and smoke! And yes, I want to be at their next
dinner party.”
— STEVEN PETUSEVSKY, author of Sizzle and Smoke and The American Diabetes Association Vegetarian
Cookbook
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
1 Twelve Ways to Say “Welcome”
2 No Plates
3 Small Plates
4 Salads and Soups
5 Pastas
6 Large Plates
7 Final Plates
UNTIL NEXT TIME
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
The culinary powers-that-be say dinner parties are staging a comeback.
Pardon us if we snicker. We’ve read that headline too often during the
many years that we’ve been full-time food writers. There’s no comeback
because there was never a go away. Good cooks have been having
friends over for dinner all along. What’s better than a night at the table, a
couple of bottles of wine, great camaraderie, and lots of laughs?
But since there’s always room for improvement, we’d like to raise the bar and make
a plea for dinner parties like the ones that have long been a part of our lives together.
At least once a month, we brush off the stemware, pull together a collection of recipes,
and put on a plated affair. The meal’s pace is accomplished with discrete servings
offered in several courses. The flavors are intense within a single dish, but each
helping is small enough that your palate doesn’t get exhausted before you move on to
the next course. The cooking then becomes the canvas for the real masterpiece: a long,
gorgeous evening together. Eyes sparkle in the candlelight. Time is measured in plates,
not minutes. And people find themselves in the warmth of each other’s affections. So,
okay, that sort of dinner party may well be due for a comeback.
Yes, we plate the courses. You needn’t. We find it a beautiful experience, a chance
to be artistic with food and to offer our friends a delicious present. We’ve also
become adept at certain tricks for throwing a successful dinner party; we’ll want to
share those with you. But almost every dish in this book could be set in the center of
the table for a family-style meal. Just bring the roasting pan or big platter to the table
and pour some more wine while everyone helps themselves.
However, we should also be honest about what this book doesn’t have. We don’t
offer options for putting together a buffet. The courses don’t do well jammed together
on a single plate. They were developed to be focused and balanced—in other words,
to stand on their own. As you’ll see, the drama will happen between the plates—that
is, both in the juxtaposition of one dish to the next and in the narrative arc of the longer
meal, beginning to end. Don’t worry: We’ll give you lots of help putting it all together.
But it’s that arc, that movement between plates, that will create a memorable evening
at your table.
And there are no side dishes here. For us, dinner parties are a way to re-create
modern-day, four-star dining at home. When you arrive at one of these new French
Laundry–inspired restaurants, these critically acclaimed temples of cuisine, you’re
presented with a menu that offers the evening’s flavors in small bits: a bowl of soup
with gingered carrots and miso, a plate of cold-smoked romaine lettuce with a candied
walnut dressing, another plate of pickled shiso leaves and caramelized shallots with a
dusting of ground green tea. You spend your time moving from plate to plate,
experience to experience. That is our vision of the dinner parties we’re about to lay
out for you.
Let’s face it: A vegetarian dinner party is not an everyday affair. And that’s too bad.
A vegetarian meal can be more satisfying than that big hunk of roasted meat that has
held court on our tables for too long. So here’s to an old-fashioned concept in a new-
fashioned medium: the (truly) vegetarian (honest-to-God) dinner party.
Truly means no fakes. We’re just not into tofurkey or fakin’ bacon. We don’t need
to be. Vegetables can carry the day without doing a meatish drag show. After writing
22 cookbooks and developing almost 12,000 original recipes, we’ve come to the
countercultural conclusion that asparagus, morels, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peaches,
pears, figs, and the rest of their plantish kin are more flavorful and offer more textural
satisfaction than anything else in the larder—more than even the most über-grass-fed,
über-grass-finished beef. A decade ago, our dinner parties were notorious for roasts;
but our menus have shifted dramatically. These days, we’re more interested in
expanding the taste and texture range at the table, moving away from the mostly savory
flavors of a hunk of meat and into the sour, sweet, bitter, herbaeceous, and (yes) larger
spectrum that fruits, vegetables, and grains provide. Over the course of hundreds of
dinner parties, we’ve crafted vegetarian and vegan recipes that meet those demands—
and now make up this book.
Every writer has a hidden agenda. Here’s ours: When we embrace the modern, fine-
dining scheme of carefully crafted courses, we can begin to see vegetables for their
true worth. They’re no longer relegated to the rim of the plate, a lost mound of steamed
greens or roasted potatoes. They become more than main-course handmaids, a position
they’ve held for too long in Western culture. No wonder so few of us understand that
the produce section holds a more astounding array of culinary delights than the meat
and fish cases combined. We’re just not used to noticing vegetables, fruits, and grains.
So it’s high time we liberated them to the center of the plate. Our dinner parties do
that. Yours can, too.
We want to encourage you to throw a five-star dinner party once in a while and to
give vegetables, fruits, and grains their rightful due, even if you’re the type who wants
a steak the next night. You may have underestimated the bounty you’re about to
witness. Even some of our vegetarian friends seem stymied when it comes to
preparing dinner parties—sometimes because they haven’t realized the culinary
potential of their plantish fare. They know the health benefits, they may be able to talk
about the ethics, but they haven’t explored the full gourmet potential of what’s at hand.
In this book, we’d like to make a subtle plea for more heart and less head. Or to put it
another way, more pleasure and less theory. No matter your tradition, carnivore or
pescatarian, vegan or omnivore, come discover that plants are truly matchless when it
comes to creating dishes good enough to serve to company.
Truth be told, neither one of us is a vegetarian. We’re both lapsed vegetarians.
Earlier in life, we both had sworn off meat: one for political reasons (aka he was in
grad school in the humanities) and one for personal reasons (in chef school, he
witnessed one too many broken-down animal carcasses). But hard-and-fast rules don’t
fit creative lives. We’re both driven explorers (in life, in music, in art, in travel, and
at the table). We take pleasure in pushing the boundaries. A strict set of thoushalt-nots
never sits well. By our thirties, just as our culinary careers began to flourish, we were
getting pretty restless. One of us had a steak at a backyard barbecue; one of us ordered
Chinese takeout. Soon, we were setting an omnivore’s table again. A few years later,
we’d written tomes on goat and ham. We were officially lapsed.
But as we were writing our seven-step plan to get off processed food, and even
more so as we were developing a collection of savory main courses for our whole-
grain book, Grain Mains, we again started eating more and more vegetarian meals.
We were amazed at what we’d missed! At subsequent dinner parties, side dishes
looked like a lackluster take on vegetables and grains. What exactly were we doing
with all that glorious produce? Not much. Sliced almonds are not a garnish; a pat of
butter is not a sauce. Ever wanting to push the boundaries, we needed to remedy that.
But how?
Our past offered few clues. Back in the days when we were vegetarians, there
weren’t many role models for the sorts of dinner parties we like to throw. Vegetarian
meals were, well, pretty lifeless, a horrid mash-up of tofu and steamed greens. Many
fine restaurants back then shared our dilemma, too. When we would order the
vegetarian or vegan option, we’d just get all the side dishes lumped together on a
plate. That’s not what we had in mind! (Maybe that lack of creativity explains the
steak and the Chinese takeout.)
Just as we found ourselves newly interested in the culinary prospects of vegetables
for their own sakes, we noticed better options on menus, thanks in large part to new,
high-end vegetarian restaurants that weren’t just patchouli-soaked 1970s holdovers
with folk music in the background and an ice cream scoop of overcooked brown rice
on the plate. Chefs Yotam Ottolenghi and Amanda Cohen led the way just as our own
table was becoming a place where vegetables got top billing. We, too, were soon
serving multiple courses of vegetarian food, nuanced and balanced.
But I don’t want to run a restaurant! you might say. Don’t worry: We’ve got some
ways to get you in the swing of it all (and to spread the word about vegetarian
cooking, whether you make the full lifestyle choice or not). First off, our recipes are
not restaurant fare; they were designed for our kitchen at home. We don’t have a
battalion of sous-chefs or a cleanup crew. We’ve made sure that most of the recipes
can be made ahead or in parts and simply assembled at the last minute. We’re not
going to stand in the kitchen for an hour while our friends sit at the table. We’d be
missing too much fun. Dinner parties needn’t be stuffy. They can be—and should be—
loud, hilarious, affectionate affairs.
About two years ago, one of us had a birthday. It wasn’t a significant digit flip
(thank God), but we still invited friends over for several courses. The whole thing
morphed into one of the best evenings we’ve ever had. A friend wanted to bring one
dish—which turned into a disaster, a flambéed ceiling narrowly averted. It all ended
with two lemon meringue pies in the center of the table and a veritable food fight to
divide the slices among a passel of otherwise mature adults. Our closest neighbors are
far enough away that we can’t see another house from ours in the New England hills.
The next day, one of them said the laughter rang up our narrow valley. “What in the
world were you doing over there?” he asked. “Eating,” we replied. (A case of
champagne may have been an accessory to the good-humored mêlée.) Now, years
later, it’s still a glorious memory, a deep well of good feeling, and a chance to have
found ourselves more fully woven into the fabric of our friends, to have cheated the
sorrow out of life one more time.
If dinner parties needn’t be stuffy, dinner-party dishes needn’t be fussy either. You
might be surprised to find some pretty fine sliders among our recipes. And tacos. And
arepas. And a vegan version of mac and cheese. Yes, there’s chic, modernist fare
here. But sometimes it’s great fun to bring out old-fashioned comfort food, even with
the stemware. Or to stick a shepherd’s pie in among more innovative flavor pairings.
Come along and see the advantage of a vegetarian dinner party as we do it:
individual courses, few to no side dishes, each plate a little work of art, some rustic
but many elegant, some reimagined throwbacks but most decidedly modern. (With no
molecular gastronomy. Whatever its value, we don’t allow chemical warfare at our
table.) In so doing, you, too, will begin to see that vegetarian fare carries more
possibilities than you might have imagined. Try a few of our small plates—maybe one
or two on your own with your spouse or partner some evening. Then try a couple
more. Try putting some together for friends. Soon enough, three things will happen.
One, you, too, will put together a meal with plated courses. Two, you will learn that
formal food doesn’t mean a stuffy evening. And three, you’ll see that vegetables
deserve the center of the plate in ways that you might not yet have imagined, no matter
if you’re a committed vegetarian or a long-time carnivore who’s just experimenting in
the plant kingdom on the down low. Your friends will begin to covet invitations to
