To celebrate the return of spring vegetables to the farmer’s market, we’re sharing some of our favorite recent vegetable-centric cookbooks. Whether you want to know more about unfamiliar produce or just brush up your prep and cooking skills, there’s a book for you here.
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ProductThe Vegetable Butcher
Cara Mangini comes from a line of butchers, but as she explains in her debut cookbook, she prefers to use her knife “against the curves of a stubborn butternut squash.” For each of the 50-plus vegetables in the book, she provides information on seasonality, varieties, choosing, storing, and using. But as the book’s title suggests, most of the information focuses on prepping, with 250 pretty-but-practical color photographs depicting how to peel, trim, shell, slice, dice, chop, and mince. -
ProductDandelion & Quince
In her debut cookbook, Michelle McKenzie, head of 18 Reasons, a nonprofit community cooking school in San Francisco,provides 35 plant profiles--from Asian pears to sunchokes--and more than 150 recipes. This informative collection will have you reconsidering celery leaves and bolted herbs, persimmon, and purslane. -
ProductThe Broad Fork: Recipes for the Wide World of Vegetables and Fruits
Chef Hugh Acheson says he wrote his book to answer a question put to him by his neighbor and fellow community supporter of agriculture: “What the hell do I do with kohlrabi?” Not only does Acheson answer that question (politely, in the form of recipes), but he also tells readers what they can do with apples, carrots, corn, tomatoes, salsify, yacon (yes, yacon), persimmons, and much more. In chapters organized by season, he offers three or four recipes for each fruit or veg, from super simple to much more involved. For parsnips, for example, you’ll find an easy purée, a sauté with country ham, parsley, and basil, and then–whoa!–Oat Risotto with Oxtail, Roasted Shallot, and Parsnips. -
ProductA Girl and Her Greens
April Bloomfield's first, highly acclaimed book, A Girl and Her Pig, celebrated porcine nose-to-tail eating, and here she takes the same approach to vegetables: a chapter called Top to Tail feature dishes that use all parts of the vegetable (Roasted Carrots with Carrot-Top Pesto and Burrata, for example). -
ProductPlenty More
In his follow-up to the highly-acclaimed Plenty, Yotam Ottolenghi focuses on his favorite techniques for vegetables, from roasting citrus to steaming eggplant to caramelizing rutabagas, which, in tandem with his inspired ingredient combinations and talent for layering texture in even the simplest dishes, makes this a must-have cookbook. -
ProductRoots: The Definitive Compendium
Diane Morgan wrote Roots because she wanted a “go-to” volume about root vegetables that was both a reference book and a cookbook. Morgan's book delivers both in spades, with 225 recipes and tons of information. -
ProductTender: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch
In this 400-recipe cookbook, renowned British food writer and television personality Nigel Slater wittily details his experience as an urban gardener and cook. Chapters are arranged alphabetically by ingredient, starting with asparagus and ending with zucchini. Planting and gardening advice is paired with vegetable prep tips, cooking suggestions, and seasonally driven recipes: In spring, there’s A Pilaf of Asparagus, Fava Beans, and Mint; for summer, An Eggplant Bruschetta, and later in the year, Winter Cabbage, Juniper, and Cream. Recipes like these will keep you cooking from the garden (or market) year-round.
