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New Laurel's Kitchen: A Handbook for Vegetarian Cookery & Nutrition



SKU: 166-x
Size: 7½'' x 9¼''
ISBN: 978-0-89815-166-4
Pages: 512
Authors: Laurel Robertson, Carol Flinders, Brian Ruppenthal
Formats: Paperback

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Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Wholegrain Breadmaking
 


Table of Contents | Read an Excerpt | Media Reviews and Endorsements | Reader Reviews

When it first appeared, Laurel’s Kitchen was heralded as a pitch-perfect response to the needs of its time. Newly awakened to the appeal of a slowed-down, earth-centered way of life, people everywhere wanted to learn how to prepare vegetarian meals made from whole, unprocessed foods. But they wanted sound nutritional guidance, too: How much protein do we really need? What cooking techniques preserve nutrients best?

Tapping into the expertise of U.C. Berkeley’s nutritional science department, Laurel’s Kitchen answered these questions exhaustively, even as it demonstrated with one delectable recipe after another that vegetarian food can be sublimely healthy without missing a gastronomical beat. With the publication ten years later of this fully revised edition, The New Laurel’s Kitchen, sales soared well past a million, and today its place as a kitchen classic seems assured.

Features
  • 150 new recipes
  • Almost every recipe has been revised to lower fat content or enhance nutrition
  • All-new final section on nutrition


Table of Contents |

Introduction: The Work at Hand

Recipes & Menus
Bread
Breakfast
—Pancakes
—Toasted Nuts & Seeds
—Better-Butter
—Yogurt
—Cereals
—Soymilk
Lunch
—Carry-out Lunches
—Sandwich Spreads
—Sprouts
Dinner
Salads
—Lowering the Fat
—Dressings
—Salads
Soups
—Stocks and Special Broths
—Basic Vegetable Soup
—Light Soups
—Bean and Pea Soups
—Fruit Soups
Vegetables
Sauces & Such
Heartier Dishes
Grains & Beans
Desserts
Menus

A Handbook of Nutrition
Introduction: The Search for an Optimal Diet
The New Laurel’s Kitchen Food Guide
Special Concerns
—Pregnancy, Infancy, and Early Childhood
—Controlling Your Weight
—Nutrition in Later Years
—Sports
—The Vegan Diet
—Diet Against Disease
The Nutrients
—The Energy-Yielding Nutrients
—Vitamins and Minerals
—Food Processing
—Conserving Nutrients in the Kitchen
—Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDA)
—Nutrient Composition of Foods

Excerpt from New Laurel's Kitchen |

Of all the things we said in Laurel’s Kitchen, I don’t think any subject brought more appreciative response than the section on working with one-pointed attention – sanctifying ordinary work by the state of mind you bring to it. Any work you do for a selfless purpose, without thought of profit, is actually a form of prayer, which unifies our fragmented energy and attention and calms the mind. In the words of a monk of the seventeenth century, Brother Lawrence:

The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.

The approach may be catching on. Only last week, I read of one homemaker’s discovery that eggs are cooked to perfection after three Hail Mary’s. “I use the boiling time,” she adds, “to place myself in touch with earlier generations of cooks who measured their recipes with litanies, using time to get beyond time.”

We are so oppressed by time these days — by “hurry sickness” and all its side effects. At moments of deep concentration, though, we are lifted clear out of time, and for a few minutes the stress of the day slips away. This may be why a very absorbing activity — chess, or fine needlework, or writing poetry — can leave us refreshed. Kitchen work, when it is undertaken in the spirit of Brother Lawrence, can heal and restore us in exactly the same way.

“I don’t know, really, what changed,” reflects my longtime friend Beth Ann. “I just know that one evening I walked in there grim as usual, determined to get it over with, and instead I found myself relaxing — accepting that I was there and willing to do it as well as I possibly could. And ever since then, it’s been completely different.

“You know, partly I think it’s the food itself. If you watch, so much beauty passes through your hands — of form, and color, and texture. And energy, too.” Abruptly her hands flew up in the air as if an electric current were passing between them. “Each grain of rice, each leaf of kale, charged with life and the power to nourish. It’s heady, feeling yourself a kind of conduit for the life force!”

To be sure, everyday cooking ends up feeling more prosaic than this. Yet I suspect that what Beth Ann was groping to say has to do with an ancient, almost wordless truth. Long before institutionalized religions came along — and temples and churches — there was an unquestioned recognition that what goes on in the kitchen is holy. Cooking involves an enormously rich coming-together of the fruits of the earth with the inventive genius of the human being. So many mysterious transformations are involved — small miracles like the churning of butter from cream, or the fermentation of bread dough. In times past there was no question but that higher powers were at work in such goings-on, and a feeling of reverence sprang up in response. I wonder sometimes whether the restorative effects of cooking and gardening arise out of similar — though quite unconscious — responses. . . .

Perhaps, though, the real point is not so much to find the holy places as to make them. Do we not hallow places by our very commitment to them? When we turn our home into a place that nourishes and heals and contents, we are meeting directly all the hungers that a consumer society exacerbates but never satisfies. This is an enormously far-reaching achievement, because that home then becomes a genuine counterforce to the corporate powers-that-be, asserting the priority of a very different kind of power.

Media Reviews and Endorsements |

“This is a wonderful volume which goes way beyond nutrition, health, and the marvelous collection of recipes it contains . . . I have consistently recommended Laurel’s Kitchen to both professionals and nonprofessionals.”
— Sheldon Margen, M.D., Professor of Public Health Nutrition, U.C. Berkeley

“The original Laurel's Kitchen, now 10 years old, demonstrated that vegetarian food can be nutritionally sound and need not be dreary. It has been enormously influential and remains so, even now when vegetarian and whole-foods cooking has joined the mainstream. For this sequel, almost every recipe has been revised to lower fat content or enhance nutrition, and 150 new recipes have been added, along with a long final section on nutrition that is all new. As in the original volume, recipes are excellent. This new version deserves to be as popular as its predecessor.”
— Library Journal

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