From the Garden: Great Vegetable Cooking from Market to Table

Pleasance Crawford is a Canadian landscape and garden-history researcher
and writer, and the editor of Landscape Architectural Review.

In her introduction, the author, an Edmonton food writer and restaurant
critic, explains that this is not a vegetarian cookbook (nor, she might
have added, is it a low-fat cookbook). Although Schultz recommends
fresh-picked garden produce and celebrates local farmer’s markets,
these recipes call for vegetables that are available year-round in every
Canadian city: artichokes and avocados from California, dried mushrooms
from several sources, and frozen spinach (from Mexico, the last time I
looked).

Following a short section on flavorings, the book provides recipes for
34 vegetables. Each recipe is prefaced by some interesting background
information and useful shopping tips; each is tempting, as long as one
has no reservations about meat or fat. Some vegetables fare better than
others. There are ten recipes for tomatoes, eight for onions, and seven
for shelled beans, but only one each for fiddleheads, kohlrabi,
parsnips, and zucchini.

The book suffers simultaneously from over-design and underplanning. The
uneven column layout on the recipe pages makes some directions hard to
follow (even though the directions themselves are clear). Several
recipes require flipping the page, an exercise no cook enjoys. The five
full-page reproductions of Vivian Thierfelder’s paintings of herbs and
vegetables are a saving grace: they are strong, colorful, and absolutely
right.