Vintage Veg
‘The Vegetarian Compass’ Is a Timeless Cookbook
Chef Karen Hubert Allison’s legacy has been lost to time, but her 1998 cookbook is transcendent
--
“People become vegetarians for spiritual, nutritional, political, and ecological reasons,” writes chef Karen Hubert Allison in the introduction to her 1998 cookbook The Vegetarian Compass. “Whether we are saving our bodies, our planet, or our place in heaven we are putting more vegetables on our plates than ever before.”
I found this book while working on a piece about rutabagas — how through a complicated sous-vide process, they could replicate the flavor of pork belly, like a dish I’d had from the vegan tasting menu at Chicago restaurant Alinea. Somewhere deep on the internet, on a message board that had grown virtually dusty, someone mentioned a recipe for rutabaga steaks found in this book. Immediately, I ordered it for research; that its cover was so simple and striking, a cabbage leaf presented with the lighting and care of a couture gown or a nude body, helped, of course. Like most people, I’m accustomed to vegetarian cookbooks that insist on their right to exist in a carnivorous world and wouldn’t dare come out of the gate with so striking and vague a cover. (It’s a 1931 photo by Edward Weston, titled Cabbage Leaf.)
What I found out upon receiving the book was that Allison had passed away before it ever hit print, and that perhaps she was allowed such leeway with design because she had been one of New York’s chef stars of the ’80s with an increasingly fancy succession of restaurants that all began in the Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, home she shared with her family. In the introduction, her husband, Lee Allison, writes that it was her dedication to vegetables, to understanding how they taste in every possible preparation, that gave her cooking its shape and uniqueness. They once ate nothing but root vegetables at home for six months, and so I understood why she was seemingly the only person who gave rutabaga the meaty treatment before it made its way to fine dining, made cannelloni pasta from it before a hip Brooklyn spot, put it in a gratin and fried it in cherry beer batter. Allison knew its ins and outs; she saw its potential, as she saw the potential in all vegetables and traditional…
