Vintage Veg
The Wide World of Madhur Jaffrey’s Vegetarian Cookbooks
1981’s ‘World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking’ taught Western home cooks how to use spices other than salt and pepper
Madhur Jaffrey is the queen of Indian home cooking, a title she’s held for quite some time thanks to the numerous influential cookbooks she’s published. I have so many of her books that I’ve not actually used all of them, including World of the East Vegetarian Cooking. This is one that I just like to look at, especially for its kitschy illustrations that try to tackle the entire Western imaginary’s conception of the “East,” including the Middle East, South Asia, and onto Japan.
The book is a gigantic tome of 500 pages, first printed in 1981. By the time my copy, from 1998, was out, it was in its 18th printing. The illustrations are reminiscent of Anna Thomas’s The Vegetarian Epicure, bringing to mind a utopian hippie picnic in which every flag of the world’s nations is represented.
Indeed, Jaffrey begins the introduction with a discussion of her “vegetarian friends”:
Over the past decade, as my vegetarian friends and I have sat around nibbling on radishes smeared with sweet butter or dining more elegantly on asparagus soufflés, we have…
