Deborah Madison

The greening of America

By Roz Cummins

January 30, 2007

Deborah Madison’s Local Flavors column is a monthly feature on Culinate.

A champion of cooking that’s both healthy and tasty, Deborah Madison got her start cooking macrobiotic food at the San Francisco Zen Center in the 1970s. She later cooked at Chez Panisse in Berkeley and became the founding chef at the seminal vegetarian restaurant Greens in San Francisco. Madison is widely credited for helping to make vegetarian cooking both accessible and delicious.

Once upon a time, going to a food co-op and buying hummus was a cultural and even political statement. Now, it seems, veggie options are everywhere. What’s your take on this?
In the 1960s, if you didn’t eat meat, people questioned you and you ended up defending a lifestyle. It was like having a beard, or so my husband says, as he had to defend his beard as well as his vegetarian choices back then.

Deborah Madison

These days, there are some people for whom ordering a vegetarian meal is part of a commitment to following a vegetarian diet or lifestyle, but for other people perhaps it’s just for a change of pace, the chance to eat more lightly, or even a chance to eat something more interesting. Cooking vegetarian dishes or ordering a vegetarian meal doesn’t need to set you apart from other people any longer, and that is wonderful.

One of the reasons that I wanted to write Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone was to get everything under one roof without any stigma. Being a vegetarian now doesn’t have to mean that you’re off on some weird little isolated island.

What ingredients that were new to you then have changed your cooking the most?
There are so many new ingredients I saw and was a part of introducing in the 1970s. We grew arugula at Green Gulch Farms, fingerling potatoes, many, many kinds of lettuces, different herbs, lots of varieties of cucumbers, the list goes on and on — things that our customers had never seen or tasted before.

I remember when sun-dried tomatoes were introduced in San Francisco. It was a big deal! Younger people are surprised that there was a time not so long ago when there wasn’t arugula and goat cheese or golden beets and strange and marvelous little potatoes.

I grew up in a family that was somewhat enlightened about food. We made many trips to San Francisco’s Crystal Palace market and, after it closed, to Greek delis where my parents bought bulgur, lentils, olive oil, and phyllo dough. My dad loved good cheeses, wine, and little gourmet treats from Europe, and he was a great gardener.

What are some of your favorite ingredients?
I love vinegars and oils: nut oils, pumpkin-seed oil, argon oil (a Moroccan oil), and mustard oil. I really like aged red-wine vinegar with a little bit of oak on it. These intense, flavorful ingredients can take vegetables and grains so many places.

I don’t chase after many new ingredients anymore, but I’m always on the lookout for ingredients of good quality. For example, I grew up on good, fresh Japanese tofu that had to be used in 24 hours. Now you can get it in a sealed box and it has a shelf life of several months! So I do chase down good tofu if I know I can find it somewhere. I always make a special trip on my way back from the airport in Albuquerque to pick some up at an Asian market, or some other favorite ingredient.

I never go anywhere that I don’t come back with bags of fruits or vegetables from farmers’ markets. I grew up in California, which was like the Garden of Eden, and now I live in New Mexico where the variety and abundance of produce is very different, but I’ve adjusted.

Do you have any advice about tackling new ingredients?
If you’ve eaten Jerusalem artichokes in a restaurant, then you’re more likely to find a way to cook them at home. People do find it hard to buy something they’ve never eaten before and don’t know how to use. For example, I don’t know how to cook tropical roots. It’s not intuitive for me in the least. If I wanted to cook yucca, I’d go to a cookbook.

I once cooked and served 12 gallons of Jerusalem-artichoke soup at the Greenmarket in New York City. At the end of the day, all the farmers who were selling Jerusalem artichokes told me that they had sold out. People tasted it, they got a recipe, and then they bought the ingredients.

One thing I find is that if I’m in the market and I’m looking at the eggplant or picking out a celery root, people come up to me and ask me how to cook it. This happens a lot. I guess I look as if I know what I’m doing. One of the things that I really like about farmers’ markets is that they are communal in that people are eager to share information and experiences about the foods they’re buying.

One of my intentions in writing Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone was, in fact, to introduce readers to vegetables — how they behave, how to work with them, what flavors they’re good with — and to lead them by the hand to something they might be interested in and know nothing about; a beet, parsnips, potatoes.

What cooks or cookbooks have been influential in your life?
There are so many! Madeleine Kamman’s When French Women Cook, Jane Grigson’s book on mushrooms as well as her classic book on fruits and vegetables, books by Richard Olney, Diana Kennedy, Paula Wolfert, Elizabeth David: these were my influences when I was starting out.