The Vegetable Book: A Detailed Guide to Identifying, Using & Cooking Over 100 Vegetables

by Colin Spencer

Colin Spencer bring us a fresh new look at vegetables, which have moved to the center of the culinary stage in past years, discussing what is available and when and how to get the best from them. Arranged by horticultural family, there are entries on more than 100 vegetables accompanied by more than 300 recipes.

For every vegetable, each root, leaf, stem and tuber is lovingly its history amusingly related; its properties, varieties and foibles investigated. Vegetarian dishes both classic and modern are also provided in a range of ways to present vegetables at their best, as side dishes and main courses such as Sweet Potato Pie, Onion Tart, Spinach Roulade and Red Pepper Cream, and Fennel Tempura.

Illustrated with 12 beautiful line drawings by artist Emma Dibben.

Genres: Cookbooks, Food

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Author biography:

Colin Spencer was born in London in 1933 and attended Brighton Grammar School and Brighton Art College. From an early age, he was interested in both art and writing and had his first stories published in The London Magazine and Encounter when he was 22.

Spencer’s first novel, An Absurd Affair, was published in 1961, but it was with his second, Anarchists in Love (1963), the first in the four-volume Generation sequence, that he began to garner widespread critical acclaim. Seven more novels followed between 1966 and 1978, including Poppy, Mandragora and the New Sex (1966), Asylum (1966), and Panic (1971), books that one critic has said ‘revel in the eccentric, the bizarre, and the grotesque’.

A man of many talents, Spencer is also a prolific author of non-fiction books, including gay-interest titles like Homosexuality: A History (1995) and The Gay Kama Sutra (1997) and acclaimed works on food and cooking which led Germaine Greer to call him ‘the greatest living food writer’.

More recently, Spencer has devoted himself to painting and to writing a trilogy of autobiographical works, the first of which, the memoir Backing into Light: My Father’s Son, was published by Quartet in 2013. He lives in East Sussex.

Reviews

[springsnotfail · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fairly wordy, more of a guide/history and less of a recipe book - the recipes are more along the lines of "Here is a couple of ways to prepare and cook this vegetable you may have never even seen before" rather than "44 exciting new ways to use Belgian endives". It groups the vegetables loosely by class (onion family, beet family, lettuce family etc) which is nice, because it gives me a much better sense of what things are.

I also really like this book because it gives a great sense of the history of the vegetable's cultivation, how vegetables go in and out of fashion, perform functions in various local diets at different times and then just stop being cultivated when they're replaced by some tastier, more convenient or just randomly selected vegetable that becomes widely commercially produced in the 18th, 19th, or 20th century. The voice is nice and not intrusive.

This is a book for browsing - one for the bedroom/bathroom rather than the kitchen!

[Dylan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I owned this book for over ten years, because I thought it was beautiful. One day I actually got around to reading it, and found that it is made of terribly pretentious writing. All style, but little of substance to chew on.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

european oriented

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great reference for vegetables. Concise information on history, nutrition, varieties, storing and preparation.