Book Review: Southern Living Vegetable Cookbook

I'm reading new books for you as fast as I can...I can read only so many pages on a screen at a time, and when new books turn out to be 800 pages long, that does slow down the queue. Here's an old book some people may want.

Title: Southern Living Vegetables Cookbook

Author: Lena Sturges

Date: 1975

Publisher: Oxmoor House

ISBN: none

Length: 80 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Ralph Mark

Quote: “If the vegetable begins to lose color, it is beginning to overcook.”

Southern Living was a spin-off from Progressive Farmer. These recipes show where progress was being made. When did Grandma ever worry about vegetables being overcooked? Did she ever eat them any other way? Crispness was undesirable in a world where most adults had bad teeth.

Still, it was only 1975, and several recipes call for four tablespoons of butter where one would do, or half a cup of oil and half a cup of vinegar where the juice and rind of one lemon would add as much oiliness and sourness as the salad could need.

What vegetarians and dieters will love about the Southern Living Vegetables Cookbook is that vegetables are promoted from side dishes to entrées. If you’re not a total vegan, but are trying to consume more vegetables and less meat, this is a cookbook for you. Vegetable omelets, or vegetables cooked with milk, contain enough animal fat and protein to make cruelty-free meals. Several recipes leave room for meat as flavoring or garnish for a dish that features vegetables.

What children, and adults with childlike taste such as the writer of this review, won’t love about this cookbook is that many recipes are designed to sneak second-rate veggies to the table behind layers of cream sauce, crumb topping, cheese, or even pie crust. To make an asparagus casserole, after cooking asparagus in the usual way you use the water to make a cream sauce, spread the asparagus in a greased dish, cover with cornflake crumbs, then chopped boiled egg, then cream sauce, more crumbs, more sauce, and shredded cheese, and bake for half an hour. Right. What I want to know is, who would let asparagus get into a shabby enough condition to need such a deep burial? Fresh asparagus is something you have to stop children from eating right out in the garden. I prefer to wash off the topsoil, myself, but I’ve never seen any reason to cook asparagus. It looks so much more, er, adult, while it’s raw, with a droplet of water glistening on the tip...

Grandma didn’t use recipes like these because she liked to nag children to eat vegetables. She invented these recipes during the long dark winters when the family ate their way through crocks of salted-and-vinegared vegetables and jars of overcooked vegetables they’d put up during the summer, and since they had no other vegetables and were on the verge of scurvy, they found it good. But Southern living is about having a garden and using vegetables while they’re so fresh that even the shelled peas, stringbeans, and potatoes taste good raw. Crisp, juicy, just slightly sweet, Southern vegetables are supposed to be treats for children.

The Southern Living Vegetables Cookbook was not written with restricted diets in mind, but does contain several meat-free, grain-free, dairy-free, and sugar-free recipes. Several recipes use all natural ingredients and can be made entirely from garden produce. And some don’t even bury the healthy veg in saturated fats and simple carbs.