Book Review: Recipes for the Heart

Title: Recipes for the Heart

Author: Lucy M. Williams

Date: 1992

Publisher: Sandridge

ISBN: 0-945080-42-5

Length: 206 pages

Illustrations: black-and-white graphics by Tom Williams

Quote: “Hypertension is not a disease; rather, it is a symptom. Therefore it cannot be cured, but it can be controlled.”

This introduction to cardio-fitness cooking reminds me a bit of Grandma Bonnie Peters’ Test Kitchen, with the informational charts and graphics on the wall. It’s not meant to be a treat; it’s meant to tell you what’s (likely to be) “good for you.” The Test Kitchen didn’t attract much traffic and this book didn’t become a bestseller.

That’s a pity, because if you can overcome the natural distaste we should feel when other people presume to tell us what they think will be “good for us,” some of it is not only healthy but tasty food.

Nevertheless, the recipes here are classified according to the aspect of the cardiovascular diet Williams is presenting—not breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and snacks, nor yet meats, veg, fruit, and grains, but sodium, potassium, calcium, fats, carbs, microwave cooking, and lower-calorie. In each category the recipes are mixed somewhat haphazardly; the chapter on sodium contains recipes for prepared mustard, catsup, barbecue sauce, biscuits, corn muffins, banana bread, corn pudding, mixed veg, mushroom soup, turkey potpie, chili bean, spaghetti sauce, lasagna, meatballs, and vanilla pudding.

Beyond that...I’m underwhelmed by the amount of dairy products in this book. Cardiovascular patients don’t need to add saturated fat to their lean, healthy oatmeal by cooking it in milk! By the time we become hypertensive nearly all of us are losing the ability to digest cow’s milk, so much of the calcium in it is lost to us. (I, over fifty, still tolerate ice cream if it’s not contaminated by glyphosate, but it no longer relieves calcium cravings for as long as it did ten years ago. I’m physically feeling the truth that the body uses most of the calcium it does get from cow’s milk to digest the fat.) Almond milk might be more beneficial to more cardiovascular patients.

Cheese, which is mostly saturated fat and casein with most of the other proteins and nutrients in milk drained off, has no rightful place in a health diet; few if any bodies are getting any calcium benefit out of cheese, and an increasing number of bodies for every year of age just absolutely refuse to try to digest cheese (mine rejected cheese from infancy). I’d never try to tell people who like cheese that they can’t enjoy it in moderation, but I think we need to stop allowing people to tell us cheese is good for any body. Even if it doesn’t make us sick, cheese is an empty-calorie taste treat that most people do not actually enjoy as much as the National Dairy Council wants us to believe. TV tells us that everybody else wants cheese and more cheese, four or five kinds of cheese, leave out even the burger or the pasta and just give them the cheese. Just for fun, you might want to survey your friends. Do you know even one person who really prefers a cheeseburger to a hamburger, apart from the vague (mis)belief that cheese adds nutrients and the Dairy-Council-subsidized way McDonalds now offers cheeseburgers for half the price of hamburgers? I don’t; I know people who liked cheese when they were kids, but I have no same-age friends who really like cheese.

I hope Williams at least collected her commission from the dairy industry for telling cardiovascular patients to add cheese to their vegetables, and not discuss adding slivered almonds (which have a sweet, milky flavor, and more calcium, and less fat) or lubricating breads and cereals with almond milk rather than the fatty, paradoxically laxative-or-binding cow product. Most young humans’ metabolisms are similar enough to calves’ that we can get some nutritional value from dairy products as long as we are children. Most adult humans’ metabolisms gradually become less similar to calves’ as we grow older; the majority of adult humans don’t digest cow’s milk at all, and the minority of us who can digest it need to educate ourselves about the alternative sources of calcium that may meet even our calcium cravings more efficiently while allowing us to share meals with our friends.

That said...here is a nice first cookbook for those whose introduction to cooking at home was made by a cardiovascular concern. You’ll learn to cook simple (non-yeast) breads like muffins and biscuits, granola, oatmeal, rice, custard, cake caramel corn, cookies, puddings, gelatin (not Jello) molds, beef, chicken, fish, quiche, meatloaf, pizza, lasagna, crepes, stirfries, potpies, savory and sweet sauces, oups, beans, vegetable sides, and potatoes. This book’s real appeal is the way it introduces fast-food-grabbers to cooking. Williams offers tips on getting relatively less toxic meals from popular fast food chains, and tips on cheaper, lower-hassle, quick-and-easy alternatives you can whip up at home, even if you rely on a microwave rather than baking things in a proper stove.

Try, just try, to eat “healthier” fast food...I’ve tried going online from McDonald’s, a place I would not otherwise have entered, where you’d expect to find very mixed feelings about trying to serve McMeals to a wheat-and-cheese-free customer. Well, I tolerate fries and Coca-Cola, although neither is my favorite food. Beyond that...the chain used to be infamous for offering only pre-packaged main dishes, but now does custom plates, like the chicken with lettuce, tomato, and onion I ordered recently. Well...I do appreciate their efforts to improve. But at the locally owned diner “grilled chicken with lettuce, tomato, and onion only, no bun, no cheese, no ‘sauce’” always yields so much more veg, even if the lettuce is iceberg. And whatever was that coating on the chicken, if it wasn’t some sort of inedible “breading”? I prodded it warily with a plastic knife and finally determined—who but a grease-intensive fast food chain ever thought of grilling chicken breast with the skin on? And this was the breast of a flabby, anemic bird, most of whose weight came from fat, which drained down into the plate; the locally owned diner supplied a lot more protein, too. And the staff at this kind of place aren’t used to doing custom orders, so whether you want wheat-free, cheese-free, sugar-free, nondairy, lower fat, whatever, you always have to get into a long intense explanation that (for me at least) drains all the pleasure out of eating the meal, with clueless kids hovering around asking “Is this okay enough?” And even at Subway restaurants, which are highly touted as “healthier” fast food places, you are never going to get a salad-like-Mother-used-to-make, a full bowl of fresh-cut, juicy lettuce, tomato, cucumber, bell peppers, Vidalia onions, and maybe parsley, “dressed” with a cut of meat or a handful of roasted nuts and the vegetables’ own lovely juices. Staff are trained to dole out tiny portions of dried-out veg and try to “fill” the dish with yucky “fillers” like cheese, croutons, chips, or oil-and-vinegar “dressings.”

Williams is on the right track here. If you’ve developed a cardiovascular disease by driving through fast food restaurants and unthinkingly “grabbing a hamburger” every day, you might need a transitional cookbook to reeducate your palate about how yummy less greasy, starchy, chemical-contaminated food can be. This is that transitional book. These recipes won’t thrill anybody who’s been feasting on McDougall or Sinatra menus, but they’re less off-putting, for someone who has, than Pritikin transitional menus.

But she could have said more...If you’re used to the richly salty and fatty flavors of fast food sandwiches, a fast food salad is an uninspiring thing, with the one or two thin slices of drained, pulpy tomatoes sitting on the one or two leaves of wilting iceberg lettuce, with or without a few slices of pickled cucumbers or crumbs of washed-out onion. If you want to eat “healthier” meals and like them, you have to get into building your own low-sodium salads. Pull whole leaves off a leaf lettuce. Tear them up. Because this salad is low in sodium and calories, go ahead and chop in a whole organically grown vine-ripened tomato with the juices flowing down everywhere, a whole small Vidalia onion, a whole peeled cucumber (or half a Kirby cucumber), maybe a carrot and/or a celery stick, as much parsley as you want, maybe some other veg, raw or lightly cooked, depending on what’s in the garden. Add nuts and seeds for oil and crunch, or if you want to eat meat or fish add your meat or fish to this salad.

Or go yuppie: lettuce, red onion, half a Kirby cucumber, strawberries, blueberries, maybe a tangerine or half a mango to add Vitamin C when using frozen berries, maybe a peach in summer, and slivered almonds.

Or go Olympian and eat “ambrosia”—traditionally a fruit cup involving whatever’s ripe in the orchard, whatever’s on sale at the supermarket, a can of pineapple, and coconut. If you want to splurge, pile it into cantaloupe halves.

Cardiovascular patients so do not have to settle for a lifetime of eating dreary “lower-fat” versions of the fat-salt-and-MSG diet that made them cardiovascular patients in the first place. Once you learn how to cook at home, which this book will teach you, you’ll be ready to eat real salads, stirfries, stews, and fruit dishes, such as farm people eat, without fear of Vitamin C shock.