Recipes from the original "Moosewood Cookbook" still delight
I was intimidated the first time I sat down to eat at Moosewood. The restaurant, founded in 1973 in Ithaca, N.Y., by a collective of like-minded friends, was one of the country’s first to champion vegetarian and pescatarian dining. I was dabbling in vegetarianism at the time, in 2001, and saw Moosewood as a sort of temple to crunchy granola, with longtime practitioners who knew so much more about food than I did.
Back then I was in college, trying to pick a major and living, with around 18 others, at Triphammer Cooperative, a house on Cornell’s campus. I was in charge of meal planning for the residents, and that job taught me a lot. It was a crash course in vegetarian and vegan nutritional guidelines — the house was strictly vegetarian and included several vegans — but I also learned how to cost individual meals, the variability in people’s cooking styles and the importance of efficiency in the kitchen.
Here’s how it worked: As a condition of living at Triphammer, you had to sign up to cook and clean. Cooking was a group activity — three or four of us tackled each meal, and then another small crew cleaned up afterward. I was responsible for choosing recipes, scaling them up to feed 20 and working with another resident to order the food in bulk from wholesale purveyors.
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Fortunately, the kitchen was fairly large, with a commercial-size, two-door fridge, separate freezer, six-burner stove, double sink and industrial dishwasher. My favorite spot in that space was the cookbook cupboard, which was packed with books like “Diet for a Small Planet” by Frances Moore Lappé, “The Vegetarian Epicure” by Anna Thomas, “Vegetariana: A Rich Harvest of Wit, Lore, & Recipes” by Nava Atlas and “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone” by Deborah Madison. Most of the books were falling apart at the binding, but the most-loved cookbook, the one where the cover had fallen entirely off and the pages were full of cook’s notes and food stains? That would be the original 1977 edition of “Moosewood Cookbook” by Mollie Katzen.
Get the recipe: Broccoli Cheese Strudel
Everyone in the house loved cooking from that book. Katzen, a former art student, wrote the whole thing out by hand, including little drawings, calligrams and instructive illustrations that offered step-by-step guidance for more complicated dishes, such as egg rolls, shish-kebabs and savory broccoli-and-cheese strudel. That hand-drawn touch gave the book charm and approachability. There are no full-bleed photographs of carefully styled dishes. Rather than push aspirational perfectionism, the book promoted a fun DIY attitude that, in my experience, encouraged even the most skittish cooks to dive in and get their hands dirty. (Katzen would write a few more Moosewood books before the Moosewood Collective took over and published over a dozen of their own. The original remains one of the best-selling cookbooks of all time.)
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We cooked every single recipe from that book. There was vegetable chowder and split pea soup in the winter and chilled cucumber yogurt soup and gazpacho in the spring. Turkish-style stuffed zucchini, cauliflower-cheese pie, lentil-walnut burgers and mushroom moussaka — one of the dishes Moosewood Restaurant made on its opening night — graced Triphammer’s long dining table more than once.
I taught many people how to handle phyllo dough when we got to the section on savory strudels. My favorite was the one filled with broccoli and sharp cheddar cheese. The filling gets bulked up with breadcrumbs, and seasoned with lemon juice and black pepper, before it’s stuffed into buttered phyllo and rolled up like a big burrito. Baked until crisp, sliced and served with a side salad, it makes a meal that reminds me of the magic of Moosewood.
Get the recipe: Broccoli Cheese Strudel
Catch up on this week’s Eat Voraciously recipes:
Monday: Blender Dutch Babies
Tuesday: Nutty, Herby Spring Pasta
Wednesday: Family Favorite Minestrone
More recipes from Eat Voraciously
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