The Complete Italian Vegetarian Cookbook: 350 Essential Recipes for Inspired Everyday Eating 2nd prt. Edition

I’ve been eating Jack Bishop’s food for 10 years, and I don’t know anyone who approaches Italian cooking with the same wonderful blend of tradition and innovation. — Mark Bittman, author of Fish: The Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking

It’s a great relief to see that Jack Bishop, food writer and cookbook author, prepares his food in a completely ordinary kitchen. The no-frills Sag Harbor setup has no professional range and precious little counter space. The refrigerator is smaller than he is.

It is in this simple kitchen that Bishop tested most of his recipes for his new book, The Complete Italian Vegetarian Cookbook, and it’s proof that you don’t need anything fancy to make yourself a good dinner.

‘There’s a lot of culinary rigamarole,’ said Bishop. ‘In Italy, you have to have a special pot to cook polenta. It’s got to be a copper pot. I have a great reverence for things Italian, but I’m an American, and I shop in America. I’m more interested in people facing the challenge of what-on-earth-am-I-going-to-eat-tonight.’

To that end, Bishop has melded two of the most popular trends in cooking in his newest book, a collection of 350 recipes that revel in all manner of Italian food that doesn’t contain meat. Bishop calls himself a ‘semi-‘ vegetarian, the kind of no-big-deal vegetarian who doesn’t want to face a slab of meat on his plate, but wouldn’t mind a little prosciutto in his pasta sauce. ‘I like the flavor of pork and lamb, but in the end I prefer vegetables,’ he said, ‘and I could live without chicken for the rest of my life.’

His newest book is an outgrowth of his earlier book, Pasta e Verdura, a collection of 140 pasta dishes made with vegetables. Although he didn’t intend to, Bishop lost 7 pounds off his already lean frame during the writing and the recipe-testing phase of that book. The dishes featured fresh vegetables, usually tossed with a pound of packaged pasta and a little olive oil.

The new book, The Complete Italian Vegetarian Cookbook, while mindful of unnecessary fat, is not lean and mean. It is a bigger, more comprehensive book that features many richer and heartier recipes, such as baked shells with fontina and Parmesan-flavored bread crumbs-macaroni and cheese by any other name. It calls for a cup of heavy cream, 1/3 cup of butter and half a pound of cheese.

The book also features more of Bishop’s well-honed advice. He is an editor and writer for Cook’s Illustrated, a quirky culinary magazine that has developed something of a cult following for its kitchen-detective format. It takes a topic, say meatloaf, and sets out to find the best possible way to make the ideal recipe. First it’ll fiddle with the ratio of ground beef, pork and veal to find the best combination. Then it will test 11 binders, including tapioca and corn flakes. Next, it moves onto the onions: raw or sauted?

Bishop says the magazine is fascinating and fun to work on, if not particularly creative for a writer. But the approach has benefited his own cooking and teaching techniques. When Bishop tackled the topic of how to make polenta in his book, he researched various ratios of cornmeal to water before advising his readers how to proceed.

That advice-filled, leave-nothing-to-chance approach also is evident in the book’s thick header notes-those chatty paragraphs that precede each recipe. Bishop is particularly generous with his advice there, warning readers of the possible pitfalls, encouraging them to try new things. And he names names, giving specific brands of ingredients.

‘There’s no reason not to share that information,’ he said. ‘People ask me all the time what brands I use. My book is not an armchair book,’ he said, ‘although I love those kinds of books. I envision it in the kitchen.’

While the book is not written for beginners, Bishop has kept the novice cook in mind. His students are either younger people who are new to the kitchen or older people who are new to vegetarianism. Either way, he finds that Italian cooking is well suited to the task. ‘Italian cooking is so friendly,’ said Bishop. ‘People know it. It’s not weird.’

And there are many excellent Italian dishes that are vegetarian by chance rather than design, said Bishop. ‘This is not like in England where they have a vegetarian society. Italians say, ‘It’s food. We’re not making politics out of it.” — Newsday, 2-4-98

Jack Bishop has given us a celebration of vegetables, cooked simply the Italian way. The recipes are enticing, yet totally approachable and generally low in fat. Bishop even manages to demystify risotto and polenta. This book will enable the home cook to get delicious vegetarian dinners on the table every night of the week. — Sara Moulton, Executive Chef, Gourmet