Dirt Candy: A Cookbook: Flavor-Forward Food from the Upstart New York City Vegetarian Restaurant

"Dirt Candy is technically a vegetarian cookbook, but it has vegan substitutes for everything. It was written as a graphic novel , which is super cool. It’s the story of Amanda Cohen opening Dirt Candy in 2008 in New York City. It’s a vegetable restaurant—that’s what she calls it—and it’s still open. It’s expanded, and it’s just got a Michelin star. She’s been doing the work of bringing vegetables into fine dining and making them the center for over a decade now. She gives you a taste of what it’s like to do vegetarian fine dining in terms of people’s responses to it, which is really funny. Because of the graphic novel format, she’s able to show not just her story, but what it’s like when you bring a dish to three different tables and one loves it, one hates it and one is eh about it, even though it’s the exact same thing. It really reframes how to think about dining out and what it means to please a huge swathe of people. Basically, it shows you can’t. But she also gives you a lot of cool techniques for elevating your home cooking. So if Isa and Miyoko are like the Martha Stewart and Ina Garten of vegan cooking, Amanda Cohen is like—I don’t know, I don’t want to compare her to a male fine dining chef, so I’m not going to—but she is someone who will help take your cooking to another level. If you’re a really good home cook, but you want to do something out of the box, make tomato pearls or do a little molecular gastronomy, she’s the one who can introduce you to those techniques. And she gives you ways to make everything vegan. She does really cool things, like kimchi doughnuts with a wild arugula salad and cilantro sauce. There are a lot of cool flavor combinations—Greek salad with king oyster mushroom rings, smoked maple butternut squash—so that’s going to be a little bit bacony. Cohen is someone who gives you storytelling and new flavor combinations and different ways of thinking about vegetables. It’s not just, ‘Let me roast it or let me sauté it.’ She gives you a lot more excitement, a lot more options, and a lot more technique."