The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook: Garden-Fresh Recipes Rediscovered And Adapted For Today's Kitchen

"Fania Lewando was a vegetarian long before it was cool. Born in Poland in the late 1880s, she published the first vegetarian Yiddish cookbook in 1938. Now, more than 70 years after her death — she died in the early ‘40s while trying to flee the Nazis — Lewando’s 400 recipes have been given new life in the newly translated Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook. There’s plenty here that won’t appeal to 21st century palates (sorry, Stewed Cabbage) and these recipes require some interpretation (working without a thermometer, Lewando advises a “hot oven” or a “not-too-hot oven”). But reading through her spare, no-nonsense instructions made me feel like I was spending an afternoon cooking with my own Yiddish-speaking great-grandmother from Vilna, getting a glimpse at a now vanished world."