Chinese Vegetarian Cookbook

Hello everyone,

I recently bought a Vegetarian Thai Cookbook and I am amazed at how much more often I cook Thai because I do not have to adjust the recipes from the other Thai Cookbooks I have to vegetarian.

So I was wondering if anyone has a recommendation for a good Vegetarian Chinese Cookbook. I have a couple of Chinese cookbooks but they have 90% meat dishes; and just removing the meat and substituting tofu is not what i am looking for. I want authentic chinese vegetarian dishes collected in one place.

Any ideas?

I have been on a similar quest and have been amazed at how difficult it is to find good Chinese vegetarian cookbooks, especially given the long tradition of meatless Buddhist cuisine. I do have a few books, some of which I can recommend as interesting, and a few that I would suggest avoiding. I haven’t had a chance to cook with them yet, but I have read them all. I’ll follow up if the new book I’ve ordered isn’t any good. I bought all of these books through amazon. There’s a whole other selection of Chinese vegetarian cookbooks through amazon.co.uk, but all the ones I found had bad reviews. If you’ve found any good books since your original post, I would love to know what you’ve picked up.

All the best,
Jen

Interesting Books
Classic Chinese Cooking for the Vegetarian Gourmet by Joanne Hush. ISBN 0-517-10043-6 (Bought used)

Authentic Chinese Cuisine for the Contemporary Kitchen by Bryanna Clark Grogen. ISBN 1-57067-101-X (In print)

(Just ordered this, but it was recommended and looks good) Vegetarian Cooking by Elizabeth Huang. ISBN-10: 094167620X (Bought used)


Not Recommended
Chinese Vegetarian Delights by Lily Chuang. ISBN 0-937064-13-0 While vegetarian, the recipes are definitely not delights, and in several cases, not Chinese. It turned out to be a special diet book with very restricted ingredients and cooking techniques (steaming only). (In print)

??????
Chinese Food Vegetarian and Healthful, Editor Wu Juey Pao. This cookbook is in Chinese and English and appears to have been published in Hong Kong. These recipes are fascinating. However, the seasoning in almost all of them is a variation on sugar, salt, peanut oil and MSG (and sometimes ketchup). I tend to prefer spicier fare, but I’m curious to try some of these recipes. I’m allergic to MSG, but will probably use a mushroom-based MSG substitute. What’s also fun about this book is that in the dessert section it shows how to cut different fruits in fancy ways. (Bought used)

i'm not sure about a vegetarian Chinese cookbook, but i can recommend a wonderful vegetarian Japanese cookbook:

The Enlightened Kitchen: Fresh Vegetable Dishes from the Temples of Japan

It's a great introduction & manual to shojin ryori - the cuisine of Buddhist temples.

Let me know if you find a great Chinese cookbook - i've been wanting one for awhile.

Madhur Jaffrey has several vegetarian cookbooks, including my favorite, World-of-the-East Vegetarian cooking.
http://www.amazon.com/Madhur-Jaffreys-W ... 0394748670

She is from India, so many of the recipes are for Indian food, but she does include many recipes from the rest of the far East. So, whilst not specifically Chinese, it is a great cookbook. The tofu and ginger stir-fry is a favorite of my whole family (including the four-year-old) and we are serious carnivores, so that is saying a lot!

Cheers, Jen

Hi,

I found the following book From the Earth: Chinese Vegetarian Cooking
by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0026329859

This is really good. She went and found all the authentic recipes from her own family and the Buddhist monasteries, etc. I have tried about 5 dishes from here and have been more than surprised by how good they taste. I especially appeciated her recipes to cook Shanghai Bokchoy. Fried rice turned out really well too, but I like the recipe from Mark Bittman's book better.

It has a section of Fish dishes as she considers that part of the Vegetarianism of China. Of course, me being a stricter Vegetarian that section is as useful as tits on a bull.

I hope that people who want a vegetarian Chinese cookbook will look into this. It is worth it.

BTW, I got rid of all of my primarily Meat cookbooks; except Bayless' book and a Moroccan Cookbook by Paula Wolfert. I found that was never using the rest. I gave them to people at work, and got rid of the rest at the Reader bookswap. I am now down to a more manageable 10 books. The difference is I really use these.

My new purchase has been a cookbook of Recipes from Andhra Pradesh. I grew up in Hyderabad and these are the kinds of food I ate at my friends places. The book is fantastic. Gorgeous photographs so you can almost smell the pulusus and pachchadis.

Thanks so much for your post Indianbadger! I've just ordered the book from Amazon and look forward to trying some of the recipes.

To follow up on my previous post, my copy of Vegetarian Cooking arrived. While not practical, it's an amazing cookbook. Its focus is on creating mock meats, sometimes quite complex ones, and recipes using them. It was published in Taiwan. Several of the ingredients used in the book I've never seen before, but hope that I can track them down. I can't recommend it as a general Chinese vegetarian cookbook, but as a more esoteric resource, I'm glad to have it.

Jen