August 14, 2012 - 12:50pm
Recommendations for good vegetable reference-ish book?
I'm a fan of reference-ish type books for food. I don't have many cookbooks because recipes generally bore me. Even with bread books, the kinds I like are reference-ish types with some recipes. Recipes are okay, but I like to get the "theory" behind them. Recipes are easy to come by. The "theory" part isn't. I have the Oxford Companion to Food, a great reference book but it doesn't focus enough on vegetables. Can anyone recommend a reference-type of book for vegetables?
Qualities I'm looking for in this type of book would be:
- good illustrations (in colour) of the different vegetables
- a history of the vegetable (culture, history, geography)
- some common ways to prepare them
- things to watch out for when preparing them
- how to pick out the good varieties
- some nutritional facts about the vegetable
- covers an extensive list of vegetables that are not only common in North American diets, but also Asian, African and European ones.
In browsing Amazon, I haven't yet found one that jumps out to me. Unfortunately, Oxford Companion doesn't produce a vegetable companion book, as far as I can tell.