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Recipes by Bryant Terry
Da Capo Press -- 2009
Buy it on Amazon
It's almost impossible to think of soul food without thinking of pork, butter and drippings, and equally improbable to imagine a vegan who would voluntarily consume any of these things -- or anything else containing animal products, for that matter.
So Bryant Terry's "Vegan Soul Kitchen" would appear to be both a novelty and oxymoron, something Terry himself admits when he writes "I do realize that veganism ... .is antithetical to the way that African-American and Southern cooking has been constructed in the popular imagination over the past four decades."
A deeper look, however, reveals that prior to the industrialization of the food industry, the traditional African-American diet included plenty of fresh produce, and as Terry demonstrates with his book's 150 recipes, those fruits and vegetables can still play a central and innovative role in dishes ranging from Creole Hoppin'-Jean (a bacon-free twist on Hoppin' John, the traditional black-eyed pea and rice dish) to Savory Triple-Corn Grits, which substitutes creamed cashews for butter. In other words, as Bryant writes, think "Alice Waters meets Melvin Van Peebles," a farm-fresh update on a rich and soulful tradition.
See what we tested and whether the book's worth buying after the jump.
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