The plant-based recipes of French veggie visionary Alain Passard
- The Art of Cooking with Vegetables contains surprisingly easy recipes inspired by his three-Michelin-starred restaurant, Arpège
- The French chef was ahead of the curve when he decided to focus on vegetables at his Paris restaurant back in 2000
These days, it is common for restaurants to offer vegetarian options, but back then, vegetables were seen as a side dish to the meat or fish. Passard wanted to make vegetables as important as any other part of the meal. He even started his own farms to grow produce of the quality he needed to maintain his stars.
At 100 pages, The Art of Cooking with Vegetables (2010) is a slim volume and combines two of Passard’s loves: art and food. Instead of photographs of the cooked dishes, the recipes are illustrated with the chef’s collages.
In the preface, Passard writes, “Colour has always brought my creativity to life. As a child, I could spend hours colouring, or making little collages from pieces of paper cut into different shapes. My very first work, a Harlequin, remains forever engraved in my mind’s eye. And this passion for collage and painting has never left me, so that now there is a perpetual to-ing and fro-ing between a recipe and its illustration.”
“The collages in this book express marvellously well the influence of colour in my cooking: for me, it is a true source of inspiration, one which urges me to search for partnerships between ingredients in a quest for gastronomic and visual harmony.