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
He probably didn’t realise it at the time, but French chef Alain Passard became both a revolutionary and a visionary when he decided, in 2000, to focus on vegetables at his three-Michelin-starred Parisian restaurant, Arpège.
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.
“Most often, it is the recipe which inspires the collage – usually because it has formed an attractive composition on the plate and I have wanted to capture it on paper. But I have also enjoyed doing the reverse: thinking first about the collage and then creating the dish which corresponds to it. I sometimes have the feeling of giving a flavour to a colour.”
The recipes in the book are easier than you’d expect from a chef of Passard’s calibre, and he doesn’t call for any equipment other than that available in most home kitchens.He’s also quite relaxed about the ingredients, saying in one recipe, for instance, that green sorrel can be used if the red variety is unavailable.
Recipes include spinach and carrots with orange and sesame; baby turnips with lemon and black pepper; turnips and new potatoes with red tomatoes; Caesar salad (Passard’s version has potatoes, tomatoes, red onion and anchovies, in addition to the standard romaine lettuce); red peppers and black tomatoes with coriander; red beetroot with lavender and crushed blackberries; and yellow carpaccio of onion, potato, horseradish and garlic.