An Onion in My Pocket
My Life with Vegetables
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
As a groundbreaking chef and beloved cookbook author, Deborah Madison—“The Queen of Greens” (The Washington Post)—has profoundly changed the way generations of Americans think about cooking with vegetables, helping to transform “vegetarian” from a dirty word into a mainstream way of eating. But before she became a household name, Madison spent almost twenty years at the Zen Center in the midst of counterculture San Francisco. In this warm, candid, and refreshingly funny memoir, she tells the story of her life in food—and with it, the story of the vegetarian movement—for the very first time. From her childhood in Northern California’s Big Ag heartland to sitting sesshin for hours on end at the Tassajara monastery; from her work in the kitchen of the then-new Chez Panisse to the birth of food TV to the age of farmers’ markets everywhere, An Onion in My Pocket is a deeply personal look at the rise of vegetable-forward cooking and a manifesto for how to eat (and live) well today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From the austere training ground of a Buddhist kitchen to her legacy as founding chef of San Francisco's renowned Greens Restaurant, Madison (Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone) relates how she became a doyenne of vegetarian cooking. Her mother, who "cooked and ate from a sense of scarcity," made her anxious about food, and, at 16, an extended stay with family friends introduced Madison to "cheese souffles, chicken poached in wine... all so delicious... all new to me." Captivated by Japanese culture, she later joined the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC), where meditation and simple meals taught her how the goodness of plain food "resided in my mouth and my attention." At the center, she developed a "tenderness for both food and people," eventually becoming the head cook; in 1977 she was invited to work at iconic Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse. Two years later, Madison left to open the SFZC-owned Greens Restaurant "next to the marina... in view of the Golden Gate Bridge." An omnivore, she "didn't like the vegetarian label," believing that naming "the way I eat... can become divisive." Chapters covering the "twenty missing years" after she left the SFZC, Greens, and her monastic Buddhist life build on the tension between abstinence and abundance, hunger and satiation, and anticipation and enjoyment of food and life. Madison's richly told story will resonate with foodies of all stripes.
