An onion in my pocket My life with vegetables

Review by Booklist Review

Restaurateur Madison became a star of the California foodie culture last century with her lauded San Francisco temple of vegetarianism, Greens. She made vegetarianism hip with her The Greens Cookbook (1987) and more recently Vegetable Literacy (2013). Born into a large family that lived all over the U.S. until her botanist father completed his doctorate, Madison mostly grew up in Davis, California, with a mother who wasn't a good cook but loved to explore world cuisines. Madison herself became a devotee of Buddhism, living for a while in a Zen monastery. Returning to California, she realized the breadth of the agricultural riches of the Central Valley and fell into Alice Waters' creative circle before plowing her own furrow with her much-decorated restaurant. Now living near Santa Fe, she continues farming and exploring the world of locally sourced foods. A wonderful sense of humor pervades her memoir, extending even to the cover illustration, a clever vegetable version of Cellini's bronze sculpture "Perseus with the Head of Medusa."

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (May)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Madison (The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone), who opened one of the first vegetarian restaurants in San Francisco in the late 1970s, here focuses on her time practicing Buddhism as well as her growing interest in cooking and working in restaurants. She describes taking advantage of every opportunity to learn about cooking, working for several months at Chez Panisse, and traveling to Europe and taking a culinary tour through France. She writes about her father, a professor, who had a keen interest in farming, which led to her interest in local produce, and how her mother, who grew up during the Great Depression, inspired her interest in creating simple but delicious food. VERDICT Madison is a prolific cookbook author, and this latest offering presents an intriguing and insightful look into how her upbringing influenced both her professional and private life.--Danielle Williams, Univ. of Evansville

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A renowned vegetarian chef and cookbook author returns with a menu of memories about her life, profession, and passions. In her youth, Madison, a member of the James Beard Foundation Cookbook Hall of Fame, became deeply involved in the Zen movement in the Bay Area, a 20-year association that involved not just meditation, but cooking and running a restaurant. She tells us about her parents' lives, her childhood fondness for Twinkies, her growing passion for fresh vegetables and fruit, and her decisions to devote herself to cooking, restaurant managing, and, eventually, writing cookbooks. We also learn about her two marriages and her move to the Southwest (first Flagstaff, then Santa Fe). The author does not observe a rigid organization. As if her writing were a meal, she moves from topic to topic like a diner enjoying her segue from course to course. Readers will enjoy her amiability and learn much from her ruminations, including the advice to "break your plans in the face of something wonderful and unexpected, like [discovering] morels. Let this food rule take over and push you here and there as it will." Madison offers detailed accounts of her Zen life, her decision to focus on vegetarian food (though she confesses that she occasionally eats--and likes--meat), her involvement in the founding of Greens Restaurant (which, 40 years later, still stands with its dazzling view of the Golden Gate Bridge), and her trips abroad. Madison also shares some lessons she's learned about cooking and restaurant work--e.g., "Be Forever Gracious," "Eat Like a Guest," "Treat Everyone the Same," "Salt As You Go." She ends with details about her writing, book tours (including some of her gaffes), memorable meals (including "that first meal at Chez Panisse"), and affecting thoughts about "nourishment and sustenance." A savory journey through kitchens, ingredients, meals, cookbooks, family, and colleagues--all composing the author's heart. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Introduction Onions, Snakes, and What Matters If there are not onions in my pockets or my purse, maybe there are shallots, or some amaranth leaves, or seeds collected from the garden, or something else food related. Once there was a four-foot-long gopher snake in my purse--safekeeping for the walk home. These snakes do lower the numbers of those garden pests. But there was a day when there actually was an onion in my pocket because I had been cooking with my pal Dan, and I had brought the onions that we needed for a pizza. There was one left over. In Spanish class I pulled out the extra onion and put it on the desk so I could find my notes and pens--also crammed into my pockets that day. People started to laugh. To me it was utterly normal. That's partially what it means to be a food person--that it is normal to find an onion in your pocket. Or that you fly home with quarts of fragrant berries on your lap, or you stuff a bag of superlong stalks of late-summer rhubarb into the overhead. It's likely that when a friend visits you in your new desert home she arrives with egg cartons in her suitcase--a ripe fig nestled into each little depression--or that another friend arrives with an extra suitcase filled with quince. Food swirls around us. We reach out for some of it; other times we toss something good into the swirl for others to enjoy. It's the forever potlatch of gift and exchange. I didn't always know I'd be so involved with food and I've long tried to piece together when it first happened, when food became something good and compelling. I think it was when I was sixteen. My parents had gone to Europe for a sabbatical and farmed each of their four kids out to another family. I got to live with a couple who did not have children, who had lived many times in France, who loved food and knew how to cook. Living with them I discovered that food could be good every night of the week. Given my parents' uneven temperaments and my mother's frugality I had no idea that this could be so. But it was and it was miraculous. Cheese soufflés, chicken poached in wine with mushrooms and cream, salads from the garden--it was all so delicious and it was all new to me. When my parents returned from their trip, they remarked on my new round face, evidence that butter and cream, predinner gin and tonics, and the much better wines we drank--the plenty of very good food and drink, in short--had had an effect. When people ask me when I became interested in food, I tell them it was when I discovered that food could taste good. Every night of the week. These meals did change my life. The man in my temporary household was, like my father, a botanist; only his specialty was alliums, not grass. Like all botanists and food people I have known, his eyes were open to all kinds of possibilities, especially culinary ones. Over a long weekend we took a trip to Mount Lassen. Once there and settled into our motel, we set out on a hike with the intention of spending the day on the trail. Shortly into our walk, I noticed some funny-looking things poking out of the ground. I asked what they were and the botanist and his wife both responded with ecstatic shouts: "Morels! They're morels!" We immediately filled our hats with them, abandoned the walk, and drove into town in search of butter and cream. We simmered the morels in cream and piled them on buttered toast for lunch. They were magnificent and they taught me my first food rule: Break your plans in the face of something wonderful and utterly unexpected, like morels. Let them take over and push you here and there as they will. You will at least come away with a memory. This event is decades old, but it remains a vivid memory. Despite this introduction to the pleasures of the table and my excitement about food tasting good, I didn't act right away. The thought "I want to be a chef " never occurred to me. Instead, I finished high school, went to college, dropped out, got back in, changed universities, graduated, got a job, went to Japan, then became a practicing, even ordained, Buddhist for about twenty years. It wasn't until I became a Zen student that I became interested in cooking and started to cook in earnest. It's supposed to be so austere, that Zen life, but people still have to eat and someone has to cook. That person became me in 1970. I've cooked for a long time: in the San Francisco Zen Center; at our monastery at Tassajara; at our farm, Green Gulch; at Alice Waters's restaurant in Berkeley, Chez Panisse; at Greens, the vegetarian restaurant I opened in San Francisco; at the American Academy in Rome; at Café Escalera in Santa Fe; and at home--when I finally got one. (I lived in community until I was forty.) At some point I decided to look back to find out what matters when it comes to food, and that's what this book is about. Excerpted from An Onion in My Pocket: My Life with Vegetables by Deborah Madison All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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