𓂀 𝔽𝕠𝕣 𝕡𝕝𝕖𝕒𝕤𝕦𝕣𝕖'𝕤 𝕤𝕒𝕜𝕖 𓂀

ᗴᗩ丅 Ƴᗝᑌᖇ ᐯᗴǤᗴ丅ᗩᗷᒪᗴᔕ

Jul 17, 2022

Although I’m not a vegan myself, there’s a tradition of vegetarianism and veganism in my family, and I was raised vegetarian. My great-grandmother was deeply interested in the Food Reform movement, which sought to encourage a wide adoption of non meat foods, for the sake of health and well-being, at a time when red meat on the table three times a day was considered the only proper way to live.

The bible of this movement, for English language readers, is Reform Cookery by Mrs Mill, which was first published in 1909 and is still in print, even in digital editions in fact. My paternal aunts and grandmother all became vegans in the 1970s through separate paths. My aunts moved to Sydney in their late teens, where they joined a pacifist, environmentalist and vegan punk scene, and never left it. My grandmother had a scare about her blood pressure, but she’s not a woman to be daunted by a mere paltry entire change of life. On the advice of her daughters, she went vegan too and has been in perfect health ever since.

So when I refused to eat meat as a 3 year old, it wasn’t as huge an imaginative leap for my parents to not force me to, as it would have been for other parents in the Western Australia of the mid 80s. Moreover, they’d both grown up with siblings crying at the dinner table, forced to finish everything put on their plates, but they never wanted to do that with their own children.

So I have a long personal history with vegetable-centered dishes and even though I eat meat now, most of my diet is still vegetarian. Thanks to my parents, the vegetarian foods I was raised on were never approached from the angle of replacing meat in a 1:1 kind of way. They were happy to let me build my meals of components which I liked and would eat. Although I wouldn’t encounter anything soy except soy sauce until my late teens, I never had any nutritional deficit. In fact I was very hale and active, and I competed successfully in ballroom dance, gymnastics and squash.

This angle, which doesn’t seek to replace meat - in the sense of how meat tastes and feels, and what it supplies to the body, but instead acts like it simply doesn’t exist, is still what I’m drawn to in meat-free recipes, and it’s how I develop my own meat-free recipes. Mediterranean cooking of all kinds is very important to me, because these cuisines were the first, for me, in which I could discover a whole diet’s worth, a whole life’s worth, of long established traditions which were already vegetarian, or easily made so. I still remember the jolt of joy I felt when I was given a Sicilian cookbook as a tween, and found it bursting with brightly shining meat-free recipes which were mouth-watering, literally.

Here are some of my meat-free faves, dishes which I could make in my sleep, I make them so often

Red cabbage and red onions in Massaman sauce