Local Flavors by Deborah Madison
A Guide for Shopping and Cooking from your Local Farmers’ Market
Local Flavors walks you through the seasons, starting with the tender greens of early spring and traveling through the highlights of summer produce to the root vegetables and gourds of fall. Hundreds of recipes are interspersed with beautiful pictures and personal stories about different farmers’ markets from Alaska to New Orleans that make this book as enjoyable to browse through as it is to cook from.
Originally published in hardcover 2002 by Random House, the book was reprinted as a trade paperback May 2008 by Random House subsidary Broadway Books now that so many Americans have begun to embrace the locavore lifestyle.
Recipes for a Wide Variety of Vegetables
The book is organized around ingredients, which makes it a great resource for people who like to buy what looks interesting at the market and then come home and try to find something to cook with it. There are plenty of recipes for farmers’ market standbys like swiss chard, beets, parsnips and other vegetables that are often hard to find recipes for in other cookbooks.
The great depth of recipes -- eight recipes using corn, four using cauliflower, nine with endive -- also means that dedicated locavores don’t have to eat the same meal every night even if they are using the same ingredients. Anyone who has ever bought pounds and pounds of something because it looked so wonderful in the market will appreciate the book for that aspect alone.
The Stories Behind the Dishes
Many of the recipes begin with Madison’s own stories of how she found the ingredients and why she decided to cook them together, which offers insight into the creative process behind many of the recipes.
Madison also brings recipes that include vegetables and herbs readers may not have heard of before and combines them in surprising ways. While it hasn’t occurred to me to make anything with stinging nettles before, if I ever do get around to craving them I know they can be cooked into a frittata or made into nettle soup. Kuchen plums, Jicama, anise hyssop, dragon tongue -- the book is an education in produce as much as in cooking.
Seasonal Cooking
Since she designed each recipe around what is in season, each dish can be made from ingredients you’ll find at the farmers’ market around the same time. In some dishes she combines familiar favorites, while in others she gets creative, basing her recipes on the idea that vegetables that are in season together usually taste good together. Some of the recipes combine different parts of a vegetable (broccoli and broccoli rabe, for example) or use other parts of vegetable plants that aren’t usually included in cookbooks, like radish leaves. But even experienced cooks will find plenty they’ve never seen before.
The last chapter is a series of recipes for “basics” -- things you may want to make to make other recipes in the book, like pizza dough and vegetable stock. It’s a nice touch that reinforces the basic idea that you can make all of these dishes yourself from scratch.
A Few Drawbacks
There are a few drawbacks to the book. For one, there are few recipes that include meat, since Madison’s previous work has been primarily vegetarian cookbooks and most farmer’s markets offer mainly vegetables. And she’s from Santa Fe, some of the vegetables she highlights won’t be available to people in other parts of the country -- you probably won’t find avocados or artichokes at the Farmer’s Market if you live in Maine or Minnesota. Still, for anyone who aspires to cook and eat locally this book is destined to become an invaluable resource.
