Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure

Picture your kitchen. Take mental stock of all that room's toys that exist because of their supposed ability to save you time and effort. Surely the alluring claims of the manufacturers of convection ovens, microwaves, blenders, food processors and semiautomatic salad sidearms have the power of a siren's call over our time-starved imaginations. But if your goal when shopping for kitchen paraphenalia is not only to save time, but also to prepare better food, and a pressure cooker does not occupy a place on your shelves, then the picture may be incomplete. My kitchen contains only one of the items in the foregoing sample list of supposed time- and work-savers - a blender - but I do have a pressure cooker.Thanks to Loma Sass' "Recipes for an Ecological Kitchen," I have learned a variety of now seemingly indispensable techniques and recipes which call my pressure cooker into frequent, often daily,service.

Now Lorna Sass, she of a doctorate of culinary history, presents "Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure" and my family has once again been propelled into new realms of eating experiences to which no microwave oven could ever have escorted them. If you've never used a pressure cooker before, "Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure" will provide you with easy access to all the information you'll need for a very satisfying journey. Right inside the front and back covers are charts for cooking times for every imaginable bean(soaked and unsoaked) and grain. Anyone new to pressure cooking may need suggestions in the areas of selection anduse of a cooker. All of this and more information necessary to the pressure cooker beginner is also found in sections titled Pressure Cooking Basics and The Language of Pressure Cooking. The Already Initiated (and perhaps even the Intrepid Novice) will pass directly to the more than 150 recipes under headings that read like major rationales for owning a pressure cooker: Bean Soups, Vegetable Soups, Grains, Beans, Rice Puddings and Steamed Pudding Cakes, to name a few.The concoctions reflect an international variety that one must wonder if Dr. Sass' dentist is not treated to a view of an inverted projection of the globe when`he gazes at her palate. India, the major cuisines of Europe, the Philippines, South America, Mexico and more are represented here. What is truly amazing is that Loma Sass' recipes are not only pleasantly challenging and exotic, but also practical.

To merely say that the seven recipes I experimented with were easy to make might foster the incorrect notion that they were small blips on my family's culinary radar screen. Not so! The Split Pea Dal with Apple and Coconut is the first split pea soup that my six-year-old daughter really loved. The Chunky Eggplant Sauce- served over spaghetti - actually transfommed my wife's previously chronic no-use-for-eggplant's attitude into surprised pleasure and warm applause for the cook. The Steamed Pudding-Cakes, simple to make, yet elegant and delicious, have become a standard and very satisfying low-fat dessert. "Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure" is beginning to show signs of being a regular stop in my continuing perusal of the cookbook shelf. Full disclosure and joumalisac integrity- the foundation of all NAVS publications- dictate a little investigative reporting on the time claims of these recipes. Each recipe is subtitled with its pressure cooking time: Garlic Potatoes, 3 minutes high pressure; Armenian Red Lentil Soup with Apricots, 4 minutes, high pressure, etc. In fact, these impressive cooking times are accurate. Just don't confuse them with the actual time it takes to, in the case of Split Pea Dal with Apple and Coconut, cut up an apple, answer the phone, hand your kid a snack and so on... The bottom line is that if your Curry is right to the left of your Dill on an alphabetized spice shelf and if your family steers clear, you really can make an enticing soup in 20 minutes flat. Those with normal levels of disorganization may need to increase this excellent time just a little to account for a few moments of bewildered perplexity concerning the location of the whole cumin seeds. Even with cooking this fast, cleanup time is a legitimate part of the culinary equation. However, if you are preparing dishes as irresistible and imaginative as Lorna Sass has provided in "Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure," and if even a trace of domestic justice reigns in your household, then someone else is doing the dishes (and occasionally cleaning the pressure cooker gasket). At least that's how it's working for me.

- Reviewed by John Niblett