The Vegetarian Feast: Revised and Updated

Foreword to the New Edition Not too long ago when I was teaching a Mediterranean cooking class in New York, one of the students asked me if I was planning to do an updated version of "The Vegetarian Feast." She had bought the book in 1979, and still cooked black bean enchiladas, one of its signature recipes, every time her son came home from college. But many of the recipes in the book contained more fat than she likes to use now. I too had become a lower-fat cook, dedicated to reducing fats in recipes without sacrificing flavor. Although I hadn't exactly relished fats back in the seventies, when I looked at my recipes in "The Vegetarian Feast," I could see that they needed an overhaul. And so I began this revision. It has been one of the most interesting undertakings of my career, enabling me to look at myself learning to cook. I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity; a novelist, after all, does not get to revise his or her first novel fifteen years down the line, even though he