Keeping warm in January with the power of outrage

Happy January! (Yeah, right. It's January. I ain't happy.) Rawleigh's Good Health Guide Almanac Cook Book has run its course, so it's time to pick out a new cookbook to represent the year. I'm going to start the new year off wrong with The Political Palate (The Bloodroot Collective (Betsey Beaven, Noel Giordano, Selma Miriam, and Pat Shea), 1980 (but heavily influenced by 1970s vegetarian cooking)). 

I'm in the wrong because the book-- which is organized by seasons-- starts with late autumn since the witch's new year is on October 31st. Yep. It's that kind of a book. I want to give it a whole year, though, and the other cookbooks start in January, so this one is getting forced into the mainstream, patriarchal year.

This is also maybe not the best choice since my copy is pretty water-damaged, as you can tell by the cover. That means I'm committing to a whole year of annoyingly difficult-to-read scans because it's virtually impossible to get the pages to lie flat. But this is one of my favorite genres-- 1970s-ish vegetarian food. (Well, mostly. There are a few fish recipes because fish weren't factory farmed or hunted, so the collective was "less exclusionary of fish.") I want to spend a year with it and see what collective had to offer on the unfortunate eve of the Reagan Revolution.

The early winter collection seems to favor holing up for the winter, as the recipes are often pretty time-consuming. The cook might spend an entire ;ate afternoon/ early evening chopping, mixing, and simmering to get Potato Cottage Cheese Dumplings with Cabbage Sauce put together.

I'll admit that the potato and cottage cheese dumplings sound like they would be really good-- full of potatoes, butter, cheese, and seasonings. What's not to like? Oh, yeah-- that this will also entail putting up with the smell of boiling cabbage for an entire afternoon/ evening. (Toss those dumplings in some marinara instead!)

The book is not as resistant to mainstream recipes as some "health" food cookbooks are. This one jumps in on the fondue craze, even if it may be a bit late by this point.

Of course, you're supposed to dip carrots, broccoli, mushrooms, and apples into the fondue, along with the more traditional French bread, but still-- you get Swiss cheese, white wine, and Kirsch. It's not nearly as austere as I might have expected.

The dessert selection is pretty indulgent as well. I had to pick through a Praline Cheesecake loaded with sugar, cream cheese, whipped cream, and nuts, and a Chocolate Mousse full of real chocolate (not carob!), whipped cream, and Grand Marnier as I tried to find a sad little dessert. I couldn't really find anything that seemed straight out of 1970s health food hell. Pineapple Isabel is about as close as it got since this is based on fruit and sweetened mostly with honey.

Even so, it's got Grand Marnier, almost half-a-dozen egg yolks, and heavy cream, so it's definitely not what I was expecting. Maybe that's because the Bloodroot Collective hated diet culture before hating it was cool, noting "It should be obvious that we come in all sizes, different shapes as well as different heights, and therefore enforced thinness is starvation and misery. It is an illness created by the attitude that the only beautiful or healthy size is thin."

Now I am really curious about what the rest of the year holds... This book seems a lot less predictable than the other vegetarian books in my collection. That unpredictability will give me something to look forward to as we continue through the entirely-predictable early winter season. (It will be COLD! Except for a few days that will be unseasonably nice just to taunt me with the knowledge that it doesn't have to be this cold.) We'll see this book again in late winter (which starts February 2, according to the collective)!