How to cook vegetables

From the librarian's dossier · AI-generated, grounded in the scanned text

How to Cook Vegetables is a 1911 recipe collection by Charles Herman Senn devoted entirely to vegetable cookery, organized alphabetically from artichokes to yams. Senn's stated purpose, laid out in his preface, is twofold: to introduce English readers to lesser-known vegetables and to rescue vegetable cookery from what he considered the era's careless English boiling methods, which he argues strip away flavor and nutritional value. Drawing heavily on Continental, especially French, techniques, the book offers hundreds of anchored recipes ranging from simple boiled and creamed preparations to elaborate composed dishes such as Artichokes a la Lyonnaise, Celery a la Villeroy, and Truffles with Champagne. Alongside recipes, Senn includes botanical and historical notes on individual vegetables, preservation methods like pickling and drying, and a substantial closing section on stocks, sauces, and general cooking hints. The book closes with an extensive index and publisher's advertisements for seed catalogs and companion volumes in Senn's culinary library. For the modern reader, this is a window into Edwardian-era attitudes toward vegetables as a class of food worth elevating through skill and sauce work, rather than treating them as a plain afterthought to meat.

The book proceeds alphabetically by vegetable, from artichokes and asparagus at the start (sections 1-2) through beans, beetroot, cabbage, cardoons, carrots, cauliflower, and celery (sections 3-5), then leeks, lentils, lettuce, mushrooms, and okra (sections 6-7), continuing through onions, parsley, parsnips, peas, and potatoes, and concluding with soy-beans, stachys, tomatoes, truffles, turnips, vegetable marrow, watercress, and yams (sections 10-11). Each vegetable entry typically opens with brief historical, botanical, or nutritional notes before moving into a graduated series of recipes, from basic boiling to elaborate composed dishes. The final sections (11-12) shift from single-vegetable entries to miscellaneous mixed-vegetable dishes, a substantial sauce and stock reference, general cooking hints, an index, and back-matter advertisements for seeds and other Senn cookbooks.