Linda McCartney (1941-1998) was a photographer, musician, and cookbook author. Despite her fame, she seemed to enjoy the time spent with her family most, and loved animals and nature. After becoming a vegetarian in the early 1970s, Linda started experimenting with vegetarian cooking to provide her family with tasty and healty meals. It was important to her that nobody felt as if they were missing out on anything when not eating meat. Over the years, she created many recipes for both traditional and more “modern” meals. As vegetarian cooking was not very well known and many people at that time felt they wanted to reduce meat but did not know what to eat instead, Linda decided to publish her own cookbook. This first book, published together with Peter Cox, was the bestselling book “Home Cooking”- the book I will be trying out and commenting on in this blog.
Linda McCartney said about this book during an interview for the Toronto Star in 1991:
“This cookbook is my first. It’s aimed at meat-eaters – to stop them eating meat. That’s why a lot of the recipes use TVP (texturized vegetable protein); it chews like meat. The recipes taste like meat but there’s no death in them. My next book will be for vegetarians.”
Over the years, Linda McCartney published two more cookbooks, “Linda’s Kitchen” (1995) and “Linda McCartney on Tour” (1998).
It was the love of animals that led Linda McCartney and her family turn vegetarian, and Linda would say that they would eat “nothing with a face”. Today, with global warming, other environmental issues, and the latest knowledge about healthy eating, there are even more reasons to go vegetarian than in the 1970s.
References and editions of “Home Cooking”:
In my blog I will be referring to the page numbers from the 1990 UK paperback edition.
For copyright reasons, I am not publishing the recipes but will put a page reference on each post. Even though Linda’s book is out of print at the moment, it can easily be found second hand in online book stores or be read directly in online libraries.
The paperback version of “Home Cooking” (ISBN 0747507376) was published in 1990 with a hardcover version (ISBN-10: 0747505314) being published in 1989. There are also a US and a UK paperback edition, but their page numbering is identical, so my references apply to both editions.
McCartney, Linda & Cox, Peter (1990) Linda McCartney's Home Cooking.
Bloomsbury Publishing, London. ISBN 0747507376.
Cartney, Linda & Cox, Peter (1990) Linda McCartney's Home Cooking.
Arcade Pub., New York. ISBN 9781559700979.