Hello, I have some questions . . .

Hello! This is my first post to this group. I'm interested in the history of food but I don't do much cooking of historical recipes because my wife is a strict vegetarian. I'm waiting for someone to start marketing flesh grown in petri dishes so I can start cooking meat again.

Anyway, I have a few questions:

First, are there any historically oriented cookbooks that have lots of good, tasty, vegetarian recipes? I don't really mind from which culture the recipes are from, but I'm most interested in the ancient mediterranean and middle-east.

Second, there is a company in Britain called Dove's Farm that produces speciality flours, including spelt flour. They put recipes on the side of the flour packets and one that used to be on the side of the spelt flour was a recipe for "Roman biscuits", which included honey and walnuts as other ingredients. My wife made them once and they were delicious. Does anyone have the recipe?

Third, does anyone other than me enjoy fiction with recipes? My favourites are My Year of Meat and The Debt to Pleasure.

Fourth, I'm also interested in alternate history and in science fiction, so if anyone has any ideas about how the history of food and cooking might have developed differently*, or on what food might be like in the future, I'd love to know them!

*If you have no idea what I'm talking about, check out the two links to Alternate Cooking essays at http://spiritualist.alternatehistory.com/agrarianist.htm

Akiyama (fourth) Soylent green anyone? Blech, just kidding.

I would think cuisine from India would be a good bet for you, I'll have to ask my friend about recommendations though, I haven't ventured into cooking it yet.

Mexican food is very adaptable to vegetarian cooking. I would recommend Food From My Heart by Zarela Martinez. I don't actually have that cookbook, it's on my wish list, but Gourmet Magazine did a feature on her with many of her recipes and they are great. Not your typical Mexican restaurant fare.

Food From My Heart looks like just the sort of cookbook I like! It's out of print, but the British library has a copy, so I should be able to order it from my local library. Thankyou!

Hi Akiyama:

For tasty historically oriented cookbooks with lots of vegetarian recipes - check out my Silk Road Gourmet. Volume One is available now and covers Georgia to Sri Lanka, Volume Two is coming out hopefully in 2011 and will cover Central Asia, the Himalayas and the Indo Pacific. Available at Electronic Bookstores all over the world. For more information see my website http://silkroadgourmet.com. Happy reading!

I read a couple of food related cozy series. They are Cleo Coyle's coffeehouse mysteries, Laura Childs' Indigo Tea House Mysteries, Fresh Baked Mysteries by Livia Washburne, Mystery A La Mode by Wendy Lynn Watson, Julie Hyzy's White House Chef series, and Leslie Meier's Lucy Stone Mysteries. There are so many new cozy authors writing food related books that it is impossible to keep up with all of them.

If you look through books which have recipes for Lent and Fast Days, you can find a number of non meat, non fish. Spinach Fritters, Pumpkin Soup from LaVarenne's the French Cook(English translation 1658) or thereabouts. If you are doing Indian figure out whether you want pre or post Portuguese influence( green red peppers, tomatoes, potatoes etc which came when the City of Goa was a Foreign port.