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August 10, 2009

With her daughter heading off to college, my friend Beth was remembering her own college days. She changed living arrangements every semester, always looking to save money. Her favorite was the vegetarian house.

But meat was not the issue as much as the mealtime arrangements. Everyone ate supper together, and took turns shopping and cooking.

Before that, Beth had done a minimal amount of cooking – mostly of the brown rice and vegetable genre popular at the time. She had never used a cookbook, never followed a recipe. But cooking for eight clearly required new skills.

"We had the New York Times Vegetarian Cookbook," she recalls. "Whoever's turn it was would go through the book; say, 'oh, this looks do-able.'" Beth learned how to follow a recipe, and she learned the pleasures of sociable meals.

If anyone wanted to move into the house, they had to eat a meal with the group, to see if they were, as she remembers, "amiable."

Beth has remained a vegetarian. In the intervening years, the number of vegetarian cookbooks has grown exponentially. But she recently bought a copy of the now out-of-print book; mostly, I think, out of nostalgia. "That house was a lot of fun," she says.

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