Reviews and Comments

This whole cookbook reminds me of a recipe note in Veganomicon, which advises the reader not to bother serving it to omnivores, and "save this for appreciative vegetarians and vegans." If you're not already pumped about fake meat, skip this.

Most of the book is recipes for meals which include fake meat. The ones I made were pretty good! I generally find that I add more seasoning and fat than she suggests, and of the recipes I've added to my rotation, I don't make any of them exactly as written.

I've been living off the batches of the chili for weeks, with some added veggies and almost twice as much chili powder.

Usually I get recipes intended to have meat in them and do substitutions, which works fine for me, but it was fun to cook from recipes that are on the same page as me from the outset.

The later part of the book has recipes for DIY'ing the meat itself, which is extremely my jam -- I almost always make my own. It's almost all seitan, which is fine by me, and her recipes are great. I love the ground beef, which goes through a stage in preparation which she describes as resembling a "strawberry milkshake" but comes out an appetizing brown.

My only complaint is that I wish she'd given more technical info and instructions for the meat recipes. Seitan has a bit of a learning curve, and, like bread, it makes a big difference if you know what textures feel right. I always have to use quite a bit more gluten than recipes call for because whatever brand I get isn't as glutinous; that's not on her and I know the territory, but I'd be cautious sharing the recipes with people who've never done it before.

As a seitan nerd, I wish she'd explained why she was adding, for example, oat flour or pea protein (which I still haven't found in stores). And I was disappointed that she doesn't use cooked chickpeas in any, which produces my favorite seitan texture.

Overall, I've really enjoyed it and I'll make my version of a handful of the recipes on the regular, which is the ideal outcome for a cookbook.

This was one of those books that when it ended, I missed getting to be in the world. It has a kind of understated, slice-of-life feel, with a lot of detail and reverence paid to the minutia of daily life and community relationships, that felt more prominent to me than the murder mysteries. Addison writes with an immense amout of compassion and tenderness, and for me that is what makes this book, and The Goblin Emperor, transcend what they would be on their face, in terms of plot.

The writing style drops you into the cultural nuances of the society largely without explanation, and you can infer, for example, what different honorifics mean through context. I really really like this and I think overall its very well done, but I think it would be more daunting if I hadn't already read The Goblin Emperor, and there were some points at which I needed a little help. Specifically, I found the sexual mores confusing, and it was important to the plot that they make sense.

I would highly recommend this if you read and liked The Goblin Emperor, but I'd be more cautious to recommend it if you haven't, even though it's not a sequel per say.