18 Vegan Cookbooks to Inspire You to Join the Plant-Based Revolution
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Even if you have no intention of ever giving up meat, fish, dairy, or eggs, there’s a strong case for familiarizing yourself with some of the best vegan cookbooks out there. Not only is keeping to a largely plant-based diet known to be better for your health, it’s generally much more sustainable as well. (For a quick and comprehensive overview of how to eat green, see this New York Times guide.)
Happily, there are a wealth of brilliant chefs devoting themselves to making vegan food genuinely exciting, from Salt Fat Acid Heat’s Samin Nosrat—now a “part-time” vegan—to Eleven Madison Park’s Daniel Humm, who changed the three-Michelin-starred institution’s menu to be fully plant-based.
Join the revolution by purchasing some of the best vegan cookbooks available now, below.
When Hannah Che first decided to go vegan, she worried that it might compromise her cherished connection to her Chinese heritage. “My parents were immigrants,” she writes in the foreword to The Vegan Chinese Kitchen. “Food was the way they taught us about our roots; certain dishes were central not just to my family’s memories, but also connected us to a lifetime of people and occasions and places and times that went before and beyond me.” Cut to 2019, and she had decamped to China to study at the Buddhist-run Guangzhou Vegetarian Culinary Institute—rediscovering the centrality of vegetables in traditional Chinese cuisine along the way. This cookbook, subtitled Recipes And Modern Stories From A Thousand-Year-Old Tradition, sees her translate her findings into recipes for “jiā cháng cài,” or homestyle, dishes. In between instructions for making the likes of scallion oil noodles and stuffed cabbage rolls, she teaches you everything from how to prep chrysanthemum greens to the best way to maintain the perfect patina on a wok. A joy to read—and to cook from.
“We didn’t approach the book, like, ‘Oh, it’s a plant-based book,’” Ghetto Gastro founder Jon Gray told Vogue of the Bronx-based collective’s largely vegan cookbook Black Power Kitchen in 2022. “We were just like, ‘What do we want to cook? What do we want to eat? And what do we want to share?’ Before the advent of industrial agriculture, people weren’t eating meat every night. So we’re taking it back to that ancestral knowledge, and truly, this is how we like to eat—we’re not trying to prescribe or preach, but this is how we’re giving it up.” That means dishes like maroon shrooms, named after free Black communities in Jamaica and served with aquafaba aioli; chili lime liberation pasta, dedicated to Black August pioneers and developed from ingredients available on most prison commissary lists; and coconut ceviche with plantain chips inspired by Afro-Cuban artist Wifredo Lam. A masterpiece of a cookbook.
Dr. Shukla pays tribute to (and expands upon) his mother and grandmother’s traditional Gujarāti cookery in Plant-Based India, one of the cookbooks I found myself turning to again and again in 2022—and not just because it contains a near-perfect recipe for pālak tofu, a vegan take on a classic paneer dish. “Let food be thy medicine” is the approach here—note the charts guiding you through the best plant-based sources of different vitamins. There’s an entire chapter on dahls, another on chutneys and raitas, and a refreshingly gentle philosophy about veganism throughout. “I believe every step closer to a plant-based way of eating is commendable,” Shukla, a practicing doctor, writes. “It’s important that we are forgiving toward ourselves and that we give ourselves and others grace to make the choices that are best for each of us.”
Ching-He Huang’s Asian Greens is filled with dishes that are quick, simple, and affordable—a godsend on busy weeknights when your determination to stay plant-based is most likely to falter. The recipes nod to a broad variety of Asian cuisines, and are built around fresh produce, tofu, seitan, tempeh, and whole grains. The Fast Furious chapter—with dozens of healthy stir-frys—is particularly great, and will convince you to invest in a top-notch wok.
As any good vegan chef will tell you, herbs can make or break a plant-based dish. Mark Diacono’s Herb is a masterclass in growing and using not just the classics (basil, chervil, dill) but also lesser-known wonders like anise hyssop and Korean mint. It includes recipes, too, many of which are vegan (or can be made so with a few easy substitutions), from tarragon rémoulade to pistou soup.
