THE VEGETARIAN TIMES COOKBOOK

Vegetarian cookbooks generally represent one of two categories: ordinary good cooking minus meat or health-buff cooking based on a kitchenful of blender-juicers along with an unbounded appetite for fake-meat ""cutlets"" and novel combinations of ingredients. Like its parent magazine, this belongs solidly to the latter group, though it makes an occasional attempt to bridge the gap. Anyone can take pleasure in white beans in a simple herbed vinaigrette, spoonbread, pickled prunes, or Greek cheese pie. But the great majority of recipes are for people who like cheese or soy milk as ail-purpose topping or enricher, handfuls of different herbs or spices competing in the same dish, and farfetched marriages of effects (kelp in stuffed grape leaves, peanut butter and banana and shredded coconut and sunflower seeds in a toasted sandwich). There is a not-particularly-illuminating section of kitchen and nutritional basics for tyros, along with a brief, helpful glossary of health-food ingredients. The main body of recipes is followed by three vegetarian holiday menus (one seder, two Thanksgiving dinners), some holiday snacks, and half a dozen things to do with pumpkin. For the more hardcore reaches of the movement.