Rose Elliot's New Complete Vegetarian

Hardly a newcomer to the vegetable-centric category, British author Elliot has been dishing up meatless recipes for decades. The hundreds of recipes in this updated tome take advantage of ingredients not widely available when she wrote the Complete Vegetarian Cookbook in 1985, and offer a plethora of ideas for every course. She includes the basics with a refreshing lack of pretension—dishes have such direct titles as two-bean vegetable dish; carrots cooked in butter with lemon and parsley; cauliflower, egg, and potato bake; and blueberry plate pie. Options also include such dinner-party candidates as roasted red beet and goat cheese salad; soba noodle, edamame, and seaweed salad; stuffed eggplant in béchamel; and linzertorte. The recipes are accessible and concise (mostly two or three to a page), and vegan recipes are helpfully labeled. Though limited in number, the color photos are pretty and appealing. There's nothing fancy or out of the ordinary, but it's a helpful reference that will serve most vegetarians well. (Jan.)