A Feminist Cookbook? What is a feminist cookbook? What's a feminist restaurant? There is no such thing as feminist food! So people have said.

This is what we say: We are feminists, that is, we recognize that women are oppressed by patriarchy-the rule of the fathers-and we commit ourselves to rebellion against that oppression. Feminism is not a part-time attitude for us, it is how we live all day, every day. Our choices in furniture, pictures, the music we play, the books we sell and the food we cook, all reflect and express our feminism. Our food is vegetarian because we are feminists. We are opposed to the exploitation, domination and destruction which come from factory farming and the hunter with the gun. We oppose the keeping and killing of animals for the pleasure of the palate, just as we oppose men controlling abortion or sterilization. We won't be part of the torture and killing of animals. We know that humans, being omnivores, can live quite well without meat and that there is much evidence ( the length of our intestines, the number of molars for grinding) to indicate that our bodies are best designed for the consumption of grains and vegetables. Meat eating can be justified in an environment that produces no other foods. We are less exclusionary of fish and do sometimes serve it at our restaurant. Since, however, we wanted to prove how well people can eat on a vegetarian diet, we have included only eight recipes in this book which use fish.

Feminist food is seasonal. We use what is close at hand, what is most fresh and local and therefore least expensive and least "preserved". This seems obvious but we know of no other serious attempt at a seasonal cookbook. Our lives are so disconnected from organic or natural timekeeping and the best efforts of the earth, that once we enter the sterile world of the pre-packaged supermarkets it is hard to remember that strawberries and tomatoes are not worth eating in January and that onion soup and oranges don't make sense in August.

To us, being feminists or women-oriented means celebrating holidays which pre-date Judaism and Christianity. The solstices and equinoxes are closer to the earth's rhythms and celebrating the waning and growing light, seeds sprouting or the harvest brought in makes more sense than the obscenity of noise and false jollity that is Christmas/New Years, or the celebration of masochism/martyrdom that is Easter. Despite the rationalization that these holidays derive from earlier pagan cultures, their continued observation in a Christian context is an endorsement of a theology and value system which continues opposition to abortion and the ERA, believes homosexuality to be a sin or a disease and confuses masochism and eroticism. We believe that carrying on "holiday" traditions of a system which is , per se, anti-women, is concretely harmful to our minds and spirits. So we don't take note of these holidays. Instead this book is divided by solstices and equinoxes and by the cross quarter days which would fall between, making eight break points in the year. While the Celtic calendar is one form of time reckoning feminists might use and the ever changing thirteen month lunar calendar is another, both are simply examples of what nature oriented calendars might be like. We wanted to stay with what is familiar to all of us while indicating the earth's rhythms by our time divisions.

Feminist food, in our case, is produced by a collective. That means each of us does what she can do best and that we learn from and teach each other. It means that, because we are working at what we want to be doing (which is to make a women's space, informed by women's values) we care very much about what we produce. Our food is our art. That means we are very particular, that continuity is important to us, that we all taste and discuss the final seasoning of a soup. It means we admire the simplicity of quick breads, puddings or boiled greens and that we also appreciate the richness of a quiche or the elegance of an endive salad.

Because we think of cooking as an art form, some discussion of our thoughts concerning the connection of art and politics is necessary. We all are taught that art is special, beyond our daily lives, requiring the learning of an obscure code of communication taught by experts. Since both those experts and the artists themselves share the general misogyny of society and the work of women artists has been ignored (as documented by Harris and Nochlin, Judy Chicago, Lucy Lippard, Eleanor Tufts, Germaine Greer) a women aspiring to learn how to make aesthetic judgments acquires an expertise that is irrelevant or negative regarding women's daily lives. Meanwhile other "lower" art forms bombard us with the violence of pornography and punk rock (as rape and wife beating increase ), the lies of sentimentality and romanticism and the excesses of consumerism. "Art" is used as justification for pornography in high fashion magazines or the latest racism and women-hating in the galleries; the lies of advertising are justified by the dollars they supposedly bring in. Somewhere the two merge and become a perversion we are not supposed to understand or evaluate. Both leave us numb and alienated.

Yet, it seems obvious that art is communication about what we experience and what we believe, and is, therefore inherently political. It is effective when it speaks to our real experiences, not the phony responses we have been taught are appropriate. Working together daily in our own space, we are beginning to trust our intuition and our intelligence as we judge these forms of communication. It is much harder to do this when we are in offices, private homes, supermarkets. Because of the isolation of women in patriarchy, we find it hard to develop women's (feminist) judgment. The best a "liberated" women can do is to learn their code and "think like a man". When we stop wanting to do that, when we start wanting women's values, women's art and women's politics, then we need new images, new words, new ways to think as Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich and others have written. We need new ways to live. As we and others begin finding these ways, we must remember that women have done this before and that much of the history of it has been ignored, not recorded or destroyed. We cook as way to survive economically, yet our cooking is part of our study, our living and our politics. It seems to us that there is no separation between art and politics, there is integrity which requires judgements and a value system underlying our work and our lives. Everything we do is the result.

Many of our customers assume we are a health food restaurant. We don't think we are, though eating recently at a local hospital cafeteria and noting how oversalted and oversugared the food was (and how replete with additives) made us wonder. Our philosophy is vegetarian and seasonal. Yes, we do use sugar and salt, though a lot less than people are used to. We always have some sugar-free desserts on our menu and you will find both kinds of recipes in this book. We experiment to develop sugar-free, baking powder-free and low salt dishes. We are extremely interested in soy protein for those who cannot or do not wish to eat dairy products. Much more remains to be done. Because our food must be (taste) wonderful we make our pie crust of butter and white pastry flour. We make a whole wheat bread but also serve and enjoy other breads made with unbleached white flour in combination with whole grains/ We do believe in eating whole grain food, but in some dishes, white rice tastes better to us, and so that's what we use! You must decide to what degree health considerations enter your cooking.

More on political cooking can be found in William Shurtleff's and Akiko Aoyagi's Book of Tofu and Book of Miso from Autumn Press and Book of Tempeh from Harper and Row. These books are about misuse of the earth that results in starvation and about cultures whose way of life demand concern with balance and quality instead of the tradition of excess in the west. They are well worth reading for data on protein availability, even if you don't want to learn about tofu, miso or tempeh. They are truly political books in the respect they show for eastern cultures and their desire to appropriately inform us of the value of our efforts to live responsibly with concern for others.

Our interest in ethnic cooking means we love discovering early New England recipes for "Indian" pudding or for molasses-apple gingerbread. We also hope to learn much more about non-meat eating cultures. It seems poor peoples have had an intuitive understanding of protein complementarity while caring how to make food taste good. While our heritage means we know most about American, French-Italian ("continental") and eastern European cooking, we want to learn more about Japanese cuisine with its exceptional respect for the seasons and Indian cooking with its exquisitely seasoned vegetarian dishes. We are discovering Middle Eastern lentil and vegetable combinations. North American cooking, and the use of peanuts and root vegetables in Africa and South America. There is much to learn from other cultures and no need to get confused with other women- hating systems of thought such as which foods are yin and which yang.

We must remember the continuity of recipes within any given culture. We have experimented and changed to our taste; however, all our recipes derive from others. Many of our favorite dishes came from friends and customers (and they will be duly noted) though we have at times, made changes in them. Much of our cooking is derived or adapted from what we have learned from the best cookbook authors; Paula Peck, Julia Child, Craig Claiborne, Michael Field, Elizabeth David, and the writers of the Gourmet Magazine and the Time-Life Foods of the World series. And some of our best vegetarian soups are from Julie Jordan's Wings of Life (Crossing Press) our favorite vegetarian cookbook. We don't believe in secret recipes. Our file is open to anyone who wants a copy, and we hope we have properly acknowledged where inspiration or recipe has come from.

We must warn you that our recipe assume the use of good equipment and good raw ingredients. We have a restaurant stove, a big Hobart mixer for kneading bread and a large food processor for making purees. Of course you can use a blender or a sieve and you can knead small quantities of bread by hand, but our recipes assume that you will put the extra effort into doing the job adequately. And we believe there is no substitute for sweet butter, good quality aged soy sauce, fresh herbs in certain dishes, Switzerland Swiss and Italian well-aged parmesan or real heavy cream when called for. We don't compromise quality. We hope you don't need to either.

As for counting calories and watching the waistline, we're not interested. Dieting has been an especially oppressive masochism expected of women in recent years. An obsession with slenderizing is supposed to give women the illusion of control over their lives - a rationalization expressed by the anorexic as well as implicit in behavior modification or other easy or hard diet regimes. It should be obvious that we come in all sizes, different shapes, as well as different heights and therefore enforced thinness is starvation and misery. It is an illness created by the attitude that the only beautiful or healthy size is thin.

We are writing this "cookbook" for all the people who asked for it. When we began we had little enthusiasm for the effort until we realized that to "feed" you, we had to tell you what feeds us. Without our best loved treasures - the resources in our bookstore to think about, talk about, and try to live by - our long hours of cooking and cleaning are drudgery. The songs, poems, stories and ideas are necessary to our lives; we hope to awaken your interest in them, and that you will pursue them beyond the small tastes we offer here.