CLUB SANDWICH 75

Stuffed from cover to cover with another bunch of great new meatless recipes, Linda's new cookbook is fresh out next month. Geoff Baker turns the pages and uncovers a delight

            And I quote - "Where Paul will always have penned 'Yesterday', Linda will go down in history as the woman who made vegetarian food accessible to everyone."
            So wrote Britain's Vegetarian Society recently. It's some praise, that. The Vegetarian Society has been commendably trying to make vegetarianism "accessible to everyone" for the 148 years since it was founded. And Linda has done it in six.
            It was just six years ago that Linda dared to publish Home Cooking, the veggie cookbook she wrote mostly as something to pass on to her kids and, maybe, just maybe, as a help to all those people who wanted to try a vegetarian diet but didn't know what to cook or how to cook it.
            Talk about touching a pulse. At a time when being vegetarian largely meant saying sorry for it, Home Cooking opened up a new world for hundreds of thousands of people. It was published around the planet - from Toronto to Tokyo - it became the biggest-selling vegetarian book ever, and its success caused Linda to devise the various lines of ready-made veggie meals that have taken her food revolution direct to the dining table.
            Through Linda's initiative and success - simply to keep up with consumer demand - her food-makers have had to shell out £10m to purpose-build in Fakenham, Norfolk, a factory entirely devoted to her line. And other food-makers have dived into the vegetarian market to the extent that the range of food now available to us veggies is wide and varied. Before Linda, the options were dire and inaccessible.
            This woman has literally changed the way the world eats. No small thing, that. If you doubt it, look at the media, look at the bookshops, look at the shelves of supermarkets - vegetarian food, vegetarian books everywhere. The Press is continually full of veggie issues - there's even been a backlash and, believe this old hack, you know you're getting there when you've provoked a backlash.
            Anyway, six years on, Linda is now stepping the food revolution up a gear with the publication of her new cookbook, Linda's Kitchen.
            If Home Cooking was daring then Linda's Kitchen is dazzling. It takes vegetarianism to a healthier, more colourful, more delicious pitch. The recipes here are not only simple and inspirational but this book is a benchmark for a better way of life that millions now openly seek to embrace. As Linda says, "It's new food for a new millennium".
            Truly, this is a wonder of a cookbook - with choices from spaghettini with sun-dried tomatoes, aubergines and chilli to saute of sweet potatoes, filo mushroom parcels, spinach pancakes, meatless meatballs and goat's cheese and dill souffle. There are meals for teenagers, barbecues, Halloween suppers, a romantic dinner for two, Mexican meals, French meals, Chinese meals, Greek meals, Indian meals, a Sunday lunch for non-veggies (they'll never know), Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas dinner, a New Year's party meal for ten, and more.
            It's a book for all those who never want to say sorry again.

There's no fakin' 'em in Fakenham. Linda at the lectern, 16 May, during the grand opening of a factory dedicated solely to the manufacturing of her frozen vegetarian meal range.

Children from Fakenham High School were an integral part of the factory's opening, tasting the meals and asking questions at the press conference. These 12-13 year olds have been involved in the food factory since the laying of its foundations and have studied at length, as part of a curriculum project, the nutritional aspects of vegetarianism.