CONFESSIONS (WITH RECIPES) OF THE VEGETARIAN EPICURE
By Roger Ebert
Chicago Sun-Times
July 24, 1996

Anna Thomas is exactly the kind of woman Martha Stewart would kill to be. Of course, Thomas would kill me for writing that sentence. But consider: Thomas has been married for more than twenty years to her college sweetheart, has two happy sons, has produced four movies and directed one, has been nominated for an Oscar, lives in a rambling ranch house on top of a ridge outside Ojai, Calif,, and, when she was in her early 20s, she wrote the two most influential cookbooks in the history of modern vegetarian cuisine. Now she has brought out a third, with the emphasis on lower-fat recipes.

Yes, and she looks like Greta Garbo, too. But to hear Anna Thomas tell it, her life more resembles a tale by Erma Bombeck than by Martha Stewart. She gets her tomatoes in late and plants too many because a lot of them are going to die. One of her sons is a vegetarian, but the other one orders steak.

Her husband, the movie director Gregory Nava, helpfully contributed a Thanksgiving turkey recipe to her latest cookbook, The New Vegetarian Epicure (Alfred A. Knopf, $30). And when I took her to eat at Charlie Trotter's, which is Chicago's finest restaurant, she saw kohlrabi broth on the menu and mused, "Just the other day, my son Teddy asked me, "Mom, how about some of that kohlrabi broth!'"

She nevertheless lingers over each course on the vegetarian side of Trotter's fresh daily menu, comparing his cooking to Mozart's music: "It's wonderful that he has a clientele that allows him to cook like this. In Mozart's day, you needed a patron. He composed for the king."

Charlie Trotter returns the compliment. When she visits his kitchen, he displays two battered and tomato-splashed volumes: Thomas' The Vegetarian Epicure (1972) and The Vegetarian Epicure, Book Two (1978). "I own thousands of cookbooks," Trotter tells her. "These are the only two I can say I have cooked every single recipe from."

Both books have sold more than a million copies and remain constantly in print. But when Thomas wrote the first one, she was not a famous chef but a struggling film student at UCLA who created the recipes out of her own daily experience.

"Was that when you were living in a clothes closet in a men's dorm?" I asked her, having dimly remembered such a story.

"No, no. The clothes closet was earlier. I was living in a regular place by 1972, cooking for myself and my friends, and I noticed that first I was not eating much meat, and then less, and then none."

She sent her manuscript to Alfred A. Knopf, the august New York publishers of such giants as James Beard and Julia Child, and they bought it instantly. "They were a little amazed to discover it had been written by a kid," Thomas remembers.

In 1972, there were few vegetarian cookbooks as such: "What I saw were cookbooks about vegetarianism. I didn't want to write about any kind of '-ism.' There's no percentage in trying to tell anyone how to eat. Everybody finds their own way. Live and let live. But you can offer them delightful choices."

Thomas soon married Gregory Nava, and in 1974 they journeyed to Spain, where she produced and he directed and they co-wrote their first feature, "The Confessions of Amans," about the misadventures of an itinerant medieval scholar. The movie cost $24,000 to make; they borrowed costumes, got actors to work for free and shot on the original locations. It was named best first feature at the 1975 Chicago Film Festival, which was when I first met them.

The two cookbooks continued to sell steadily, but Anna and Gregory concentrated on the movies. She directed and he produced "The Haunting of M" (1979), set in Scotland, which combined magic realism and enchanted visuals in an evocative Henry Jamesian ghost story.

In 1983, he directed, she produced and they co-wrote "El Norte," the classic film about a Guatemalan brother and sister who trek through Mexico to Los Angeles. The filming was dangerous; at one point, Mexican police kidnapped their accountant and held him for ransom, while Nava's parents, posing as tourists, smuggled exposed film out of the country in their suitcases. But it won an Oscar nomination for best screenplay.

Their next film, "A Time of Destiny" (1988), starred William Hurt and Tim Hutton in a family fable with war as a backdrop; when it failed at the box office, Nava recalls, "we were in movie hell" for a couple of years, doing studio rewrites.

Then came the four-year struggle to make "My Family, Mi Familia", their great film about three generations of a Mexican-American family. Now Nava is directing a film based on the life of the singer Selena, staring Jennifer Lopez, who also starred in "My Family."

"Jennifer is a trouper," Thomas said. "I remember when we were shooting scenes in Mexico. Just Greg, Jennifer and myself, and a two-man crew. I did the hair and make-up. We'd stop at a drugstore to buy the make-up." Making good movies is incredibly harder than being a good chef, Thomas believes: "When you commit to a movie, you're hooked for years. With food, you get an idea, buy the food, cook it, eat it, everybody's happy, and you're done! Closure in one day."

The New Vegetarian Epicure reflects that spirit in her introduction to one of the recipes I tested, "Guillermina's Lentil Soup." Thomas reports the following dialogue about the recipe with her friend Guillermina:

"Do you put chard in? Or spinach?"
"Yes."
"Which one?"
"Which one do you have?"
"How about potatoes?"
"OK."
"But how many?"
"How many do you want?"
"Do you use green onions or yellow onions?"
"Which ones do you like?"
"Just make the soup, and I'll watch."

Thomas watched, and wrote it down, and I made it, and it was good. It was also healthful. For three years now I've been trying to folow the guidelines of the Pritikin Program, which advises regular excercise and low-fat, low-salt, almost vegetarian meals. Thomas' first two cookbooks are not on the program, to put it mildly. Eggs and cheese rain down on the recipes like manna from the fat gods.

"When I was 20, and weighed ten pounds less than I do now, what did I know?" Thomas asked. "In the new book, most of the recipes happen to be low fat. I use a little olive oil, some butter, a touch of cream. Not substituting for fat, but finding a kind of food that doesn't rely so much on fat."

In Guillermina's Lentil Soup, which is thick, spicy and hearty, there are only two tablespoons of olive oil in a pot that yields 12 to 15 servings - and I cut the oil in half and still had enough to saute the onions, leeks and garlic.

I left out the two teaspoons of salt altogether. Robert Pritikin would have been proud of me.

As for Thomas, she believes in flexibility. "You wouldn't want to do without the pleasure of eating ice cream once in a while," she mused, and somehow I knew that her "once in a while" and mine were days, even weeks, apart.

As for the turkey: "We have a houseful at Thanksgiving, and some are vegetarian and some are not. I cook a complete vegetarian meal, and Greg roasts a turkey, and some eat it and some don't."

While we were having this conversation, we had spent two hours working our way through Charlie Trotter's "Vegetable Menu" (Ragout of Peanut Potatoes...Aromatic Vegetable-Strewn Quinoa...) and then, after paying our respects to the maestro in his kitchen, we returned to the real world.

"Did you see my dedication?" Thomas asked. "I dedicated the book to my kids."

It says: "For Christopher and Teddy - eat your vegetables!"