Mollie Katzen
Mollie Katzen is an American cookbook author and artist, best known for
the vegetarian cookbook published by Ten Speed Press, The Moosewood Cookbook, a revised version of the 1974 self-published cookbook by members of the Moosewood Restaurant. Although she is not a strict vegetarian, Katzen has published a number of additional vegetarian cookbooks such as The Enchanted Broccoli Forest.
Early life
Katzen was raised in Rochester, New York in a Jewish family. She has attributed her interest in vegetarian cuisine to her kashrut-observant upbringing. Throughout grade school and high school, she attended the Eastman School of Music, where she studied oboe and piano, resulting in an Eastman Preparatory School Diploma. In 1968, Katzen entered Cornell University and later received her bachelor's degree in fine arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the sister of Daniel Katzen, former Boston Symphony Orchestra horn player.Cooking
In 1969, while at Cornell University, Katzen cooked at the Ithaca Seed Company, a macrobiotic café.Katzen studied fine art at Cornell University and the San Francisco Art Institute, where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honors in Painting. One day, on her way to school, she heard a radio ad for rock-lawyer Rubin Glickman's Shandygaff restaurant Katzen took a bus from the art studio and asked to be hired. She ended up cooking and developing recipes there for two years, greatly influenced by the developing Farm-to-table ethos of the new California cuisine. Katzen returned to Ithaca in 1972 to help her brother Josh and his friends build a new restaurant, which was named Moosewood Restaurant, after a local striped maple tree. She remained there until 1978.
Cookbooks
The Moosewood Cookbook became a highly influential vegetarian cookbook, with four editions. In 2007 the Moosewood Cookbook won the James Beard Foundation Cookbook Hall of Fame Award. In 2017, her papers were collected by the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution."Mollie Katzen's Cooking Show" ran on PBS from 1995 to 2000.
In 2013, Katzen published her last cookbook, The Heart of the Plate, which she considers her best work.