Making songs and recipes

JOHN KIRK-ANDERSON/The Press

FLIP GRATER: ``When I first became vegan I spent a lot of time looking for recipes that weren't simply meat and three veges without the meat.''

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Vegetarian singer/songwriter Flip Grater reaped more than audiences on her album promotional tour.

Last year, Christchurch-based songwriter Flip Grater loaded her Lada with a guitar, laptop and soundtrack and headed for Oamaru. She had a gig at the Penguin Club there and the town was the first stop on a promotional tour for her debut album, Cage for a Song.

Three months and 2824km later, the tour was in the bag, there was a new and enthusiastic audience for her music and Grater had discovered handed-on recipes were wonderful mementoes of people and places.

As a keen cook with thoughts of putting together a recipe book of vegan and vegetarian dishes, she made a point of collecting recipes from those she met "on the road" – new hosts, old friends, acquaintainces and audience members.

Grater has been a vegetarian since she was 15. In the foreword to The Cookbook Tour she describes her progression from environmentalism to animal rights and veganism as "looking for a cause to fight society".

"I said something like that to Kim Hill when I was on her (RNZ Saturday Morning with Kim Hill) show and she kind of told me off for being flippant about being a vegan.

"I've been thinking about what she said, and maybe she is right, but I think flippancy is a kind of defence mechanisim that stops me getting too aggressive about what I choose to eat."

She has noticed many people become aggressive when questioned on their dietary choice ... "In a way it's like your lifestyle you are defending.

"I stepped away from the aggression of animal-rights activism because it conflicted with my compassion for humans, and I don't want to get defensive about being vegan."

This is her first attempt at a cookbook, but she is, she says, "an enthusiastic cook".

"I like having dinner parties, and when I first became vegan I spent a lot of time looking for recipes that weren't simply meat and three veges without the meat. There were lots of experiments, some good, some not."

She prefers to cook for friends or family rather than cook for one. "If it's just me, I get takeaways. We have great Indian takeaways in this city, so that's what I do. I like to eat out, too, because Christchurch is spoiled for choice when it comes to good vegetarian restaurants."

The Cookbook Tour is not a weighty tome, and if there are messages about good or bad dietary choices they are well buried. It is simply a collection of recipes gathered – or blagged as the author puts it – from people she stayed with, sang with, drank with.

It is, however, more that its covers suggest. The recipes are simple but well-tuned, and the people who gave them to her and the places they live are sketched broadly but with wit.

The rhythm in her writing is doubtless a legacy from her day job as a songwriter, and the book reads well. Praise, too, for her editor and designer, who had the wisdom to allow generous white spaces in this small black-and-white book.