Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant (1990)

To survivors of such countercultural offspring of the '70s as food co-ops, alternative work styles, and salvation through soybeans, the institution that put Ithaca, N.Y., on the map is not Cornell University but Moosewood, a collectively owned and operated vegetarian restaurant now in its 18th year. The first Moosewood cookbook, a solo project by founding member Mollie Katzen, sold over a million copies. Now the collective has worked together to produce another sampling of its own, Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant. Like the restaurant's special Sunday menus, each of the book's 18 chapters features a different ethnic or regional cuisine as interpreted by one of Moosewood's 18 cooks. Some explore the spicy reaches of Thai, Caribbean, or Northeast African cooking; others honor the stolid East European and Jewish fare that has always shared the Moosewood menu with more Aquarian creations. Some recipes aim for authenticity; others freely ''Moosewoodize,'' as one cook puts it. But then, ethnic purity has never been a Moosewood fetish — and, to be fair, the group's eclecticism embraces some down-to-earth ethnic cooking in this new harvest of Moosewood's Sunday best. B