🌱 Vegan recipes from around the world

A vegan recipe on Vegetive contains no animal product at all: no eggs, no milk, no butter, no cheese, no honey. This is not a modern constraint imposed on old dishes, it is how much of the world already eats. In India, dals and pulse curries need no dairy once ghee gives way to oil, and many southern preparations never contained any. In Ethiopia, the Orthodox calendar sets aside close to two hundred fasting days a year without animal products, and out of that grew a whole repertoire of lentil, chickpea and vegetable stews such as shiro wat.

The Levant contributes chickpea purées, herb salads and vegetables stuffed and stewed in olive oil. South-East Asia cooks with coconut milk rather than cream, and treats tofu and tempeh as everyday staples: Indonesian gado-gado is the clearest example, its peanut sauce doing the work a dairy sauce would do elsewhere. Mexico, West Africa and the Mediterranean round out the selection with corn breads, fried plantain and slow-roasted vegetables.

The recipes below range from a weeknight chana masala to a dish worth cooking for guests. Each one lists its preparation time, its difficulty and the country it comes from. Where a traditional version relies on butter, yoghurt or fish sauce, the recipe says so and gives the swap that keeps the dish faithful to its original balance rather than merely edible.