🫒 Vegetarian food in Europe

There are two Europes on a plate, and the dividing line is olive oil. In the south, the cooking of the poor produced the continent's most copied dishes: Tuscan pappa al pomodoro and ribollita are nothing but stale bread that somebody refused to throw away, and so are panzanella and Catalan pa amb tomàquet. Greece adds the ladera, vegetables stewed slowly in oil and eaten warm or cold — briam, gigantes plaki — and France contributes ratatouille, which follows exactly the same logic.

North and east, the climate dictates something else: potato, rye, cabbage and beetroot. Polish pierogi and Ukrainian varenyky are the same stuffed dumpling, placki ziemniaczane the same grated pancake found in Belarus and Sweden, and Finnish lanttulaatikko turns swede into a bake sweetened with molasses.

The engine in the east is the same one as in Ethiopia: fasting. Orthodoxy bans meat, eggs and dairy for several weeks a year, which is why borscht and Romanian sarmale de post have existed in a lean version for centuries, with nothing to adapt. In the west the lever is different: Europe has the egg and the cheese, and it uses them — tortilla de patatas, cacio e pepe, spanakopita. This is the best-stocked region on the site, and the one where a celebration dish can be vegetarian without ever announcing it.