Background

Mollie Katzen was born on October 13, 1950, in Rochester, New York, United States. She is the daughter of Leon and Betty Heller Katzen. She has three siblings.

Katzen began cooking early - at about the age of ten - though she did not discover the joys of fresh vegetables.

Education

Mollie Katzen attended the Eastman School of Music and Cornell University. At the university, she cooked in a variety of restaurants learning about various cuisines in the process. Then she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at San Francisco Art Institute in 1972.

Career

After graduating from university, Mollie Katzen joined a group of other aspiring restaurateurs who in 1973 founded a cooperative eatery in Ithaca, New York, called the Moosewood Restaurant. Although Katzen only planned to work for a short stint at the restaurant, she stayed for five years. After receiving numerous requests for recipes for the restaurant’s dishes, Katzen made up a seventy-eight-page book of them. When it succeeded at the local bookstore, selling eight hundred copies in a week, Katzen began thinking of writing a more elaborate version. She interested Ten Speed Press of Berkeley, California, in one hundred and ninety-eight of her recipes and illustrations, which she offered as a total package. Her first book Moosewood Cookbook was published in 1974.

For the cookbook’s fifteenth anniversary, Katzen re-engineered these recipes to make them lower in cholesterol and sodium for her revised and expanded Moosewood Cookbook. She also used more standard measures and gave more complete directions to make the updated book more user-friendly for beginning cooks. Katzen followed The Moosewood Cookbook with The Enchanted Broccoli Forest: And Other Timeless Delicacies (1982), a collection of soup, bread, entree, and dessert recipes, along with sample menus. Like its predecessor, this cookbook features hand lettering and whimsical drawings.

In a departure from her previous cookbooks for Still Life With Menu Cookbook (1988) Katzen created a painting to introduce each menu for a completely vegetarian dinner, while the instructions are entirely typeset. In this volume, Katzen focuses on making vegetarian cooking easy for the full-time wage earner. Because she is concerned about the broader, global issues surrounding vegetarianism, she has donated part of the proceeds from Still Life with Menu to Food First (the Institute for Food and Development), which researches hunger in the world.

For Pretend Soup and Other Real Recipes: A Cookbook for Preschoolers and Up (1994), inspired by a visit to her son Sam’s preschool, Katzen teamed up with Ann Henderson, an early childhood educator. The book is a collection of seventeen recipes doubly explained. Humorous drawings illustrate the cooking methods for children, while more standard directions instruct the child cooks adult helpers. Respecting the ability of even younger children to work in the kitchen, Katzen instructs them in kneading the dough, making a salad, breaking eggs, and the like. The recipes include such ingredients as zucchini and spinach but still appeal to children’s palates.

Since 1995, Mollie Katzen has also been the host of four highly rated cooking series. Katzen's other works include Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven, Mollie Katzen's Sunlight Cafe, Honest Pretzels: And 64 Other Amazing Recipes for Kids, Salad People and More Real Recipes: A New Cookbook for Preschoolers and Up, Eat, Drink, and Weigh Less (with Walter Willett), The Vegetable Dishes I Can't Live Without, Molly Katzen's Recipes: Soups, Mollie Katzen's Recipes: Salads, Mollie Katzen's Recipes: Desserts, Get Cooking, The Heart of the Plate: Vegetarian Recipes for a New Generation.

Achievements

• Mollie Katzen has been listed as a notable writer and artist by Marquis Who's Who and as one of the best-selling cookbook authors of all time by the New York Times. She has also been named by Health Magazine as one of The Five Women Who Changed the Way We Eat. Some of her books changed the way Americans look at vegetarianism.
  
  Katzen was included in the magazine Parents' top ten list in 1994 for Pretend Soup and Other Real Recipes. Her book Moosewood Cookbook became one of the best-selling cookbooks of all time.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Get Cooking

    (Get Cooking contains 125 foolproof, basic recipes for sou...)

    2009
  • Eat, Drink, and Weigh Less

    (With so many fad diets telling us to eat only this or non...)

    2006
  • Salad People and More Real Recipes

    (In Salad People and More Real Recipes, Mollie Katzen work...)

    2005
  • Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven

    (Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven presents more than 200 a...)

    1997
  • The Heart of the Plate

    (In The Heart of the Plate, Mollie Katzen completely reinv...)

    2013
  • Mollie Katzen's Recipes: Salads

    (Credited with moving vegetarian cooking from the fringes ...)

    2008
  • Mollie Katzen's Sunlight Cafe

    (Mollie Katzen's Sunlight Café offers tasty, protein-rich,...)

    2002
  • The Enchanted Broccoli Forest

    (This hand-lettered, pen-and-ink illustrated sequel to the...)

    1982
  • Mollie Katzen's Recipes: Soups

    (Mollie Katzen's Recipes: Soups brings together her classi...)

    2007
  • Still Life with Menu Cookbook

    (Still Life with Menu Cookbook is a new collection of dele...)

    1988
  • Mollie Katzen's Recipes: Desserts

    (From Mollie Katzen comes this signature collection of 50 ...)

    2009
  • The Vegetable Dishes I Can't Live Without

    (Sometimes we need a little inspiration when it comes to a...)

    2007
  • The Moosewood Cookbook

    (The Moosewood Cookbook has inspired generations to cook s...)

    1974
  • Honest Pretzels

    (Are you a kid? Then this cookbook was written especially ...)

    2004
  • Pretend Soup and Other Real Recipes

    (Are you a kid? Then this book was written especially for ...)

    1994

Views

Quotations: "My goal is to find the most appealing and delicious ways to prepare and present fruits, vegetables, whole grains, good oils, legumes, nuts and meat and dairy - and to get people eating smart and feeling and looking wonderful."

"For me, vegetarian these days refers to the food and not the person."

"My vegetarian thing was never about meat or not; it was a massive vegetable obsession."

Membership

Mollie Katzen is a founding member of the Harvard School of Public Health's Leadership Council and remains on the faculty of its Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives project.

Personality

Mollie Katzen loves juxtaposing and having a collaboration on the plate with several different things that complement each other. She loves mashed vegetables, mashed carrots, mashed parsnips, and mashed celery roots. She hardly ever uses sour cream.

Interests

• Politics, philosophy, cinema, human evolution, walking, hiking, reading, gardening

Connections

Mollie Katzen married Jeffrey David Black on June 26, 1983. The marriage produced one child, Samuel Katzen Black. The couple divorced in October 1985. Then Katzen married Carl Shames on December 12, 1986 with whom she also has one child, Eve Katzen Shames.

Father:

Leon Katzen

Leon Katzen was an American lawyer. He opened a law office in New York City in 1945. In 1950 he founded Lacy Katzen LLP. In addition to his family, the most important things to Leon were the security and well-being of Israel. He died on October 29, 2015.

Mother:

Betty Heller Katzen

Betty Katzen worked as a social worker in the City School District of Rochester. She died on October 13, 2009.

child:

Samuel Katzen Black

child:

Eve Katzen Shames

husband:

Carl Shames

Ex-husband:

Jeffrey David Black