I'm interested to hear what actual vegetarians say, but my impression is vegetarian cooking used to be more of a genre than it is now. Overlapping with the ‘hippie-derived’ cooking genre, which also has declined.

I think cooking vegetarian used to be more of A Big Change, and cooks went vegetarian without a tradition and were open to trying new inventions of recipes because they were vegetarian. I can browse the cookbooks not looking for anything just because I have a soft spot for the vibe.

Or from another perspective, American Veggie invented some unnecessary things from too small a culinary foundation, when people could have drawn more directly from existing vegetarian traditions.

(I do cook from Moosewood and American Wholefoods, but I would feel too limited if I had to stay inside those.)