Shurtleff and his former wife Akiko Aoyagi have written and published consumer-oriented cookbooks, handbooks for small- and large-scale commercial production, histories, and bibliographies of various soy foods.
[2] In 1980, Lorna Sass wrote in The New York Times, "The two people most responsible for catapulting tofu from the wok into the frying pan are William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi.
[7][8] While in Japan, Shurtleff met his future wife Akiko Aoyagi, who at that time worked as a Tokyo-based fashion designer.
[7] While he had initially developed an interest in soy foods at the Tassajara Zen Center,[9] Shurtleff had also read the (then) recently released Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé, which argued that soybeans were a superior source of protein.
[12][7] They then began to work on the book, with Aoyagi focused on developing, creating, and writing recipes, both Eastern and Western, and providing the technical illustrations.
[15] All three books have recipes that do not use meat, poultry or fish products, though the authors mention some traditional uses of the soy foods with these ingredients.
This book built on a very small but established non-Asian constituency in the United States that was making and using tempeh, including The Farm in Tennessee.
For example, David Mintz invented the non-dairy, kosher pareve ice cream stubstitute Tofutti in 1981: "It was after he opened his Manhattan restaurant, he said in one of many versions of the story, that 'a Jewish hippie' tipped him to the potential of tofu.
[20] In discussing Kauffman’s book, San Francisco Chronicle journalist Steve Silberman refers to Shurtleff and Aoyagi as "pioneers" who "placed tofu at the center of millions of vegetarian tables in the West after falling in love with the snowy pressed soy curds as Zen students in Kyoto.
"[21] American author and professor Rynn Berry interviewed Shurtleff and Aoyagi for a chapter in the "Visionaries" section of his 1995 book Famous Vegetarians and Their Favorite Recipes: Lives and Lore from Buddha to the Beatles.
Additional "Visionaries" include Bronson Alcott, Sylvester Graham, John Harvey Kellogg, Henry Stephens Salt, and Frances Moore Lappe.
[24] Over their careers, Shurtleff and Aoyagi have written, published, and assembled a wide variety of research material on soybeans and soyfoods.