Shakers (not the salt or pepper variety)

Today, we're looking at recipes from some real movers and shakers.

Well, that's only half right. It's The Shaker Cook Book: Not by Bread Alone (Caroline B. Piercy, 1953).

I'll admit that I wasn't moved to read too much about Shaker theology, but based on the recipes, they're pretty firmly of the no luxuries/ hard work/ waste not, want not persuasion.

No luxuries means there's a chapter on meatless cooking for the spiritualist sect that banned meat eating for a decade.

The nut and rice patties have that nondescript combination of nuts, starch, and eggs common to old meat-substitute meals.

Enterprising Shakers seemed to try to stretch the "no luxuries" rule by creating pretend luxuries. I doubt this substitute is likely to fool anyone:

No amount of cream sauce could make me mistake green onions for asparagus.

Enough hard work might make a "luxury" acceptable, though.

Will Tomato Figs fool people into thinking they're actually figs? I have my doubts, but anyone who is willing to spend a week boiling, weighting, sugar-sprinkling, and sunning eight pounds of tomatoes deserves some kind of reward. I hope I'd be surprised by these.

The "waste not, want not" mentality comes in everywhere. A Shaker making a bunch of apple pies, for example, would have to get out a second recipe to ensure that the pies aren't too wasteful:

Apple Parings Jelly makes sure the trimmings don't go to waste. (Plus, it's extra work on apple pie day. Yay!)

Maybe the best example of all these principles at work (and perhaps their erosion by the wider acceptance of convenience foods) is in a recipe that doesn't immediately seem all that exceptional: a molded fruit salad.

The first instructions-- the ones I presume very good Shakers would follow-- call for using calf's foot jelly to make the mold. Of course, making the jelly is hard work AND it uses up ingredients that could easily be wasted. This recipe does make a small allowance for the comparatively luxurious and labor-saving option of using prepackaged lemon gelatin, but I'm pretty sure that's just for the Shakers everybody's grandmas disapproved of.

A real molded fruit salad was supposed to start with this:

Yes, for Shakers, the salad would start with days of boiling calf's feet, straining, chilling the liquid, scraping fat and sediment(!), and clarifying the resulting mixture, all before adding the actual fruit. (Home canned preferred, obviously!)

I can see why this cookbook has WAAAY fewer gelatin-based recipes than one might expect for the time period. I can also see how changes in food science were perhaps changing a very small corner of a very small culture. A few naughty Shakers were getting away with using pre-packaged lemon gelatin! I'm scandalized just imagining it.