And if you're fixing the picnic, you better have a shitload of free time and a big tolerance for a hot kitchen because this is an old school, labor-intensive vegetarian cookbook.
The first possible menu has a couple of easier touches. Vegetable sandwich #13 is just chopped raw carrots and salted peanuts mixed with cream cheese and sliced olives. (Of course, the bread it's supposed to be slathered on should probably homemade, so that easy touch is canceled right out.)
The first course of Stuffed Tomatoes is a relatively low commitment...
... provided you already had cooked soybeans on hand to mash into the soybean pulp. The tomatoes bake only for a half hour or so, which is nothing for this book. (I'm not sure whether the picnic is supposed to be in the back yard so everything can easily be carried out and served hot from the oven, or whether the tomatoes are supposed to be chilled after baking and served cold from a picnic basket.)
Of course, the baked beans are going to be the major commitment in this menu, as they have to be made from scratch.
Nothing like simmering beans for 15 minutes, then baking them for 6-8 hours in an un-air-conditioned commune kitchen to make summer fun for the whole collective. (And of course, the tomatoes had a different temperature, so they should probably be cooked separately.)
There's no specific apple cupcake recipe, but I imagine they're expected to be handmade as well, probably baked at 350 so they can't go in with the beans or the tomatoes. You can see how preparing for this picnic would take the entire day. How relaxing!
The alternative menu initially seems better. Even if the cold carob drink is a disappointment for anyone who was hoping for chocolate milk, at least it doesn't take too long.
Maybe the peanut butter and banana will help cover up the carob flavor, and the chance of Campylobacter and Listeria from the unpasteurized milk will make it exciting.
The Vegetable Medley hints that it might be really complicated.
Aside from all the slicing and dicing, cooks need 1/2" of tomato bouillon, and the little star means there's a separate recipe for that.
Luckily, the bouillon only requires five minutes of simmering. (Putting a bunch of peanut butter into tomato bouillon seems like a really odd choice to me... I guess the vegetarians back then were looking to cram extra protein into everything they could!)
The real pain in the ass is the item that sounds like it should be relatively straightforward: the veggie burgers.
Just work some garlic powder into the nutmeat and brown the burgers in oil. The catch, of course, is that the nutmeat is homemade too...
And basic nutmeat requires shelling and blanching 8 cups of peanuts, then putting them through a food chopper and boiling with soybean meal for about four hours! (And I imagine the rolls all those nutmeat burgers will be served on will need to be homemade as well.) No amount of patchouli is going to make the place smell right once everyone has sweated in that hot and steamy farmhouse....
The point is, I am super glad that I can just grab a package of Morningstar Farms Grillers, some burger buns, a bag of pre-cleaned sugar snap peas, a tub of pre-made hummus, and call it a day if I want to pack a picnic. The vegetarians of old must have had 27 hours in a day, 69% more sweat glands than average humans, and non-functional olfactory receptors to endure their carefree picnics.
Now communes are for rich people. I remember reading about one being built in IC where the smallest buy in was a quarter million dollars. I bet their communal kitchen has air conditioning, and nobody would dream of making this stuff.
ReplyDeleteSo many of the old vegetarian recipes seem like hours and hours of labor for what's sure to be a pretty sad result...
Delete