A little bit raw

When I picked up The Delicious World of Raw Foods (Mary Louise Lau, 1977), I expected it to be an earnest-ish treatise on raw cooking, bursting with alfalfa sprouts and sunflower seeds (only earnest-ish because of the subtitle: A Culinary Guide for Preparing Appetizers, Soups, Salads, Vegetables, Main Dishes, and Desserts with Little or No Cooking; a really earnest health food book wouldn't allow the "little" to sneak in!). The introductory chapter seemed to reinforce that impression, insisting that raw foods are "excellent for your digestion," "a great way to stay slim," and that "All raw foods are 'beauty' foods" that "promote healthy, glowing skin and sparkling eyes." All that and they're supposed to save energy during an energy crisis!

The recipes themselves only occasionally reinforce those ideas, though. Yes, there are a few earnest health-food-shop-style recipes.

This is almost exactly what I pictured-- "big handful"s of alfalfa sprouts, sesame and sunflower seeds, avocado, cider vinegar. Of course, the croutons are cooked, so they are a little out of place, but hopefully the insistence that they be made out of 100% whole-grain bread makes up for it. The fact that the title specifies that this recipe is "à la Health-Food Restaurant" should clue us in that the default assumption for most recipes is not health food restaurant, though.

A lot of recipes seem to suggest that this is more of a cookbook for upper middle class people who want to feel like they're actually being virtuous without having to actually buy into a lot of the '70s earth mother health food ideals.

Serious raw foods cookbooks tend not to call for rye bread and hard cooked eggs. Vintage health food cookbooks tended not to call for generous amounts of butter slathered on sandwiches. It seems like the raw food title is just a health halo to make diners feel a little self-righteous about scarfing down caviar and and hand-scraped raw beef.

Even things like fruit salad that would be pretty easy to make using '70s health food standards tend to be more upscale than raw health food ideals.

While the no-sugar health-food-for-kids books tended to rely heavily on concentrated juices, raw foodists would have observed that concentrating orange juice usually means cooking it, so this would be a no-go. (Plus a lot of health food books avoided alcohol, but Lau is more interested in having a little fun than being too pure.)

She liked having a little fun with titles sometimes, too. 

Anyone for Devastating Horseradish Cream Dip with Cannibal Steak? Any excuse for raw steak and sour cream made Lau happy.

The book isn't even all that married to its tendency to go for higher-end ingredients, though. Just as it couldn't be confined to actual raw foods, it also couldn't resist a little bit of the tasty foods that snobs tend to see as trashy.

Mix classic health foods like watercress and cashews with half a can of fried onions, the popular cream-soup-casserole topper! (And of course a canned food with "fried" right in the name should count as raw if you didn't cook it!)

And speaking of lower-end ingredients and "raw" foods cooked by someone else first...

This is the only cook book I have (that I know of) making the claim that dried chipped beef mixed into sour cream is not only raw, but also a weight loss and beauty food!

So the book isn't really a raw foods book, or even entirely a book of higher-end recipes that can let the well-off pretend they get the same health halo as hippie-style '70s foods. At least it's consistent in keeping the chef cool, right?

Oh, for fu....

Really? This raw foods cookbook has a recipe that calls for putting food in the oven until it's "piping hot"?

I give up. There seems to be no guiding principle to this book other than a vague sense that putting the words "raw foods" on the cover will maybe sell more copies. I have to admit that Lau has good instincts not to trust "healthy" raw foods to take her too far, though, as those tend to be some of the saddest recipes in the book.

Who wants a plate of icy cold raw potatoes when they ask for fries?

Even if the "fries" are dressed up and served in a napkin-covered basket and served with ketchup, raw crinkle-cut potatoes are going to get a hard no from just about anybody. This is one case where straying far, far away from the premise was probably the only way to save the cookbook....