Last weekend, we learned that the Four Horsemen of the Vintage Recipe Apocalypse are (arguably) cottage cheese, gelatin, mayo, and pineapple. That made me think of one of my favorite subgenres of vintage recipes: vintage health food recipes. What would their four horsemen be? My forays into the genre suggest soy, nonfat dry milk powder, carob, and honey could be the appropriate grouping, so I started hunting through The Rodale Cookbook (Nancy Albright, 1973, brown type) and New Age Vegetarian Cookbook (The Rosicrucian Fellowship, 1968, black type) for examples.
I know soy was a huge part of "healthy" cooking. Just look at the way Baked Soy Cheese Supreme doubles down on it.
The "soy cheese" is just the book's name for tofu, not the soy nondairy "cheese" we see today. If that's not enough protein, the "soy noodles" (which are homemade noodles made with soy flour instead of the regular wheat flour) provide backup. Soy sauce and soy oil also make appearances! This goes all-in on the soy.
Another soy find shook my convictions about the four horsemen a little. Soybean-Rice Casserole reminded me just how ubiquitous brown rice was in these old health food recipes too. If I had to replace one of the items, I might swap out honey (which is still often used as a "healthier" substitute for sugar, even though it's pretty much just sugar) for brown rice, or even for wheat germ (which was also a BIG THING in health-food cookery).
Okay, so I've definitely established that soy was a heavy, but what about my nonfat dry milk powder, carob, and honey (if I'm keeping it in place of the brown rice or wheat germ)?
Soy-Peanut Butter Cookies definitely get us closer!
Of course we have the soy from the title (this time in flour form), plus 3/4 of a cup of skim milk powder and a half-cup of honey!
I still don't have any carob, though. Nut Balls (Don't think about the name too hard!) include plenty of carob powder...
...plus honey! Plus "soy milk powder," which is not quite nonfat dry milk powder, but it's close. It's almost a two-for-one ingredient in my list.
After a little hunting, though, Rodale came through with a recipe using all four ingredients:
Of course, Fudgies are only fudgy if you consider carob to be an acceptable fudge flavor, and the texture of skim milk powder and soy flour "melted" into honey and vegetable oil is an acceptable substitute for the smooth, creamy texture of sugar crystals in milky butterfat.
So, no, I'm pretty sure this wouldn't convince anyone other than a health food devotee that this is fudge, but I was excited to find all four items in one recipe! What do you think about the list? Would you swap out any of the horsemen? I think soy would just about have to stay (for obvious reasons), but should brown rice, dates, wheat germ, nutritional yeast, or some other health food powerhouse have been there instead? The '60s and '70s were full of faddish health foods, so it's a tough call.
And the faddish health foods continue today. I was amazed by how often they used cheese. I know that they consider it to be a good source of protein (along with stomach pain and bloating), but it doesn't seem to fit the idea of health food. Maybe that's my more current era talking.
ReplyDeletePart of me says to switch rice for the honey since sweets tend to be more palatable than the savory items, but the sweets you have found tend to show otherwise. Health food nuts of the 60s and 70s were skinny because they definitely weren't eating for enjoyment! Anything named soybean rice surprise was a definite signal that you would decide to fast through that meal...
The sweets are definitely only marginally palatable. One link I inserted was to the very delicious-sounding "Wheat-Soy Dessert." (It also has skim milk powder and honey. A lot of desserts were seemingly-random groupings of soy, skim milk powder, honey, dried fruit, nuts, and/or sesame seeds.)
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