Strap in for one of the weirdest health food journeys yet

I'm always pumped to find a new-to-me vegetarian cookbook from the '70s. There are so many veg options now compared to back then, when people seemed willing to spend hours working on recipes that sounded like they'd end up tasting like wallpaper paste. I was even more excited than usual to find Eat for Strength: A Vegetarian Cookbook (Agatha Thrash, M.D., copyright 1979, though mine is a revised edition from 1983).

I was especially curious about this one since it has a Bible verse and a family cosplaying as pioneers on the cover. (Log cabin look! Home canned food! Earthenware containers! Kids with homemade-looking clothes and terrible haircuts!) I just knew it was going to be bonkers.

And bonkers it is! I mean, I expected to see the usual '70s health food hang-ups, like having to abstain from chocolate and pretend that carob is somehow a worthy substitute.

But this book had totally unexpected hang-ups too. Want to make a quick bread? Well, you better have old iron gem pans (similar to muffin pans).

Why? Because "all baking sodas and baking powders either leave residues in the breads that injure the body, or they damage the grains during the cooking process, making them less nourishing." That's right! No chemical leaveners allowed. It's gotta be yeast or steam.

I was not surprised that so much of the food sounded incredibly bland. I mean, that was the whole ethos of so many health food cookbooks. But this book seems defiantly bland, proclaiming at one point "The cook should not feel at liberty to prepare dishes that are exciting or that tempt to excess." I should have known that a book with a Bible verse on the cover was opposed to any fun.

The Potato Curry might make it seem like there's at least an occasional attempt to build flavor, but look carefully.

Note that this calls for "Nonirritating Curry" in bold--  meaning that the recipe is elsewhere in the book. The nonirritating curry (equal parts paprika, ground dill seed, ground coriander, and garlic powder) is in a section that insists pretty much every spice is an "irritating substance," so no chili peppers-- they cause cancer and raise blood pressure. No mustard seed or ginger-- they cause genitourinary irritation and raise blood pressure. No black pepper--it has the same effects as mustard and ginger PLUS gastrointestinal irritation. (No explanation for why turmeric and cumin are apparently not allowed. They're customary in many curry blends and not on the "irritating substances" list, but they're not part of the homemade blend. Maybe Agatha Thrash had never heard of them? Maybe she just got tired of claiming that pretty much every spice would cause high blood pressure, cancer, or irritation to some bodily system and assumed she didn't have to accuse each spice individually?) In any case, the pages about irritating substances are scare-mongery enough that one might imagine that India to be very lightly populated, given how much the residents flirt with disaster by eating actual spices.

On top of all this, you may have noticed that the nonirritating curry mix isn't even required in the Potato Curry recipe! That's right-- you could substitute an onion and a green pepper for the not-very-currylike-to-begin-with "curry" powder and apparently still call it Potato Curry.

Even though most herbs and a few spices are considered "safe," they're still left out a lot of the time. Saffron is on the "safe" list, but it's conspicuously absent from the "Saffron" Rice.

It just relies on sweet potatoes to make the rice yellowish. I'm guessing saffron is considered too expensive to use, even if it is allowed, but I'm just speculating.

Even with spices and leaveners disallowed, I was still not prepared for the "Mushroom" Soup. 

I mean, I wasn't surprised not to find cream in the Cream of "Mushroom" Soup, but I at least expected mushrooms! Most vegetarian cookbooks rely pretty heavily on mushrooms to bring umami and body to recipes, but mushrooms are not allowed here. Apparently, Agatha Thrash thought garbanzo beans, whole kernel or creamed corn, dumplings, or olives were all appropriate subs for mushrooms, as "Certain species of mushroom have been reported to be cancer-producing in animals." (Of course, death cap mushrooms, as their name implies, will straight-up kill people, but that doesn't really seem relevant to my enjoyment of portabellas. Agatha Thrash loves overgeneralizing.) 

You might have noticed by now that the recipes call for soy milk, not dairy. This book is unusual for the time in that it's not just vegetarian, but very nearly vegan. (A lot of '70s vegetarian cookbooks rely pretty heavily on dairy fat to make things taste good.) So on top of the seemingly arbitrary pronouncements about what ingredients will be left out because Thrash has arbitrarily proclaimed that they will kill you, the recipes also shun dairy and eggs. I'll admit that I was pretty interested to see what early dairy substitutes looked like. The book goes into making one's own soy and nut milks, but also rudimentary "cheeses" and "butters."

Even though I'm often (briefly) willing to entertain the idea of trying to make a homemade nondairy "cheese" from modern recipes just because I'm curious and I like a good craft project, I don't even want to imagine what a glob of flour, cornmeal, peanut butter, and canned tomatoes tastes like. I can't even picture it as cheese-adjacent. 

The nondairy "butter" sounds equally unpromising.

Coconut oil and some salt might be a rudimentary butter sub, but mixing it into a cooked flour/water paste with some carrots just seems like a lot of work for something that will probably be worse than the way-less-effort original.

Even though the book bans so many ingredients, it actually allows something that most modern health food cookbooks would drown you in organic agave syrup for even mentioning. You might have noticed it in the Carob Pudding recipe, and it's a sweetener option in this Hungarian Dessert as well.

That's right! Karo (corn syrup) is allowed in place of honey for readers who want "recipes using no animal products." I mean, I get why current health food darlings like brown rice syrup or the aforementioned agave syrup weren't listed. Few people would have had access in the '70s. I just wonder why there is zero mention of maple syrup. That is super-common in other health food cookbooks. Maybe Thrash thinks maple is carcinogenic too, somehow, and I have just failed to track down the page that says so.

In any case, is the Hungarian Dessert actually Hungarian? Kind of. I did find a noodle-based Hungarian dessert pretty easily, but it's egg noodles baked with with eggs and loads of dairy fat-- not even close to whole wheat spaghetti tossed in a little oil and corn syrup or honey.

So, in short (Too late!), this has got to be one of my favorite books ever. I can spend a whole day on the byzantine and arbitrary rules, just seeing where they lead... And if you've made it all the way to the end of the post, I've kind of forced you to do it too!