Trying to tolerate soybeans

My favorite thing about Beat Today's Rising Food Costs with Soybean Cookery (Virg and Jo Lemley, 1975, second edition) might just be the introductory paragraph.

On the pages just after this cover, the Lemleys state, "We tried cooking with the soybean long ago. We bought every cookbook we could find on the soybean and found that it just wasn't our favorite food. But the high nutritional value and low cost aspect of this bean kept haunting us. So-- we set out to find a way to make it more palatable. This is what soybean cookery is all about." In short, it acknowledges that soybeans suck and the authors would have given up on them if other foods were more affordable. The project taught them that soybean cookery is mostly about trying to find a way to make something nasty at least palatable. That's not exactly the kind of enthusiasm that tends to sell cookbooks (unless I'm the primary audience, and I couldn't have been because I didn't even exist when this book was created).

Since soybeans are sooooo delicious that you'd surely want to have some at every single meal, I've set up a menu to incorporate soybeans from morning to night. Let's start the day off right with a (probably not) yummy Soybean Omelet!

You might wonder whether you'd really want the flavor of cinnamon in with those of eggs, onions, bell peppers, and Monterey jack cheese, but the "Soybean Tips" section earlier in the book notes that "Soybeans reluctantly absorb other flavors. They are very independent and hold on to their nutty flavor. We found that cinnamon neutralizes this." It's not like there's cinnamon in every recipe, but you do find it a lot more than you'd expect. I take the tip as an admission that even if cinnamon might not be the ideal flavor in any given recipe, it helps hide that the soybeans taste even worse without the incongruous cinnamon. Again, not really a ringing endorsement of the decision to focus on soybeans....

As part of lunch, I'll offer up a salad.

I picked Sprout Salad because I can't resist gawking at '70s health food. Usually, I'd expect alfalfa sprouts in such a salad, but here, the authors double down on the unpalatable star of their booklet and use soybean sprouts in addition to the cooked soybeans. The recipe features zucchini as well, and the inside cover tells me that the Lemleys have written a book about zucchini. I wonder if that means they hate zucchini too. I hope I come across that one someday. 

For dinner, how about some comfort food, like, say, lasagna?

Sorry, I mean "Mock Lasagne." Replacing the layers of noodles with soybeans seems like a surefire way to make it less comforting. I love the reassurance that "If you like lasagne-- you'll be wild about this recipe--." A more realistic tag line might just be "If you like lasagne, allow us to ruin it for you."

Maybe we should just skip to dessert.

Yeah, cheesecake is a pretty heavy dessert to serve with lasagne/a, but I have a feeling nobody will want too much of either one anyway. And hey, maybe the soybeans will help cancel out all the saturated fat from the dairy in this meal! They better be good for something, because even the book acknowledges that they're not great for flavor...