A peek into 100+-year-old food science

The Science of Food and Cookery (H. S. Anderson, 1921) is fascinating on a number of levels.

One is that this is a vegetarian cookbook, long before the hippies made vegetarian cookery more popular in the 1960s and '70s. Another is that this copy is a library book from The Hotel and Restaurant Department of the City College of San Francisco. Perhaps most surprising of all is that this book was in circulation until at least September 20, 1996-- the last due date stamped on the date slip in the back of the book! I briefly imagined that the book was in circulation for 75 years, but that's impossible, as the school didn't open until 1935, and then it was named San Francisco Junior College. It didn't become City College of San Francisco until 1948, so this book was already well over 20 years old by the time it became a library book-- perhaps highlighting how few options there were at the time for people who wanted vegetarian cookbooks? 

Sometimes, all this work for vegetarian options seems kind of needless. For instance, cooks were expected to make their own homemade breakfast cereal.

I'm not sure why, as commercial cereals were definitely available by this time, and I'd imagine a simple bowl of shredded wheat would be more nutritious than something based mostly on pastry flour and corn meal. (Plus, it wouldn't require all that mixing, rolling out, cutting in strips, baking, and sending through a food grinder!) 

You might think some coffee would be a reasonable accompaniment to cereal, but it's not so simple. While coffee is vegetarian, it's still not allowed because it "cheats the body by producing sleeplessness" and "Its use is often followed by palpitation of the heart and indigestion." Instead, the book's audience would have to fabricate "coffee" out of things that were clearly, well, not coffee. Now I know for sure that soybean coffee long predated the version in 1972's Natural Cooking the Prevention Way: 

And if cooks don't happen to have access to a big store of soybeans, the book offers more specifics on how to make Homemade Cereal Coffee than Cookbook United States Commemorative 1776-1976 did.

Still, though, it often makes sense that this book expects cooks to put a lot of effort into the dishes. Home refrigerators were not yet a thing, so it took a lot of effort to preserve food. While the book has plenty of recipes for home canning, I was more interested to learn how home cooks preserved eggs (a common ingredient in the recipes for both their protein and their binding abilities). For those who might not have regular access to fresh eggs (or wanted to stock up when the price was low), the book offers the "Water-Glass Method" to preserve fresh eggs for up to a year.

I was interested to know that the preservation in silicate seals the pores in the shell so tightly that it needs to be pricked before boiling, and I was even more interested to see that this type of preservation is still used!

The most difficult part of being a 1920s vegetarian might have been finding substitutes for meat in a culture that saw meat and potatoes as the necessary center of the plate. It's not like cooks in 1921 could run out to the grocery store for packages of Beyond, Impossible, or Gardein. Instead, they got to stay home and make things like Nuttose.

Yum! Nothing like nut butter thinned with water, then thickened with a slurry of tomato pulp, flour, and cornstarch and cooked for 2-3 hours... You may note, though, that the name "Homemade Nuttose" implies that it could be bought. That's right! John Harvey Kellogg invented the original Nuttose and started selling canned versions of it in 1896. (Here's an ad from 1898.) I imagine it was still pretty hard to find with the limited grocery options of 1921, though, and the homemade version probably cost less anyway.

If Nuttose didn't cut it for old-timey vegetarians that might be craving something meaty, the book also offers recipes with the meaty-sounding "fillet" in their names, like these Olive Fillets.

I'm really not sure how a bread triangles enclosing a filling of chopped olives, onion, and parsley before being baked under a thin cream-tomato sauce count as fillets, though. This recipe still seems like less of a stretch than the Cereal Fillets, though.

Isn't this basically just mush? Yes, the cornmeal is cooked in milk instead of water so it has a little extra protein, and it's breaded before the second cooking (baking rather than frying, "because hot fats not only coat but intimately penetrate the food with which they are cooked"! 😮). I guess the breading is supposed to make it look more fillet-like, but come on. This is barely-disguised mush. Even the recommendation to "Serve with maple sirup or jelly" seems like an admission that this is mush rather than a meat-like fillet.

I hope you're as fascinated by this 100+-year-old window into vegetarian cooking as I am, because I haven't even showed you the casseroles, or the toasts, or the aspics! Stay tuned. 

It's holiday veggie protein loaf time!

For Thanksgiving, I gave you a full menu from The Vegetable Protein and Vegetarian Cookbook (Jeanne Larson and Ruth McLin, 1977). Now I've got a follow-up stocking stuffer: the book's holiday menu from the winter chapter.

I really want to know about the Holiday Loaf with Potato Icing. The savory "icing" makes it almost sound like this concoction could be a cousin of those cream-cheese-iced sandwich loaves I love so much!

As I've researched this book, I've found a shocking number of weird old canned veggie "meats" are still available, but we're almost out of luck on the Holiday Loaf as far as I can tell. Proteena now seems to be a kind of cattle feed, and Nuteena is definitely gone, at least if Wikipedia is correct. (Loma Linda still listed a "Nutolene" (Doesn't that sound delicious? Like nuts preserved in gasoline.) on their site when I was doing research, but it didn't seem to be available to actually order as far as I could tell.) For those who feel super-ambitious, I did post a recipe for homemade Nuttose, so that might do the trick, based on the fact that it's also an old-timey vegetarian meat substitute with "nut" in its name. In any case, we've basically got a block of protein-bread-based dressing coated in mashed potatoes, as if two side dishes mashed together magically make a main dish. Maybe the gravy will make it feel more substantial.

Well-- like the Celery Gravy for Thanksgiving was based on cream of celery soup, this Mushroom Gravy is mostly cream of mushroom soup, though the cook can add extra mushrooms to make it mushroomier.

The German Red Cabbage seems Christmassy to me, if only because it makes me think of my favorite cut in A Christmas Story, when Randy's lifting of the toilet lid transforms into his mom's lifting the lid on the bubbling pot of cabbage.

Don't worry. Ralph and Randy's mom assures us that we love red cabbage (even if I'm already iffy on cabbage and definitely backing away when it also involves an apple, brown sugar, and an onion).

I was hoping there would be some crazy recipe for a cottage cheese bowl-- hopefully involving lime gelatin, olives, canned crushed pineapple, and/or slices of canned veggie links along with the cottage cheese, but no such luck. I guess it just literally means a bowl of cottage cheese. So festive!

The Green Goddess Salad adds a festive green to the table, though I was surprised that this version uses green food coloring to brighten up the dressing.

I'd expect a health food cookbook to call for avocado, but maybe Larson and McLin are practical enough to worry about the dressing turning brown when there's so much to prep and the food might end up sitting out for a while.

The Easy Fruitcake is easy because it doesn't take a month or more to make it, I guess. 

It even allows for the addition of actual candied fruit, not just calling for raisins, nuts, dates, and maybe prunes, the way more hardcore health food cookbooks might. (This does use margarine instead of butter, though, so you know it's health food.)

And if there is any doubt this is a health food cookbook, the Chilled Berry Delight should put it to rest.

It's just strawberries topped with raspberries puréed with a hint of lemon juice. The whipped cream or whipped topping is supposed to make it festive. I suspect it would just have made my childhood self sadder that there wasn't a "real" dessert.

Like most of the menus in the book, this meal is just for four, so it implies very limited family presence! If you're lucky, it will just be mom and dad fighting-- not mom fighting with Aunt Carol, dad arguing with grandpa, sister Jennifer fighting with cousin Karen, and everybody arguing with Uncle George.

Happy Holidays from me and the random picture of pumpkins and beets at the end of this menu! May your holiday tables be full of food and free of conflict.

The old and the flavorless veggie casseroles

When I introduced The Science of Food and Cookery (H. S. Anderson, 1921), I promised/ threatened that we'd check out some casserole recipes. I love reading casserole recipes anyway, but it will be really interesting to see what cooks did 100+ years ago when they weren't trying to stretch the meat (as this is a vegetarian cookbook) or able to throw in a can of cream of mushroom or cream of celery soup as a binder (as these soups weren't available yet and Anderson probably wouldn't have approved of them even if they were). So what was on the menu?

I'm starting with spaghetti in tomato, even though it's technically not a casserole, but a one-pot meal.

I'm sure that the first step, "Break the spaghetti into inch lengths," probably has some readers apoplectic. It probably doesn't help that the sauce is a barely-seasoned tomato pulp thickened with a roux. My favorite part of the recipe may be that the spaghetti is boiled "until thoroughly done" and then added to the sauce and simmered "until it is of a consistency to dish up and not run on the platter." This sounds like code for cooking the spaghetti until it's practically melted into the sauce-- definitely not the al dente texture modern readers are accustomed to. 

Also, if you're wondering about the cream roast flour in the ingredients, it's not nearly as exotic as you might think it is. It's just flour toasted in the oven but removed before it turns brown.

As far as the spaghetti goes, it fits my casserole theme because there is an actual casserole-ish dish that references Spaghetti in Tomato: Baked Spaghetti en Croustade.

So yes, once the spaghetti has been cooked until it's more of a gel than a solid, combine it with a cream sauce (as it's sure to need more liquid), top with hard-boiled eggs and parsley, then seal up the whole thing under a pie crust, as surely noodles need to be paired with additional starch.

Also in the world of questionably Italian dishes, the book offers Scalloped Vegetable Oysters Italienne:

I guess the fact that this uses macaroni is enough to earn it the "Italienne" in the title? Otherwise, there's little about salsify and (likely overcooked) macaroni in cream that seems overtly Italian to me.

I was a bit surprised to see a Tamale Pie on offer, supposing that a book that avoids seasonings would have no use for such a recipe. 

And this concoction consisting primarily of various unseasoned chopped or ground vegetables (with a bit of Nuttose for protein) might suggest that I was correct to be skeptical. Just in case you are inclined to generosity and suspect that the tamale mush used to top the pie might bring in the needed flavor, here's the recipe for the topper:

To its credit, it does have more flavor than plain cornmeal boiled in salted water would have, but it's mostly flavored with the same vegetables that are already in the filling, so it's not like this adds much.

The saddest casserole may just be the Ribbon Bean Loaf.

Yes, the alternating layers of greenish bean purée and reddish bean purée might look kind of neat, but the appearance is probably the most exciting thing about this one. Diners better hope there's a killer cream tomato sauce or gravy to make this brick-o-beans go down a little smoother.

I do sometimes make fun of old cookbooks' reliance on cans of cream-of-something soup, but that comes partly from secret love of the stuff. These recipes seem like they could benefit from an infusion of cream-of-something-- even the ones like tamale pie where it really shouldn't work! At least the soup would bring some fat and salt to otherwise austere recipes.