Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Vintage Vegetarian Cuisine: Early Advocates of a Vegetable Diet and Some of Their Recipes, 1699-1935
    Vintage Vegetarian Cuisine: Early Advocates of a Vegetable Diet and Some of Their Recipes, 1699-1935
    Vintage Vegetarian Cuisine: Early Advocates of a Vegetable Diet and Some of Their Recipes, 1699-1935
    Ebook199 pages2 hours

    Vintage Vegetarian Cuisine: Early Advocates of a Vegetable Diet and Some of Their Recipes, 1699-1935

    By Mark Thompson

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    For centuries, advocates of a vegetarian diet have been promoting the virtues of their dietary practices – and publishing recipes to show adherents and skeptics alike how to prepare appealing, healthy meals without meat. Vintage Vegetarian Cuisine traces that campaign through 15 landmark vegetarian cookbooks, starting with a collection of salad recipes from London in 1699 and ending with a soybean cookbook published in the American heartland during the Great Depression. A selection of more than 250 recipes illustrates the contributions that each book made.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateDec 8, 2014
    ISBN9780979551062
    Vintage Vegetarian Cuisine: Early Advocates of a Vegetable Diet and Some of Their Recipes, 1699-1935
    Author

    Mark Thompson

    MARK THOMPSON is coauthor of the bestseller Success Built to Last, is an executive coach, leadership expert, and investor. Forbes has called him "a venture investor with the 'Midas touch'".

    Read more from Mark Thompson

    Related to Vintage Vegetarian Cuisine

    Related ebooks

    Cooking, Food & Wine For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Get Digital

      Sep 23, 2021

      Growing your own vegan food has never been more in vogue. That’s why bicoastal vegan urban farmer and “plant coach” Nick Cutsumpas is sharing his expertise with his following of more than 128,000 on everything from mastering drainage and hydroponic f

      1 min read

    • Article

      Out&About

      May 21, 2021

      Out&About
      2 min read

    • Article

      Connected By Vegetarianism

      Apr 7, 2020

      Connected By Vegetarianism
      2 min read

    • Article

      In Memoriam

      Nov 24, 2019

      In Memoriam
      2 min read

    • Article

      “They Decided That God Must Be Leading Them To North America”

      Dec 27, 2019

      Launched in 1620, the Mayflower voyage – which carried the first English Puritans to North America – had a long gestation period in England. Stephen Tomkins’ new book explores the Protestant separatist movement that eventually culminated in the journ

      7 min read

    • Article

      Rehearsal for Rebellion

      Apr 26, 2022

      Rehearsal for Rebellion
      10 min read

    • Article

      Half In Love With Death

      Mar 9, 2021

      Half In Love With Death
      12 min read

    • Article

      American Nostalgia On A Bun

      Apr 24, 2018

      American Nostalgia On A Bun
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Rise Of Cookbooks

      Nov 1, 2018

      The Rise Of Cookbooks
      5 min read

    • Article

      Wonders Of God

      Oct 27, 2022

      Wonders Of God
      6 min read

    • Article

      True Believer

      Mar 26, 2019

      True Believer
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Original Food Influencer

      Sep 7, 2023

      The Original Food Influencer
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Original Food Influencer

      Sep 7, 2023

      The Original Food Influencer
      10 min read

    • Article

      Quaker Awakening

      Mar 9, 2021

      Quaker Awakening
      12 min read

    • Article

      Campaigner. Iconoclast. Absent Friend. LGBTQ People Who Changed The World

      Feb 15, 2024

      NOMINATED BY GABRIELLE STOREY Christina, queen regnant of Sweden from 1632 until her abdication in 1654, was one of the most learned women of the 17th century. Her sexual identity and orientation have been the cause of much debate due to her cross dr

      6 min read

    • Article

      Eat, Read, Travel

      Oct 19, 2021

      Eat, Read, Travel
      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Vintage Vegetarian Cuisine

    5/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Vintage Vegetarian Cuisine - Mark Thompson

      International Standard Book Number: 978-0-9795510-6-2

      1st e-book edition, December 2014

      Seasonal Chef Press

      www.SeasonalChefPress.com

      Philadelphia

      Copyright 2014 by Seasonal Chef Press. All rights reserved.

      Cover design by Katherine Moffat.

      Art by John Gummere. Cover illustration inspired

      by Edward Hicks’ Peaceable Kingdom paintings.

      All the world were eaters and composers of sallets

      in its best and brightest age....

      In paradise ... the wolf and the lamb

      , the angry and furious lion,

      should eat grass and herbs together with the ox.

      John Evelyn, 1699

      A Note About the Recipes

      I. Vegetarians Ahead of Their Time

      II. A Salad in Every Hedge

      Aceteria (1699)

      III. Biblically Ordained Diet

      Vegetable Cookery (1833)

      IV. Water in Lieu of Medicine

      The Water Cure for Ladies (1844)

      The New Hydropathic Cookbook (1854)

      V. Avoiding Foods that Invite Mischief

      Vegetable Diet as Sanctioned by Medical Men (1859)

      VI. The Kelloggs’ Sanitarium

      Science in the Kitchen (1893)

      VII. Reaching Out to Meat Eaters

      Cassell’s Vegetarian Cookery (1892)

      New Vegetarian Dishes (1891)

      VIII. Doctor of Whole Wheat

      The Allinson Vegetarian Cookery Book (1915)

      IX. Speaking up for Nuts

      Reform Cookery Book (1909)

      No Animal Food (1910)

      X. Cookless Cuisine

      Unfired Food and Trophotherapy (1912)

      Mrs. Richter’s Cook-less Book (1925)

      XI. Soybeans in Every Pot

      Let’s Use Soybeans (1931)

      Food for Life (1935)

      Source Notes

      Recipes by Category

      Acknowledgments

      A Note About the Recipes

      This book tells the story of 15 landmark vegetarian cookbooks published over a time span of more than three centuries. There are several thousand recipes in those books. I’ve chosen 250 of them to reprint. It is a somewhat representative sample, but skewed in favor of recipes that are especially interesting. Some of the cookbooks I’ve included are historically important but devoid of culinary merit. Their authors were convinced that seasoned foods incited unhealthy passions, and their admittedly unstimulating recipes reflect those fears. I have included just a handful of their recipes, to give readers a sense of how their dietary prescriptions played out in practice. That left room for a larger sampling of recipes from the cookbooks whose authors actually enjoyed food.

      All of the recipes are reprinted verbatim from the original editions of the cookbooks. Peculiar spellings and terminology, apparent typos and seemingly illogical instructions are preserved intact. So are archaic weights and measures, which I have not attempted to convert. Thu s, when one author calls for as much mustard as will lie upon an half-crown piece, and other authors call for a suspicion each of mace and sweet herbs, or a saltspoonful or a breakfastcupful of some other ingredient, you’ll have to make your own best guess about what that means.

      I have not tested all of the recipes. My decision to include them doesn’t mean I think they’d all be tasty. I included, for instance, Dr. R.T. Trall’s recipe in which he says green beans require boiling three or four hours not because I agree but because it is part of the historical record and helps tell the story of the evolution of vegetarian cuisine. Plenty of the other recipes have genuine culinary merit, or at least contain the kernel of a good idea worth tinkering with. The recipes, in other words, will offer many hours of adventure in the kitchen for a culinary explorer with a curiosity about history. Have fun experimenting with them.

      Mark Thompson

      Sylvester Graham

      CHAPTER I

      Vegetarians Ahead of Their Time

      In the spring of 1817, a party of 22 adults and 19 children, led by Rev. William Metcalfe, set sail from Liverpool bound for Philadelphia. Members of a congregation that had formed eight years earlier in Salford, just outside of Manchester, they called themselves Bible Christians. They distinguished themselves from other denominations most notably by abstaining from alcohol and meat. They were drawn to Pennsylvania by its reputation for religious tolerance, and for the abundant opportunities they expected to find to spread their particular brand of gospel and add to their numbers in America.

      The venture had an inauspicious start. It usually took about six weeks to sail from England to the northeastern United States in those days. The Bible Christians heaved and bucked at sea for 11 weeks. Whether it was because of the grim rations on board made worse by their refusal to partake of a shipboard staple, salted beef and cod, stress from such close confinement for so long, or a deeper doctrinal or personality split, the immigrant congregation did not make it to Philadelphia intact. As Metcalfe’s son, Joseph, would recall in a memoir, 23 of the original group of 42 gave way to indulgences in eating and drinking en route and left the fold.

      The prospects for the remaining faithful did not dramatically improve any time soon. Several of the Bible Christian families set out for Lycoming County, 150 miles northwest of Philadelphia, to try their hand at farming and to open a branch church. Their teachings were greeted with coldness and indifference in that part of the state and they drifted away from the faith.

      A core group stayed in Philadelphia, where Rev. Metcalfe, who was a scholar in the classics back in England before he became a minister, took in students to help defray church costs. A succession of deadly outbreaks of yellow fever in 1818 and 1819, which caused many families to evacuate the city for extended periods of time, waylaid that venture. Metcalfe also worked for a while as an editor of the monthly Rural Magazine and Literary Evening Fireside. It folded in 1820. A stable livelihood eluded other church members, as well. They all suffered more or less from the pinch of poverty, a church historian later recounted.

      The tepid response to their religious teachings in Philadelphia was surely an even bigger disappointment. They almost certainly would have known that one of the city’s most beloved early patriarchs, Benjamin Franklin, had been a vegetarian for a while as a young man. He told of the experience in his autobiography, the first English language editions of which were published in London in the 1790s. Expressing a sentiment that the Bible Christians shared, Franklin recalled that for a time, he had regarded the killing of animals for human consumption as unprovoked murder. Franklin went on to say that he recanted one day at a fish fry when he was prepared to stick to his principles and pass up what had been a favorite of his, until he noticed when a fish was gutted that it had preyed on smaller fish. Nevertheless, his youthful openness to the idea of abstaining from meat may have lifted the Bible Christians’ hopes that they would find kindred spirits in Philadelphia. That would happen, but not for quite a while.

      Metcalfe and his remaining congregants settled in a building on 3rd Street above Girard in the Northern Liberties, a suburb north of the city center. The church and its members were fixtures in that neighborhood for more than 100 years. When the yellow fever outbreaks drove so many out of town, they remained during the whole period of suffering, and afforded their sick neighbors all the relief in their power, according to William Alcott, writing in Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, a vegetarian manifesto he published in 1859.

      The benefits of their dietary prescriptions should have been readily apparent to Philadelphians, Alcott thought. After all, not one of their little number ever sickened or died of either yellow fever or cholera, a feat he attributed to their vegetarian diet. But their new neighbors had no sympathy for their habits, Joseph Metcalfe wrote. Despite his father’s best efforts to propagate vegetarianism in America, during the first 10 or 12 years his labors in this direction appear to have been entirely unproductive of any promising results. By 1820, only half a dozen or so new adults had joined the church.

      A trickle of curious visitors appeared for Sunday services over the years, but the congregation never expanded beyond the single building on 3rd Street. The Bible Christian congregation lasted into the 20th century, long enough to publish a 100-year retrospective in 1922, before fading away. That certainly wasn’t the outcome that the audacious band of believers who immigrated to Philadelphia in 1817 had expected. However, while the church failed to propagate itself, the Philadelphia Bible Christians and their leader, William Metcalfe, would have an impact that belied their small number, thanks to a succession of serendipitous encounters in Philadelphia in 1830. Their message about the benefits of a meat-free diet reached three charismatic characters who happened to be passing through Philadelphia in that year. They would broadcast the message to a much larger audience than the Bible Christians could ever reach.

      The first was a Presbyterian minister named Sylvester Graham, who was working as an itinerant temperance lecturer for the Pennsylvania Society for Discouraging the Use of Ardent Spirits. One of his first target audiences in Philadelphia was factory and workshop owners in the Northern Liberties, who let their workers drink on the job, accepting the common wisdom that it was a treatment. They had not noticed the connections that Alcott revealed between alcohol consumption, faltering performance on the job and an overall decline in their workers’ physical and moral fitness. Temperance advocates were curiosities in those early years of an organized temperance movement, so it didn’t take long for Graham and the Bible Christians to find each other.

      Neither Graham nor the society that employed him were officially recommending abstaining from meat at the time, but they were clearly sympathetic to the idea. One role model held up for emulation in the society’s annual report for 1831 was the brilliant and indefatigable Roman Emperor Julian, who not only refrained from drinking alcohol but also ate a light and sparing diet... usually of the vegetable kind.

      Graham himself was coming around to the view that alcohol was only one of the harmful substances that must be stricken from the diet. Highly processed white flour was another. He called for replacing it with a whole-wheat alternative that he had recently invented, which would come to be known as graham flour. Metcalfe helped persuade Graham that meat was just as evil, if not more so. Its effects are not as visible as the fearful blight inflicted by alcohol, but Metcalfe believed there is a desolation wrought in the soul by the sin of flesh eating more fearful than any outward ghastliness.

      Graham was not about to join the Bible Christian church. Theological differences would have precluded that. But Metcalfe’s influence on him was apparent by the early 1830s, when he began working lessons on the virtues of abstaining from meat into his lectures about the evils of alcohol. Graham was, by all accounts, a captivating speaker who could change people’s lives with his words. His wide-ranging lectures, which touched on the moral benefits of a vegetable diet but focused on the physiological case for abstaining from meat, were compiled in a book published in 1839, Lectures on the Science of Human Life. It became a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic and was cited as a source by vegetarian cookbooks and treatises for decades to come.

      In the early 1830s, Graham also began lecturing about another issue that would become an obsession of his: sex. He delved into that topic in his Lecture to Young Men on Chastity, about the mortal perils of foul and fiendish lust. He honed the talk on the lecture circuit for several years before issuing it in pamphlet form in 1834. Sex was permissible within a marriage, but only once a month, Graham believed. Masturbation was a horridly abominable vice that often led to utter insanity. Tight pants, soft mattresses, spiced foods and meat helped stir up the unclean fires of morbid lust, he went on to say. The key to taming that treacherous instinct is "a pure and well regulated

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1