Vintage Vegetarian Cuisine

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. The recipes include a chopped salad composed of cucumbers, olives, beets, mushrooms, raisins, pistachios, pine kernels, almonds and orange peel, “adorn'd with buds and flowers,” from the first English-language vegetarian cookbook published in 1699; a carrot pudding made with orange-flower water and candied orange peel, from an 1833 edition of Vegetable Cookery, published by a founding member of a vegetarian denomination called Bible Christians; brussel sprouts sausages, baked mushroom pudding, Brazil Nut Curry and a Radish Sauce that is “exceedingly nice with cheese,” from an 1892 cookbook issued in London that aimed to entice meat-eaters into the vegetarian fold; Panacea Soup and Sour Lentils and Nuts from Unfired Food, a cookbook published in Chicago in 1912 by one of the first advocates of a raw food diet; and a nut roast and queen's apple and onion pie from a 1915 cookbook written by Thomas Allinson, a relentless early booster of whole wheat. The recipes, reprinted verbatim from the original cookbooks, show how contemporary vegetarian cuisine evolved. They also will give adventurous cooks many intriguing ways to bring history to life in their own kitchens.