By Jennifer “JJ” Harbster
The Library of Congress has been collecting U.S. community cookbooks since the copyright deposit of one of the country’s first community cookbooks, Maria Moss’s 1864 “Poetical Cook Book” which raised funds for wounded Civil War soldiers. What has amassed since are thousands of titles that represent more than a century of U.S. food trends, eating habits, food systems, and responses to historical events.
One such food trend are meatless meals. Meat substitutes appear in U.S. community cookbooks at the turn of the 20th century for a variety of reasons, including economics, patriotic duties, and nutritional concerns, as well as religious and ethical practices. These early alternative meat substitutes were homemade, using ingredients that were easily attainable, such as nuts and legumes. Occasionally, statements on reasons for including meat substitutes were featured with the recipes, which provide historical context.
Using the Library of Congress digital community cookbook collection, I went on a search of early meat substitute recipes, focusing on cookbooks published from the 1890s through World War I. This time range was selected to coincide with the rise in vegetarianism in the U.S and the food (diet) reform movements of Sylvester Graham and the Kellogg Brothers, as well as the promotion of meat substitute recipes during WWI.
Place is an important filter when surveying community cookbooks, and so I focused my attention on Chicago since a series of lectures on vegetarianism was given at the 1893 Columbian Exposition that influenced a wave of vegetarian organizations and business in the city. To broaden my search, I included titles by state: Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York, and Michigan. Lastly, I was already familiar with the “Meals Without Meat” chapter (pgs. 371-390) written by Mrs. Antoinette “Nettie” Harris, a vegetarian, in the 1903 “Raisin Center Cook Book” from Fowler, California, and so I wanted to see if I could discover additional vegetarian voices in titles from California.
Searching for meat substitute recipes in historical community cookbooks requires the use of a variety of terms such as meatless or meat-less, meat substitute, substitutes for meat, mock, and even sham (see for example the recipe for Sham Oysters in “Inglenook Cook Book,” p. 139). I discovered that the use of mock can be problematic since the term is more often applied to an alternative meat to use in a recipe, such as Mock Turtle Soup recipes that call for calf liver. However, mock can be used to describe a meat alternative recipe, such as a Mock Turtle Soup recipe from the “Monmouth Baptists Ladies Cookbook” (Illinois, 1907) that uses black beans instead of meat (p.15), so searching for mock recipes should not be avoided.
Altogether, I reviewed 50 titles and did not find as many meat substitute recipes as I had hoped. I did discover a curious pattern of plant substitute recipes for oysters throughout the early 20th century titles. For example, the “North End Club Cook Book” (Chicago, 1905) featured Mock Fried Oysters (p.31) and Mock Oysters (p. 35). One of the most common substitutes for oyster was salsify, also known as oyster plant or vegetable oyster, a plant that is not native to North America and is said to taste like oyster when cooked. Also worth mentioning is the use of celery as oyster substitute such as Mock Escalloped Oysters (p. 66) from “Monmouth Baptists Ladies Cookbook” that makes “a delicious dinner dish and resembles escalloped oysters.” It is possible that these occurrences of oyster plant or celery substitutes were a direct result of overfishing practices which depleted oyster populations along the east coast of the United States by the early 20th century.
As one would expect, the WWI community cookbooks were a treasure trove of creative meat substitute recipes. “Twentieth Century Club War Time Cook Book” (Pittsburgh, PA, 1918 ) included its meat substitute recipes with their chapter on meats (pgs. 44-52). The recipes were highly creative and included names such as Liberty Meat (p.44) and Camouflage Roast (p.45); as well as meatless substitute recipes for common foods such as Mock Sausage (p.47) and a Nut Scrapple (p.49). “Conservation Recipes” (Berkeley, CA, 1918) featured a chapter on meat substitutes (pgs. 62-75) that recommended the use of “dried beans, peas, some nuts, milk, eggs, and cheese” (p. 62). A couple of creative examples featured were a Mock Veal Roast that used lentils and peanuts (p. 69) and a Vegetable Roast that used soybeans (p. 70).
Chicago community cookbooks proved to yield the most success in my search for meat substitute recipes. There were also some unexpected finds such as a recipe for granula (sic), a “hygienic food” (“Inglenook Cook Book,” Elgin, IL, p. 93), and a mock smelt recipe (“The Housekeepers’ Friend,” Chicago, 1891, p. 33) that boasts “This is a fish dish, that is not fish at all.” Further explorations of meat substitute recipes in historical community cookbooks would include a larger pool of Chicago and Illinois titles to gain a deeper understanding of the influence of vegetarianism and use of meat substitute recipes in these Midwestern communities. The historical presence of these plant-based alternatives challenges the stereotype of the Midwestern diet as a strictly sturdy meat-and-potatoes affair.
Jennifer “JJ” Harbster is the head of the Library of Congress Science Section. In this capacity she works with an amazing group of librarians who develop science collections, provide reference services, and create research products and programs. She is also the Library’s culinary specialist since cooking/baking is a science, and cookbooks are classed as a technology, which fall under her section’s purview. She delights in spending time with the Library’s cookbook collection. For her, cookbooks are so much more than a list of recipes. They are stories, histories, and documents of eating habits, food systems, and people.