5 Vegan Recipes from the Past for Your Next New Year’s Eve Party
Early 20th century vegetarian periodicals show that vegetarians in the past celebrated the start of the new year with festive menus of plant-forward dishes. Enjoy this list of vegan recipes for bite-size savory and sweet treats from the past to start the new year off in vintage style.
#1 Savory Cheese
This recipe is unusual in several ways, it is an example of an early raw foods vegetarian recipe, and it includes rhubarb. Rhubarb is a hardy winter perennial plant, originally cultivated for thousands of years in Asia and Eastern Europe for medicinal purposes. While rhubarb leaves contain toxic levels of oxalic acid, the stalks are generally considered safe to consume uncooked.
This “savory cheese” would make a good dip for a modern vegetable platter.
SAVORY CHEESE. Mix and rub together 1 oz. Rhubarb juice and 2 oz. peanuts flaked very fine. Let it stand 15 minutes and add and mix into it 1 oz. Mixed Savory herbs minced very fine; such as marjoram, sage, thyme, tarragon or parsley. (p. 136)
2# Stuffed Mushrooms
Stuffed mushrooms, like this recipe, are a festive staple of canape offerings. Edible mushrooms have been considered a culinary delicacy by many ancient cultures. Now-common varieties of mushrooms found in grocery stores like Agaricus bisporus, the button mushroom, were first cultivated over 300 years ago.
STUFFED MUSHROOMS. — For twelve persons, have 15 or 16 medium-size mushrooms, of about equal size. Cleanse and wash them well; drain them well on a cloth. Cut off and chop up the stems. Put the sauce-pan two tablespoonfuls palatable oil and spoonful of flour; let it melt, and brown a little, over a lively fire; put into it the chopped mushroom-stems; two spoonfuls of parsley chopped fine, half a spoonful of shallot, salt and pepper. Turn one or two minutes on the fire; add a cupful of water or of broth. Boil down seven or eight minutes with a lively fire. Put into a plate that can go over fire two spoonfuls of oil; set upon it the mushrooms with the hollows up; fill them with the stuffing which you have prepared. Scatter over them a little bread crumbed fine, or some bread chippings. Let them cook ten minutes with a fire above and below. Serve up.¹ (p. 147–148)
#3 Tomato Rarebit
A dairy free take on Welsh rarebit makes another savory option for vegan appetizers. This recipe from 1912 includes common vegan products commercially available at the time in the ingredients list. The nut cheese called for in the recipe was a cheese alternative developed in the late Victorian era, it could be prepared at home by grinding nuts in a mill, or purchased as a packaged product.
TOMATO RAREBIT 4 onions, 4 large tomatoes, ¼ pound nut cheese, salt to taste. Fry onions and tomatoes, mash the cheese and sprinkle over them. Brown in the oven. Serve on granose biscuits.² (p. 48)
#4 Pastry Crust Sandwiches
This Edwardian recipe calls for crackers made from buttery pastry, with peach marmalade and almonds sandwiched in between. It was found under a list of sweet sandwich recipes, described as “better than cake.”
Pastry crust, prick with fork, cut in any desired shape, bake; spread with chopped almonds mixed with peach marmalade or any desired sweet or jelly and put two pieces together. (p. 469)
A dairy-free pastry recipe to create the crackers from the same decade can be found in the vegetarian cookbook Food and Cookery.
PLAIN PASTRY. 1 ½ cups sifted pastry flour. 6 tablespoonfuls solid vegetable fat. ½ teaspoonful of salt. Scant 5 tablespoonfuls cold water. Mix the flour and salt in a bowl. Add the fat, and cut into the flour with a silver fork or knife, in order to blend. Avoid rubbing the ingredients with the hands, as that would make the mixture too oily. Add the water slowly, and mix through the dry ingredients with a fork. Form lightly and quickly with the hands into a soft dough, and lay on a floured board. Use a light motion in handling the rolling-pin, and roll from the center outward. (p. 118)
Peaches, called for in the 1917 peach marmalade recipe that could be used as a filling in this vintage sweet treat, have been cultivated since the neolithic period, originating in China.
PEACH MARMALADE. Peel and seed the peaches, and stew in a little water until tender. To each pint of this peach pulp add three-fourths of a pound of sugar, and about a fourth of a cupful of water. Boil down to a thick marmalade, stirring constantly to prevent burning. (p. 87)
5# Stuffed Figs
For a final sweet bite to start a new year, stuffed figs are a classic and simple dessert at the end of a meal, or sweet beginning to a holiday dinner. This recipe with its unusual combination of a maraschino cherry and pecan filling was published in 1917. Cherries preserved in syrup have existed since at least the 17th century. The familiar bright red maraschino cherries are a relatively modern invention of the prohibition era in American history. The original maraschino cherry was a marasca cherry preserved in a distilled marasca cherry liqueur, a product still manufactured today.
Stuffed Figs I. 16 figs. 16 pecan nut meats. 8 maraschino cherries. Granulated sugar. Use figs that come in boxes, baskets or in glass jars. Wash them, dry on cheesecloth, make an opening in each, and stuff with half a maraschino cherry, and one nut meat broken in pieces. Roll in granulated sugar, and put in paper cases. (p. 198)
Bring a bit of the past with you as you begin the new year with these vintage bites of history.
Thank you for reading!
Notes:
- Transcription omitted the vegetarian version of the recipe made with dairy butter.
- Granose biscuits were a product name of a baked whole wheat product originally developed by the Battle Creek Sanitarium, similar to Weet-Bix.
For more vegan, vegetarian, and botanical histories, follow Plant Based Past on Medium.
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Next Week: Advice from the Past on Going Vegan