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Mock Veal Roast
1/2 pint shelled roasted peanuts, 1/2 pint lentils, 2 tablespoons melted Crisco, 1/2 pint toasted breadcrumbs, milk, pepper and salt to taste. Soak the lentils over night; drain, bring them to a boil; throw away water; cover with fresh water and boil until tender; drain again; press them through a colander. Add nuts, chopped or ground, melted Crisco, breadcrumbs and seasoning, with sufficient milk to make it the consistency of mush. Pour into baking dish and bake in a moderate oven 1 hour. Beans or peas may be substituted for lentils.
A meatless loaf built on lentils and ground peanuts, from a period when "mock" dishes were a respectable way to stretch or replace meat. The measurements are by liquid pint, which needs translating before anything else.
- Half a pint means one cupVolume measure for dry goods was standard here: 1/2 pint is 1 cup. So 1 cup shelled roasted peanuts, 1 cup dry lentils, 1 cup toasted breadcrumbs.
- Moderate oven350F. An hour at that temperature sets the loaf and dries the surface; a lower oven leaves it wet in the middle.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote it, so it appears in nearly every recipe. Any neutral solid or liquid fat works — 2 tablespoons melted shortening, butter or oil.
- The double boil on the lentilsBringing them to a boil, discarding that water and starting again was an old habit; the reasons usually given were to reduce the flatulent effect and any bitterness, though this was received wisdom rather than anything demonstrated. It costs flavour and a little colour, and modern practice is simply to cook soaked lentils through in fresh water. Brown or green lentils hold up better than red, which collapse.
- PeanutsUse unsalted roasted peanuts and season the mixture yourself, or the loaf will be over-salted. Grind them coarsely — a fine paste makes the texture pasty rather than meaty.
- Consistency of mushThis is the hinge. The mixture should mound on a spoon and just slump, not pour. Too much milk and it bakes into a pudding; too little and it comes out crumbly and dry. Add the milk a few tablespoons at a time.
- Baking dishA loaf tin gives you something you can slice; a shallow dish gives more browned surface. Grease it well either way, and let the loaf rest ten minutes before turning out.
- Yield and servingAbout four servings. The recipe gives no accompaniment, but the mixture is dry on its own and suits being served as a roast would be, with a brown gravy or tomato sauce and a green vegetable.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, and the book exists to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated shortening the company launched in 1911. That commercial purpose is also why a vegetarian loaf sits comfortably in the book: Crisco was marketed as a vegetable fat, clean and modern, in contrast to lard, and meatless cookery gave it a natural home. "Mock" dishes — mock turtle, mock duck, mock veal — were a long-established genre by then, and the nut-and-legume roast in particular had been promoted since the late nineteenth century by vegetarian reformers and sanitarium kitchens, where ground peanuts were a staple protein. The instruction to boil the lentils once, throw away the water and start again is older still, a piece of received wisdom about pulses that survived in print long after the reasoning for it had faded.