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Nut Loaf
Mix together 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1 cup chopped English walnuts and almonds, 1 cup crumbs, 1/2 teaspoon salt, dash pepper, 1 large ground onion, 3 tablespoons flour, 2 well-beaten eggs and 1 cup milk. Pour into Criscoed pudding dish and bake 30 minutes.
A meatless loaf from a Crisco promotional cookbook, closer to a savory bread pudding than to a modern nut roast. The batter is loose, so the dish it bakes in matters more than the timing.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as was normal when ranges had no thermometers. A moderate oven, 350F, for 30 minutes suits an egg-and-milk batter this wet; hotter and the custard curdles at the edges before the center sets.
- The dishA "pudding dish" is a deep baking dish rather than a shallow one; sizes varied. In anything wider the mixture spreads thin and dries out; in a shallower or larger pan it may need longer. Test with a knife in the middle.
- CriscoThe recipe comes from Crisco's own promotional literature and exists to demonstrate the product. Any neutral solid or liquid fat works, and butter improves the flavor. "Criscoed" simply means greased.
- CrumbsProbably dry bread crumbs rather than packaged seasoned ones, though the recipe says only "crumbs." Fresh soft crumbs absorb less milk and give a wetter loaf; if that is what you have, use a bit more.
- The onion"1 large ground onion" means an onion put through a hand food chopper, juice and all. Raw onion pulp of that volume stays sharp and watery in only 30 minutes of baking. Softening it in a little fat first, and draining any liquid, is the one change worth making.
- English walnutsThe period name for the common walnut, specified to distinguish it from the stronger native black walnut. Chop the nuts fairly fine so the loaf slices instead of crumbling.
- Yield and servingA small dish, likely three or four servings as a main course. It was intended as a meat substitute; the recipe gives no sauce, but a tomato, mushroom or plain white sauce suits a loaf this mild.
This comes from one of the Crisco recipe books published by Procter & Gamble, the shortening having been introduced in 1911, and it does two jobs at once: it demonstrates the product in a baked savory, and it offers a meatless main course. Nut loaves of this sort were a fixture of early twentieth-century American cooking, promoted heavily by health reformers and Seventh-day Adventist kitchens, and later leaned on during the meat economies of the First World War. The formula is always the same idea -- chopped nuts and crumbs bound with egg and milk -- and the appeal was that it sliced like a meat loaf and delivered fat and protein without the butcher. The reliance on ground onion for nearly all the seasoning is a fair signal of how restrained the flavoring of the period could be.