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Nut Roast
1/2 cup lentils, 1/2 cup shelled roasted peanuts, 1/2 tablespoon Crisco, 1/2 cup toasted breadcrumbs, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/2 saltspoon pepper and milk. Soak lentils over night; in morning drain, cover with fresh water and bring to boil. Drain again; and put in fresh water and cook until tender. Drain once more; throw away water and press lentils through colander. Add nuts, either ground or chopped, Crisco, breadcrumbs, seasoning and milk sufficient to make mixture consistency of mush. Put into Criscoed baking dish; bake in moderate oven 1 hour; turn out on heated platter; garnish with parsley or watercress and serve with Piquante sauce.
A small vegetarian loaf from the era when nut roasts stood in for meat at the center of a plate. Nothing here is difficult, but several measures and one habit of lentil cookery need translation.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the pepper here is a generous pinch. The recipe is under-seasoned by modern taste; taste the mixture before it goes into the dish and adjust.
- CriscoThis book was written to promote it, and half a tablespoon of any neutral fat, butter or oil does the same work. It is there for richness and to keep the loaf from drying, not for structure.
- Moderate oven350F. An hour at that temperature is right for a small dish of this depth; the loaf is done when the surface is set and dry enough to hold when inverted.
- The triple drainingSoaking overnight, boiling, draining, and boiling again in fresh water was common advice for pulses in books of this period, usually justified as making them more digestible. It also strips flavor. One soak and one cooking in fresh water is enough, and lentils do not strictly need soaking at all.
- Milk quantityThe original gives none. Expect a quarter cup or so, added a spoonful at a time until the mash holds together like thick porridge. Too wet and the loaf will not turn out of the dish.
- The peanutsRoasted peanuts sold today are usually salted; use unsalted if you can, or cut the half teaspoon of salt. Chopped gives texture, ground gives a smoother, denser loaf.
- Turning it outThe one point at which this fails. Grease the dish thoroughly and line the base with parchment, then let the loaf stand five minutes before inverting so it firms up.
- YieldHalf a cup of dry lentils and half a cup of nuts makes a small loaf, enough for two as a main course or three or four as part of a larger meal.
- Piquante sauceA brown sauce sharpened with vinegar, mustard, capers or chopped pickle. Some acidity is not optional here; the loaf is starchy and flat without it.
Nut roasts belong to the vegetarian cookery that spread through Britain and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, promoted by food-reform movements and by manufacturers of nut butters and cereal foods. The logic of the dish is protein arithmetic: pulses and nuts bound with crumbs, shaped in a mold, and served on a platter with sauce and a green garnish so that it occupies the visual place of a joint of meat. The Crisco throughout is not incidental either. This is one of the promotional cookbooks issued after hydrogenated vegetable shortening came on the American market in 1911, and a meatless loaf shortened with vegetable fat rather than butter or suet was a useful demonstration of the product's range.