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Vegetable Turkey
One cup of ground walnut meats, one cup of mashed potatoes, one cup of ground peas, one-half cup of bread crumbs, one cup of rich milk or thin cream, salt to taste. Put in a well buttered mould and bake to a nice brown.
Sauce-One medium sized onion, two tablespoons of butter, one tablespoon of flour, two cups of strained tomatoes.
— Mrs. Henry Heath
A nut loaf of the sort that stood in for roast fowl on vegetarian tables around 1900. The method is compressed to the point of shorthand, so most of the work here is filling in what the original assumes.
- "Ground peas" is ambiguousIn parts of the South the phrase means peanuts, but sitting beside walnuts and potatoes it may equally mean cooked dried or green peas put through a food chopper. Either reading produces a workable loaf; peanuts give a denser, sweeter result.
- GrindingA hand food chopper produced a coarse, crumbly texture, not a paste. Pulse walnuts in a processor in short bursts and stop while they are still gravelly, or the loaf turns oily and heavy.
- Rich milk or thin creamWhole milk or half-and-half. Nineteenth-century "rich milk" was unhomogenised milk with some of the cream still in it.
- Oven and panNo temperature is given; 350F is right for a loaf like this. A "well buttered mould" means any loaf pan or charlotte mould, buttered heavily since there is no egg to help it release.
- TimingExpect 45 to 60 minutes for a standard loaf pan, until the top is browned and the centre is set. Let it stand 10 minutes before turning out; unmoulded hot, it will collapse.
- BindingWith no egg, the potato and bread crumbs are doing all the work. If your mashed potato is loose, hold back some of the milk rather than adding it all at once.
- Seasoning"Salt to taste" was the whole of it, and by modern palates the loaf is flat. Sage, thyme, black pepper and a little onion cooked into the mixture bring it closer to what the name promises.
- The sauceNo method is given: soften the chopped onion in the butter, stir in the flour and cook it a minute, then add the strained tomatoes and simmer until it coats a spoon. Season with salt.
- YieldAbout four to six servings, depending on what else is on the table.
Nut loaves like this one belong to the vegetarian cookery that spread through American kitchens in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, pushed along by health-reform movements and by the sanitarium cooking associated with Battle Creek, Michigan, where nut-based meat substitutes were developed and promoted. The name follows a long tradition of "mock" dishes -- mock turtle, mock oyster, mock duck -- in which a cheaper or meatless preparation borrows the shape, the browned crust and above all the place on the platter of the thing it replaces. A moulded loaf sliced at table with a tomato sauce poured over does the work of a roast, and in a community cookbook such as this one it would have served equally well for a Lenten supper, a household keeping meatless days, or a cook simply out of fowl. That it arrives credited to a named contributor, Mrs. Henry Heath, is characteristic of the village receipt book: these were neighbours' recipes, gathered and printed with the neighbour's name attached.