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Individual Vegetable and Vegex Salad
Take a round of whole wheat bread and spread it with a teaspoonful of butter, and a teaspoonful of vegex, creamed together. Chop a raw carrot, a stalk of celery and a leaf of cabbage, mix with mayonnaise, place a mound of this on the bread and sprinkle with cocoanut, or chopped walnuts.
An open-faced salad sandwich that stands or falls on the seasoning of the spread. The proportions in the original are generous with the yeast extract; scale it back before anything else.
- Vegex substitutionVegex was a yeast extract of the same family as Marmite, but a full teaspoon of Marmite or Vegemite on one round of bread is overwhelming. Cream about 1/4 teaspoon into a full teaspoon of soft butter, taste, and add more only if it needs it.
- "A round of bread"In period usage this usually means simply a slice; it could also be a slice cut into a disc with a biscuit cutter. Modern sandwich bread works if you cut the crusts off; toasting it lightly keeps the mayonnaise-dressed vegetables from soaking through.
- Chop, not grateThe carrot, celery and cabbage should be in small dice so the mound holds together. Grated carrot weeps and slumps into the butter within minutes.
- Bind it lightlyRoughly a tablespoon of mayonnaise per cup of chopped vegetables. More than that and the mound will not sit on the bread.
- CocoanutUnsweetened dried or freshly grated coconut suits the savoury spread best; sweetened flaked coconut from the baking aisle will fight the yeast extract, though period cooks may well have used it. Chopped walnuts are the safer of the two toppings.
- Yield and timingOne round per person as a lunch salad course, two as a light meal. Assemble immediately before serving "individual" here means each portion is built to order, not chilled in advance.
Cook and Be Cool belongs to the run of American cookbooks written for warm-weather cooking, where the appeal of a salad was that it needed no stove at all. Vegex sat squarely in that world: a yeast-extract paste marketed in the United States from the 1920s both as a savoury spread and as a meat-free stand-in for beef extract, sold to vegetarians and to readers interested in the then-new vitamin B research. Its presence here, creamed with butter on whole wheat bread, is a reminder that yeast extract was once an American health-food product rather than a British curiosity, and that chopped vegetables bound with mayonnaise were part of the vocabulary of the interwar salad course. The coconut is the period detail that dates the recipe most sharply.