Home › Recipes › Protose and Celery Salad
Protose and Celery Salad
1 cup diced celery 1/2 cup diced protose 1/2 cup mayonnaise Mix ingredients lightly together, and serve on lettuce.
A three-ingredient salad from the vegetarian kitchens of the American health-reform movement. The only obstacle is the protose, which no longer exists commercially.
- What protose wasProtose was a canned meat substitute made of wheat gluten and ground peanuts, sold by the Sanitas/Kellogg food companies of Battle Creek from the 1890s onward. It had a firm, close texture that diced cleanly, closer to canned luncheon meat than to modern crumbles.
- Substituting for itPlain seitan works if you cut it into small dice and toss it with a spoonful of peanut butter to get the characteristic nutty note. Firm smoked tofu or a dense wheat-gluten deli slice are also reasonable stand-ins; anything soft or wet will collapse into the mayonnaise.
- ProportionsHalf a cup of mayonnaise to a cup and a half of solids gives a heavily bound salad by current taste. Start with a third of a cup and add more only if it looks dry.
- MayonnaisePeriod cookbooks assumed mayonnaise made at home from raw yolks. Commercial jarred mayonnaise is made with pasteurised egg and is the safer choice for a salad that will sit at the table.
- Handle it lightlyThe instruction to mix lightly matters more than it looks. Diced gluten breaks down under stirring and turns pasty, so fold two or three times and stop.
- Chill and seasonThe original gives no salt, pepper or acid. A pinch of salt and a squeeze of lemon lift it considerably, and half an hour in the refrigerator firms the dressing.
- YieldAbout a cup and three-quarters of dressed salad, enough for two lettuce-cup servings as a light lunch or four as a side.
Protose belongs to the Battle Creek Sanitarium and the vegetarian food industry that grew up around it in the 1890s and after. Wheat gluten and peanuts were combined and canned to give abstaining households something with the bite and slice of meat, and cookbooks issued from that circle treated protose as an ordinary pantry staple, diced into salads, sliced for sandwiches, roasted with gravy. A celery and mayonnaise salad was a standard American formula of the era for turning cold cooked chicken into a course, and this recipe reads as the vegetarian counterpart to it; the recipe's plainness is the point. Protose was manufactured well into the twentieth century before disappearing, but the same logic, a gluten-and-nut protein cut into a creamy salad, recurs in vegetarian cookery since.