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Saged Nut Cheese
1 cup nut butter 3 cups water 2 eggs, beaten 2 teaspoons salt 3 teaspoons sage 1/2 cup cornstarch Thin the nut butter with water, add the remaining ingredients and mix thoroughly. Cook like nut cheese, or cook in a double boiler four hours. Allow it to cool in the double boiler, then cut around it with a knife and remove it. This is very nice sliced and served cold.
A vegetarian sandwich loaf of the health-reform era, set with egg and cornstarch and steamed in the top of a double boiler. It is called a cheese only in the old sense of something pressed into a mould and sliced cold.
- The hinge: cook it in the mould you will slice fromThe mixture sets as it steams and must cool completely in the same vessel before it will hold a slice. Chill it several hours, then run a knife around the wall to release it; turning it out warm gives you a paste rather than a loaf.
- Nut butterThis means plain ground nuts and nothing else, usually peanut or almond. Use an unsweetened, unstabilised butter, the kind with oil on top. Modern shelf-stable peanut butter carries sugar, salt and hydrogenated fat, all of which change the flavour and make the 2 teaspoons of added salt too much.
- Thinning the butterAdd the 3 cups of water a little at a time and stir smooth before you go on, or the butter seizes into lumps that never disperse. Beat the eggs and cornstarch into a portion of the cool liquid before combining, so the starch does not clump.
- SageThe three teaspoons are presumably dried sage; rubbed will disperse better than coarse whole leaf. That is a heavy hand by current taste, and sage was strongly associated with sausage seasoning. Start with half if you are unsure, since it cannot be corrected later.
- Four hours over waterThe starch gelatinises and the egg sets within the first hour; the remaining time is old practice for a very firm, sliceable body. Steady simmering water in the lower pan is enough, and the pan will need topping up. Testing at 90 minutes will tell you whether it is already firm enough for your purpose.
- "Cook like nut cheese"A cross-reference to a plain nut cheese given elsewhere in the book; that method is not reproduced here. The double-boiler alternative is the only method this recipe spells out.
- YieldSomething over a quart of mixture, giving a loaf of perhaps two to two and a half pounds. Keep it covered in the refrigerator and use within three or four days.
Books like this one belong to the American vegetarian health-reform kitchen of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where nut butters and nut "cheeses" and "meats" were built to fill the place of flesh food at the centre of a meal. Commercial nut butter is generally credited to the Battle Creek sanitarium circle in the 1890s, and once cheap ground nuts existed the loaf followed almost at once: a protein-rich paste, a starch and egg binder, a mould, a water bath, and cold slices for sandwiches. The sage is the tell. Sage was the defining seasoning of English and American breakfast sausage, so a sage-scented sliceable loaf announced its intention plainly to anyone at the table who missed meat.