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Mixed Nut Puree
5 ounces of almonds 4 ounces of pine kernels 1 1/2 ounces of walnuts 1 teaspoon vanilla 4 ounces biscuits--any kind 1 1/2 pints milk Prepare the nuts, and pass them through the nut mill twice, also the biscuits. Mix all well together, pour the boiling milk over, and add the vanilla. When cold, serve in a glass dish with whipped cream.
A ground-nut cream thickened only by the biscuit crumbs and the nut solids, set by cooling rather than by eggs or gelatine. The whole thing depends on how finely the nuts are ground.
- The nut millA hand nut mill produced a dry, floury grind. A food processor will turn nuts to paste instead, so pulse in short bursts, or use a spice/coffee grinder in small batches. Grinding twice, as instructed, is the point: coarse fragments will sink and leave the milk thin.
- "Biscuits--any kind"Read plain sweet biscuits: Marie, rich tea, digestives, or similar. If sweet biscuits are used they supply the only sweetening, since the recipe contains no added sugar, and much of the body. Four ounces is roughly a cup of crumbs.
- PintsIf the measure is Imperial, 1 1/2 pints is 30 fl oz, about 3 1/2 US cups. Using 1 1/2 US pints (24 fl oz) instead will give a noticeably stiffer puree.
- Pine kernelsPine nuts. They are high in oil and go rancid quickly — taste one before grinding, and buy them fresh rather than from the back of the cupboard.
- AlmondsBlanch and skin them if you want a pale, smooth purée; leave the skins on for a browner, coarser result. Either works, but the skins are visible in the finished dish.
- VanillaA teaspoon of extract or essence, added off the heat with the milk so the aroma is not driven off.
- SettingPour the milk boiling over the dry mixture, stir well, and let it cool fully — a couple of hours at room temperature, then chilled. It thickens as the crumbs swell and the nut oils firm; it will never be as stiff as a set custard.
- YieldProbably about six servings as a light dessert. Whip the cream unsweetened, or barely sweetened, if sweet biscuits have been used.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a wave of vegetarian and food-reform cookbooks published in Britain and America between the 1890s and the 1920s, when nuts were promoted as the plainest substitute for meat protein. The nut mill called for here was, by most accounts, a common fixture of such kitchens, sold alongside the nut butters, nut meals and "nutmeat" loaves that vegetarian societies and sanatorium kitchens popularised. The dish itself is often said to descend from the medieval and early modern almond milks and almond creams that European cooks made for fast days, when dairy and meat were forbidden; here the almond is joined by pine kernels and walnuts, and the thickening is done with crushed biscuit rather than with rice flour or breadcrumbs. Puréed nut desserts of this kind are generally traced to that fasting tradition rather than to any single author, and their reappearance in vegetarian books of the period shows how readily the older Lenten repertoire was repurposed for a new argument about diet.