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Nut and Cheese Roast
1 cup grated cheese 1 cup chopped English walnuts 1 cup bread crumbs 1 tablespoon butter Juice of 1/2 lemon 2 tablespoons chopped onions Salt and pepper Cook the onion in the butter, and a little water until it is tender. Mix the other ingredients, and moisten with water, using the water in which the onion has been cooked. Pour into a shallow baking dish, and brown in the oven.
A straightforward nut loaf of the kind that filled the "meat substitutes" chapter of wartime and vegetarian cookbooks. The original assumes you know what a browned roast should look like, so the useful additions are temperature, moisture and yield.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe says only "brown in the oven." A moderate oven, around 375F, works well: give it 25 to 35 minutes, until the top is set and coloured and the edges pull slightly from the dish.
- The hinge: how much waterAdd the onion water a tablespoon at a time until the mixture just holds together when pressed. Too little and it bakes to gravel; too much and it never firms up. Dry breadcrumbs will drink far more than fresh ones.
- BreadcrumbsCrumbs of this period are usually from stale bread, coarse rather than the fine sandy commercial type, though period books call for both soft and dried crumbs. Dry your own in a low oven if you want the drier texture.
- Cheese"Grated cheese" in a book of this kind would most likely be a firm Cheddar or similar. About 3 to 4 oz makes a cup grated. Pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch or cellulose and gives a drier result.
- English walnutsSimply the common walnut, as distinguished from the American black walnut, which is far stronger and would dominate the cheese. Chop them to pea size rather than grinding them.
- SeasoningWith only lemon, onion, salt and pepper, this needs more salt than instinct suggests, because the crumbs are bland. Taste the raw mixture and adjust before it goes into the dish.
- Dish and yieldA shallow pan of about 8 inches, or a small loaf tin if you want slices. Feeds three or four as a main course with a sauce, since there is nothing here to keep it moist on the plate. Tomato sauce or brown gravy is a common accompaniment for dishes of this kind.
Nut roasts of this kind belong to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century vegetarian movement, which had to answer a practical question: what occupies the centre of the plate when the joint is gone. Cheese and nuts were an obvious answer, among the high-protein foods a cook could buy without a butcher, and the food-reform writers of the period leaned on them heavily. Books titled for meatless cookery multiplied around the First World War, when meat conservation was a civic duty in Britain and the United States alike as much as a dietary conviction, so the same recipes served both the principled vegetarian and the household observing a meatless day. The construction is essentially that of a forcemeat or stuffing baked on its own, which is why so many of these roasts read like dressing without the bird.