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Nut and Cheese Loaf
1 tablespoon chopped onion 1 tablespoon fat 1 cup grated cheese 1 cup chopped nuts 1/2 cup milk 1 cup cooked cereal 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon sugar 1/4 teaspoon paprika 1 1/2 tablespoons lemon-juice 1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce Buttered crums Cook onion in fat until delicately brown. Mix with all the other ingredients and moisten with milk. Cover with buttered crums and brown in oven. Serve hot with tomato sauce. Serve with some crispy food, as celery.
A soft-textured baked loaf typical of the meatless "nut roast" family, held together by cooked cereal rather than egg. It is quick to assemble from leftovers, and the choice of cereal decides the texture.
- "Cooked cereal"This means leftover cooked breakfast grain: oatmeal, cracked wheat, farina or rice. Rolled oats give the softest result, cracked wheat or rice the firmest. Use it cold and stiff, not hot and loose, or the loaf will not hold a cut.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350-375F, for 30 to 40 minutes will heat it through and brown the crumbs. It is already-cooked food, so you are only setting and browning it.
- "Crums"An older spelling of crumbs. Buttered crumbs are dry bread crumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly a tablespoon of butter to a half cup of crumbs, spread over the top before baking.
- The cheeseA firm grating cheese is meant -- what the period called American cheese, closest to a medium or sharp cheddar today. Avoid pre-shredded cheese coated in starch; it will not bind as well.
- NutsWalnuts, pecans and peanuts were among the nuts commonly used in vegetarian cookery of this period. Chop them to the size of peas rather than grinding them, or the loaf turns pasty.
- Binding and slicingWith no egg, the mixture sets only as the cheese melts and the starch cools. Bake it in a small loaf pan or a shallow baking dish and let it rest ten minutes before serving, or spoon rather than slice.
- MilkHalf a cup is listed, but the direction is only to "moisten with milk," so it is probably best treated as an upper limit: add it gradually until the mixture just holds together, since wet cereal will need less.
- YieldAbout four modest servings. The tomato sauce and the raw celery are not decoration here -- the loaf is rich and rather soft, and both are doing real work.
Nut loaves like this one were a staple of American meatless cookery from the 1890s through the 1930s, a tradition shaped in large part by Seventh-day Adventist kitchens and the Battle Creek sanitarium food industry, which promoted nut foods as a protein to replace meat. By the time New Delineator Recipes appeared, the formula had settled into a familiar shape: a chopped nut, a grated cheese, a starchy binder from the cereal pot, and something sharp -- here lemon juice and Worcestershire -- to keep the whole thing from tasting flat. Its presence in a general-purpose magazine cookbook rather than a specialist vegetarian one suggests how far the dish had travelled into ordinary household use, where it could use up yesterday's cooked cereal.