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Nut Loaf (Sub. Meat Dish)
Blanche 1/2 cup each of almonds, pecans, English walnut meats; chop fine; mix well with 2 cups of bread crumbs, 2 tbsp. melted butter, 1 well beaten egg; season with salt to taste, sprig of celery, 1 tsp. onion juice. Add slowly enough boiling water to slightly moisten. Cover and let stand ten minutes. Then add enough more boiling water to make it of a consistency which can be molded into a loaf. Brush with melted butter and brown in a hot oven. Serve with sauce as follows: Tomato sauce-1 pint or 1/2 can tomatoes, 1 slice onion, salt to taste, strain, thicken with 1 tsp. flour, blended with 1 tbsp. butter; add 1 tsp. sugar; serve hot.
— Edith O. Robinson
A meatless loaf from the era when nuts were the standard stand-in for a roast. It is workable but underspecified; the water is added by feel and the oven time is not given at all.
- The hinge is the moistureAdd the boiling water in small amounts and stop as soon as the mixture holds a shape when squeezed. Crumbs keep absorbing during the ten-minute rest, so a mix that looks dry at first will firm up further; too much water and the loaf will not slice.
- "Hot oven"The recipe gives no temperature or time. Period usage for a hot oven runs roughly 400-450F, so around 425F is a fair reading. At that heat expect a hand-formed loaf on a buttered pan to need something like 30 to 40 minutes to set through and brown; a small loaf pan will take longer and gives cleaner slices.
- Blanching the nutsAlmonds are the ones that clearly need it, to slip the skins. Pecan and walnut skins are thinner, though the walnut pellicle can be bitter; toasting them lightly instead does more for the flavor than a water bath.
- "Sprig of celery"Read this as a stalk, chopped fine, or the leaves from the heart. Raw celery will stay crisp in the loaf, so chop it very small or sweat it in the butter first.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a box grater and use the liquid that collects, or press grated onion in a sieve. A small onion will give up a teaspoon or more.
- Bread crumbsDry crumbs are meant here, not fresh ones from a bag; the recipe depends on them drinking up boiling water. Stale bread ground in a processor and dried in a low oven behaves as intended. Packaged fine crumbs also work, adjusting the water by feel.
- The tomato sauceSimmer the tomatoes with the onion slice for about ten minutes before straining, then whisk in the butter-flour paste and cook a minute or two so it does not taste of raw flour. A teaspoon of flour in a pint of tomato gives a very thin sauce; double it if you want it to coat.
- YieldServes four modestly. The loaf is rich but low in bulk, so it wants a starch and a vegetable alongside.
Nut loaves appear across American church and club cookbooks from the 1890s onward, usually labelled as a substitute for meat, and the Philathea class books belong squarely to that world of Protestant women's Bible-study societies that raised funds by printing their members' recipes. Two currents may have met in dishes like this one: the vegetarian cookery promoted by health reformers, and the plain economy of any table where meat was set aside. Nuts were the obvious substitute because they read as both rich and respectable, and the Kellogg sanitarium's nut preparations helped fix the idea in print. The "Sub. Meat Dish" appended to the title says something about how it was understood: not a vegetable course but a stand-in for the roast.