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Nut and Cheese Loaf
1 tablespoon chopped onion
1 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon fat
¼ teaspoon paprika
1 cup grated cheese
1½ tablespoons lemon-juice
1 cup chopped nuts
½ teaspoon Worcestershire
½ cup milk sauce
1 cup cooked cereal
Buttered crums
1 teaspoon salt
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.
EGG DISHES
The ingredient list was set in two columns and has run together in transcription; read it as onion, fat, cheese, nuts, milk, salt, sugar, paprika, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, cooked cereal and buttered crumbs. Once untangled it is a straightforward baked nut loaf of the kind meatless cookery leaned on for a century.
- The binder is the hinge"1 cup cooked cereal" means leftover breakfast porridge - rolled oats, cracked wheat, hominy or rice, cooked and cooled until stiff. It is what holds the loaf together, so it must be thick rather than soupy; a slack cereal gives a mixture that will not slice.
- Buttered crumsDry breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly 1/2 cup crumbs to 1 tablespoon butter. They brown and crisp on top; fresh soft crumbs will steam instead.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. A moderate oven, 350-375F, for 25-35 minutes will heat the mixture through and colour the crumbs. Everything in the loaf is already cooked, so you are browning, not baking raw.
- Vessel and yieldA shallow greased baking dish or a small loaf pan holds this well. It makes about four modest servings as a main dish; a shallow dish gives more crumb surface, a loaf pan gives neater slices but needs the longer end of the time.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" in this period means a firm dry American or Cheddar-type cheese. Anything young and wet will make the mixture greasy and loose; a well-aged Cheddar is closest in behaviour.
- NutsWalnuts, pecans and peanuts were all common in American cookery of the period, and the recipe asks for them chopped rather than ground to paste. Toasting them briefly before mixing sharpens the flavour, which the recipe otherwise carries only with paprika, lemon and Worcestershire.
- Moisten with milkThe half cup is a ceiling, not a requirement. Add it gradually until the mixture just holds together - the amount needed depends entirely on how dry the cereal and cheese are.
- WorcestershireNote that most commercial Worcestershire sauce contains anchovy, so the dish is vegetarian in the older sense of meatless rather than in the modern sense.
Nut loaves like this one belong to the wave of American vegetarian cookery that came out of the health-reform and Seventh-day Adventist sanatorium kitchens of the late nineteenth century, where nuts and cheese were promoted as a protein substitute for meat. By the time this recipe was collected the idea had drifted well beyond reform circles into ordinary household books, where meatless dishes served Lenten menus and plain economy as much as any principle. The construction - a cooked starch, a fat-and-protein element, a savoury seasoning and a browned crumb top - is the standard scaffold for the genre; the recipe closes by directing that it be served with tomato sauce and something crisp such as celery.