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Nut Loaf
2 cups soft bread-crums
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups chopped nut-meats
1 teaspoon paprika
Soak bread-crums in milk, add nuts, slightly beaten eggs and seasonings. Turn into greased bread-pan, set in pan of water and bake forty minutes. Serve with tomato sauce. The loaf may be steamed instead of baked.
A plain custard-bound nut loaf of the sort that carried early vegetarian cookery. The original gives no oven temperature and no yield, so both need filling in.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits a custard-bound loaf baked in a water bath, and forty minutes at that heat should be about right for an ordinary loaf pan; the original offers no guidance either way.
- The water bath is the pointThis is a savoury custard held together by two eggs, not a meatloaf. Set the loaf pan in a larger pan and pour in boiling water to come halfway up the sides; direct dry heat curdles the egg and the loaf turns grainy and weeps.
- Soft bread-crumbsFresh crumbs torn or grated from a day-old loaf, not the dry sandy kind sold in canisters. Dry crumbs absorb far more milk and give a dense, pasty loaf; if that is all you have, use about half the quantity.
- "Bread-pan"A standard loaf tin, roughly 8x4 or 9x5 inches. The mixture is loose when it goes in and firms as the egg sets.
- The nutsThe recipe specifies only "nut-meats"; walnuts or pecans suit it, as would almonds or peanuts, both common in vegetarian cookery of the period. Chop by hand to a coarse rubble rather than grinding to meal. Two cups is a generous amount of fat and the loaf is rich; toasting the nuts first is not in the original but sharpens an otherwise mild dish.
- PaprikaAt this period paprika in American kitchens generally meant a mild, sweet pepper used as much for colour as for heat. A teaspoon of modern sweet paprika is fine; hot or smoked varieties will dominate everything else.
- DonenessA knife or skewer in the centre should come out clean and the loaf should feel set rather than liquid at the middle. Let it stand ten minutes before turning out or it will break.
- SteamingThe alternative given at the end means covering the pan and setting it over simmering water. The original gives no time, and steaming will run longer than the forty minutes allowed for baking. The result is paler and more delicate, with no browned crust.
- YieldFour modest servings as a main course with the tomato sauce, six if it is one dish among several. It slices cold the next day better than it reheats.
Nut loaves like this one belong to the wave of vegetarian cookery that spread through American and British households in the last decades of the nineteenth century, pushed along by health reformers, Seventh-day Adventist food work and the sanitarium kitchens that produced so many nut butters and nut preparations. The idea was straightforwardly substitutional: a loaf shaped in a bread tin, sliced at table and served with a sauce, occupying the place on the plate where a roast would have been. The binding here is period technique: bread soaked in milk with beaten egg, baked in a water bath, the same method used for savoury puddings and timbales throughout the era.