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Aunt Susan's Vegetable Turkey
One pound of bread crumbs, one half pound butter, one half pound of nut meats, one egg, three gills of hot water, sage, salt and pepper to taste; should be highly seasoned; put bread and butter in a chopping bowl, pour over it boiling (or very hot) water, chop very fine, grind nuts, add beaten egg, nuts, season and mix thoroughly, butter a pudding pan, shake around this some bread crumbs, put in mixture and bake one hour or until done. Turn out on a hot platter and serve with brown gravy. Flour browned in butter for the brown sauce: cook together one tablespoonful of butter and one tablespoonful of flour until brown, add one cupful of water, and boil until thickened; season with salt and pepper.
A meatless nut loaf built on the same seasoning logic as turkey stuffing, baked in a pudding pan and turned out whole. The original is generous with fat and vague about oven heat, so a few numbers help.
- Three gills of hot waterA gill is a half cup, so this is 1 1/2 cups. Poured over a pound of crumbs and a half pound of butter it makes a very soft, paste-like mixture; add it gradually and stop when the mass just holds together, or the loaf will not turn out cleanly.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F for the stated hour; the loaf is done when the centre reads about 160F and the edges have pulled from the pan.
- Bread crumbsProbably crumbs from stale bread rather than the fine commercial kind, though the instruction to chop the bread fine in the bowl suggests they may have been fairly coarse. A pound is roughly 4 to 5 cups of dry crumbs. Modern packaged crumbs are drier and finer and will drink more water.
- Butter quantityHalf a pound to a pound of crumbs is two sticks, which is what holds a nut loaf together in the absence of much egg. It can be cut to 5 or 6 tablespoons, but the loaf becomes correspondingly crumbly and drier.
- Nut meatsThe kind is not specified; walnuts, pecans or hazelnuts all suit sage. Grind them fine but stop short of butter, or the loaf turns dense and oily. Half a pound is about 2 cups of nut halves.
- Chopping bowlThe crumbs, butter and hot water were worked together with a chopping knife in a wooden bowl. A food processor pulsed briefly, or a sturdy spoon in a mixing bowl, does the same job; the aim is an even paste with no lumps of butter.
- Season hardThe instruction to season highly is the hinge. Bread, butter and nuts are all mild, and an underseasoned loaf tastes of nothing. Reckon on a teaspoon or more of salt, a full teaspoon of dried sage, and plenty of pepper. Check the seasoning before the beaten egg goes in.
- Turning outButter the pan and dust it with crumbs as directed, then let the baked loaf stand five minutes before inverting. Straight from the oven it is too soft to hold its shape.
- Gravy and yieldThe brown sauce is a plain roux gravy; take the flour and butter to a real hazelnut brown for flavour, since there are no pan drippings. One tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of water makes a thin sauce. No yield is given in the original.
Vegetable turkeys, mock ducks and nut roasts appear in American cookbooks from the 1890s onward, and their arrival in a general household book like this one suggests that vegetarian cookery was moving out of reform circles and into ordinary kitchens. Much of the impetus came from the health-reform movement associated with Battle Creek, Michigan, where nut and cereal preparations were promoted as substitutes for meat; commercial nut butters and gluten products date from the same years. The dish is not an imitation of turkey in taste so much as in role: it is a loaf, sliced at table, sauced with brown gravy, and seasoned with the sage that Anglo-American cooks had long associated with poultry stuffing. The homely attribution to an aunt may have been a way of signalling that a recipe came from a real household rather than a printed source.