This is Tammy Proctor, and this season on Eating the Past, we are
talking vegetarian cooking, history, and lifestyles. Once again I’d like to
revisit USU’s historic cookbooks in the Merrill-Cazier Library Special
Collections.
So today, I want to feature a very earthy-crunchy 1970s
cookbooks, called the Farm Vegetarian Cookbook, which is part of our
large folklore collection. You can check out the groovy cover and one
recipe from the book our eating the past page on the UPR website.
This book is focused on promoting a vegetarian and local food lifestyle,
and it was written by Louise Hagler, a vegan food advocate who was
partly responsible for popularizing tofu in the United States.
The book follows a number of people living on a communal farm in the
1970s, and the book says that they are a ‘large, longhair spiritual
community” with 750 people, including 250 kids living on 1750 acres.
In other words, a hippie-influenced commune.
This place, the farm community in Tennesee, was founded in 1971 by
Stephen Gaskin, who later founded Plenty international, a nonprofit global
food organization.
The cookbook, first printed in 1975, was republished widely and now its
later edition, the new Farm Vegetarian Cookbook, is a staple for many
vegetarian cooks.
Stephen, who wrote the intro, explains the concept: ‘the thing about our
cookbook is we don’t want to be faddish or cultish or scare people off.
We just honestly want them to know how to make it on vegies, even
somebody who doesn’t particularly have a moral reason for being a
Vegetarian . . .” (p. 1)
In other words, this is vegetarian cooking for the masses, focused around
easy recipes and inexpensive ingredients. That being said, Stephen goes
on to say that they are “absolute vegetarians. We don’t do meat or milk or
eggs or cheese or fish or fowl.”
Today we would call that vegan, so you can see the evolution of the terms – from
absolute vegetarian to vegan.
The book provides recipes for all kinds of dishes, but it also has a really
useful section on making your own vegan versions of common foods. It
explains how to make soy “butter”, soy “cream cheese”, soy mayonnaise,
and soy whipped cream, for instance. (p. 78-9)
There are lots of great recipes here, but I’ll feature just one – tamale pie.
This one calls for “dried field corn”, or what we’d call hominy, cooked in
a pressure cooked with lime, salt and water for an hour. Then you grind
the corn to make a paste. This is not easy as far as I’m concerned, and I’d
be tempted to just buy a bag of masa harina!
But from that point on, the recipe is pretty straightforward. Cook a pot of
pinto beans, sauté onions, and green peppers with tomatoes chili spices
and canned green chiles.
Put this bean mixture into a casserole layered with the ‘corn paste’ and then
bake at 350 degrees for about ½ hour. This is hearty fare to feed a family.
As Stephen says, “this is people food and I know its good for you because we
make it on it!”
