So I was looking through a few British and American cookery books from the early years of the modern vegetarian movement, and good lord were their recipes bland. A recipe for pureed lentils in E.E. Kellogg’s Science in the Kitchen, for example, is exactly that: lentils, pureed, without the slightest bit of seasoning (which Mrs. Kellogg deemed too “stimulating,” a reflection of the Kelloggs’ shared terror for the evils of sexual desires they thought stoked by the consumption of anything remotely savory). So I’ve decided to pull instead from my own archives a favorite recipe of my own devising along with a bit of tenuously related history from further afield geographically.
After a few typically tortured years of experimentation with various diets, the Russian author Tolstoy in the latter decades of the nineteenth century began to advocate for ethical vegetarianism. By chance, Tolstoy’s writings ended up in the hands of one Peter Verigen, the leader of the Doukhobors, a minority religious sect that rejected the organizational church, the inspiration of the Bible, and the divinity of Christ, preaching instead a direct, unmediated relationship with the divine. Read more »
