Mr. Shaw’s Vegetable Goose

Famous playwright, vegetarian, and cantankerous old bastard George Bernard Shaw was a critic of a great many things, not the most trivial of which, for my purposes here at least, was his disdain for vegetarian faux-meats, “such weak concessions to the enemy as ‘vegetable rabbit,’ ‘vegetable sausage,’ and the like.”

Nonetheless, there was one vegetable beast of which he approved: “‘Vegetable goose’ is, however, to be commended when in season. It is simply a vegetable marrow with sage stuffing and apple sauce.” So, as a particular fan of cantankerous old bastards, I offer my attempt at vegetable goose with a caramelized onion, pecan, and sage stuffing. I made this with two massive zucchinis picked from our garden, but any squash ought to do, though you may need to adjust the cooking time accordingly:

Caramelized Onion Quiche

I won’t pretend that the above has anything to do with history, not yet at least. It’s a tester recipe for a forthcoming book by Isa Chandra Moskowitz, using tofu and other ingredients to substitute for the traditional egg. But the quiche itself actually does go back quite a way, to the medieval kingdom of Lotharingia, roughly corresponding to the region of Lorraine in modern-day France (hence, quiche Lorraine). In the English-speaking world, the word quiche itself doesn’t appear in the language until the early twentieth century, but instructions for egg-based tarts appear as early as the fourteenth, in Forme of Cury, a manual of cookery for the court of Richard II. Medieval quiches appear to have been typically more heavily spiced, slightly sweetened, and often mixed with chopped beef marrow or pork. When I feel sufficiently motivated, I might just have to whip up some seitan and make a mock-medieval version…

Lentil Cakes

Modern vegetarianism as an organized movement, oddly enough, derives historically not from the self-flagellating liberal middle class with whom many associate it today, but rather, from nineteenth-century working-class radicals in England’s industrialized north. The first official vegetarian society (apart from the short-lived and awkwardly named British and Foreign Society for the Promotion of Humanity and Abstinence from Animal Food) was founded in 1847 by activists in Salford, England. The movement took off, and by 1914, there was a vegetarian society in nearly every country of Europe. Hell, in 1908, there was even an International Union of Vegetarian Esperantists, who advocated vegetarianism and … Esperanto. I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Anyway, back to the lentil cakes: By the early 1900s, and well before the founding of the Vegan Society in 1944, several members of the UK Vegetarian Society had already begun questioning the ethics of egg and dairy consumption. From this discussion was born the first vegan cookbook, although the word vegan itself had not yet been coined: In the year 1910 appeared the cookbook No Animal Food by Rupert H. Wheldon, who, after filling almost half the volume with preachy advocacy for a diet completely free of animal products, finally got around to providing a few recipes. After the fold is my updated version of Wheldon’s original recipe for lentil cakes.