Borscht

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.

Cinnamon and Sugar Parsnips

As fascinating as the image may be of portly, bewigged dudes sitting around coffee shops being witty, I confess that as an English major I never found the literature of the “long eighteenth century” particularly interesting. But it did, admittedly, produce some of the most colorful characters of British history: A contemporary and frequent correspondent with Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn was a noted bibliophile, diarist, and gardener, and became in his elder years one of the first in early modern Europe to advocate for a diet of “wholsome Vegatables.” His book Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets, both a compendium of horticultural lore and manual for vegetarian cookery, was written in part as a corrective to the current and unhealthful vogue for red meat (and, not unlikely, for the associated problem of the aforementioned portliness among the gentlemanly class).

I followed here Evelyn’s description of the preparation of parsnips, substituting a non-hydrogenated vegan-friendly margarine for butter, and dusting the finished product with a two-to-one mixture of sugar and cinnamon: “Take the large Roots, boil them, and strip the Skin: Then slit them long-ways into pretty thin Slices; Flower and fry them in fresh Butter till they look brown. The sauce is other sweet Butter melted. Some strow Sugar and Cinamon upon them. Thus you may accomodate other Roots.”