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COOKBOOK ARCHAEOLOGY
by Herman Thrust
As Brillat-Savarin said (and the folks on Iron Chef repeated), “tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are.” Today we’re going back in time to learn about a previous generation of vegetarians, but we’re not too concerned about what they ate as much as we are what they cooked and how they cooked it.
We’re reviewing Gar Shu Vegetarian Cookbook by someone named Sanctilean. It was published in 1957, and I somehow suspect it’s been long out of print, so consider this a game you can play along with at home – all you need to do is find an old vegetarian cookbook, preferably one published around the time that your parents were teenagers. This way, if your parents aren’t vegetarian, you can get to understand some of the reasons they think you eat like a freak, and if they are vegetarian, you can gain a greater sense of awed respect for what they had to deal with back in the day. It’s also helpful to find a book with a spiral binding, because, well, these bindings last longer, which means that the pages are less likely to have fallen out, so when you see a passage that spreads between pages like “Bush is the devil,” you’ll know it’s not just a funny coincidental pairing of “Bush leaves are fragrant” and, say, “Karl Rove is the devil.”
As long as your “home game” book fits our loose criteria, you should be fine. The discoveries we’re about to make have been tested on enough old veggie cookbooks that they’ve become universal truths.
Once we’ve picked these truths out, we’ll be able to extrapolate some glimpses into the future, or at least some hopes on how our grandchildren will view the vegan cookbooks of the early 21st century. Ready? Here we go…
In the past: vegetarian cookbook authors were really lazy.
We know this because: the recipes aren’t trying very hard to be vegetarian. Our test book is filled with recipes for salads and soups, and the rest is desserts. I don’t know if bacon and spare ribs were a common feature in the cookies of the olden days, but it doesn’t strike me as particularly hard to come up with a vegetarian cookbook if all you do is take a really big cookbook and rip out all of the recipes with meat in them.
In the future: people will look upon the books of today and think, well, that vegetarian cookbook authors were really lazy. Ideally, this will be because everything’s vegetarian, and without a healthy dose of respect for the past, nobody would realize that it’s hard to come up with recipes for mock chicken salad. Of course, I’ve seen too many present-day mock chicken salad recipes that consist of equal parts mock chicken and mock mayonnaise, so maybe that lazy label will be hard to shake no matter what the future looks like.
In the past: vegetarians liked to annotate.
We know this because: there’s a ton of handwritten marks in our book, and there probably are in yours as well. The only way that a vegetarian cookbook of a sufficient age has survived as long as it has is because someone used it. Someone used it actively, and someone felt that it was worth keeping out of the trashcan. While recipes don’t necessarily expire, themed collections sure do go out of style. These books are long out of print, and there’s no way you’re holding a brand new copy. It’s almost guaranteed (as far as a universal truth can take you) that your book has a bunch of writing in it, probably from more than a few hands.
Stars and comments appear next to recipes. Adjustments are made to the ingredient amounts. Somewhat troublingly, words are underlined, seemingly at random. I read recently about an art group in Chicago that placed 100 homemade books on public library shelves. I have a theory that the underlined words, if isolated and sequenced properly, would provide a deep and meaningful message, but the thought Scares Me, and I leave this task to archaeologists who wear hats and fear snakes. The message, if it did exist, would have to be pretty damned wordy. For the brevity’s sake, here’s the collection of words that aren’t underlined on page 5 alone:
“The prehistoric word means in garden. The ultimate in purity of diet is which grow The ultimate in purity of drinks is and All The food prescribed within the Gar Shu Dietary consists wholly (without exception) of what grows from to and from to.”
So very, very deep.
In the future: people will still write in their books, and they’ll probably still use secret codes to pass on messages. In fact, the opportunities have never been more available, even with the limited technologies we have today. Remember the joke in the Simpson’s episode about Paul McCartney hiding a recipe for Lentil Soup in a song? With Kazaa or Napster 5 or whatever people are using these days to trade music, anything can be a cookbook, and probably is. Haven’t you ever wondered why that pirated version of Hey Ya! always makes you crave chick pea salad with swiss chard?
In the past: vegetarian food was very different than it is today.
We know this because: there are many many references to things that sound like they might be food products, but if I were to ask for any of them at the local grocery store, I’d easily perpetuate the stereotypes held by the carnivorous majority.
Of course, my historical ignorance is showing here. For example, what’s a “veelet”? All I know is that it’s something you serve with tartar sauce. There is also a recipe that calls for “6 slices of protein,” and something called “Soyamel.”
It’s possible that these people didn’t have the “benefits” of globalization, and “shop locally” wasn’t just a nice idea, it was the only thing people could do. Maybe the Soyamel factory was three blocks down from the cookbook publishing house. Maybe people just couldn’t get things like eggplants or chick peas back then. Hell, we put vinegar on our French fries in Canada, and it’s going to take a good while before that idea spreads South, even with the internet and FedEx.
In the future: we’re faced with two possibilities. In what we’ll call Evil future, all cookbooks will be meaningless because so many plant species will have been wiped out due to rampant strains of genetically modified crab grass (animal-based cookbooks will have similar problems with extinction). In Good future, people won’t have any trouble finding the products mentioned in today’s cookbooks because they’ll be all that people eat. Hey, we never said how far we’re going into the future! In fact, the real puzzle may be over comments like “this tastes a lot like chicken,” because people will figure that’s just a sick joke, like “this tastes a lot like grandma.” Let’s take a moment to be thankful that the grandma phrase never showed up in the books of the past, shall we?
There you have it. While you may never need to decipher an ancient vegan cooking text to save the world from Nazis or find the Grail, hopefully you’ll find enough entertainment and insight to make up for the fact that all of the recipes you try from your garage sale score never really turn out properly because you’re substituting vegan donuts 1:1 for that Soyamel stuff. *