1 week Ago
Holiday roasts from the Portland Food Co-op. Courtesy of the Portland Food Co-op The Thanksgiving email from the Portland Food Co-op featured six types of plant-based holiday roasts this year. Such abundance got me thinking about the 1980s, when vegetarians either cobbled together our own Thanksgiving roasts or served a baked, stuffed squash as a centerpiece.
How did we get here? The origins of vegetarian Thanksgiving date way back to the mid-19th century. Yet even before the first vegetable turkey was ever roasted, vegetarians had split into two camps. One favors bringing veggie dishes to Thanksgiving.
The other condemns the annual feast altogether. Both have shaped the vegetarian version of the holiday: the critics by encouraging lighter fare and a focus on gratitude, and the joiners by developing the recipes. Nationally famous back-to-the-land leader (and Mainer) Helen Nearing was a critic.
In her 1980 vegetarian cookbook “Simple Food for the Good Life,” she wrote that on Thanksgiving “when housewives are toiling and overfed eaters are stuffing, Scott (her husband Scott Nearing) and I give a vacation to the stomach and to the cook by going without solid food, just drinking water or juices.” While few others take that extreme ascetic approach, she was far from the first vegetarian to criticize or offer alternatives to the conventional Thanksgiving menu. Before 1863, when it became a national holiday, Thanksgiving was an irregular feast observed primarily in New England.
When Maine’s governor declared Nov. 16, 1848 Thanksgiving, vegetarian publisher Jeremiah Hacker wrote in his Pleasure Boat newspaper about false gratitude, rampant gluttony and animal cruelty among those celebrating. After the Thanksgiving proclamation of 1859, Hacker wrote of the tendency for holiday guests to “gorge themselves to such a degree that doctors can get no rest, day nor night for a week.
” Dr. Reuben D. Mussey (a one-time professor at the Medical School of Maine and the fourth president of the American Medical Association) would say much the same in his 1862 vegetarian book “Health: Its Friends and Its Foes.
” Thanksgiving and Christmas, he wrote, regularly make “extra work for the physician, if not the undertaker.” The idea of a vegetarian Thanksgiving had entered the American imagination by this time. In 1869, the editorial staff at the newspaper in Evansville, Indiana, joked about the gift of unusual vegetable specimens, including “a huge beet (with drumsticks!) that bears a remarkable resemblance to a dressed turkey.
” In 1875, readers of a Maryland newspaper contributed tales of curious vegetables, including “a large red sweet potato of a peculiar shape, resembling ...
a turkey.” Noting that the sweet potato was grown in a local brickyard, the writer joked that the yard “produces vegetable turkeys as well as bricks.” If mainstream Americans in the 1860s were laughing about the idea of vegetable turkeys, it seems likely vegetarians of the time were already roasting vegetables and calling them turkeys.
VEGETABLE TURKEYS RISE But it wasn’t until 1891 that a recipe first appears. That summer, the Western Rural and American Stockman newspaper in Chicago shared a recipe for “A Vegetable Turkey” sourced from “a magazine which advocates an exclusively vegetable diet.” The turkey was formed from bread, butter, nuts, one egg, sage and other seasoning, and the recipe was reprinted in newspapers throughout the country.
Just before Christmas that same year, The Boston Globe published a holiday dinner menu featuring Aunt Susan’s Vegetable Turkey from “a popular vegetarian journal.” The menu also listed lentil soup, rice-lentil cutlets, mashed potatoes, Graham gems and bread plum pudding. But not all vegetarians were interested in vegetable turkey.
In 1892, influential vegetarian recipe developer Ella E. Kellogg (wife of breakfast cereal inventor Dr. John Harvey Kellogg) published her cookbook “Science in the Kitchen,” joining the growing push to change the holiday.
She supplied two vegetarian Thanksgiving menus: One includes stuffed potatoes, succotash, Graham puffs and pumpkin pie; the second, vegetable oyster soup, roasted sweet potatoes, parsnip celery stew and boiled wheat with raisins. Neither suggests a vegetable turkey. Likewise, when the University of Chicago’s Vegetarian Society hosted its first Thanksgiving banquet in 1895, the Chicago Tribune reported that the menu included chestnut soup, mushroom filled pastries and cranberry tarts, but no vegetable turkey.
Newspapers across the country reported on the event. A vegetarian Thanksgiving menu from the 1904 community cookbook “The Raisin Center Cook Book.” The menu was originally published four years earlier in Good Housekeeping magazine.
The Raisin Center Cook Book Over the years, vegetarian or vegetable turkeys (they eventually went by both names) were made from a great variety of ingredients, ranging from bread crumbs, lentils, vegetables, breakfast cereal to nuts of all types and even peanut butter. They were sometimes shaped like the bird and sometimes baked in a loaf pan. In 1904, for instance, a community cookbook from California, “The Raisin Center Cook Book,” supplied two recipes for vegetable turkey.
Both call for boiled chestnuts, one mixing them with cooked turnips, carrots, potatoes, butter and cream; the other with eggplant, butter, onions and bread crumbs. The earliest known American to market vegetable turkeys was Carl Rasmusson, the proprietor of a vegetarian restaurant in New York City. He advertised Vegetarian Turkey Roasts in 1901 for 20-cents each.
In 1906, The Evening Star in Washington, D.C. published a vegetarian Thanksgiving menu along with what may be the era’s most elaborate recipe for a vegetarian turkey.
Layers of white “meat” (cooked rice, mashed potatoes, bread crumbs, nuts, eggs and onions) and dark “meat” (lentils, lima beans, bread crumbs, walnuts, tomatoes, eggs, onions, nut butter and seasonings) were shaped around a mound of stuffing. Uncooked pasta was used to mimic turkey legs. Vegetable turkey often went by other names.
It became a Golden-Rule Roast when the vegetarian Millennium Guild held its Thanksgiving dinner in 1913 at the Copley Hotel in Boston. In 1934, the Battle Creek Enquirer reported that the city’s famous health spa was serving Protose turkey for Thanksgiving, made with the plant-based meat sold by Dr. Kellogg’s Battle Creek Sanitarium.
The name “mock turkey” also popped up sporadically, including in the 1909, “Mrs. Rorer’s Vegetable Cookery and Meat Substitutes.” NUT ROASTS & TOFU TURKEYS After the Great Depression and World War II, vegetarianism faded from public view, not to re-emerge until the tumultuous 1960s.
In his syndicated column in 1968 about U.S. persecution of Native Americans, comedian Dick Gregory wrote, “It was the violence of the Thanksgiving dinner table that made me a vegetarian.
” Cookbooks in the 1960s and ’70s offered many ideas for vegetarian Thanksgiving, including Freya Dinshah’s 1965 “The Vegan Kitchen,” with multiple recipes for nut roasts; and Frank and Rosalie Hurd’s 1968 “Ten Talents” cookbook, with recipes for Thanksgiving chestnut croquettes and a Thanksgiving roast. The Thanksgiving centerpiece in Anna Thomas’s popular 1972 “The Vegetarian Epicure” was “crisp Almond Croquettes bathed in creamy Béchamel sauce, accompanied by Cranberry-Cumberland Sauce and Potatoes in Wine.” The roasted squash centerpiece joked about in the 1860s returned at this time.
Recipes for such are in the 1976 “Laurel’s Kitchen,” and Martha Rose Shulman’s 1979 “The Vegetarian Feast.” Shulman’s baked Great Vegetarian Turkey assembled an elaborate stuffing from lentils, brown rice, sunflower seeds, bread crumbs and broccoli and placed it inside a hollowed squash. By 1978, a new dish had emerged, when the owner of the Tofu Shop in Telluride, Colorado, roasted a large block of tofu for Thanksgiving, calling it a tofu turkey.
By the following year, the all-vegetarian Cafe Mendocino in Miami was among restaurants serving it. In 1980 Bar Harbor-based Island Works Tofu shared its recipe for baked tofurkey, mounding stuffing on a baking sheet, surrounding it with marinated tofu strips and shaping it into a turkey with carrot drumsticks. In this clipping from the Lewiston Daily Sun in December 1982, Ulla Hansen places a vegetarian turkey in the oven at the Poland Spring Health Institute.
Lewiston Daily Sun During the 1980s, Maine newspapers were filled with stories about home-cooked vegetarian Thanksgivings. In 1982, The Lewiston Sun Journal ran a photo of Ulla Hansen placing a vegetable turkey in the oven at the Poland Spring Health Institute, which held public vegetarian Thanksgiving dinners in the 1980s and 1990s. By the early 1990s, chef Miyoko Schinner was selling The Unturkey.
She published her complicated recipe — it involves homemade seitan, yuba (soy milk skin), mushroom stuffing and vegetarian gravy — in her 1991 cookbook “The Now and Zen Epicure.” (The Unturkey recipe in Schinner’s 2021 “The Vegan Meat Cookbook” occupies six pages.) Though sold nationwide, Unturkeys never achieved a major commercial breakthrough.
That would happen in 1995 with the launch and national success of rival brand Tofurky . After the swift rise of Tofurky, recipes for plant-based Thanksgiving centerpieces mostly disappear from vegetarian cookbooks for a time. Such vegetarian Thanksgiving recipes begin to reemerge during the 2010s.
Now, 15 years later, we’ve come full circle, with vegetarians opting for stuffed squashes, store-bought roasts or homemade vegetable turkeys for their tables. For this abundance of nonviolent, tasty choices, I am truly thankful. TALK WHAT? A free, virtual talk on the history of vegetarian Thanksgiving WHO? Hosted by The Vegan Museum in Chicago with Tofurky founder Seth Tibbott.
Guest appearance from Vegan Kitchen columnist Avery Yale Kamila. WHEN: 8 p.m.
, Thursday Tickets: givebutter.com/Talking-Veggie-Turkey Avery Yale Kamila is a food writer who lives in Portland. Reach her at avery.
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