Author Archives: Mark

I was looking for a conversation-piece appetizer to take to a happy-hour potluck recently and decided that curry balls from a cookbook published by Thomas Richard Allinson in London in 1915 would fit the bill. Whether the curry balls—simple, flavored … Continue reading →

I recently tried out a vintage recipe on an unsuspecting crowd of partygoers: a Brazil nut curry sauce from Mrs. E. W. Bowdich’s  New Vegetarian Dishes, published in London in 1892. I’d never made it before and couldn’t guess how it … Continue reading →

Hotch potch, according to the Oxford English dictionary, is a “mutton stew with mixed vegetables.” Its name, says Oxford, the leading authority on British English, is derived from the middle English word for “blending together” that gave us modern English … Continue reading →

I talked about my book, Vintage Vegetarian Cuisine, at a recent event at the Big Blue Marble bookstore in the Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. The intrepid group of attendees were treated – challenged, would be another way to put it … Continue reading →

John Kellogg, whose family was made famous by cornflakes, had a bizarre obsession with sex. The most abominable sexual practice of all, in his view, was masturbation. That was a major a focus of a best-selling book about child-rearing that … Continue reading →

I’m pretty sure a cookbook published in Tennessee in 1935 was the first English language book to carry a recipe that called tofu “tofu.” The book, Food for Life, The Art and Science of Preparing Food, published by the Nashville Agricultural … Continue reading →

Two cookbooks published in London in the early 1890s were written for vegetarian homemakers who were facing the challenge of cooking for carnivores. The authors of the two books, E.W. Bowdich and Arthur Gay Payne, had some similar ideas about … Continue reading →

This is one of the appetizers I served at a dinner party recently, based on a suggestion from a raw-food advocate named George J. Drews. In 1912, he published a cookbook in Chicago, which seemed to be something of a hotbed … Continue reading →

According to Mrs. E.W. Bowdich, no legume was more nutritious than the haricot bean. Three dozen of the recipes in her cookbook, New Vegetarian Dishes, which was published in London in 1892, used haricot beans in one form or another. One of them, … Continue reading →