The Battle Creek Diet, Day 2

Posted on February 24, 2009 by Sarah Lohman

Eggs Baked in Cream, I love thee.

Breakfast: Egg Baked in Cream, Whole Wheat Gem, and an Orange.

As I was preparing my baked eggs in cream, I suddenly remembered another reference to this recipe in the book Julie & Julia, the story of a woman who cooks every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It was a favorite dish of the book’s author, and she had referred to it as the perfect hangover cure. I looked up Mrs. Child’s recipe for Oeufs en Cocotte, which was slightly more refined than the one I made. She recommends heating the cream first, then dropping the eggs in, and covering it with more cream and a little butter before putting them in the oven. It’s important to set the egg dish in water, “otherwise the intense heat of the over toughens the outside layers of egg before the inside has cooked…The eggs are done when they are just set but still tremble slightly in the ramekins.”

Child recommends cooking them 7-10 minutes at 375 degrees. I left my eggs in a little long and they got over cooked (the yolk was not as runny as I would have liked) but still tasted AWESOME. When it came out of the oven, I garnished it with more salt and some fresh cracked pepper. The cream and the egg white melded together, and become something that transcended a mere egg to taste like the most creamy egg-like thing in existence. I sopped up the creamy-egg-goo with my whole wheat gem, and slurped the rest off a spoon. After finishing the meal with a perfectly ripe orange, I decided that this might have been the best breakfast EVER.

Lunch: Scalloped Potatoes, String Beans, and Cottage Cheese.

The scalloped potatoes were another huge success: the combination of the onions and the milk gave the potatoes an addictive, sweet flavor, and the butter tied everything together. I was literally licking the bottom of my bowl. I would definitely make this again. Hell, I’d take it to a potluck!

The beans I simply blanched and salted, and the cottage cheese came from a regular old Breakstone’s container.

Dinner: Walnut Roast with Chile Sauce, Mashed Potatoes, Radishes.

My second night of making meatless meat was slightly better than the first. I halved this recipe and I used a seasoned bread crumb. It is important to let it sit in the cream and milk for at least 10 minutes. It coagulates into a surprisingly thick goop. When it came out of the oven (40 minutes at 375 degrees) it poofs up on top and looks all brown and yummy. For the chili sauce, I used tomato paste and thinned with a little water in place of “condensed tomatoes.” It was actually good, just a bit strong. I could have thinned it out a little more. Combined with the Walnut Roast…well, it was okay. I ate about half, but it was kind of intense and weird. I don’t think we have a winner yet.

The were no cooking suggested in Ms. Cooper’s book for mashed potatoes, so I made them the classic way, with some butter and a shot of cream. Ditto with the radishes. I ate them in the French fashion, smeared with butter and sprinkled with salt. The fat cuts the tart bite of the radish, and it’s very tastey.

Walnut Roast. It would be nice to eat a dinner that doesn’t look like kitty catfood barf.

On day two, I have to say that these meals are consistently well rounded. Produce plus a starch plus a protein keep me full and give me energy. And my bowels are immaculate!

The Battle Creek Diet, Day 1: Lunch and Dinner

Posted on February 23, 2009 by Sarah Lohman

Asparagus Tips on Toast

Lunch: Asparagus Tips on Toast, Baked Potato, Yogurt

The asparagus was a perfect little snack. I prepared it a little differently than the original recipe: I threw some butter in a skillet, put a slice of bread in there to toast it grilled-cheese style, and nestled the asparagus along side, with a little salt and freshly cracked pepper. Bread toasted, asparagus bright green and ready, I stacked them up and poured the butter left in the skillet over top. It was tasty: the buttery, crunchy sweetness of the bread with the slight bitter bite of the asparagus: yum. I’ll be serving this at the dinner party, but with a hollandaise to kick it up a notch.

I rounded out the meal with a baked potato and a vanilla yogurt for desert–nothing special, store bought. I did not make my yogurt from scratch. It was a well-portioned, delicious meal.

Dinner: Protose Steak and Baked Eggplant.

My first mistake: for some reason, I decided I did not need to follow the given instructions for baked eggplant. Victorians are notorious for over-boiling their veggies, so I assumed I didn’t need to pre-cook the eggplant. I didn’t, and it was still pretty raw when I took it out the oven. I’m going to try this recipe again, and follow directions.

Next, I took the Protose out of the fridge (for more on how I made it, check here). It was surprising firm after mellowing a day in the cold. I threw a tablespoon of butter in a skillet and began to brown some onions. After a minute or so, I sliced the protose and set that in the skillet to brown. After it was brown on both sides, I added a little flour and cream to make a sauce with the onions.

The result? It tasted like peanut butter. I didn’t spit it out, I ate it, but it was not…”good.” It will not be appearing on my Banquet menu in March.

My protose sizzles in a skillet with onions.

Kellogg originally developed meat-like products to lure plump turn-of-the-century millionaires to his diet and his Sanitarium. This is where I feel his cuisine, and all vegetarian cuisine begins to go wrong. I love vegetarian cuisine. Flavourful beans, grains and vegetables–delicious! However, I think it should stand alone and not try to reproduce the taste and mouth feel of meat. It’s always either disgusting or disappointing; and if you’re a vegetarian, why would you want to feel like you’re eating meat anyway?Overall, it was a pretty good day. The food was better than tolerable, and in a few cases lovely. However, I think I ate about a half a stick of butter, which is more butter than I’ve consumed in about the last 6 months. I feel greasy.

UPDATE 01/22/2012: I made protose tonight for the second time in my life, and I have to say its pretty damn delicious. I used fresh ground peanut butter from whole foods, got a different brand of seitan, and was heavy handed with the seasoning. I recommend this recipe if you’re a veg or vegan.

The Battle Creek Diet, Day 1: Breakfast

Posted on February 23, 2009 by Sarah Lohman

Whole wheat gems.

For the next five days, I’m going to be immersing myself in the food of John Harvey Kellogg and the Battle Creek Sanitarium. All of the meals I’ve planned and the recipes I will be using come from The New Cookery be Lenna Francis Cooper (1914), who was at one time the head dietitian at Battle Creek.

Breakfast
Whole Wheat Gems, Hashed Brown Potatoes, Pineapple, and Tea.

Although I work from home, I don’t ordinarily bounce out of bed and fix myself a hearty breakfast. It ended up not taking that much time, and it felt like it could be a pleasant ritual. It also felt good to sit down to my first biologic meal. I can feel my intestines being cleansed already!

To make whole wheat gems, replace the grahams flour in the recipe with 1 cup whole wheat flour. A gem tin is essentially a cast-iron mini muffin pan, which, when greasy and hot, makes the gems extra crispy. I didn’t have a gem pan, so I made these into drop biscuits by adding a 1/4 cup less milk. I baked them for 9 minutes in a 450 degree oven. They didn’t take much time to mix up, and came out cute as buttons. They tasted alright–the sweetness was pleasing, but you could really taste the whole-granieness. I think they will be better tomorrow toasted and smeared with jelly.

The hashed browned potatoes were the most difficult thing I made this morning. I only used one potatoes, and cut it into cubes. I originally baked them in a pan lined in tin foil, but when I took them out after 10 minutes they were sticking, and the brown crispy parts were tearing off. So I plucked them off the pan, burning my finger badly in the process, and dropped them into a non-stick skillet. I added the milk and popped them back into the oven, stirring after an additional five minutes. All in all, they cooked about 18 minutes. The potatoes mostly absorbed the milk, and there was also this crispy milk skin. They were pretty tasty, but I don’t think you can go very wrong with potatoes, salt and butter.

I also cut up a fresh, sweet, heavenly pineapple and had a mug of herbal tea. Kellogg forbade caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco at the San; a few rules which we will ignore at the dinner party next month.

History Dish Mondays: Protose

Posted on February 22, 2009 by Sarah Lohman

So the big week is finally here: I’ve decided to spend the next five days immersing myself in the diet of the Battle Creek Sanitarium and John Harvey Kellogg. I’m not sure what to tell you to expect–either the delightful world of vegetarian cuisine, or another week of torture comparable to the Tenement Diet.

Protose is one of J. H. Kellog’s invented meat substitutes. I currently have it on my menu for the Dinner on the Road to Wellville party in March. I’m skeptical that it’s not horrible, so I want to give it a try in advance, so that i have time to come up with a suitable replacement, if necessary.

Protose was manufactured by the Kellogg/Worthington company until about 2000; since it was discontinued, there seems to be an online group of hard-core vegans trying to recreated it’s special taste and texture. While searching for a suitable recipe, I came across this fascinating recollection of one man’s experience with the cuisine of J.H, Kellogg:

“Protose. What does that conjure up for me?

You’d never guess.

The three most trusted people that Dr. J.H. Kellogg had working for him were three unmarried sisters: Gertrude, his chief administrator and executor of his will; Angie his chief dietitians; and Mable his chief nurse and the one person who accompanied Kellogg to Ontario to attend the Dion quintuplets.

By the mid-1950’s, the doctor long dead, the three unmarried sisters now running the Sanitarium in Miami Springs would spend the summers back up in Battle Creek at their farm in the country.

My grandfather was the brother to these three sisters and, dying young, my own father was raised by the sisters and Dr. Kellogg.

During the summers we would visit them three or four times for a weekend and invariably one of the meals was the most delicious “roast” made out of Protose. Once you’ve had it, especially the way they prepared it, you were hooked.”

I can’t confirm whether the story is true, but fascinating none the less.

After further research, I came up with this recipe:

***

Protose
Original Recipe from a post on Vegan Food
With variations suggested by Chowhound.com and Ellen’s Kitchen

1/2 cup creamy, natural peanut butter
1 cup wheat gluten (seitan)
1 c vegetable stock
2 T cornstarch
1/2 a medium onion, chopped
1 tsp Italian herb blend
Pinch of salt

Steam in top of a double boiler for three hours, stirring occasionally. Let cool in the pan, turn out on platter and slice.

***

Seitan, if you were wondering, is a vegan food product invented by Buddhist monks in China. You take wheat dough and wash it under water until nothing remains but the gluten. It’s very high in protein, but it also looks like this:

I tasted a tiny bit of it out of the bag. It had a bizarre taste I wasn’t expecting: like burnt maple syrup. Very unappealing.

I buzzed the seitan in a food processor and mixed it up with all the other ingredients. I found out I didn’t have corn starch, so I ended using flour instead. I used McCormick’s Italian Herb Grinder for the seasoning. I took a tiny taste of the mixed ingredients and it tasted like…peanut butter with Italian seasoning.

I set it on a double boiler, and it looked done after about two hours. I flipped it out of the mold and it looked pretty unappealing. I’m preparing it in a dish for dinner today, so we’ll see how that goes. But I have a feeling I’m going to end up taking this one off the menu.