Vegan recipes without modern or Asian ingredients?

December 12, 2009 1:28 PM

Where can I find vegan recipes, especially for baked goods, that don't use modern ingredients like margarine and egg replacer, or Asian ingredients like soy milk and tofu?
posted by archagon to Food & Drink (10 answers total)

Some recipes can use flax seed as an egg replacer (see here). Likewise with bananas.

Canola oil can sub in for butter/margarine nicely. The milk part is a little more difficult -- is something like almond or rice milk too modern for you?

Your best bet may be to find regular vegan recipes and convert them -- I know that most of Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero's recipes don't usually use margarine (at least in their cupcake book -- don't know about the cookie one) nor egg replacer.

Is there a specific reason you're looking for these recipes? Or a specific type of baked good you're looking for? I may be able to help more if I know why.
posted by darksong at 2:00 PM on December 12, 2009

seconding the MOskowrz books - they are wonderful. This one is great as well.
posted by wocka wocka wocka at 2:12 PM on December 12, 2009

Not for baked goods, but I notice that a lot of accidentally vegan recipes for vegetable side dishes fit your criteria--bean salads, soups, roasted vegetable dishes, etc. that just happen to not contain animal products or have easy-to-omit animal product ingredients (i.e., skip the cheese on top or use veggie broth instead of chicken). So, I'd look at basic cookbooks or cooking blogs and scale up the recipes from side dish portions to meal-sized portions (Smitten Kitchen and SimplyRecipes are my go-to basic cooking blogs).
posted by Meg_Murry at 2:18 PM on December 12, 2009

I also should have mentioned that I don't like substitutions or recipe conversions.
posted by archagon at 3:13 PM on December 12, 2009

I used to have some older cookbooks that fitted the criteria you mention, put out by the UK vegan society back in the day when there weren't the substitutions. Unfortunately can't think up the names, because one was really good, but that line of thinking and the subsequent googling got me to this, which is apparently the first vegan cookbook published in the UK in 1910 or thereabouts (link's to a digital version of a US reprint) and has some (admittedly very sparse on the instructions it seems) recipes for biscuits, puddings, bread and cakes.
posted by Abiezer at 4:01 PM on December 12, 2009

have you been to the vegancooking community on livejournal? There's thousands of recipes there that are tagged and searchable, and you could also join and ask this question there - you're sure to get lots of results.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 4:03 PM on December 12, 2009

Almond milk was used extensively in medieval cooking, so I can't call that 'modern'. :)
posted by sandraregina at 4:44 PM on December 12, 2009

Helen Nearing's Simple Food for the Good Life sounds like what you seek. It's partly a cookbook and partly philosophical essays on food and eating. A few recipes (very few -- I could only find one on perusal of my copy) use dairy products but generally it's veggies all the way. I particularly like the Super Supper Soup, whose ingredients are dried beans, oil, onions/leeks, potatoes, celery, carrots, turnips, garlic and some herbs.
posted by mmw at 7:40 PM on December 12, 2009

The only thing I can think of is what sandraregina mentions - I have medieval reconstruction cookbooks, like 'Pleyn Delit', which have vegan recipes for fasting days. They do make a lot of use of almonds.
posted by cobaltnine at 6:38 AM on December 13, 2009

Here's another depression-era cake. It's chocolate. We used to make this all the time as kids - it's great.
posted by CathyG at 6:00 PM on December 13, 2009