Vegetarian cooking, summer meal tips from the New York Tribune

One hundred years ago today … the Sunday New York Tribune weighed in at 68 pages. Its Section IV, “Society and Fashion,” included a page titled “The Tribune Institute: Housekeeping as a Profession.” The July 11 installment was dedicated to summer cooking, and specifically vegetables.

Virginia Carter Lee explains, “With the coming of summer and the really warm weather the appetizer vegetarian dishes not only act as valuable aids in maintaining the family health, but also aid in reducing the household budget” (“The Uncooked Cabbage as a Summer Salad Has the Backing of Cooks and Scientists”).

The “Tribune Institute” provides recipes for Japanese barley soup, mock oyster patties, macaroni curry (?) with vegetables, “baked lentils, and vegetable pie.” It even offers a week’s worth of meal suggestions; the below are Monday and Tuesday’s menus, which are not entirely vegetarian.

One notable aspect of the July 11 page is its report on doing the housework with no maid, a situation that led the author Florence Taft Easton to re-conceive lunch as a casual meal rather than a sit-down, formal affair.

Eaton was a prolific writer who published many articles on gardening, travel, and education.

WRITTEN BY JONATHAN GOLDMAN, JULY 11, 2020.

TAGS: food, cooking, vegetarianism, housekeeping, domestic work, meals, soft shell crab, Florence Taft Eaton