One of my hobbies (if you can call it that) is looking at, and veganising, recipes from other times, languages, culinary traditions etc. Protose was a meat alternative based on peanuts and gluten that was originally invented by Kellogg’s, I believe, in around 1900, and produced up until the year 2000. Sadly, I gather it never had much success.
However, I’ve decided to recreate it. Or emulate it, perhaps. Lets say I’m a food revivalist? That sounds okay. In any case, I’m planning on putting up a load of sort of Medieval recipe over the next week or so. Lots of early recipes are incredibly imprecise regarding quantities and cooking times and temperatures (in the days before gas and electricity and thermometers, one could not simply put the oven on 180C and then go and watch Bones, after all) but this is fine because I only measure things under duress and generally just chuck things together using common sense. Unless I put them on the internet, in which case they’re only slightly imprecise.
ANYWAY, here is the recipe for my crack at protose.
Ingredients
-
50g gluten powder
-
100g gram flour (chick pea flour)
-
100g peanut butter
-
vegetable stock (250ml? Not a huge amount.)
-
a pinch of salt
-
a teaspoon of brown sugar
I use unsweetened, unsalted crunchy peanut butter. If you use sweetened or added-salt peanut butter, omit the salt and sugar, obviously.
Method
Mix the dry ingredients evenly and then add the peanut butter. Rub it between your fingertips until it has a breadcrumb-like consistency. Pour in a little stock, and knead it together to form a dough ball. Taste a little. Isn’t it delicious?
Put in a small oven-safe dish with a lid that fits well and pour over a little more of the stock. You’re going to be half-baking, half-steaming this, so it needs to stay moist. It’s a very, very good idea to oil your dish, as gluten sticks to anything and everything.
Put in the oven at about 180 degree/whatever you cook things on normally. Remember: to be imprecise is to be authentic. Ahem. Remove from the oven after about an hour and allow to cool.
Verdict
Really tupping good. Kind of like if beef and peanuts had a baby. A thousand noms to protose.
Per quarter (~100g): 281 Calories, 18g Carb (2g Fibre), 13G fat, 23g Protein. (Seems high, but is actually fairly similar in calories and protein to dry lentils, gram for gram).
Herbivorous Rex 
Have you ever cooked with peanut flour? It’s defatted, so I bet you could up the protein ratio in this a lot that way, though it might change the texture a bit.
I would have, but I just couldn’t find any anywhere, so peanut butter was the next most sensible alternative.
Try it! Let me know how it goes.
What a cool project! Thanks for sharing it 🙂 I, too, am a fan of revitalizing old recipes.
“One of my hobbies (if you can call it that) is looking at, and veganising, recipes from other times, languages, culinary traditions etc. ”
oh that’s interesting! How did the idea occured? How/where do you find the documents or informations you’d need?
I kind of have the same hobby (…), rather trying to veganize traditionnal recepies (mostly from belgium) or to recreate what my grandparents used to make -but then finding the recepe is another challenge (besides veganizing)
Hmm. There’s a good book called Early Vegetarian Recipes by Anne O’Connell, but that’s probably more English recipes. There are a few medieval recipe collections online, but your grandparents are probably not that old. I normally just look for individual recipes online, or try to find a general theme.
Je parle français aussi – si tu trouves une collection de recettes dit-moi s’il te plait !