The Laurel

New York City
1903-04

The Gobbler's Dream: Signing the “Vegetarian Pledge” (1904)

The Laurel was probably the best vegetarian restaurant in New York at the turn of the last century. Situated on West Eighteenth Street, just a couple of blocks from Union Square, it was named after the bay laurel whose aromatic leaves were used extensively in vegetarian cooking. Technically, it was a lacto-ovo vegetarian restaurant, as shown by the dairy products and egg dishes on the menu below. Dating from 1903, this daily menu offers a wide selection of dishes, quotes from the Bible and the Anglo-Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith, and some beliefs about health and nutrition.1 Along with a banquet menu from the following year, it reflects the foodways and philosophy of vegetarianism at this point in its history in the United States.

The hours of operation shown on this menu are revealing. The Laurel closed at 3:00 p.m. on Friday, well before sundown, and did not reopen again until Sunday morning. By keeping these hours, this vegetarian eatery could be used as a dairy restaurant by Sabbath-observant Jews, indicating that the Jewish community may have played an important role in supporting vegetarianism in America at this early date; the first vegetarian restaurants in New York did not appear until the mid-1890s.

Vegetarianism, which has roots going back to antiquity, began to emerge in western countries in the middle of the nineteenth century. The American Vegetarian Society was founded in 1850, just a few years after the word “vegetarian” was coined. Establishing a chapter in New York in 1852, the society held a “festival” at the Chinese Assembly Rooms, a large hall situated at 539 Broadway, as evidenced by this admission ticket for the dinner.2

Actually, there is no menu to be found from this event, for despite already having distributed tickets, the dinner was cancelled. With the annual meeting reduced to a series of speeches, the organizers put a good face on the situation, promising that it would be a “feast of reason.” Such pronouncements only invited ridicule by the newspapers that enjoyed mocking the vegetarians. Exercising journalistic restraint, the New York Times reported that the philosophical repast “was not as inviting as the pumpkin pies, melons, peaches, pears, grapes and apples that were first offered, if we may judge by the scant attendance, for not more than fifty persons were present.” Fortunately, things went much better the following year. Hosted by newspaper editor Horace Greeley, the vegetarian dinner at the society's annual meeting in 1853 was attended by about 300 people, a group that included socialists, abolitionists, temperance advocates, and other antebellum reformers like the suffragettes Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Amelia Bloomer. About two thirds of the attendees at this dinner were women.

The dinner in 1853 began with tomato and rice soup, followed by Graham bread, fruited bread, mixed-fruit cake, wheat cakes, corn blanc mange, apple biscuits, molded rice, molded farina, and molded wheat grits. There were only two vegetables on the bill of fare—baked sweet potatoes and stewed squash with cream. However, there was a wide variety of fruit and many desserts like pumpkin pie, baked apples, coconut custard, and ice cream. Ironically, this successful banquet seems to have marked the end of the so-called "first wave" of vegetarianism in the United States, after having inched forward for two decades. Vegetarianism would not reemerge as a movement until the end of the nineteenth century.3

By the time the society held its dinner at the Laurel in 1904, such events were no longer considered newsworthy, the novelty of vegetarianism having worn off over the preceding fifty years. Although none of the dishes on the banquet menu shown below corresponds exactly to those on the regular menu of the previous year, many of the dishes are similar, especially given the fact that both menus rely heavily on protose and nuttolene, the canned meat substitutes produced by Kellogg’s Sanitas Nut Food Company in Battle Creek, Michigan. Protose was made with peanuts and wheat gluten; nuttolene, which appears on this banquet menu in the form of cutlets, was a baked peanut pâté that was sliced or chopped for cooking. Nut chowder, the first course served at the banquet, could be made with either one of these so-called “vegetable meats.” The other ingredients included chopped hard-boiled eggs, strained tomatoes, sauteed onions, thyme, sage, and bay leaves. Boiling water was poured over the mixture which was then thickened with flour.4

The reasons why someone might decide to adopt a plant-based diet may be related to their religious beliefs, health concerns, or ethics. In 1904, one of the primary motivating forces was opposition to the killing of animals, a sentiment reflected on these menus by Goldsmith’s poem. Over recent years, the number of issues encompassed by ethical vegetarianism has grown to include many of the problems caused by the mass consumption of meat, such as the treatment of animals in factory farms, environmental damage, and the exacerbation of world hunger.

Notes
1. This verse by Goldsmith was taken from The Hermit, a ballad that he inserted in his 1766 novel The Vicar of Wakefield.
2. In 1859, the old Chinese Assembly Rooms, situated on lower Broadway near Spring Street, were converted into a concert saloon named the Melodeon. Featuring “pretty waiter girls,” watered-down drinks, and dancing, the Melodeon is often cited as one of the first nightclubs.
3. Karen Iacobbo, Vegetarian America: A History, 2004.
4. Edward Fulton, Substitutes for Flesh Foods: Vegetarian Cook Book, 1904.