Tweaking tradition

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This article was published 22/03/2021 (2014 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s a ham on the front cover of Jo Snyder’s cookbook. It’s sitting on a white plate, glazed and roasted to perfection. Most people wouldn’t think twice about the ham’s origins until scanning up to read the book’s title: The Vegan Mennonite Kitchen: Old Recipes for a Changing World.

Turns out the ham isn’t a ham after all. It’s a loaf of seitan — a vegan meat substitute made from wheat gluten — in disguise; or rather, a loaf of seitan paying homage to the Sunday roasts and traditional Mennonite food Snyder grew up with.

Born outside Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont., she lived in Winnipeg, Vancouver and Toronto before recently returning to her birthplace with her husband and dog. Snyder, 43, grew up on a crop farm with her large extended family nearby. Eating together was a regular pastime and most meals came from the hallowed pages of the Mennonite Community Cookbook, first published in 1950 by Mary Emma Showalter.

“My mother had one, both my grandmothers had one… it’s a very ubiquitous, well-loved cookbook in the Mennonite community,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Pennsylvania Dutch, like my heritage, or if you’re Russian Mennonite, which is like a lot of the Manitoba Mennonites, everybody has it.”

In 2018, after inheriting her grandma Lena’s copy of the cookbook — a food-smudged, yellowed, first-printing edition — Snyder decided to try recreating some of the recipes with plant-based ingredients. She’s been vegetarian since high school and vegan for the last eight years; dietary choices made out of compassion for animals and concern for the environment.

The project started as a one-off dinner party menu and quickly turned into a part-time job filled with recipe development and taste-testing.

The Vegan Mennonite Kitchen is Snyder’s first cookbook and is meant to be a respectful nod to Showalter’s tome, with recipes for vegan versions of cabbage rolls, schnitzel, mac and cheese with ham and peas, wiener stew and pot roasts galore.

“It was really nice to revisit these recipes with a plant-based version so I could enjoy some of them again,” she says, adding that the writing process was also a chance to meditate on her upbringing.

“Mennonite culture has obviously been a huge part of my life and I went to church as a kid… it was neat to think about, like, who I am in religious culture, because I haven’t really reflected on that for most of my adult life.”

An obvious challenge was veganizing a cooking tradition in which meat and animal products are a cornerstone. There was a lot of trial and error in attempting to recreate the flavours of slow-roasted meats with seitan, portobello mushrooms and lentils.

“There’s a lot of animals in this book,” Snyder says with a laugh of the original. “Almost all of the recipes… aside from the jams and jellies, either have butter or milk or cream or eggs or meat or, you know, lard.”

Snyder isn’t a chef (she works in corporate communications and, while in Winnipeg, was editor of University of Winnipeg student newspaper The Uniter and frontwoman for punk rock bands Sixty Stories and Anthem Red), but someone who, as she put it, loves to cook and misses her grandmother. She enlisted friends and family to be recipe-testers and hosted biweekly dinner parties to scrutinize her creations before committing them to print.

“I really treated the process as a way to bring people together, which is sort of the spirit of the book as well,” she says. “It was a really nice experience to sit together, have these meals and get some good feedback.”

The Vegan Mennonite Kitchen is currently available for pre-order through Pandora Press (pandorapress.com) and Snyder is curious to see how the older Mennonites react to her adaptation of a classic. Although, she is hopeful readers will recognize the similarities between her cookbook and Showalter’s — the original being a collection of recipes from home cooks who substituted ingredients with abandon.

‘It’s illustrative of the time where people were trying to use what they had and use up food so it didn’t go to waste… if their chickens had a lot of eggs they would make an apple grunt that had four eggs in it instead of two and that’s how the recipes turned out,” Snyder says.

“When you take it back and make it plant-based you can almost use that same philosophy. Now, we’re in a different position where we’re maybe looking at it differently in terms of what’s sustainable, what can feed everybody and what do we have around us?”

eva.wasney@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @evawasney