From the always excellent A Hundred Years Ago blog, a Meatless item from a cookbook of the period which included Lenten recipes.
“A Good Dish for the Meatless Meal” Recipe
As will be noted, the recipe included "drippings", which caused some confusion in the secular sense. How could that be "meatless". My comments on the same:
“I assume that “drippings” refer to the fat created when cooking beef or pork – though I am a bit foggy why meat drippings would be called for in a recipe for a meatless dish. Maybe a hundred years ago “meatless” just meant that there were no chunks of meat.”
It wasn’t because of that so much so as that vegetarianism was relatively rare a century ago and it remains distinctly different from “meatless” in the Roman Catholic sense. In the latter, for example, fish and seafood is not included as “meat” either, where as quite a few vegetarians would regard it as meat, although some do eat fish.
A person would have to delve into the topic, but generally you’ll find that broths are “technically” not classified as meat for Roman Catholics, and some animal derived foods, such as gelatins, are not. Probably the author of this recipe didn’t regard drippings as in the meat category and at the time perhaps they weren’t either, form this prospective. In more recent years, as the number of Catholic meatless days had declined in some regions and is limited to Lent, in those regions, people have tended to define meatless more strictly and expanding on the meatless category has been discouraged.
Of note, people often associate this with “Catholics”, by which they usually mean Roman Catholics, but the Orthodox and the Eastern Catholics also observe days of fast and abstinence and their practice is much more broad. It progresses in time over Great Lent and ultimately they abstain from not only meat, but dairy products, fats, and alcohol as well.
As an side, during World War One the U.S. government declared there to be an entire series of “meatless” days and while it didn’t enforce it through a law, it pretty heavily pressured Americans to observe them. If I recall correctly one such day was basically beefless and an other was porkless. None of these days was on a Friday, so I’ve always thought that if you were a Catholic that must have been a bummer as you would end up with three meatless weekdays during Lent rater than one.
I should note that the thought of using broth in a "meatless" meal bothers me from a Catholic prospective, and I suspect it does quite a few others as well. I'm not completely certain how most modern Catholic apologists would look at this today, but I think they'd at least discourage it.
Anyhow, some of what I've noted there, I've noted before, that being the situation that existed during the Great War which would have caused Catholics to be eating meatless about half the week during the war. One day of the week (Monday if I recall correctly) was meatless, which apparently meant beefless (it's somewhat difficult to tell). Tuesday was porkless. Another day was wheatless For Catholics, every Friday at the time was meatless, excluding only seafood, which was difficult to obtain for many people at the time, and for the Orthodox the rules were even stricter. It's interesting to note that the government never, at any time, proposed "hey, let's just adopt the Catholic rule and make Fridays meatless. . . " Indeed, in 1917-18, they wouldn't have as the obvious reference to Catholicism wouldn't have gone down well with American society at large at the time. It probably sill really wouldn't.
I'm publishing this, it might be noted, on a Friday, which remains meatless during Lent for Catholics all over the globe (not all of whom are otherwise, like American Catholics, lacking in that obligation in the rest of the globe). Oddly enough, today isn't meatless.
That's because today is the Solemnity of St. Joseph, the day dedicated to Jesus' temporal adoptive father. As Canon Lawyer Edward Peters has pointed out regarding this day, as a solemnity:
This year, the solemnity of my Confirmation saint quashes not only one’s personal Lenten penances but the canonical obligation of abstinence on Friday. Canon 1251.
Canon 1251 provides:
Can. 1251 Abstinence from meat, or from some other food as determined by the Episcopal Conference, is to be observed on all Fridays, unless a solemnity should fall on a Friday. Abstinence and fasting are to be observed on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.
This is so such days can be celebrated.
I have to admit again, I'm a bit squeamish about it. However, noting that this is in fact the Canon Law, and for a good reason, I had corned beef has made with leftover corned beef this morning. This is in part because I didn't want to waste it, but I also take the suspension of the obligation for celebratory reasons seriously.
At any rate, I've pointed out elsewhere on this blog, from time to time, the interesting interaction of fasting and abstinence in out largely Protestant society. Even Catholics often don't understand the nature of these penitential observances and Protestants, to include the large number of secularized Protestants in American society, clearly don't. But none the less some of the very people who will mock the Catholic observances impose extremely strict similar dietary practices upon themselves. As recently noted, I've watched people I know go through an endless number of "cleanses" which supposedly are health based, but which are generally based on bogus pop "science" and which really serve as a way of self deprivation by people who feel they need it. People are atoning for something, even if they don't know what.[1].
Vegetarianism and even more so veganism are extreme examples of this. Like societies of Medieval Monks that undertook similar dietary regimens as a way of penance and sacrifice for the entire world, such people often really imagine themselves doing the same somehow, although without the science or logic to back it up, and not grounded in any metaphysical footing, they're mostly making themselves suffer, simply figuring, deep down, that suffering must be good for something in and of itself, rather thank linked to something.
This really comes across in the occasional lecturing the proponents of such diets make along the lines of quit eating meat in order to save the planet, as cows are directly responsible for global warming. Large ungulates have been a feature of the planet since day one so they're certainly not responsible for global warming in and of themselves. To the extent that is true at all, and I'm pretty skeptic of a bovine role in that, it would be due to feeding practices, not the cows themselves or their consumption. Indeed some types of crop farming (in particular rice farming) directly contributes to CO2 in the air as well and frankly meat free diets contribute a lot of CO2 in a secondary fashions, and are otherwise pretty environmentally iffy in some instances so a vegetable based diet is at least as environmentally harmful, potentially more so, than one that isn't. If a person really wanted a to have a diet that was as environmentally benign as possible, they'd plant their own garden, hunt, and fish.
Of course part of all of that is based on the American belief that there must be something that an individual can do so that they can personally live forever, or if not that, personally escape the ravages of old age. Suffering from the lack of logic noted in Fairlie's The Cow's Revenge, here too we see some interesting things at work. To a surprising degree preserving ourselves at all cost for old age, at least right now, preserves ourselves for the torment of dementia. That's not an argument at all for taking up smoking cigarettes, drinking a quart of whiskey per day, and wrestling bears, but it is simply a fact. The common cheerful view that if I "cleanse" for a month and then go on the all Kiwi fruit diet I'll live to 100 with the body of a 20 year old is, frankly, baloney. The traditional Catholic acknowledgment of the terminal nature of life is something not too many secular self sufferers engage in. Lots of people hitting the gym every day and running marathons may well extend their lives a bit, and I hope that they do. They may well be fitter in old age as well, and I hope that they are. And they may stave off dementia, which exercise and a good diet will help do. Or they may be sliding into a world of mental torment by age 60 irrespective of all of that.
Nor, for that matter, is imposing the more difficult, perhaps, aspects of traditional morality that goes along with Lenten observations. Abstaining from meat on Fridays is a pretty minor deal, rather obviously, and for secular abstainers, abstaining from meat in general or going on a cleanse may involve self suffering, but I rarely hear of anyone determining to abstain from conduct that everyone knows is existentially destructive. People don't do that, and indeed I imagine that some people imagine themselves preserved in good condition in order to be able to engage in their vices until very old age. Not too many who are wrapped up in an accepting a Big Bang Theory or Friends concept of personal morality, for example, are going to abstain from that sort of conduct for forty days. Giving up carbs, going on high carbs, abstaining from meat, easting all meat, abstaining from alcohol, or whatever, for a few weeks is one thing. Society approves. Abstaining from courser conduct? Well society says you can't.
Anyhow, all of this amounts to simple observation, much strayed from where it was originally going. It's interesting, however. As noted once before, secularized America isn't a society of self restraint in any fashion, which interestingly causes people, at least as to diet, to self restrain. But often, they don't really know why.
Footnotes
1. This argument can obviously be taken too far, and it isn't meant to be an eat everything you want, and in as big of quantities as you want, argument.
Indeed, it's clearly the case that Americans eat too much processed food and food with way too much sugar. American bread alone is really cake, as a rule.
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