Crusty Skallop Cheese Pie — Cooking Creatively with Natural Foods (1972)

Forgotten New York, Seventh Day Adventism, and the last bad vegetarian restaurant

This cookbook has been 35 years in the making. It really goes back to the birth of Brownies. That was in 1936. In the beginning we were just a sliver in the wall, hardly a soybean’s throw from Union Square in New York City. The address hasn’t changed, but we have.

…In its premier phase Brownies admittedly attracted its share of eccentrics. We had dotty old ladies galore, clomping through the door in their Murray Space Shoes, clamoring for asparagus-fern salads dressed with essence of eucalyptus. And wall-to-wall hypochondriacs: “Oh, Mr. Brown, do you think if I put just ten grains of raw sugar in my rose-hip tea, my pancreas will become overstimulated?”

Today the whole world embraces the idea of good nutrition; everybody is anxious to rediscover the natural tastes of goods. So we have everybody lighting our doors: business people, publishers, secretaries, laborers, film producers and actors, television executives, housewives, photographers and models, professors and students, folk singers, rock musicians. Danny Kaye, David Brinkley, Julie Newmar, Gayelord Hauser, Helen Hayes, Anita Loos, Bea Lillie, Tony Perkins, Robert Merrill, Red Buttons, Andy Warhol, Rita Moreno… Everybody comes. And especially that vanguard of the whole ecology movement, the young!

…On Earth Day in 1970 Karen came into the restaurant after an exhilarating stroll down a carless Fifth Avenue. “Mother,” she said, “when are you going to write that cookbook so I can start making some of these dishes in my own apartment?” It was perhaps the sincerest compliment our cuisine had ever received—and the ultimate goad to get us cracking on the cookbook. — Edith Brown, in the introduction to Cooking Creatively with Natural Foods

If you want to buy me a pair, I’m a 13.

I have a pretty good knowledge of long-shuttered health food restaurants, but until a couple of weeks ago I’d never heard of Brownies, which was located at 21 E. 16th Street from 1936-1985. To me, Brownies will always be the cool bar/music venue on Avenue A that got gentrified out of existence the same year I moved in around the corner (chicken or egg?), turning into the lame sports bar Hi-Fi. This was my first personal moment of [shakes head, rolls eyes, stubs out Kamel Red Light on the snowy sidewalk] “New York’s not what it used to be.” I was 20. Most cities transform themselves every generation or so, shedding their old familiar haunts and landmarks like snakeskin. But that wincing nostalgia hits hardest in New York, where we’re all walking everywhere, unable to speed past the mutation in a car.

For New Yorkers my age and a generation older, 21 E. 16th Street was the address of Danny Meyer and chef Michael Romano’s influential Union Square Café. Meyer and Romano took the farm-to-table Med-American ethos pioneered on the West Coast and translated it for a New York sensibility. The ingredients were fresh, but there wasn’t a whiff of hippie about the place. But to an earlier generation, 21 E. 16th Street had more than a whiff of something. Ruth Reichl, in a La Briffe post titled “The First Great Vegetarian Restaurant,” remembers stopping in at Brownies “on my way home from school to stare at a menu featuring vegetable bacon, wheat germ, and soy powder. I can still remember the smell of the place, which struck me as weird and rather grim. I’d look around and hurry out; you could not have paid me to dine there.” Needless to say, “The First Great Vegetarian Restaurant” wasn’t Brownies. According to Reichl, it was San Francisco’s Greens (read all about it here).

But Brownies had its fans; no restaurant lasts for fifty years without them. Was the food tastier than young Ruth thought it would be? Or was it just, in the pre-Meyer, pre-Moosewood, pre-hippie food revolution world, vegetarian beggars couldn’t be choosers? Even its ardent defenders reminisce about the scene rather than the cuisine. How many health food restaurants even were there in 1930s-1960s New York, where dotty old ladies, hypochondriacs, speed-addled Pop Artists, and anorexic starlets could all not eat in peace? That’s the beauty of diet food. The worse it tastes the better it works.

As I drove through Glendale on Father’s Day morning, I thought, maybe they’re wrong, maybe they’re all wrong! I was heading to a Seventh Day Adventist bookshop/health-food store, apparently the only place in Southern California that sells cans of Loma Linda brand “Vegetable Skallops.” I needed these waterlogged cubes of textured wheat gluten and soy protein concentrate to make a dish from Brownies owners Sam and Edith Brown’s 1972 cookbook, Cooking Creatively with Natural Food. Pre-hippie movement, fake meat was mostly manufactured and consumed by the extremely religious. Many Eastern faiths (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, etc.) have huge vegetarian contingents, but the Seventh Day Adventists are the only major Christian denomination that totally eschews meat. While today, Adventists are one of the most racially diverse religious groups in America, at the turn of the 20th century, they were mostly white. And in 1905, when Loma Linda foods was founded, whitey wasn’t eating no channa masala. So the church started its own brand of canned (this was before people had home refrigerators, let alone freezers) soy-based meat-like products, plunging awkwardly shaped foodstuffs into lightly salted water and calling them things like Diced Chik, Prime Stakes, and Veja-Links.

By the 1960s, Loma Linda Foods became the largest manufacturer of soy-based food in the country. So, while the Browns didn’t have any strongly held religious beliefs themselves, their cookbook often calls for these specifically Adventist foods. I assume they used them in the restaurant too, though I couldn’t find the menu on DoorDash. While the church no longer owns Loma Linda, the products are still distributed through their book/gift shops. So, in 2025, I can drive ten minutes down Chevy Chase and taste the same textured protein cube enjoyed by both a teetotaling farmer in 1910s North Carolina and Valerie Solanas.

The woman working the gift shop was as cheerful as I expected an Adventist to be, enthusiastically wishing me a “Happy Father’s Day!!!” as I bought my single can of Vegetable Skallops and two-pound bag of Textured Vegetable Protein. Is this what she thought I was feeding the kids on my special day? Not likely. They’re taking me out to dinner. At a NICE restaurant. And we’re dressing up!

I had one more obscure ingredient to pick up on my way home. Spike! SPIKE. Spike? What the hell is “Spike?” The Cheesy Skallop Pie’s cornmeal crust calls for a generous 1/8 tsp of it, and in order to faithfully recreate the same mysterious flavor enjoyed by Fannie Brice, Malcolm X, and David Berkowitz, I had to buy a jar. I thought I was going to have to drive even further out in Glendale to a gift shop run by an even more obscure religious group, but it turns out Spike is literally sold at Vons. It’s a regular, modern ingredient sitting right between the Mrs. Dash and the Tony’s Creole Seasoning Blend. Why had I never noticed it before? Has it been there the whole time like a reverse Fruit of the Loom cornucopia, existing in this simulation but absent in the universe where I went grocery shopping the first 1,043 times?

It’s actually lovely. It’s like Lawry’s Seasoning Salt with extra nutritional yeast umami. If there’s one thing you take from this week’s blog, it’s to treat yourself to a nice big bottle of Spike. I swear, just go to the supermarket closest to you, it will be there. Spooky.

So I went home, ignoring the pleas of my children: “Daddy, play with us!” “Is there going to be enough Crusty Skallop Cheese Pie for everyone, Father?” “I’m so hungry Papa,” and walked into the kitchen to conjure up some Brownies magic.

I tried to be as faithful to the recipe as I could, and I only jeujed things up when I knew it wouldn’t compromise the cheesy crusty integrity of the dish. Because cottage cheese is so prominent an ingredient, I sprung for the good stuff (Good Culture), and I used a more assertive cheddar (Tillamook extra sharp) than I imagine the Browns had access to. John bought some low-sodium V8 when I was up in Berkeley (the mice will play), so I didn’t worry about acquiring any “California tomato juice.” For “soybean granules,” I used the TVP I bought from the nice Christian lady, and everything else was by-the-book. I did use Bob’s Red Mill cornmeal and nice farmer’s market cherry tomatoes, but I imagine even the stuff at crummy New York grocery stores was just as tasty before Nixon dismantled the USDA.

I clocked a couple of minor concerns as I was baking. First, is it a little weird that you don’t bake the crust first before you put in the filling? I’m no Paul Hollywood, but I know that “blind baking” is pretty standard. Also, we’re just throwing the Skallops in raw? Their texture, out of the can, was unsettling. I nibbled a corner and the slightly briny taste didn’t assuage my hesitations. Have faith, like Tony Perkins, Patti Smith, Leona Helmsley, the lady at the giftshop, and the global Seventh Day Adventist community.

I know you’re on pins and needles. Was the Crusty Skallop Cheese Pie revelatory? Was Red Buttons right and Ruth Reichl wrong? Is Brownies an unfairly forgotten gem, as important to American culinary history as Greens, The French Laundry, and Goop Kitchen? Before you read any further, I want you to look at the photo I took of the finished pie and guess.

It was horrific, by far the worst thing I’ve made on this eight-month-long Back to the Garden journey. I’ll admit to my own culpability, my role in this culinary debacle. Do you notice how pale and runny the pie looks? Well, Daddy was so worried about the Skallops and the Spike and the not yet peak-season tomatoes, he forgot to add the eggs. And what is a Crusty Skallop Cheese Pie without a couple of eggs to bind everything together? It’s not a pie at all, it’s a pile… of hot cottage cheese, unseasoned canned soy protein, and a cornmeal crust the texture of baby food.

I hate wasting food, and so I choked down a thick slice, on Father’s Day of all days. Little Roscoe and Felicity forgot to make reservations at Chi Spacca anyway. I was ready to suffer the next couple of nights too, self-flagellation for my own hubris and not heeding Ruth Reichl’s warning. But I couldn’t do it. Imagine what it looked like after chilling in the fridge for 24 hours. I took one glance at the congealed horror in the pie pan and scraped the whole thing into the green bin out back. I couldn’t deal with it decomposing in our little countertop compost bin. God knows what sick-fuck fruit flies it would attract.