42 Tested Recipes for Stoy Soy Flour (PDF File, 5.3 MB), from 1943, is different from the alternative grain cookbooks I have from the fifties. Cooking with Wholegrains (1951) and El Molino Best (1953) were part of the whole grain movement among whole grain mills. Stoy Soy Flour appears at first glance to be just another soybean product from A. E. Staley Mfg. Co. But A. E. Staley is not the same kind of mill as El Molino Mills and especially not the the same kind as the Orton’s Vermont Country Store.

As an example of how much Staley differed from whole grains producers, they would later become pioneers in the introduction of high fructose corn syrup to other producers such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi. That’s a far cry from El Molino Mills, who appear to have excised any mention of syrup from their ingredients!

A. E. Staley was a bulk food processor from about 1906 through the late eighties. As far as I can tell, they only marketed soy flour during World War II. If this pamphlet can be used as a guide, they did it specifically to provide a non-rationed protein alternative to meat, milk, eggs, and cheese during World War II.

Soy Flour is one of the world’s five great protein foods. Meat, milk, eggs and cheese are the other four. Wartime needs, due to military and lend-lease requirements, are taking large quantities of these common protein foods. Therefore, STOY is meeting a great need for a new source of protein in the diet.

Staley left the soy flour business after the war ended. It remained popular in the whole grains movement well into the 21st century but today even specialty flour companies such as Bob’s Red Mill have stopped making it. Soy flour is often one of the many legume-based flours available from Indian grocers. That’s where I get it.

A. E. Staley’s unstated but implied focus on only temporarily replacing other protein sources means that many of these recipes don’t really benefit, flavor-wise, from the use of soy flour. While two do mention an added “nut-like soy flavor”, most are purely about either reducing the use of protein foods elsewhere in the family’s diet, or cutting back on wheat flour, another in-demand food item for the troops.

This book, in other words, was about freeing up wheat and meat for the war effort by convincing consumers to replace them with soy flour. Its appearance in 1943 was specifically the result of a government push for reducing wheat use:

During World War II, the USA had a major campaign to reduce use of wheat flour. Soy flour—if used in the right proportions—could help to yield delicious, protein-rich products.

The best of the recipes I tried substituted for both eggs and wheat: the Stoy Crispy-Crust Meat Loaf replaced one of the eggs and all of the bread crumbs with soy flour. This meant a smoother textured meat loaf than normal; the recipe itself was a superior recipe, too, probably due to the inclusion of chili sauce, for which I used Sriracha.

The meat loaf was very flavorful—partly because I used Sriracha.

It’s a smoother meat loaf than normal, and that’s fine.

Egg nog with a slight flavor of soy is something I’ll try again.

There’s also a Victory Jam Cake that reduces the use of wheat. I think it also reduces the use of eggs, as it uses only three eggs for two layers of a 9-inch layer cake. This is the only recipe with a title that calls out a war focus to these recipes. Most of the recipes have Stoy in the title, not Victory or Liberty or any of the other keywords to wartime rationing.

The inside back cover has a quote from the United States Department of Agriculture under “What Government Authorities Say:”

Special committees in the Department are now developing a program for the utilization of soy products—both in kitchen recipes and in prepared foodstuffs—to take full advantage of this important protein food in the American diet. Soy products already have played a significant wartime role. Rich in valuable protein, minerals and vitamins, they are readily adaptable to large scale use as a human food to supplement meat, milk, and eggs.

The reason there’s not much in the way of advertisements like this for soy flour after the forties is that nobody wanted it.

The war ended with a glut of soy flour in America. After the government's insistence that lots of soy flour be produced in a hurry, much was actually over-produced. A great deal of the tonnage sent abroad to countries such as France and Greece was apparently not accepted. Forrestal (1982) reported that the A.E. Staley warehouse in Ohio had mountains of soy flour that nobody seemed to want; eventually it became weevily and was fed to cattle.

I can understand the lack of enthusiasm. None of these recipes seem to benefit specifically from any soy flavor. The best of them, the meat loaf, benefits from a smoother texture, but this is probably achievable with any non-gluten flour, such as rice flour. In fact, it would probably be very good with brown rice flour instead of soy flour, although not likely as nutritious. I expect chickpea or almond flour would also work very well—maybe even potato flour.

I fully intend to keep their meat loaf in my rotation—but I’m not going to be scrupulous about using soy flour as the filler.

I’m going to guess that this cookbook wasn’t meant to provide killer recipes that would sell the public on soy flour. It was meant to reduce reliance on eggs, dairy, meat, and wheat until the war was over. The Stoy Old-Fashioned Molasses Cookies are perfectly passable. They, also, replaced about one egg as well as some of the flour with soy flour. They were fine cookies, but there was nothing special about them.

If there were a war on and real molasses cookies were unavailable, I would have no problem eating these as a substitute. I expect they would have been better with another egg. While I’m not going to make this recipe again, I did freeze most of them and I used them for a cookie-crumb crust for a ginger-rum cheesecake. They made the perfect crust to counterpoint the very sweet cheesecake.

The molasses cookies in a yogurt cranberry whip.

The molasses cookies were perfect for a ginger-rum cheesecake crust.

The molasses milk drink was milk diluted with molasses, and molasses diluted with milk.

Staley Mfg. Co. continued to process soy after the war, but if I’m reading this history correctly, only for use in other products, not for marketing directly to consumers.

One of the things that struck me browsing through this pamphlet is that none of the pies contain soy flour. The only soy in them is if you use this cookbook’s recipe for pastry or pie crust. This is common for baking powder cookbooks, too: they include pies that only use the advertised product in the sense that they use it in the pie crust. Presumably, companies hoped that by including pie recipes the consumer would use the crust from the facing page!

This is not wartime privation. This is good.

Not surprising, I suppose. Pies are awesome and everyone wants to take credit for them. I only celebrate three food holidays on this blog, and one is Pi Day. And in their defense, the Stoy pastry and the Stoy pie crust use a lot more soy flour than, say, the Horsford Cook-Book pie crusts use baking powder or baking soda!

The beverages were the reason I bought the book. I’ve recently gotten into making easy egg nog recipes and the Stoy Egg Nog looked interesting. It turns out to be the recipe that most benefited from soy flour specifically. The “nutty flavor” did indeed come through and was enhanced by the vanilla and the sugar.

The Stoy Cocoa De Luxe was just as good, if not better. It’s a very rich hot cocoa—perfect for fall and winter weather!—thickened with corn starch and fortified with soy flour. It was good enough that I’m considering making a jar of all five dry ingredients so that I can make it at a moment’s notice by just microwaving some milk and boiling some water. This is purely a case of using soy to add protein. The flavor does not come out, because the teaspoons of soy flour are overridden by the tablespoons of cocoa. It’s possible that the soy flour helps to thicken it a bit, but I’m guessing that corn starch is so much more powerful than bean flour at thickening that the addition is minimal if it even exists.

I can’t emphasize this too much: it’s one of the best hot cocoas I’ve had.

But does it contain more flavor?

The Stoy Molasses Milk Drink was less interesting. It’s basically milk mixed with molasses, with a bit of soy flour added instead of, rather than in addition to, an egg. Mixing molasses into the milk diluted the milk flavor, and mixing milk into the molasses diluted the molasses flavor. The molasses overpowered any “nut-like soy flavor” that might have been imparted by soy flour.

As with the cookies, there was nothing particularly wrong with this drink, but absent a protein shortage I’d be unlikely to make it for its own sake.

The first time I heard about soy flour was in Beatrice Trum Hunter’s Whole Grain Baking Sampler. It caught my eye because it was one of the lesser ingredients in Cornell Bread. Hunter called the addition of wheat germ, soy flour, and milk powder the “Triple Rich Cornell Formula” and she incorporated it into many of her bread recipes. As she defined it, the Cornell Mix is simple:

…for each cup of flour, first place in the measuring cup 1 tablespoon of soy flour, 1 tablespoon of nonfat dry milk powder, and 1 teaspoon of wheat germ. Then fill the remainder of the cup with unbleached flour.

Hunter’s soy flour cookies are interesting, in that while they do contain wheat, it’s only in the form of wheat germ. The flour is only soy flour. They are, to my taste, much better than the molasses cookies from Staley Manufacturing. They are both chewier and more flavorful.

Soy Molasses Cookies

Servings: 30
Preparation Time: 30 minutes
Beatrice Trum Hunter
Beatrice Trum Hunter’s Whole-Grain Baking Sampler (Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• ½ cup sorghum molasses
• ½ cup vegetable oil
• 1 egg
• 1 cup soy flour
• ½ cup wheat germ
• ginger or other spices if desired.

Steps

1. Blend ingredients together in order.
2. Drop by teaspoons onto a greased cookie sheet.
3. Flatten with a sugared glass.
4. Bake at 350° for 12-15 minutes, or until browned at the edges.

I’m not sure, but I think there are either typos in Hunter’s original, or the ingredients she used were significantly different than the ones I used. Her recipe did not call for flattening the cookies but simply spacing them to allow spread. She specifically notes that her recipe makes a very thin batter. With those ingredients, however, I did not get a thin batter at all. Left as dropped from the teaspoon, they did not spread. They had to be flattened. It’s possible that the flour I used was finer than the flour she used, or that sorghum molasses is thicker than unsulfured molasses; it’s also possible that it’s missing some other ingredient, such as milk.

And of course it’s also possible that she used an older style of instruction, and that “2 cups soy flour” really means “up to 2 cups soy flour”. I might try it that way next time, going for a thinner batter, and I might also try adding some ginger or other spices commonly used in molasses cookies.

Because it’s a thicker batter, I upped the temperature to 350°. Her recipe called for only 300°, which likely would be fine if it was a thin enough batter to spread on its own. I had to bake mine for about 20 minutes to get them to brown slightly.

I’m including a recipe from the Whole Grain Baking Sampler because, as usual, a recipe from the book I’m providing a PDF for would be superfluous—I haven’t modified the Stoy recipes in this pamphlet in any significant way, unless you include using Sriracha as the chili sauce for the meat loaf.

Also, I never miss an opportunity to plug Hunter’s book. She writes from a very different perspective from both 42 Tested Recipes (PDF File, 5.3 MB) and the later vegetarian movement both of which, oddly, had the same purpose: to provide substitutes for meat in order to convince everyone else to join their respective wars.

Hunter just thought it was healthier to eat a variety of foods and to eat the whole food; her Natural Foods Cookbook did the same for the rest of the table that her baking sampler did for baked goods. It includes an entire chapter on parts of the animal “usually relegated to the position of miscellaneous items”. That means pages and pages of recipes for liver, kidney, tripe, sweetbreads, brains, heart, tongue, and lungs.

When she says whole foods, she includes the whole animal!

For those who have never savored the goodness of whole foods, there is a pleasant discovery in store.

42 Tested Recipes for Stoy Soy Flour (PDF File, 5.3 MB) is a pleasant discovery, too, despite the pedestrian nature of the recipes. That was very likely its entire point: provide recipes that replaced existing ones which relied too much on meat-based proteins and wheat flours.

I don’t have much in the way of wartime cookbooks. The only other post-1941 cookbook I have, Cold Cooking, was probably written before December 7. The next cookbook in my collection is the 1946 Joy of Cooking which had already jettisoned the wartime content of its otherwise close-to-identical predecessor.

Staley’s 42 Tested Recipes, on the other hand, was a product of the war and lasted only to the war’s end. It’s a unique relic of war-time cooking—or at least of war-time propaganda. As Veterans Day approaches, you might consider trying a few of these wartime rationing recipes (PDF File, 5.3 MB). If you do decide to use soy flour and want more recipes for it, there are a lot of soy flour recipes in El Molino Best and in Beatrice Trum Hunter’s Whole Grain Baking Sampler. And of course there’s the classic Cornell Bread, also available in Hunter’s book.