Seitan sounds modern, but Chinese cooks were making wheat meat in 535
The name seitan was coined in Japan in 1961, yet the food itself is ancient. Chinese cooks were washing the starch out of wheat dough to leave a chewy, meat-like protein at least fourteen centuries ago, and Buddhist monks made it a staple. Its Chinese name translates as wheat tendon.
The method is simple. Knead a dough, rinse it in water until the starch granules wash away, and what remains is gluten, a sticky, stretchy mass that can be simmered, steamed or fried. On its own it tastes of very little, but it soaks up marinades, and in Japan it is often cooked in a broth of soy sauce, kombu and ginger. Factories now also dry the gluten into a powder that home cooks can rehydrate.
The earliest written mention is in the Qimin Yaoshu, an agricultural encyclopedia compiled by Jia Sixie in 535, which describes noodles made from gluten. By the Song dynasty it was known as mianjin. It became especially important to Chinese Buddhists who avoid meat, and one story credits its invention to cooks feeding emperors during an annual vegetarian week. Chinese kitchens make several forms: puffy deep-fried balls sold as imitation abalone, and steamed sausage shapes that can be sliced into wheels or dyed pink as mock ham, a well-known food in Xi'an.
Europe caught up in the 18th century. Bartolomeo Beccari described washing out gluten in a Latin treatise on wheat written in 1728. By the 1830s Western doctors were recommending it for diabetics, and in the United States Seventh-day Adventists championed it from the late 19th century, with a company linked to John Harvey Kellogg's Battle Creek Sanitarium advertising it in 1882.
The macrobiotic teacher George Ohsawa gave it the name seitan in 1961 after a student showed it to him, and the American firm Erewhon imported it under that label in 1969. At first the word meant a salty brown condiment for brown rice. Only later did it come to mean any soy-seasoned gluten, helped along by products such as Wheatmeat, launched in Boston in 1974.
Source: Seitan
