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Bean Cutlets
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 tablespoonful flour 1/2 cupful bean liquor Salt and pepper to taste 2 eggs 1/4 lb. dried beans A few cooked mixed vegetables
Breadcrumbs
Soak beans in water twenty-four hours, then boil for several hours till quite tender, drain them, preserving liquor, chop them very fine; blend Crisco with flour in saucepan over fire, add bean liquor, beans, salt and pepper, and yolks of eggs; turn out on to a dish and set aside till cold. Then cut out with cutlet-cutter or shape with knife; dip in beaten whites of the eggs, then in fine breadcrumbs, repeat a second time, and fry in hot Crisco. Serve on hot platter decorated with a few hot cooked mixed vegetables. Sufficient for eight cutlets.
This entry gives ingredients only, in the compressed style the book uses throughout — the method is assumed. What is described is a croquette: a stiff panada of fat, flour and bean liquor, bound with beans and egg, shaped, crumbed and fried.
- The hinge: a very stiff panadaThe 2 tablespoons fat, 1 tablespoon flour and 1/2 cup bean liquor must be cooked down until the paste leaves the sides of the pan in a mass. If it stays pourable, the cutlets will collapse in the fat no matter how carefully they are shaped.
- CriscoAn all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, launched a few years before this book and heavily promoted by it. Any neutral solid shortening or butter works in the sauce; a neutral oil is fine for frying.
- 1/4 lb. dried beansAbout 1/2 to 2/3 cup dry, which soaks and cooks up to roughly 1 1/4 cups. The recipe does not say which bean; a small white haricot or navy bean is the likeliest reading. Cook them soft enough to mash, and reserve the cooking water — that is the "bean liquor", not canned brine.
- The two eggsProbably one beaten into the hot bean mixture as a binder and one beaten for the egg-and-crumb coating. The recipe does not list breadcrumbs, though cutlets of this period were commonly crumbed before frying.
- "A few cooked mixed vegetables"Left deliberately vague because this is a leftovers dish: diced carrot, peas, turnip, green beans. Keep them to about half a cup, finely diced, or the mixture will not hold together.
- Chilling before shapingNot mentioned, but spread the mixture on a plate and refrigerate an hour before forming. Cold mixture shapes cleanly into the flat, tapered cutlet form the name implies.
- FryingDeep fat at 375F, three to four minutes, until deep gold. Everything in the mixture is already cooked; you are only setting the crust.
- YieldSix to eight small cutlets — a main course for two, or a supper dish for three or four with a sauce. A tomato sauce or brown gravy suits it well.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that barely exists now: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks what to do with a new product. Crisco reached American kitchens in 1911, and the recipe books that followed it set out to prove that a hydrogenated vegetable shortening could do everything butter, lard and suet had done — including deep frying, where its high smoke point was the selling point. The bean cutlet itself is older than the shortening. Meatless "cutlets" and croquettes, in which pulses, lentils or nuts were bound with a thick white sauce and shaped to imitate a chop, ran through late-Victorian and Edwardian cookery, promoted by vegetarian societies and adopted by thrifty households as a way to serve a hot, substantial dish on a day without meat. The shaping is the point: the cutlet form, sometimes finished with a paper frill, made economy look like a proper dinner course.