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Dried White Bean, Lima, or Kidney
1½ Cupfuls Dried Beans 1 Quart Boiling Water 1 Small Onion, Minced 3 Tablespoonfuls Minced Carrots Bit of Bay-Leaf ¼ Teaspoonful Pepper 2 Cupfuls Milk 3 Tablespoonfuls Snowdrift 1/3 Cupful Flour
An ingredient list for a creamed bean soup of the standard early-twentieth-century pattern: beans simmered soft in water with aromatics, pressed through a sieve, then bound with a milk-and-fat roux. The quantities give roughly 1½ quarts, or four to six servings.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening (hydrogenated in its later formulations), the house product this book was written to sell. Any neutral solid shortening works, and 3 tablespoons of butter gives a better flavour in a milk soup.
- Which bean, and how longThe three named beans do not cook alike. Soaked overnight, limas are tender in 45 minutes to an hour, white (navy) beans in about 1½ hours, kidney beans in 1½ to 2 hours. Unsoaked, add an hour or more, and top up the quart of water as it boils away.
- Kidney beans specificallyRaw and undercooked red kidney beans contain phytohaemagglutinin, which causes acute stomach upset. They must reach a full rolling boil for at least 10 minutes early in cooking, not merely a bare simmer, before being left to soften.
- The roux is the hingeCook the 3 tablespoons of fat with the ⅓ cup of flour for a minute or two before the 2 cups of milk go in, and add the milk off the heat, whisking. Flour stirred straight into hot bean purée will lump and will taste raw.
- Pepper measureThe pepper quantity has lost its fraction in printing; a quarter teaspoon suits this volume. Note also that no salt is listed at all, and a bean soup needs about a teaspoon, added after the beans have softened.
- SievingPeriod practice was to press the cooked beans and vegetables through a fine sieve for a smooth purée. A blender or food mill does the same work; leave a portion of the beans whole if you prefer texture.
- Bay-leaf"Bit of bay-leaf" means a fragment, not a whole leaf, and it should be fished out before puréeing.
- FinishingCombine the white sauce with the bean purée over low heat and thin with the bean cooking liquid to the consistency you want. Do not boil hard once the milk is in or the soup will catch on the pan bottom.
Snowdrift was a cottonseed shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and its cookbooks belong to a distinct genre: promotional volumes issued by fat and flour manufacturers in the first decades of the twentieth century to teach cooks that a manufactured shortening could stand in for butter and lard in everything from pastry to soup. The dish itself is a pury Boston Cooking School and its imitators, where nearly any cooked vegetable was pressed through a sieve and united with a milk-thickened white sauce. Dried beans made the version most households could afford year-round, and white bean, lima or kidney are offered as interchangeable options.