Bean Meat
1 1/3 cups soy beans 2/3 cup peanut butter 2/3 cup water 2 1/2 teaspoons salt Wash the beans and soak them overnight. Then grind them through a food chopper, using the nut butter disk. Mix the ground beans with the remaining ingredients. Put into a can and steam three hours, or set in a kettle of water in which the water comes part way to the top of the can, and boil three hours.
A steamed soy-and-peanut loaf meant to be sliced and used the way you would use a cooked meat. It is straightforward once you understand the vessel and the reason for the long steam.
- The beans must be raw-soaked, not cookedDry soybeans soaked overnight roughly double in volume and stay hard; they are ground in that state. The three hours of steaming is what actually cooks them, so it cannot be shortened. Underdone soy is both unpleasant and hard to digest.
- "Food chopper, nut butter disk"That is a hand-cranked grinder fitted with its finest plate. A food processor works, run long enough to reduce the soaked beans to a coarse, damp paste with no whole pieces left; scrape down the sides several times.
- The canAn open tin can or a straight-sided pudding mould, filled about three-quarters full and covered loosely with foil so condensation does not pool in the loaf. Do not seal it airtight. This is a steamed loaf, not a canning process, and a sealed low-acid can held at boiling temperature is not shelf-stable.
- Water level and topping upIn the boiling-water method the recipe asks only that the water come part way up the can. Over three hours a good deal will evaporate, so keep a kettle going and top up with boiling water rather than cold.
- Peanut butterUse unsweetened natural peanut butter, stirred. Modern sweetened, stabilised brands add sugar and hydrogenated fat and will make the loaf both sweet and greasy.
- SaltTwo and a half teaspoons for this quantity is assertive by current taste. A teaspoon and a half gives a loaf you can still season on the plate.
- Yield and servingServing -- Chill it thoroughly before turning out and slicing; the slices hold together far better cold, and can be browned in a little fat or used in sandwiches.
- KeepingTreat it as you would any cooked protein: refrigerate and use within three or four days, or slice and freeze. It is not a preserve.
Loaves of this kind belong to the American vegetarian cookery that grew out of the Seventh-day Adventist health-food movement around Battle Creek, Michigan, in the decades either side of 1900. Meat substitutes built from nuts and legumes were a house speciality there — the commercial products Nuttose and Protose came from the same circle — and \"bean meat\" is the plain domestic version: a bound, sliceable protein loaf named for the job it does at table rather than for anything it resembles. Soybeans were still an unfamiliar item in American kitchens at the time, promoted mainly through vegetarian and agricultural-experiment channels, which is why the recipe treats them as something needing explanation about grinding and long cooking rather than assuming the reader knows them.