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Some Kitchen Kinks: Cook
Cook the rice and tomatoes with the stock in a double boiler until the rice is tender, removing the cover after the rice is cooked if there is too much liquid. Add the butter and stir it in with a fork to prevent the rice from being broken. A little catsup or Chili sauce with water enough to make three-quarters of a cup may be substituted for the tomatoes. This may be served as a border with meat, or served separately in the place of a vegetable, or may make the main dish at a meal, as it is savory and reasonably nutritious.
Meat Cakes. 1 pound chopped veal. ¼ pound soaked bread crumbs. 2 tablespoonfuls savory fat or butter. 1 teaspoonful chopped onion. 11½ teaspoonsful salt.
Dash of pepper.
Mix all the ingredients except the butter or fat and shape into small round cakes. Melt the fat in a baking pan and brown the cakes in it, first one side and then the other.
Either cooked or raw veal may be used. In the case of raw meat the pan should be covered so that the heat may be retained to soften the meat.
Stew from Cold Roast.
This dish provides a good way of using up the remnants of a roast, either of beef or mutton. The meat should be freed from fat, gristle, and bones, cut into small pieces, slightly salted, and put into a kettle with water enough to nearly cover it. It should simmer until almost ready to break in pieces, when onions and raw potatoes, peeled and quartered, should be added. A little soup stock may also be added if available. Cook until the potatoes are done, then thicken the liquor or gravy with flour.
The stew may be attractively served on slices of crisp toast.
Meat with Beans.
Dry beans are very rich in protein, the percentage being fully as large as that in meat. Dry beans and other similar legumes are usually cooked in water, which they absorb, and so are diluted before serving; on the other hand, meats by the ordinary methods of cooking are usually deprived of some of the water originally present-facts which are often overlooked in discussing the matter.
Nevertheless, when beans are served with meat the dish is almost as rich in protein as if it consisted entirely of meat.
Pork and beans is such a wellknown dish that recipes are not needed. Some cooks use a piece of corned mutton or a piece of corned beef in place of salt or corned pork or bacon or use butter or olive oil in preparing this dish.
In the Southern States, where cowpeas are a common crop, they are cooked in the same way as dried beans. Cowpeas baked with salt pork or bacon make an excellent dish resembling pork and beans, but of distinctive flavor. Cowpeas boiled with ham or with bacon are also wellknown and palatable dishes. Recipes are here given for some less common meat and bean dishes:
Three loosely joined entries: the finish of a stewed rice-and-tomato dish, a veal cake, and a stew built from leftover roast. All three assume a cook who works by eye, so the notes below fill in the numbers.
- Bread crumbs in the meat cakesThe quantity has lost its fraction in printing; a quarter pound of soaked crumbs to a pound of veal is the proportion that gives a workable cake. The salt reads as one and a half teaspoons, which is right for a pound of meat plus binder.
- Soaked bread crumbsThis means stale crumb (not dried commercial crumbs) moistened in milk or water and squeezed out. It is the panade that keeps ground veal from cooking dry, and dried breadcrumbs will not do the same job.
- Cook the veal cakes throughGround veal needs an internal temperature of 160F. The recipe's reason for covering the pan with raw meat is to retain heat and soften it, but the cover also traps steam and helps finish the interior after both sides have browned; do not skip it and judge by colour alone.
- Savory fatRendered drippings from beef, pork or poultry. Butter, bacon fat or a neutral oil all substitute; butter alone will brown fast at the heat needed.
- Double boiler for the riceThe rice-and-tomato dish is cooked over water rather than direct heat, which is slow but forgiving. Allow a good while -- upwards of 45 minutes -- and cook until the rice is tender as directed, lifting the lid at the end to drive off surplus liquid.
- Three-quarters of a cupThat is the total liquid the tomato is standing in for, so if you use catsup or chili sauce, measure the sauce and top up with water to reach 3/4 cup rather than adding both freely.
- Thickening the stewFlour stirred straight into hot liquor will lump. Slake it in cold water first, or work it into a little fat, then stir in and simmer a few minutes to lose the raw taste.
- YieldA pound of veal makes roughly eight small cakes, four servings. The stew's yield depends entirely on how much roast is left over; the recipe gives no quantities.
The three entries sit together for a reason that has nothing to do with flavour: they are all economies. Household manuals of this period were written for cooks buying meat by the pound at a butcher's counter, where a Sunday roast was expected to reappear on Monday and Tuesday in some altered form, and where veal, cheap and bland, was routinely extended with soaked bread. The essay on beans that follows makes the logic explicit, and does it in the language of the new nutritional science that had reached American domestic writing by the turn of the century: protein percentages, water lost in cooking, the observation that a bean and meat dish is nearly as rich as meat alone. Cowpeas, mentioned here as a Southern field crop, are black-eyed peas and their relatives, then grown chiefly as fodder and soil improvement and eaten mostly where they grew.