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Half-A-Can Recipes
ONE of the difficulties of using canned goods in cooking for one or two is that only part of a can can be eaten at one time, and we do not always know just what to do with the rest. Because I found this trying, I began to play tricks on my canned goods and reduced some of my old-time standard recipes to fit my smaller pans. In this way I learned a variety of ways for using each can, so that there is neither waste nor a needless repetition of dishes. With the necessarily small refrigerator of a kitchenette, it is likewise impossible to keep a lot of left-overs, so by using these recipes I avoid them.
In opening a can of any vegetable, and Half-a-Can Recipes sometimes of fruit that is not to be served again for a week or so, I pour it out at once, always at once, one half to be used and the other half put into a saucepan to be heated up to the boiling point and poured into a sterilized half-pint jar. After sealing and cooling, these can be set into the refrigerator. It takes but a few minutes to do this, but it saves a monotonous repetition of the same food.
Canned goods used most frequently in this way are corn, peas, tomatoes, asparagus, string beans, lima beans, baked beans, beets, and salmon. All but the beets are used for cream soups. I have one basic recipe which can be adapted to any vegetable in making a cream soup to serve two or three persons.
Basic Recipe for Eight Cream Soups 1 tablespoonful butter 1 tablespoonful flour 2 cupfuls milk teaspoonful salt 1/2 to 1 cupful vegetable pulp Melt the butter, add the flour and salt, and remove from the flame while stirring in the milk. Cook up the vegetable and mash through a strainer, or merely dice up very fine and heat for a hurry-up soup.
Cook up the milk and flour, and when it has boiled for three minutes pour in the hot vegetable pulp - except in tomato soup.
Remove from the fire at once, give it a few turns with the Dover egg beater, and serve.
Seven Creamed Dishes The only difference between the cream soups and creamed dishes is that for the one tablespoonful each of butter and flour, one cupful instead of two cupfuls of milk is used, and the vegetables are added whole or in pieces rather than mashed. Corn, peas, asparagus, string beans, lima beans, beets, and salmon are all delicious when served in this way. They may be served on hot toast, in little toasted bread cases Half-a-Can Recipes made by cutting out boxes of stale bread and buttering and toasting them in the oven, or in pattie cases. Baking-powder biscuit dough can be used for pattie cases by rolling out to a quarter of an inch in thickness and cutting two rounds, cutting a smaller round out of one of these. The ring so made is placed on top of the first round, moistened with a bit of milk to unite them in the baking. With a sharp-pointed knife cut out the soft center part and fill with the creamed dish made.
This is really a formula rather than a recipe: one white sauce, thinned two ways, stretched across eight vegetables. Get the sauce right and the rest follows.
- The ratio is the recipeSoup is 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour, 2 cups milk, and a quantity of vegetable pulp the original prints as "to 1 cupful" (the lower figure lost in printing). Creamed dishes use the same butter and flour with only 1 cup milk, which gives a sauce thick enough to sit on toast; the vegetables also go in whole or in pieces rather than mashed.
- Do not seal the leftover half in a jarReheating half a can of corn or beans and sealing it hot into a jar looks like canning but achieves none of it: low-acid vegetables need pressure processing, and a sealed jar held for "a week or so" is the wrong environment for them even in a refrigerator. Put the remainder in a covered container instead and use it within three or four days.
- Tomato is the exception, and it mattersTomato is the exception -- The recipe holds tomato back from the general instruction but does not say what to do instead. Acid curdles a milk-based sauce; the usual remedy is to pour the hot white sauce into the hot tomato pulp rather than the reverse, and to serve immediately without letting it stand over heat.
- The salt figure is incompleteThe original reads "teaspoonful salt" with the fraction lost in printing. For 2 cups of milk, about 1/2 teaspoon is right, adjusted after tasting since canned vegetables are usually salted already.
- Dover egg beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater, once a standard kitchen item sold under the Dover name. A whisk or a few seconds with an immersion blender does the same job of smoothing the finished soup.
- Pulp without a strainerThe recipe calls for pressing hot vegetables through a strainer, though it also allows simply dicing them very fine. A blender or food mill is faster, though for peas and asparagus a brief sieving still catches skins and strings that a blender only chops finer.
- Patty casesBiscuit dough rolled 1/4 inch thick and stacked as described. The original specifies no oven temperature; modern biscuit practice is a hot oven for 10 to 12 minutes. The bread cases she mentions as an alternative are simply toasted in the oven until crisp and pale gold.
- Two colour warningsCanned beets bleed into a white sauce and turn it magenta, which is harmless but startling. Canned salmon carries soft bones and skin; leave them in for calcium or lift them out, but flake the fish so the sauce is not lumpy with vertebrae.
- YieldThe recipe itself gives the soup as serving two or three. The creamed version, with half the liquid, will stretch less far.
Kitchenette cookbooks were a product of a specific American housing shift: by the 1910s and 1920s, apartment buildings in cities were being fitted with tiny alcove kitchens, often with two gas burners, a small oven, and an icebox barely large enough for a bottle of milk. Cookery writing had to be rescaled to match, and canned goods, then cheap, plentiful, and increasingly trusted after decades of domestic-science advocacy, were the obvious staple for a household of one or two. The white sauce that anchors these eight soups and seven creamed dishes was the great workhorse of the period's cooking schools, taught as a ratio to be memorised and varied rather than as a dish in itself; the Boston Cooking School tradition in particular drilled students in thin, medium, and thick versions of it. What dates the page most sharply is not the recipe but the storage advice: the habit of boiling leftovers and sealing them into a jar reflects an era when refrigeration was minimal and home preserving was widely practised. The low-acid canning hazard was identified and acted on through the 1919-1920s outbreaks and the canning-industry research that followed, and home-canning guidance changed accordingly.