Home › Pickles-Relishes › Kidney Bean Salad (Mrs Robt Sitz can red kidney)
Kidney Bean Salad (Mrs Robt Sitz can red kidney)
Mrs. Robt. Sitz. 1 can red kidney beans 1 C celery cut fine 1 C sugar 2 eggs 1/2 C vinegar 6 sweet pickles Mix beans, vinegar and sugar. Add celery and cut up hard boiled eggs and then sweet pickles. Very good for a winter salad.
A sweet-sour canned bean salad of the church-supper type, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed her reader knew what a salad should taste like. The proportions need a decision or two before you commit.
- Dissolve the sugar firstThe hinge of the recipe. A cup of granulated sugar dissolves only slowly and grudgingly in half a cup of cold vinegar; warm them together until clear, then cool before it touches the beans. Otherwise the salad is gritty and the sweetness sits in pockets.
- The sugar is a period quantityOne cup of sugar to half a cup of vinegar produces something close to a pickle syrup. Modern palates usually want a third to half that sugar; taste the dressing before dressing the beans.
- "1 can" means about 15-16 oz"1 can" means roughly a pint of beans -- today's standard is 15-16 oz; period cans ran to that or somewhat larger. Drain and rinse them well, or the canning liquid will thin the dressing and dull the color.
- Sweet picklesCounted by the piece, so presumably six small whole sweet gherkins or sweet cucumber pickles rather than slices. Chop them fine; a spoonful of their brine is a reasonable substitute for part of the vinegar.
- VinegarCider vinegar suits the beans better than white distilled. Both are sold today at roughly 5 percent acidity.
- EggsTwo hard-boiled, coarsely chopped. Add them last and fold gently, or they break down and cloud the dressing.
- Rest itNo time is given, but the beans need at least two hours refrigerated to take up the sweet-sour dressing. It keeps three or four days covered and improves on the first day.
- YieldAbout four cups, serving six as a side. Lettuce leaves or a bed of shredded cabbage would suit it.
Church fundraising cookbooks of the early twentieth century are full of "winter salads" like this one, and the phrase is the point: before year-round refrigerated produce, a salad in February had to be built from the pantry. Canned kidney beans, a jar of sweet pickles, celery from the root cellar and two eggs were all reliably at hand. The sweet-sour dressing, heavy on sugar and vinegar, belongs to the same Midwestern tradition as wilted lettuce and pickled beets. The attribution to Mrs. Robt. Sitz follows the standard convention of these fundraising books, where recipes were signed with a husband's name and the collection served as both a cookbook and a roster of the congregation.