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Bean Croquettes
3 cups stewed or baked beans 3 cups corn flakes 2 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons strained tomato 1 1/2 teaspoons salt Soak one cup of beans in cold water over night, then cook in three or four pints of water, and cook until tender; when quite dry, add the butter, strained tomato and salt if desired. Lastly, fold in the cornflakes--the quantity of flakes will depend upon the dryness of the beans--and form into croquettes. When shaped, place in a hot oven, and bake until nicely browned.
A wartime protein dish that depends entirely on moisture control: the beans must be dry enough to hold a shape before the flakes go in. Everything else is straightforward.
- The hinge: dry beans"When quite dry" is the whole recipe. Drain cooked beans thoroughly and, if they are still wet, return them to a dry pan over low heat until the mash stiffens and pulls away from the sides. Wet beans will slump in the oven no matter how many flakes you fold in.
- Quantities are a range, not a formulaThe headnote lists 3 cups of cooked beans but the method starts from 1 cup dry, which yields roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups cooked. The flake quantity is explicitly variable; start with 2 cups and add more only until the mass holds a shape when squeezed.
- "Hot oven"In period usage roughly 400-450F. Bake on an oiled sheet, turning once; expect somewhere around 20-25 minutes for browning on both sides.
- Corn flakesUse plain unsweetened flakes if you can find them; many modern brands contain added sugar, which browns faster than the croquette heats. Crush about half of them for binding and keep the rest coarse for the outside.
- No egg, no breadingThe standard croquette treatment of the period was egg-and-crumb and fried; this one has neither, so the croquettes are fragile. Shape them small and flat-sided rather than in tall cylinders, and let them cool a few minutes on the sheet before moving them.
- Strained tomatoThis means fresh or canned tomato pushed through a sieve, thinner and sharper than modern tomato paste. Passata is the closest equivalent; if using paste, thin it with water.
- SeasoningAs written this is beans, butter and salt. Baked beans carry their own molasses and pork flavour, but plain stewed beans will need onion, pepper or a little mustard to be worth eating.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 croquettes, enough for four as a main course with a sauce or gravy.
Meatless Cookery belongs to the flood of American cookbooks published around the First World War, a period when households were widely urged to keep meatless days and to lean on vegetable sources of protein — chiefly beans, lentils, peanuts and nuts — though the book's own framing is dietetic rather than that of a conservation pamphlet. Croquettes were the standard vehicle: shaping a soft savoury mash into neat cylinders let cooks serve a bean paste in the place on the plate where a cutlet would otherwise sit, with the same sauce and the same garnish. The corn flakes are the period detail. Flaked breakfast cereals are generally said to have become commercially available only in the first years of the century, out of Battle Creek, Michigan, and cookbook writers of the 1910s and 1920s appear to have seized on them as a ready-made binder and coating that saved both bread and eggs, both of which were also being conserved. Recipes calling for crushed cereal in place of crumbs are not hard to find in the substitute-cookery literature of these years.