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Boston Roast
1 pound can kidney beans or like quantity of cooked beans Bread crumbs 1/2 pound grated cheese Salt Mash the beans, or put them through a meat grinder. Add the cheese and sufficient bread crumbs to make the mixture stiff enough to be formed into a roll. Bake in a moderate oven, basting occasionally with butter and water. Serve with tomato sauce. This dish may be flavored with onions, chopped and cooked in butter and water.
A bean-and-cheese loaf of the sort that filled the meat course in wartime and vegetarian households. The original assumes you know how much crumb a stiff mixture needs and how long a loaf takes; here are the numbers.
- The hinge: how stiff is stiffThe mixture must hold a shape on its own before it goes near the oven — think firm meatloaf, not batter. Drained canned beans carry a lot of moisture, so start with about 1 cup of dry crumbs to 2 cups of mashed beans and add more until a spoonful stands up without slumping. Too wet and it spreads into a puddle; too dry and it bakes to sand.
- A 1 pound canPeriod cans of this size held roughly 2 cups of beans with their liquid. Use a modern 15-16 oz can, drained and rinsed, which gives nearer 1 1/2 cups of beans, or the same quantity of home-cooked kidney beans.
- Moderate oven350F. Bake 45 to 60 minutes, until the outside is set and lightly browned; the interior only needs to be hot through, since everything in it is already cooked.
- Half a pound of grated cheeseAbout 2 cups packed. A sharp cheddar or any firm dry cheese does the work — it is both the binder and nearly all the flavor, so a bland cheese leaves you with bland beans.
- Basting with butter and waterMelt roughly 2 tablespoons butter into 1/4 cup hot water and spoon it over every 15 minutes or so. This is a substitute for the pan drippings of a real roast; it keeps the crust from cracking and gives it color.
- Free-form roll or loaf panThe instruction to form a roll means a free-standing loaf on a greased shallow pan, which browns on all sides. A loaf pan is easier and less likely to crack, but you will get soft sides and should turn it out to serve.
- Salt and seasoningNo quantity is given. Start with 1 teaspoon, taste the raw mixture and adjust — canned beans and aged cheese both carry salt already. The optional onion cooked in butter and water is worth doing; without it the loaf tastes flat.
- YieldServes 4 to 6 as a main course. It slices far better after resting 10 minutes, and cold leftovers cut cleanly for sandwiches.
Bean and nut "roasts" were a staple of American meat-substitute cookery from the 1890s through the First World War, promoted first by vegetarian reformers — the Battle Creek circle around the Kelloggs among the most visible — and then by wartime food-conservation campaigns that asked households to spare meat for the troops. The form is usually much the same: a cooked legume or ground nut, a starchy binder, a fat, and something savory, pressed into a loaf and basted so it behaves like a joint on the table. The Boston in the name is generally taken as a nod to Boston baked beans and the city's long association with the bean pot rather than to any particular Boston kitchen. That the recipe leans on half a pound of cheese is telling: dairy was the acceptable protein for cooks who had given up meat, and this loaf is really a cheese dish with beans for bulk.