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Pimento and Cheese Roast
2 cups cooked lima beans 1/4 pound cream cheese, commercial or homemade 3 canned pimentos chopped Bread crumbs Put the first three ingredients through a nut chopper. Mix thoroughly, and add bread crumbs until it is stiff enough to form into a ball. Brown in the oven, basting occasionally with butter and water.
A plain vegetable loaf of the sort that filled the "meat substitute" chapters of wartime cookbooks. It works, but the original assumes a good deal of unstated knowledge about seasoning, oven heat and timing.
- Season it, because the recipe does notThere is no salt, pepper or aromatic anywhere in the list. Lima beans and fresh cheese are both flat without it; count on a teaspoon of salt, black pepper, and something sharp such as grated onion, mustard or lemon to keep the mixture from tasting of nothing.
- "Cream cheese, commercial or homemade"In this period the phrase covers any fresh unripened soft cheese, including drained homemade curd, not specifically the stabilised block sold today. A quarter pound is 4 oz. Modern block cream cheese works and is the closest commercial match; a drained farmer cheese or ricotta gives a lighter, more period result.
- Nut chopperA small hand-cranked grinder with a glass jar beneath. A food processor pulsed a few times does the same job, but stop before it turns to paste — you want a coarse, slightly rough texture that holds together.
- Canned pimentosThese are skinned, cooked sweet red peppers packed in liquid, sold today in jars as pimientos or roasted red peppers. Three of them is roughly a small jar, somewhere around 4 to 7 oz depending on their size. Drain and blot them well or the loaf will be too wet to bind.
- Bread crumbsThe recipe does not say which; dry crumbs are the safer choice for binding. Add them by degrees — start with half a cup and stop as soon as the mass holds a shape. Too many and the roast bakes dry and mealy.
- Oven heat, unstatedNo temperature or oven term is given at all; many ranges of the period had no thermostat and cooks judged heat by hand. A moderate oven, around 350-375F, suits this; hotter and the outside crusts before the centre sets.
- Shape and timingA free-standing ball browns unevenly. Pack it into a small greased loaf pan or shape it on a shallow baking dish and bake 40 to 45 minutes, until firm and browned. Everything in the mixture is already cooked, so you are only setting and colouring it.
- Basting with butter and waterThe intent is to keep the surface from drying while it colours. Melted butter thinned with a little hot water, brushed on two or three times, does it. Do not pour liquid into the pan or the base goes soggy.
- YieldEnough for about four as a main dish, though the recipe gives no yield. It slices best after ten minutes' rest and is good cold the next day; a tomato sauce or brown gravy would be a plausible period accompaniment.
Books titled Meatless Cookery appeared in the United States around the First World War, when the Food Administration urged households to observe meatless days so that beef and pork could be shipped abroad. The "meat substitute" chapter is the heart of such books, and its standard form is the loaf or roast: pulses, nuts or cheese ground together, bound with crumbs, shaped and browned so it could be carved and sauced at table like a joint. The pimento here is a marker of its moment — canned Spanish-type sweet peppers had become cheap and widely available in American groceries in the years after 1900, with Georgia growers supplying much of the crop, and cooks reached for them constantly for colour in an otherwise pale dish. The pairing of pimento with fresh cheese was common in this period, and is often linked to the origins of the enduring Southern spread of the same name, though the combination was commercially promoted in the North before it became a Southern staple.