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Boston Roast
1 pound cooked kidney beans 1/2 pound grated cheese Butter and water Bread crumbs Salt and red pepper Mash the beans or put them through a meat grinder; add the cheese, salt and sufficient bread crumbs to make the mixture stiff enough to form into a roll. Bake in a moderate oven, basting occasionally with butter and water. Serve with tomato sauce.
A bean-and-cheese loaf from the meatless side of the book, with the terse instructions typical of a loose-leaf card. The proportions work, but a few things need translating.
- The hinge: make it stiffer than looks rightThere is no egg here, so the loaf holds together only through mashed bean starch, cheese and crumbs. Add crumbs until the mixture will stand as a free-form roll on the pan without slumping when you press it into shape; a mixture that seems slightly too dry raw will be correct once the cheese melts and loosens it.
- A moderate oven350F. Figure 45 minutes to an hour for a roll made from this quantity, until the outside is firm and browned and the center is hot through.
- 1 pound cooked kidney beansWeighed cooked and drained, that is roughly 2 1/2 cups, from somewhere in the region of 6 to 8 ounces of dried beans. Canned beans, well drained and patted dry, work; if they are wet the loaf will not set.
- Grated cheeseHalf a pound is about 2 cups. In 1900s American home cooking this meant a firm yellow store cheese, so a sharp Cheddar is the right substitute rather than anything soft or fresh.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not sweet pepper. A quarter teaspoon is plenty for this quantity unless you want it noticeably hot.
- Basting with butter and waterMelt a few tablespoons of butter into an equal amount of hot water and spoon it over every 15 minutes. The water keeps the surface from drying and cracking while the butter browns it; without basting a lean bean loaf goes crusty and chalky.
- Pan and shapingForm the roll on a greased shallow baking pan. A loaf tin will steam the sides and defeat the basting, though it does make a tidier slice if you would rather have that.
- Yield and servingServes four to six as a main dish. Let it rest ten minutes before slicing or it will crumble; the tomato sauce is not optional in practice, as the loaf is dense and wants the acidity.
Recipes titled "Boston roast" appear across American cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s, almost always in a chapter of meat substitutes, and the name is generally traced to the association of Boston with baked beans rather than to any particular Boston kitchen. Its ancestry is often traced to the vegetarian cookery promoted from the 1890s onward by health reformers and sanitarium kitchens, which turned beans, nuts, cheese and crumbs into loaves that could be sliced and sauced like a joint of meat, though the line of descent is plausible rather than established. Books such as this one carried those dishes into ordinary households for reasons that were likely practical enough: meat was often among the more expensive items on the table, and Fridays and fast days needed filling. The pairing of legume and cheese also happens to make a genuinely substantial dish, which is why versions of it outlived the movement that produced it.