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Dried Beans Sauté
1 pint beans 1½ tablespoons butter or drippings 1/2 tablespoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper Soak the beans and cook them until tender but not broken; then drain off the water and save it for soup. Put the butter or savory drippings in a pan over the fire and when hot put in the drained beans which have been seasoned. Cook over a hot fire for fifteen minutes, frequently turning the beans with a fork; then cover and let them cook for half an hour where they will not burn. If desired moist, a half cup of stock, milk or water may be added before putting them to cook for the last half hour. 2 cups pink beans 6 cups water 1 small onion
A loose-leaf page whose ingredient list has come apart in transcription: the beans, water and onion are stranded at the end, and the fat and seasoning at the start. Read it as 2 cups dried pink beans, 6 cups water, 1 small onion, 1½ tablespoons butter or drippings, ½ tablespoon salt, ¼ teaspoon pepper.
- The hingeCook the beans tender but not broken. Anything softer collapses into paste once it hits hot fat and gets turned with a fork for fifteen minutes, and the dish becomes refried beans by accident.
- Pink beansPinto's smaller relative, still sold as frijol rosado or habichuelas rosadas. Pinto or cranberry beans substitute directly; 2 cups dry is roughly a pound and yields about 6 cups cooked.
- Soaking and the first cookOvernight in cold water, or an hour off the heat in boiling water. Simmer in the 6 cups of water with the onion, 60-90 minutes depending on the age of the beans. Tradition holds that salt should go in at the end rather than the start for tender skins, though the point is disputed; the recipe in any case seasons the beans after draining.
- DrippingsRendered bacon, beef or roast pork fat, kept in a crock by the stove. Bacon fat is the nearest common substitute; lard, or butter as the recipe allows, both work.
- "Over the fire" and "a hot fire"Stovetop, not oven. Medium-high for the first fifteen minutes, then the lowest setting that keeps things moving for the covered half hour — the instruction to put them "where they will not burn" is the period's way of saying reduce the heat.
- The saved bean waterWorth keeping, as instructed. Cloudy with starch and onion, it thickens a soup and freezes well; label it, because it sours in the refrigerator within three or four days.
- SeasoningHalf a tablespoon of salt for a pound of dried beans is about right in total, but if you salted the cooking water, cut it back sharply here.
- YieldServes four to six as a main dish, more as a side. Add the optional half cup of stock or milk if you want them saucy rather than dry and slightly crusted.
Mrs. Fryer's book takes up meat substitutes, and the concern dates it: such chapters appear in American cookbooks from the vegetarian and sanitarium cookery of the 1890s and 1900s onward, and they multiplied around the First World War, when Food Administration campaigns urged households toward meatless days and beans were promoted hard as the cheapest protein on the shelf. Pink beans point west and south and and of Caribbean and Mexican cooking and and the technique here, boiled beans finished in hot pork fat until they take on a crust, is the same logic that produces frijoles refritos, arrived at from a different direction. The instruction to save the cooking water for soup is the real signature of the period: nothing edible left the kitchen.