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Pimiento Roast
2 cups cooked lima beans 3 canned pimientoes Bread crumbs Butter and water 1/4 pound cream or cottage cheese Chop the first three ingredients or put them through a meat chopper; mix thoroughly and add bread crumbs until the mixture is stiff enough to form a roll. Brown in the oven, basting occasionally with butter and water.
A bean-and-cheese loaf of the kind that filled the "meat substitutes" chapter a century ago. The recipe is written in shorthand and assumes the cook will season and judge consistency by hand.
- The hinge: moistureLima beans and cottage cheese are both wet, and canned pimientos are wetter still. Drain the beans well, blot the pimientos dry, and press cottage cheese in a sieve before grinding, or no amount of crumbs will give you a mixture that holds a roll.
- Breadcrumbs, unmeasuredExpect roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups of dry crumbs, added a few tablespoons at a time until the mass stops slumping. Dry crumbs make the consistency easier to judge here; fresh ones carry more moisture of their own and can go pasty.
- "Meat chopper"A hand-cranked grinder. A food processor does the same work in short pulses; keep the texture coarse, since a smooth puree will bake into something closer to paste than a loaf.
- Cheese quantityA quarter pound of cottage or cream cheese is about 1/2 cup. Cream cheese gives a firmer, richer roll; cottage cheese a lighter and blander one, and it is the version that needs the most draining.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 375F, on a greased shallow pan, for about 45 minutes until the outside is set and browned.
- Basting with butter and waterThe recipe does not say whether the two are melted together as one basting liquid or brushed on alternately; either reading works. Two or three bastings across the bake is enough; more and the surface never firms.
- SeasoningThe original lists none at all. Salt, black pepper, and a little grated onion or a spoon of the pimiento liquid are needed if the loaf is not to taste flat.
- Yield and servingProbably about four servings as a main dish. It slices best after resting ten minutes, and loaves of this kind were commonly served hot with a tomato or cream sauce, which the recipe leaves you to supply.
Mrs. Fryer's book belongs to the era when American cookbooks commonly gave meatless cooking its own chapter heading, driven less by vegetarian conviction than by household economy and, by the late 1910s, by wartime conservation campaigns urging families to spare meat. The "roast" of that literature is a loaf: a ground legume or nut base bound with crumbs and dairy, shaped into a roll and browned so it could be carved and sauced at table like a joint. Pimientos appear here because they had recently become cheap and ubiquitous in cans — the sweet Spanish pepper is generally said to have been grown and packed commercially in the American South from the early twentieth century — and they served to put colour and a mild sweetness into pale dishes. Lima beans, the other bulk ingredient, were among the usual protein stand-ins of the day alongside peanuts and cottage cheese, all three being praised in contemporary domestic-science writing for delivering protein without meat at a fraction of the butcher's price.