Home › Meat Substitutes › Purée of Dried Beans
Purée of Dried Beans
1 pint beans 1 tablespoon butter or drippings 1/2 teaspoon sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 saltspoon pepper 1 cup hot milk Cook the beans until very soft; drain well, saving the water, and rub through a purée sieve. Put one pint of the strained beans in a saucepan with the butter or savory drippings and seasoning and add the hot milk gradually until a thick mush is formed. Heap the purée in the center of a hot platter and garnish with fried bacon, sausages or mutton chops.
A soup may be made with the water in which the beans were cooked and the remainder of the strained beans.
Dried peas may be prepared in the same way. 1 pint beans
A straightforward bean purée that depends almost entirely on cooking the beans past the point of tenderness. The original assumes you know how to get there.
- A pint of beansDry measure: 1 pint is 2 cups of dried beans, roughly a pound, which cooks up to about 5 to 6 cups. Note that the recipe then calls for 1 pint of the strained beans, so you will have purée left over for the soup mentioned at the end.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So 1/8 teaspoon of pepper here, which is conservative for a pound of beans.
- Soaking is assumedNo soak is mentioned; recipes of this kind commonly assumed one. Cover the beans generously with cold water overnight, then simmer 1 to 1 1/2 hours for navy or marrow beans; older beans can take considerably longer. "Very soft" is the hinge — anything short of collapsing will not pass a sieve and will leave the purée grainy.
- Salt the cooking waterThe seasoning here goes in at the end, which leaves the beans themselves flat. Salt the cooking water lightly; it does not toughen beans, and the interiors season no other way.
- Purée sieveA food mill or a tamis with a wooden pestle. Both strain out the skins, which is the point. A food processor keeps the skins in and can turn cooked beans pasty, so a mill is the better tool if you have one.
- Savory drippingsBacon or roast beef fat saved from earlier cooking. Bacon fat is the closest thing in a modern kitchen and suits the dish.
- ConsistencyAdd the hot milk a spoonful at a time and stop when it mounds — the purée has to hold a heap on the platter. The milk is heated so that it does not chill the purée as it goes in.
- YieldAbout four servings as a main dish with the garnish, with thinned purée and bean liquor left over for the soup the recipe mentions.
If this sits in a chapter of meat substitutes, it would be consistent with the American food-conservation campaigns of the First World War, when wheat, meat and fat were pressed toward the war effort and households were urged to lean on beans and peas for protein — though nothing on the page itself fixes the date. The logic is thoroughly economical: one pot of beans yields a platter dish and a soup, and nothing, not even the cooking water, is thrown out. The garnish of bacon, sausage or mutton chops may look like a contradiction in a meat-substitute recipe, but meat demoted from the centre of the plate to a flavouring at its edge was a familiar economy. Puréeing pulses through a sieve to remove the skins is far older than the war, and dishes called purée turn up in nineteenth-century English cookbooks well before this.