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Vegetable Meat Pie
1/2 cup lima beans 1/4 cup peanuts 1/4 cup almonds 4 potatoes 1/4 cup flour 1/2 saltspoon pepper 1/2 cup hot milk 1 hard-boiled egg 1/2 tablespoon chopped parsley 1/2 tablespoon chopped onion 1/2 teaspoon salt Soak the beans over night; in the morning let them boil rapidly for one-half hour. Drain; slip the beans from their skins and split in halves. Blanch the almonds and chop them with the peanuts. Boil the potatoes, and cut two into small cubes. Mash the remaining two and use for a dough, adding four tablespoons of the hot milk, a little salt and the flour. Put layers of beans in the baking dish, sprinkling each layer with nuts, egg, potato cubes and seasoning. Roll out potato dough to cover; bake half hour.
A nut-and-bean pie under a mashed potato crust, from the era when "meat substitutes" meant legumes and nuts rather than soy. The original gives no oven temperature and leaves a little milk unaccounted for, so a few decisions fall to the cook.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. The beans, potatoes and egg are already cooked or part-cooked, so the bake is largely to set the crust and heat through: 400F for 30 minutes, uncovered, until the potato top colours.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoon is an eighth of a teaspoon of pepper. Season the layers more generously than that if you want the beans to taste of anything.
- The leftover milkFour tablespoons of the half cup go into the potato dough; the recipe never says what becomes of the other four. Pour it over the layered filling before the crust goes on, or the pie will be dry.
- BeansHalf a cup of dried limas, soaked overnight, yields roughly a cup and a half cooked. Thirty minutes of hard boiling gets them just tender enough to skin and split; older beans may want longer, and the skins slip most easily while they are still hot.
- NutsUse raw or plain roasted unsalted peanuts, not the salted cocktail kind, and adjust the salt accordingly. Blanching the almonds means a minute in boiling water, then squeezing the skins off. Chop both fairly fine so they distribute through the layers.
- Potato crustTwo boiled potatoes, mashed with four tablespoons hot milk and a quarter cup flour, make a stiff paste rather than a pastry. Roll it between sheets of parchment, dust with extra flour if it sticks, and patch it in the dish rather than fighting to move it whole.
- The hingeSkinning and splitting the limas is the recipe's own instruction and worth following: the skins are tough and papery after boiling and are unlikely to soften much in a half-hour bake.
- YieldFills a dish of roughly a quart; enough for about two as a main course, or four as a side.
This comes from the kind of meat-substitute cookery that is often said to have filled American cookbooks around the 1910s, when wartime conservation campaigns urged households toward meatless meals and thrift more generally. The nutritional logic of the day held that nuts and pulses could stand in for meat because they supplied protein and fat, an idea promoted energetically by vegetarian cookery writers and by the sanitarium kitchens at Battle Creek, whose nut loaves and nut roasts filtered into mainstream books like this one. The mashed-potato lid rather than a pastry one saves butter, one of the things wartime kitchens were asked hardest to economise on. Blanched almonds and peanuts in the same dish is a period signature: peanuts were cheap and newly abundant, almonds still a small luxury used for flavour and texture.